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diff --git a/old/13814-8.txt b/old/13814-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dc0226f --- /dev/null +++ b/old/13814-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,15664 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Development of the Feeling for Nature in +the Middle Ages and Modern Times, by Alfred Biese + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and +Modern Times + +Author: Alfred Biese + +Release Date: October 20, 2004 [eBook #13814] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR +NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND MODERN TIMES*** + + +E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Leonard Johnson, and the Project +Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team + + + +THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES +AND MODERN TIMES + +by + +ALFRED BIESE + +Director of the K. K. Gymnasium at Neuwied + +Authorized translation from the German + +1905 + + + + + + + +AUTHOR'S PREFACE + + +The encouraging reception of my "Development of the Feeling for +Nature among the Greeks and Romans" gradually decided me, after some +years, to carry the subject on to modern tunes. Enticing as it was, I +did not shut my eyes to the great difficulties of a task whose +dimensions have daunted many a savant since the days of Humboldt's +clever, terse sketches of the feeling for Nature in different times +and peoples. But the subject, once approached, would not let me go. +Its solution seemed only possible from the side of historical +development, not from that of _a priori_ synthesis. The almost +inexhaustible amount of material, especially towards modern times, +has often obliged me to limit myself to typical forerunners of the +various epochs, although, at the same time, I have tried not to lose +the thread of general development. By the addition of the chief +phases of landscape, painting, and garden craft, I have aimed at +giving completeness to the historical picture; but I hold that +literature, especially poetry, as the most intimate medium of a +nation's feelings, is the chief source of information in an enquiry +which may form a contribution, not only to the history of taste, but +also to the comparative history of literature. At a time too when the +natural sciences are so highly developed, and the cult of Nature is +so widespread, a book of this kind may perhaps claim the interest of +that wide circle of educated readers to whom the modern delight in +Nature on its many sides makes appeal. And this the more, since books +are rare which seek to embrace the whole mental development of the +Middle Ages and modern times, and are, at the same time, intended for +and intelligible to all people of cultivation. + +The book has been a work of love, and I hope it will be read with +pleasure, not only by those whose special domain it touches, but by +all who care for the eternal beauties of Nature. To those who know my +earlier papers in the _Preussische Jahrbücher_, the _Zeitschrift für +Vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte_, and the _Litteraturbeilage des +Hamburgischen Correspondents_, I trust this fuller and more connected +treatment of the theme will prove welcome. + +ALFRED BIESE. + + + + +Published Translations of the following Authors have been used: + +SANSCRIT.--Jones, Wilson, Arnold, anonymous translator in a +publication of the Society for Resuscitation of Ancient Literature. + +LATIN AND GREEK.--Lightfoot, Jowett, Farrar, Lodge, Dalrymple, Bigg, +Pilkington, Hodgkin, De Montalembert, Gary, Lok, Murray, Gibb, a +translator in Bonn's Classics. + +ITALIAN.--Gary, Longfellow, Cayley, Robinson, Kelly, Bent, Hoole, +Roscoe, Leigh Hunt, Lofft, Astley, Oliphant. + +GERMAN.--Horton and Bell, Middlemore, Lytton, Swanwick, Dwight, +Boylau, Bowling, Bell, Aytoun, Martin, Oxenford, Morrison, M'Cullum, +Winkworth, Howorth, Taylor, Nind, Brooks, Lloyd, Frothingham, Ewing, +Noel, Austin, Carlyle, Storr, Weston, Phillips. + +SPANISH.--Markham, Major, Bowring, Hasell, M'Carthy, French. + +FRENCH.--Anonymous translator of Rousseau. + +PORTUGUESE.--Aubertin. + +The Translator's thanks are also due to the author for a few +alterations in and additions to the text, and to Miss Edgehill, Miss +Tomlinson, and Dr B. Scheifers for translations from Greek and Latin, +Italian, and Middle German respectively. + + + + +INTRODUCTION + + +Nature in her ever-constant, ever-changing phases is indispensable to +man, his whole existence depends upon her, and she influences him in +manifold ways, in mind as well as body. + +The physical character of a country is reflected in its inhabitants; +the one factor of climate alone gives a very different outlook to +northerner and southerner. But whereas primitive man, to whom the +darkness of night meant anxiety, either feared Nature or worshipped +her with awe, civilised man tries to lift her veil, and through +science and art to understand her inner and outer beauty--the +scientist in her laws, the man of religion in her relation to his +Creator, the artist in reproducing the impressions she makes upon +him. + +Probably it has always been common to healthy minds to take some +pleasure in her; but it needs no slight culture of heart and mind to +grasp her meaning and make it clear to others. Her book lies open +before us, but the interpretations have been many and dissimilar. A +fine statue or a richly-coloured picture appeals to all, but only +knowledge can appreciate it at its true value and discover the full +meaning of the artist. And as with Art, so with Nature. + +For Nature is the greatest artist, though dumb until man, with his +inexplicable power of putting himself in her place, transferring to +her his bodily and mental self, gives her speech. + +Goethe said 'man never understands how anthropomorphic he is.' No +study, however comprehensive, enables him to overstep human limits, +or conceive a concrete being, even the highest, from a wholly +impersonal point of view. His own self always remains an encumbering +factor. In a real sense he only understands himself, and his measure +for all things is man. To understand the world outside him, he must +needs ascribe his own attributes to it, must lend his own being to +find it again. + +This unexplained faculty, or rather inherent necessity, which implies +at once a power and a limit, extends to persons as well as things. +The significant word sympathy expresses it. To feel a friend's grief +is to put oneself in his place, think from his standpoint and in his +mood--that is, suffer with him. The fear and sympathy which condition +the action of tragedy depend upon the same mental process; one's own +point of view is shifted to that of another, and when the two are in +harmony, and only then, the claim of beauty is satisfied, and +æsthetic pleasure results. + +By the well-known expression of Greek philosophy, 'like is only +understood by like,' the Pythagoreans meant that the mathematically +trained mind is the organ by which the mathematically constructed +cosmos is understood. The expression may also serve as an æsthetic +aphorism. The charm of the simplest lyrical song depends upon the +hearer's power to put himself in the mood or situation described by +the poet, on an interplay between subject and object. + +Everything in mental life depends upon this faculty. We observe, +ponder, feel, because a kindred vibration in the object sets our own +fibres in motion. + +'You resemble the mind which you understand.' + +It is a magic bridge from our own mind, making access possible to a +work of art, an electric current conveying the artist's ideas into +our souls. + +We know how a drama or a song can thrill us when our feeling vibrates +with it; and that thrill, Faust tells us, is the best part of man. + +If inventive work in whatever art or science gives the purest kind of +pleasure, Nature herself seeming to work through the artist, rousing +those impulses which come to him as revelations, there is pleasure +also in the passive reception of beauty, especially when we are not +content to remain passive, but trace out and rethink the artist's +thoughts, remaking his work. + +'To invent for oneself is beautiful; but to recognise gladly and +treasure up the happy inventions of others is that less thine?' said +Goethe in his _Jahreszeiten_; and in the _Aphorisms_, confirming what +has just been said: 'We know of no world except in relation to man, +we desire no art but that which is the expression of this relation.' +And, further, 'Look into yourselves and you will find everything, and +rejoice if outside yourselves, as you may say, lies a Nature which +says yea and amen to all that you have found there.' + +Certainly Nature only bestows on man in proportion to his own inner +wealth. As Rückert says, 'the charm of a landscape lies in this, that +it seems to reflect back that part of one's inner life, of mind, +mood, and feeling, which we have given it.' And Ebers, 'Lay down your +best of heart and mind before eternal Nature; she will repay you a +thousandfold, with full hands.' + +And Vischer remarks, 'Nature at her greatest is not so great that she +can work without man's mind.' Every landscape can be beautiful and +stimulating if human feeling colours it, and it will be most so to +him who brings the richest endowment of heart and mind to bear: +Nature only discloses her whole self to a whole man. + +But it is under the poet's wand above all, that, like the marble at +Pygmalion's breast, she grows warm and breathes and answers to his +charm; as in that symbolic saga, the listening woods and waters and +the creatures followed Orpheus with his lute. Scientific knowledge, +optical, acoustical, meteorological, geological, only widens and +deepens love for her and increases and refines the sense of her +beauty. In short, deep feeling for Nature always proves considerable +culture of heart and mind. + +There is a constant analogy between the growth of this feeling and +that of general culture. + +As each nation and time has its own mode of thought, which is +constantly changing, so each period has its 'landscape eye.' The same +rule applies to individuals. Nature, as Jean Paul said, is made +intelligible to man in being for ever made flesh. We cannot look at +her impersonally, we must needs give her form and soul, in order to +grasp and describe her. + +Vischer says[1] 'it is simply by an act of comparison that we think +we see our own life in inanimate objects.' We say that Nature's +clearness is like clearness of mind, that her darkness and gloom are +like a dark and gloomy mood; then, omitting 'like,' we go on to +ascribe our qualities directly to her, and say, this neighbourhood, +this air, this general tone of colour, is cheerful, melancholy, and +so forth. Here we are prompted by an undeveloped dormant +consciousness which really only compares, while it seems to take one +thing for another. In this way we come to say that a rock projects +boldly, that fire rages furiously over a building, that a summer +evening with flocks going home at sunset is peaceful and idyllic; +that autumn, dripping with rain, its willows sighing in the wind, is +elegiac and melancholy and so forth. + +Perhaps Nature would not prove to be this ready symbol of man's inner +life were there no secret rapport between the two. It is as if, in +some mysterious way, we meet in her another mind, which speaks a +language we know, wakening a foretaste of kinship; and whether the +soul she expresses is one we have lent her, or her own which we have +divined, the relationship is still one of give and take. + +Let us take a rapid survey of the course of this feeling in +antiquity. Pantheism has always been the home of a special tenderness +for Nature, and the poetry of India is full of intimate dealings +between man and plants and animals. + +They are found in the loftiest flights of religious enthusiasm in the +Vedas, where, be it only in reference to the splendour of dawn or the +'golden-handed sun,' Nature is always assumed to be closely connected +with man's inner and outer life. Later on, as Brahminism appeared, +deepening the contemplative side of Hindoo character, and the drama +and historical plays came in, generalities gave way to definite +localizing, and in the Epics ornate descriptions of actual landscape +took independent place. Nature's sympathy with human joys and griefs +was taken for granted, and she played a part of her own in drama. + +In the _Mahâbhârata_, when Damajanti is wandering in search of her +lost Nala and sees the great mountain top, she asks it for her +prince. + + Oh mountain lord! + Far seen and celebrated hill, that cleav'st + The blue o' the sky, refuge of living things, + Most noble eminence, I worship thee!... + O Mount, whose double ridge stamps on the sky + Yon line, by five-score splendid pinnacles + Indented; tell me, in this gloomy wood + Hast thou seen Nala? Nala, wise and bold! + Ah mountain! why consolest thou me not, + Answering one word to sorrowful, distressed, + Lonely, lost Damajanti? + +And when she comes to the tree Asoka, she implores: + + Ah, lovely tree! that wavest here + Thy crown of countless shining clustering blooms + As thou wert woodland king! Asoka tree! + Tree called the sorrow-ender, heart's-ease tree! + Be what thy name saith; end my sorrow now, + Saying, ah, bright Asoka, thou hast seen + My Prince, my dauntless Nala--seen that lord + Whom Damajanti loves and his foes fear. + +In Maghas' epic, _The Death of Sisupala_, plants and animals lead the +same voluptuous life as the 'deep-bosomed, wide-hipped' girls with +the ardent men. + +'The mountain Raivataka touches the ether with a thousand heads, +earth with a thousand feet, the sun and moon are his eyes. When the +birds are tired and tremble with delight from the caresses of their +mates, he grants them shade from lotos leaves. Who in the world is +not astonished when he has climbed, to see the prince of mountains +who overshadows the ether and far-reaching regions of earth, standing +there with his great projecting crags, while the moon's sickle +trembles on his summit?' + +In Kalidasa's _Urwasi_, the deserted King who is searching for his +wife asks the peacock: + + Oh tell, + If, free on the wing as you soar, + You have seen the loved nymph I deplore-- + You will know her, the fairest of damsels fair, + By her large soft eye and her graceful air; + Bird of the dark blue throat and eye of jet, + Oh tell me, have you seen the lovely face + Of my fair bride--lost in this dreary wilderness? + +and the mountain: + + Say mountain, whose expansive slope confines + The forest verge, oh, tell me hast thou seen + A nymph as beauteous as the bride of love + Mounting with slender frame thy steep ascent, + Or wearied, resting in thy crowning woods? + +As he sits by the side of the stream, he asks whence comes its charm: + + Whilst gazing on the stream, whose new swollen waters + Yet turbid flow, what strange imaginings + Possess my soul and fill it with delight. + The rippling wave is like her aching brow; + The fluttering line of storks, her timid tongue; + The foaming spray, her white loose floating vest; + And this meandering course the current tracks + Her undulating gait. + +Then he sees a creeper without flowers, and a strange attraction +impels him to embrace it, for its likeness to his lost love: + + Vine of the wilderness, behold + A lone heartbroken wretch in me, + Who dreams in his embrace to fold + His love, as wild he clings to thee. + +Thereupon the creeper transforms itself into Urwasi. + +In Kalidasa's _Sakuntala_, too, when the pretty girls are watering +the flowers in the garden, Sakuntala says: 'It is not only in +obedience to our father that I thus employ myself. I really feel the +affection of a sister for these young plants.' Taking it for granted +that the mango tree has the same feeling for herself, she cries: 'Yon +Amra tree, my friends, points with the fingers of its leaves, which +the gale gently agitates, and seems inclined to whisper some secret'; +and with maiden shyness, attributing her own thoughts about love to +the plants, one of her comrades says: 'See, my Sakuntala, how yon +fresh Mallica which you have surnamed Vanadosini or Delight of the +Grove, has chosen the sweet Amra for her bridegroom....' + +'How charming is the season, when the nuptials even of plants are +thus publicly celebrated!'--and elsewhere: + +'Here is a plant, Sakuntala, which you have forgotten.' Sakuntala: +'Then I shall forget myself.' + +Birds,[2] clouds, and waves are messengers of love; all Nature +grieves at the separation of lovers. When Sakuntala is leaving her +forest, one of her friends says: 'Mark the affliction of the forest +itself when the time of your departure approaches! + +'The female antelope browses no more on the collected Cusa grass, and +the pea-hen ceases to dance on the lawn; the very plants of the +grove, whose pale leaves fall on the ground, lose their strength and +their beauty.' + +The poems of India, especially those devoted to descriptions of +Nature, abound in such bold, picturesque personifications, which are +touching, despite their extravagance, through their intense sympathy +with Nature. They shew the Hindoo attitude toward Nature in general, +as well as his boundless fancy. I select one example from 'The +Gathering of the Seasons' in Kalidasa's _Ritusanhare_: a description +of the Rains. + +'Pouring rain in torrents at the request of the thirst-stricken +Chatakas, and emitting slow mutterings pleasing to the ears, clouds, +bent down by the weight of their watery contents, are slowly moving +on.... + +'The rivers being filled up with the muddy water of the rivers, their +force is increased. Therefore, felling down the trees on both the +banks, they, like unchaste women, are going quickly towards the +ocean.... + +'The heat of the forest has been removed by the sprinkling of new +water, and the Ketaka flowers have blossomed. On the branches of +trees being shaken by the wind, it appears that the entire forest is +dancing in delight. On the blossoming of Ketaka flowers it appears +that the forest is smiling. Thinking, "he is our refuge when we are +bent down by the weight of water, the clouds are enlivening with +torrents the mount Vindhya assailed with fierce heat (of the +summer)."' + +Charming pictures and comparisons are numerous, though they have the +exaggeration common to oriental imagination, 'Love was the cause of +my distemper, and love has healed it; as a summer's day, grown black +with clouds, relieves all animals from the heat which itself had +caused.' + +'Should you be removed to the ends of the world, you will be fixed in +this heart, as the shade of a lofty tree remains with it even when +the day is departed.' + +'The tree of my hope which had risen so luxuriantly is broken down.' + +'Removed from the bosom of my father, like a young sandal tree rent +from the hill of Malaja, how shall I exist in a strange soil?' + +This familiar intercourse with Nature stood far as the poles asunder +from the monotheistic attitude of the Hebrew. The individual, it is +true, was nothing in comparison with Brahma, the All-One; but the +divine pervaded and sanctified all things, and so gave them a certain +value; whilst before Jehovah, throned above the world, the whole +universe was but dust and ashes. The Hindoo, wrapt in the +contemplation of Nature, described her at great length and for her +own sake, the Hebrew only for the sake of his Creator. She had no +independent significance for him; he looked at her only 'sub specie +eterni Dei,' in the mirror of the eternal God. Hence he took interest +in her phases only as revelations of his God, noting one after +another only to group them synthetically under the idea of Godhead. +Hence too, despite his profound inwardness--'The heart is deceitful +above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?' +(_Jeremiah_)--human individuality was only expressed in its relation +to Jehovah. + +'The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his +handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth +knowledge.'--_Psalm_ 19. + +'Let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, +and the fulness thereof. + +'Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein; then shall all the +trees of the wood rejoice.'--_Psalm_ 96. + +'Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful +together.'--_Psalm_ 98. + +'The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their +voice; the floods lift up their waves. The Lord on high is mightier +than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the +sea.'--_Psalm_ 93. + +'The sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back. The mountains +skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs.'--_Psalm_ 114. + +'The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee; they were afraid: +the depths also were troubled.'--_Psalm_ 77. + +All these lofty personifications of inanimate Nature only +characterise her in her relation to another, and that not man but +God. Nothing had significance by itself, Nature was but a book in +which to read of Jehovah; and for this reason the Hebrew could not be +wrapt in her, could not seek her for her own sake, she was only a +revelation of the Deity. + +'Lord, how great are thy works, in wisdom hast thou made them all: +the earth is full of thy goodness.' + +Yet there is a fiery glow of enthusiasm in the songs in praise of +Jehovah's wonders in creation. + +'0 Lord my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and +majesty. + +'Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest +out the heavens like a curtain. + +'Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters; who maketh the +clouds his chariot; who walketh upon the wings of the wind. + +'Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire; who +laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for +ever. + +'Thou coveredst the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above +the mountains. + +'At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted +away. + +'They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the +place which thou hast founded for them. + +'Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn +not again to cover the earth. + +'He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills. + +'They give drink to every beast of the field: the wild asses quench +their thirst. + +'By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which +sing among the branches ... + +'He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the +service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth. + +'And wine that maketh glad the heart of man ... + +'The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which +he hath planted. + +'Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees +are her house. + +'The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats, and the rocks for +the conies. + +'He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down. + +'Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the +forest do creep forth. + +'The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God. + +'The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down +in their dens. + +'Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening.... + +'This great and wide sea, wherein are creeping things innumerable, +both small and great beasts.... + +'He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth; he toucheth the hills, +and they smoke. + +'I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to +my God as long as I have my being.'--_Psalm_ 104. + +And what a lofty point of view is shewn by the overpowering words +which Job puts into the mouth of Jehovah; 'Where wast thou when I +laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast +understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof if thou knowest, or +who hath stretched the line upon it? + +'Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the +corner stone thereof? + +'When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God +shouted for joy?... + +'Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the +dayspring to know his place? + +'That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked +might be shaken out of it?... + +'Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea, or hast thou walked +in the search of the deep?... + +'Declare, if thou knowest it all!... + +'Where is the way where light dwelleth, and as for darkness, where is +the place thereof?' etc. + +Compare with this _Isaiah_ xl. verse 12, etc. + +Metaphors too, though poetic and fine, are not individualized. + +'Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy water-spouts: all thy +waves and thy billows are gone over me.'--_Psalm_ 42. + +'Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in +deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, +where the floods overflow me.'--_Psalm_ 69. + +There are many pictures from the animal world; and these are more +elaborate in Job than elsewhere (see _Job_ xl. and xli.). +Personifications, as we have seen, are many, but Nature is only +called upon to sympathise with man in isolated cases, as, for +instance, in 2 _Samuel_ i.: + +'Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be +rain upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the +mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as if he had not been +anointed with oil.' + +The Cosmos unfolded itself to the Hebrew[3] as one great whole, and +the glance fixed upon a distant horizon missed the nearer lying +detail of phenomena. His imagination ranged the universe with the +wings of the wind, and took vivid note of air, sky, sea, and land, +but only, so to speak, in passing; it never rested there, but hurried +past the boundaries of earth to Jehovah's throne, and from that +height looked down upon creation. + +The attitude of the Greek was very different. Standing firmly rooted +in the world of sense, his open mind and his marvellous eye for +beauty appreciated the glorious external world around him down to its +finest detail. His was the race of the beautiful, the first in +history to train all its powers into harmony to produce a culture of +beauty equal in form and contents, and his unique achievement in art +and science enriched all after times with lasting standards of the +great and beautiful. + +The influence of classic literature upon the Middle Ages and modern +times has not only endured, but has gone on increasing with the +centuries; so that we must know the position reached by Greece and +Rome as to feeling for Nature, in order to discover whether the line +of advance in the Middle Ages led directly forward or began by a +backward movement--a zigzag. + +The terms ancient and modern, naive and sentimental, classic and +romantic, have been shibboleths of culture from Jean Paul, Schiller, +and Hegel, to Vischer. Jean Paul, in his _Vorschule zur Aesthetik_, +compares the ideally simple Greek poetry, with its objectivity, +serenity, and moral grace, with the musical poetry of the romantic +period, and speaks of one as the sunlight that pervades our waking +hours, the other as the moonlight that gleams fitfully on our +dreaming ones. Schiller's epoch-making essay _On Naive and +Sentimental Poetry_, with its rough division into the classic-naive +depending on a harmony between nature and mind, and the +modern-sentimental depending on a longing for a lost paradise, is +constantly quoted to shew that the Greeks took no pleasure in Nature. +This is misleading. Schiller's Greek was very limited; in the very +year (1795) in which the essay appeared in _The Hours_, he was asking +Humboldt's advice as to learning Greek, with special reference to +Homer and Xenophon. + +To him Homer was the Greek _par excellence_, and who would not agree +with him to-day? + +As in Greek mythology, that naive poem of Nature, the product of the +artistic impulse of the race to stamp its impressions in a beautiful +and harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in Homer, the +feeling for Nature is profound; but the Homeric hero had no personal +relations with her, no conscious leaning towards her; the +descriptions only served to frame human action, in time or space. + +But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive Homeric +time, was short in spite of Schiller, who, in the very essay referred +to, included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the sentimental, and +Shakespeare among the naive, poets--a fact often overlooked. + +In line with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for +Nature passed through various stages. These can be clearly traced +from objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic +personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions, in which +scenery was brought into harmony or contrast with man's inner life; +until finally, in Hellenism, Nature was treated for her own sake, and +man reduced to the position of supernumerary both in poetry and +also--so approaching the modern--in landscape-painting. + +Greece had her sentimental epoch; she did not, as we have said, long +remain naive. From Sophist days a steady process of decomposition +went on--in other words, a movement towards what we call modern, a +movement which to the classic mind led backward; but from the wider +standpoint of general development meant advance. For the path of +culture is always the same in the nations; it leads first upward and +then downward, and all ripening knowledge, while it enriches the +mind, brings with it some unforeseen loss. Mankind pays heavily for +each new gain; it paid for increased subjectivity and inwardness by a +loss in public spirit and patriotism which, once the most valued of +national possessions, fell away before the increasing individuality, +the germ of the modern spirit. For what is the modern spirit but +limitless individuality? + +The greater the knowledge of self, the richer the inner life. Man +becomes his own chief problem--he begins to watch the lightest +flutter of his own feelings, to grasp and reflect upon them, to look +upon himself in fact as in a mirror; and it is in this doubling of +the ego, so to speak, that sentimentality in the modern sense +consists. It leads to love of solitude, the fittest state for the +growth of a conscious love of Nature, for, as Rousseau said 'all +noble passions are formed in solitude,' 'tis there that one +recognizes one's own heart as 'the rarest and most valuable of all +possessions.' 'Oh, what a fatal gift of Heaven is a feeling heart!' +and elsewhere he said: 'Hearts that are warmed by a divine fire find +a pure delight in their own feelings which is independent of fate and +of the whole world.' Euripides, too, loved solitude, and avoided the +noise of town life by retiring to a grotto at Salamis which he had +arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his +biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He, +rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. +His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible +that I should see myself standing face to face, in which case I +should have wept for the sorrows that we suffer'; and in the chorus +of _The Suppliants_ we have: 'This insatiate joy of mourning leads me +on like as the liquid drop flowing from the sun-trodden rock, ever +increasing of groans.' In Euripides we have the first loosening of +that ingenuous bond between Nature and the human spirit, as the +Sophists laid the axe to the root of the old Hellenic ideas and +beliefs. Subjectivity had already gained in strength from the birth +of the lyric, that most individual of all expressions of feeling; and +since the lyric cannot dispense with the external world, classic song +now shewed the tender subjective feeling for Nature which we see in +Sappho, Pindar, and Simonides. Yet Euripides (and Aristophanes, whose +painful mad laugh, as Doysen says, expresses the same distraction and +despair as the deep melancholy of Euripides) only paved the way for +that sentimental, idyllic feeling for Nature which dwelt on her quiet +charms for their own sake, as in Theocritus, and, like the modern, +rose to greater intensity in the presence of the amorous passion, as +we see in Kallimachos and the Anthology. It was the outcome of +Hellenism, of which sentimental introspection, the freeing of the ego +from the bonds of race and position, and the discovery of the +individual in all directions of human existence, were marks. And this +feeling developing from Homer to Longos, from unreflecting to +conscious and then to sentimental pleasure in Nature, was expressed +not only in poetry but in painting, although the latter never fully +mastered technique. + +The common thoughtless statement, so often supported by quotations +from Schiller, Gervinus, and others, that Greek antiquity was not +alive to the beauty of Nature and her responsiveness to human moods, +and neither painted scenery nor felt the melancholy poetic charm of +ruins and tombs, is therefore a perversion of the truth; but it must +be conceded that the feeling which existed then was but the germ of +our modern one. It was fettered by the specific national beliefs +concerning the world and deities, by the undeveloped state of the +natural sciences, which, except botany, still lay in swaddling-clothes, +by the new influence of Christendom, and by that strict feeling for +style which, very much to its advantage, imposed a moderation that +would have excluded much of our senseless modern rhapsody. + +It was not unnatural that Schiller, in distaste for the weak riot of +feeling and the passion for describing Nature which obtained in his +day, was led to overpraise the Homeric naïvete and overblame the +sentimentality which he wrongly identified with it. + +In all that is called art, the Romans were pupils of the Greek, and +their achievements in the region of beauty cannot be compared with +his. But they advanced the course of general culture, and their +feeling--always more subjective, abstract, self-conscious, and +reflective--has a comparatively familiar, because modern, ring in the +great poets. + +The preference for the practical and social-economic is traceable in +their feeling for Nature. Their mythology also lay too much within +the bounds of the intelligible; shewed itself too much in forms and +ceremonies, in a cult; but it had not lost the sense of awe--it still +heard the voices of mysterious powers in the depths of the forest. + +The dramatists wove effective metaphors and descriptions of Nature +into their plays. + +Lucretius laid the foundations of a knowledge of her which refined +both his enjoyment and his descriptions; and the elegiac sentimental +style, which we see developed in Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil, +and Horace, first came to light in the great lyrist Catullus. In +Imperial times feeling for Nature grew with the growth of culture in +general; men turned to her in times of bad cheer, and found comfort +in the great sky spaces, the constant stars, and forests that +trembled with awe of the divine Numen. + +It was so with Seneca, a pantheist through and through. Pliny the +younger was quite modern in his choice of rural solitudes, and his +appreciation of the views from his villa. With Hadrian and Apuleius +the Roman rococo literature began; Apuleius was astonishingly modern, +and Ausonius was almost German in the depth and tenderness of his +feeling for Nature. Garden-culture and landscape-painting shewed the +same movement towards the sympathetic and elegiac-sentimental. + +Those who deny the Roman feeling for Nature might learn better from a +glance at the ruins of their villas. As H. Nissen says in his +_Italische Landeskunde_: + +'It was more than mere fashion which drew the Roman to the sea-side, +and attracted so strongly all those great figures, from the elder +Scipio Africanus and his noble daughter, Cornelia, down to Augustus +and Tiberius and their successors, whenever their powers flagged in +the Forum. There were soft breezes to cool the brow, colour and +outline to refresh the eye, and wide views that appealed to a race +born to extensive lordship. + +'In passing along the desolate, fever-stricken coasts of Latium and +Campania to-day, one comes upon many traces of former splendour, and +one is reminded that the pleasure which the old Romans took in the +sea-side was spoilt for those who came after them by the havoc of the +time.' + +In many points, Roman feeling for Nature was more developed than +Greek. For instance, the Romans appreciated landscape as a whole, and +distance, light and shade in wood and water, reflections, the charms +of hunting and rowing, day-dreams on a mountain side, and so forth. + +That antiquity and the Middle Ages had any taste for romantic scenery +has been energetically denied; but we can find a trace of it. The +landscape which the Roman admired was level, graceful, and gentle; he +certainly did not see any beauty in the Alps. Livy's 'Foeditas +Alpinum' and the dreadful descriptions of Ammian, with others, are +the much-quoted vouchers for this. Nor is it surprising; for modern +appreciation, still in its youth, is really due to increased +knowledge about Nature, to a change of feeling, and to the +conveniences of modern travelling, unknown 2000 years ago. + +The dangers and hardships of those days must have put enjoyment out +of the question; and only served to heighten the unfavourable +contrast between the wildness of the mountain regions and the +cultivation of Italy. + +Lucretius looked at wild scenery with horror, but later on it became +a favourite subject for description; and Seneca notes, as shewing a +morbid state of mind, in his essay on tranquillity of mind, that +travelling not only attracts men to delightful places, but that some +even exclaim: 'Let us go now into Campania; now that delicate soil +delighteth us, let us visit the wood countries, let us visit the +forest of Calabria, and let us seek some pleasure amidst the deserts, +in such sort as these wandering eyes of ours may be relieved in +beholding, at our pleasure, the strange solitude of these savage +places.' + +We have thus briefly surveyed on the one hand, in theory, the +conditions under which a conscious feeling for Nature develops, and +the forms in which it expresses itself; and, on the other, the course +this feeling has followed in antiquity among the Hindoos, Hebrews, +Greeks, and Romans. The movement toward the modern, toward the +subjective and individual, lies clear to view. We will now trace its +gradual development along lines which are always strictly analogous +to those of culture in general, through the Middle Ages. + + + + +CHAPTER I + +CHRISTIANITY AND GERMANISM + + +When the heathen world had outlived its faculties, and its creative +power had failed, it sank into the ocean of the past--a sphinx, with +her riddle guessed,--and mediæval civilization arose, founded upon +Christianity and Germanism. There are times in the world's history +when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept away and all +things made new at a stroke, as if by the world-consuming fire of the +old Saga. But, in reality, all change is gradual; the old is for ever +failing and passing out of sight, to be taken up as a ferment into +the ever emerging new, which changes and remodels as it will. It was +so with Christianity. It is easy to imagine that it arose suddenly, +like a phoenix, from the ashes of heathendom; but, although dependent +at heart upon the sublime personality of its Founder, it was none the +less a product of its age, and a result of gradual development--a +river with sources partly in Judea, partly in Hellas. And mediæval +Christianity never denied the traces of its double origin. + +Upon this syncretic soil its literature sprang up, moulded as to +matter upon Old Testament and specifically Christian models, as to +form upon the great writers of antiquity; but matter and form are +only separable in the abstract, and the Middle Ages are woven through +and through with both Greco-Roman and Jewish elements. + +But these elements were unfavourable to the development of feeling +for Nature; Judaism admitted no delight in her for her own sake, and +Christianity intensified the Judaic opposition between God and the +world, Creator and created. + +'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; if any +man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him': by which +John meant, raise your eyes to your Heavenly Father, throned above +the clouds. + +Christianity in its stringent form was transcendental, despising the +world and renouncing its pleasures. It held that Creation, through +the entrance of sin, had become a caricature, and that earthly +existence had only the very limited value of a thoroughfare to the +eternal Kingdom. + +While joy in existence characterized the Hellenic world until its +downfall, and the Greek took life serenely, delighting in its smooth +flow; with Christianity, as Jean Paul put it, 'all the present of +earth vanished into the future of Heaven, and the Kingdom of the +Infinite arose upon the ruins of the finite.' + +The beauty of earth was looked upon as an enchantment of the devil; +and sin, the worm in the fruit, lurked in its alluring forms. + +Classic mythology created a world of its own, dimly veiled by the +visible one; every phase of Nature shewed the presence or action of +deities with whom man had intimate relations; every form of life, +animated by them, held something familiar to him, even sacred--his +landscape was absorbed by the gods. + +To Judaism and Christianity, Nature was a fallen angel, separated as +far as possible from her God. They only recognized one world--that of +spirit; and one sphere of the spiritual, religion--the relation +between God and man. Material things were a delusion of Satan's; the +heaven on which their eyes were fixed was a very distant one. + +The Hellenic belief in deities was pandemonistic and cosmic; +Christianity, in its original tendency, anti-cosmic and hostile to +Nature. And Nature, like the world at large, only existed for it in +relation to its Creator, and was no longer 'the great mother of all +things,' but merely an instrument in the hands of Providence. + +The Greek looked at phenomena in detail, in their inexhaustible +variety, rarely at things as a whole; the Christian considered Nature +as a work of God, full of wonderful order, in which detail had only +the importance of a link in a chain. + +As Lotze says, 'The creative artistic impulse could be of no use to a +conception of life in which nothing retained independent +significance, but everything referred to or symbolized something +else.' But yet, the idea of individuality, of the importance of the +ego, gained ground as never before through this introspection and +merging of material in spiritual, this giving spirit the exclusive +sway; and Christianity, while it broke down the barriers of nation, +race, and position, and widened the cleft between Nature and spirit, +discovered at the same time the worth of the individual. + +And this individuality was one of the chief steps towards an +artistic, that is, individual point of view about Nature, for it was +not possible to consider her freely and for her own sake alone, until +the unlimited independence of mind had been recognized. + +But the full development of Christianity was only reached when it +blended with the Germanic spirit, with the German Gemüth (for which +no other language has a word), and intensified, by so doing, the +innately subjective temperament of the race. + +The northern climate gives pause for the development of the inner +life; its long bleak winter, with the heavy atmosphere and slow +coming of spring, wake a craving for light and warmth, and throw man +back on himself. This inward inclination, which made itself felt very +early in the German race, by bringing out the contemplative and +independent sides of his character, and so disinclining him for +combined action with his fellows, forwarded the growth of the +over-ripe seeds of classic culture and vital Christianity. + +The Romanic nations, with their brilliant, sharply-defined landscape +and serene skies, always retained something of the objective delight +in life which belonged to antiquity; they never felt that mysterious +impulse towards dreams and enthusiastic longing which the Northerner +draws from his lowering skies and dark woods, his mists on level and +height, the grey in grey of his atmosphere, and his ever varying +landscape. A raw climate drives man indoors in mind as well as body, +and prompts that craving for spring and delight in its coming which +have been the chief notes in northern feeling for Nature from +earliest times. + +Vischer has shewn in his _Aesthetik_, that German feeling was early +influenced by the different forms of plant life around it. Rigid +pine, delicate birch, stalwart oak, each had its effect; and the +wildness and roughness of land, sea, and animal life in the North +combined with the cold of the climate to create the taste for +domestic comfort, for fireside dreams, and thought-weaving by the +hearth. + +Nature schooled the race to hard work and scanty pleasure, and yet +its relationship to her was deep and heartfelt from the first. +Devoutly religious, it gazed at her with mingled love and fear; and +the deposit of its ideas about her was its mythology. + +Its gods dwelt in mountain tops, holes in the rocks, and rivers, and +especially in dark forests and in the leafy boughs of sacred trees; +and the howling of wind, the rustle of leaves, the soughing in the +tree tops, were sounds of their presence. The worship of woods lasted +far into Christian times, especially among the Saxons and +Frisians.[1] + +Wodan was the all-powerful father of gods and men--the highest god, +who, as among all the Aryan nations, represented Heaven. Light was +his shining helmet, clouds were the dark cap he put on when he spread +rain over the earth, or crashed through the air as a wild hunter with +his raging pack. His son Donar shewed himself in thunder and +lightning, as he rode with swinging axe on his goat-spanned car. +Mountains were sacred to both, as plants to Ziu. Freyr and Freya were +goddesses of fertility, love, and spring; a ram was sacred to them, +whose golden fleece illuminated night as well as day, and who drew +their car with a horse's speed.[2] As with Freya, an image of the +goddess Nerthus was drawn through the land in spring, to announce +peace and fertility to mortals. + +The suggestive myth of Baldur, god of light and spring, killed by +blind Hödur, was the expression of general grief at the passing of +beauty. + +The _Edda_ has a touching picture of the sorrow of Nature, of her +trees and plants, when the one beloved of all living things fell, +pierced by an arrow. Holda was first the mild and gracious goddess, +then a divine being, encompassing the earth. She might be seen in +morning hours by her favourite haunts of lake and spring, a beautiful +white woman, who bathed and vanished. When snow fell, she was making +her bed, and the feathers flew. Agriculture and domestic order were +under her care. + +Ostara was goddess of bright dawn, of rising light, and awakening +spring, as Hel of subterranean night, the darkness of the underworld. +Frigg, wife of the highest god, knew the story of existence, and +protected marriage. She was the Northern Juno or Hera. + +Ravines and hollows in the mountains were the dwelling-places of the +dwarfs (Erdmännlein), sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly to +man; now peaceful and helpful, now impish spirits of mischief in +cloud caps and grey coats, thievish and jolly. + +They were visible by moonlight, dancing in the fields; and when their +track was found in the dew,[3] a good harvest was expected. Popular +belief took the floating autumn cobwebs for the work of elves and +fairies. The spirits of mountain and wood were related to the +water-spirits, nixies who sat combing their long hair in the sun, or +stretched up lovely arms out of the water. The elves belonged to the +more spiritual side of Nature, the giants to the grosser. Rocks and +stones were the weapons of the giants; they removed mountains and +hills, and boulders were pebbles shaken out of their shoes. + +Among animals the horse was sacred to many deities, and gods and +goddesses readily transformed themselves into birds. Two ravens, +Hugin and Munin, whose names signify thought and memory, were Odin's +constant companions. The gift of prophecy was ascribed to the cuckoo, +as its monotonous voice heralded the spring: + + Kukuk vam haven, wo lange sail ik leven? + +There were many legends of men and snakes who exchanged shapes, and +whom it was unlucky to kill.[4] + +The sun and moon, too, were familiar figures in legends. + +Their movement across the sky was a flight from two pursuing wolves, +of which one, the Fenris wolf, was fated one day to catch and devour +the moon. The German, like the Greek, dreaded nothing more than the +eclipse of sun or moon, and connected it with the destruction of all +things and the end of the world. In the moon spots he saw a human +form carrying a hare or a stick or an axe on his shoulder. + +The Solstices impressed him most of all, with their almost constant +day in summer, almost constant night in winter. Sun, moon, and stars +were the eyes of heaven; there was a pious custom to greet the stars +before going to bed. Still earlier, they were sparks of fire from +Muspilli, to light the gods home. Night, day, and the sun had their +cars--night and day with one horse, the sun with two: sunrise brought +sounds sweeter than the song of birds or strings; the rising sun, it +was said, rings for joy, murmuring daybreak laughs.[5] + +Day brought joy, night sorrow; the first was good and friendly, the +second bad and hostile. The birds greeted daytime and summer with +songs of delight, but grieved in silence through night and winter: +the first swallow and stork were hailed as spring's messengers. May +with greening woods led in beloved summer, frost and snow the winter. + +So myth, fable, and legend were interlaced in confusion; who can +separate the threads? + +At any rate, the point of view which they indicate remained the +common one even far into the Middle Ages, and shewed simple familiar +intercourse with Nature. Even legal formulæ were full of pictures +from Nature. In the customary oath to render a contract binding, the +promise is to hold, so it runs, 'so long as the sun shines and rivers +flow, so long as the wind blows and birds sing, so far off as earth +is green and fir trees grow, so far as the vault of heaven reaches.' +As Schnaase says,[6] though with some exaggeration, such formulæ, in +their summary survey of earth and sky, often give a complete +landscape poem in a few words. He points out that in northern, as +opposed to classic mythology, Nature was considered, not in the +cursory Hebrew way, that hurried over or missed detail, but as a +whole, and in her relation to man's inner life. + +'The collective picture of heaven and earth, of cloud movement, of +the mute life of plants--that side of Nature which had almost escaped +the eye of antiquity--occupied the Northerner most of all. + +'The _Edda_ even represents all Nature together in one colossal +form--the form of the giant Ymir, whom the sons of Boer slew, in +order to make the mountains from his bones, the earth from his flesh, +the skies from his skull.' + +A still grander mythical synthesis was the representation of the +whole world under the form of the sacred ash tree Yggdrasil. This was +the world tree which united heaven, earth, and hell. Its branches +stretched across the world and reached up to the skies, and its roots +spread in different directions--one toward the race of Asa in heaven, +another toward the Hrimthursen, the third toward the underworld; and +on both roots and branches creatures lived and played--eagle, +squirrel, stag, and snake; while by the murmuring Urdhar stream, +which rippled over one root, the Nones sat in judgment with the race +of Asa. + +Not less significant was the conception of the end of the world, the +twilight of the gods (Götterdämmerung), according to which all the +wicked powers broke loose and fought against the gods; the sun and +moon were devoured by wolves, the stars fell and earth quaked, the +monster world-serpent Joermungande, in giant rage, reared himself out +of the water and came to land: Loki led the Hrimthursen and the +retinue of hell, and Surt, with his shining hair, rode away from the +flaming earth across Bifröst, the rainbow, which broke beneath him. + +After the world conflagration a new and better earth arose, with +rejuvenated gods.[7] + +German mediæval poetry, as a whole, epic and lyric, was interwoven +with a hazy network of suggestive myth and legend; and moral +elements, which in mythology were hidden by the prominence of Nature, +stood out clear to view in the fate and character of the heroes. The +germ of many of our fairy tales is a bit of purest poetry of +Nature--a genuine Nature myth transferred to human affairs, which lay +nearer to the child-like popular mind, and were therefore more +readily understood by it. + +So, for instance, from the Maiden of the Shield, Sigrdrifa, who was +pierced by Odin's sleep thorn, and who originally represented the +earth, frozen in winter, kissed awake by the sun-god, came Brunhild, +whose mail Siegfried's sword penetrated as the sun rays penetrate the +frost, and lastly the King's daughter, who pricked herself with the +fateful spindle, and sank into deep sleep. And as Sigrdrifa was +surrounded by walls of flame, so now we have a thorny hedge of wild +briar round the beautiful maiden (hence named Dornröschen) when the +lucky prince comes to waken her with a kiss.[8] + +Not all fairy tales have preserved the myth into Christian times in +so poetic and transparent a form as this. Its poetic germ arose from +hidden depths of myth and legend, and, like heathen superstitions in +the first centuries of Christianity, found its most fruitful soil +among the people. It has often been disguised beyond recognition by +legends, and by the worship of the Madonna and saints, but it has +never been destroyed, and it keeps its magic to the present day. + +We see then that the inborn German feeling for Nature, conditioned by +climate and landscape, and pronounced in his mythology, found both an +obstacle and a support in Christianity--an obstacle in its +transcendentalism, and a support in its inwardness. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE THEOLOGICAL CHRISTIAN AND THE SYMPATHETIC +HEATHEN FEELING OF THE FIRST TEN CENTURIES A.D. + + +The Middle Ages employed its best intellectual power in solving the +problems of man's relation to God and the Redeemer, his moral +vocation, and his claim to the Kingdom of the blessed. Mind and heart +were almost entirely engrossed by the dogmas of the new faith, such +as the incarnation, original sin, and free-will, and by doubts which +the Old Testament had raised and not solved. Life was looked upon as +a test-place, a thoroughfare to the heavenly Kingdom; earth, with its +beauty and its appeal to the senses, as a temptress. + +To flee the world and to lack artistic feeling were therefore marks +of the period. We have no trace of scientific knowledge applied to +Nature, and she was treated with increasing contempt, as the +influence of antiquity died out. In spite of this, the attitude of +the Apostolic Fathers was very far from hostile. Their fundamental +idea was the Psalmist's 'Lord, how great are Thy works; in wisdom +hast Thou made them all!' and yet they turned to Nature--at any rate, +the noblest Grecians among them--not only for proof of divine wisdom +and goodness, but with a degree of personal inclination, an +enthusiasm, to which antiquity was a stranger. + +Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians: + +'Let us note how free from anger He is towards all His creatures. The +heavens are moved by His direction and obey Him in peace. Day and +night accomplish the course assigned to them by Him, without +hindrance one to another. The sun and the moon and the dancing stars, +according to His appointment, circle in harmony within the bounds +assigned to them, without any swerving aside. The earth, bearing +fruit in fulfilment of His will at her proper seasons, putteth forth +the food that supplieth abundantly both men and beasts and all living +things which are thereupon, making no dissension, neither altering +anything which He hath decreed. Moreover, the inscrutable depths of +the abysses and unutterable statutes of the nether regions are +constrained by the same ordinances. The basin of the boundless sea, +gathered together by His workmanship into its reservoirs, passeth not +the barriers wherewith it is surrounded; but even as He ordered it, +so it doeth. For He said, "so far shalt thou come, and thy waves +shall be broken within thee." The ocean which is impassable for men, +and the worlds beyond it, are directed by the same ordinances of the +Master. The seasons of spring and summer and autumn and winter give +way in succession one to another in peace. The winds in their several +quarters at their proper seasons fulfil their ministry without +disturbance, and the overflowing fountains, created for enjoyment and +health, without fail give their breasts which sustain the life for +men. Yea, the smallest of living things come together in concord and +peace.'[1] + +The three great Cappadocians, the most representative of the Greek +Fathers and leaders of the fourth century, wrote about the scenery +round them in a tone of sentimentality not less astonishing, in view +of the prejudice which denies all feeling for Nature to the Middle +Ages, than their broad humanity and free handling of dogma. + +It was no ascetic renouncing the world and solitude[2]; but rather a +sensitive man, thoughtful and dreamy at once, who wrote as follows +(Basil the Great to Gregory Nazianzen): + + It is a lofty mountain overshadowed with a deep wood, irrigated + on the north by cold and transparent streams. At its foot is + spread a low plain, enriched perpetually with the streams from + the mountains. The wood, a virgin forest of trees of various + kinds and foliage which grows around it, almost serves it as a + rampart; so that even the Isle of Calypso, which Homer evidently + admired as a paragon of loveliness, is nothing in comparison with + this. For indeed it is very nearly an island, from its being + enclosed on all sides with rocky boundaries. On two sides of it + are deep and precipitous ravines, and on another side the river + flowing from the steep is itself a continuous and almost + impassable barrier. The mountain range, with its moon-shaped + windings, walls off the accessible parts of the plain. There is + but one entrance, of which we are the masters. My hut is built on + another point, which uplifts a lofty pinnacle on the summit, so + that this plain is outspread before the gaze, and from the height + I can catch a glimpse of the river flowing round, which to my + fancy affords no less delight than the view of the Strymore as + you look from Amphipolis. For the Strymore broadens into lakes + with its more tranquil stream, and is so sluggish as almost to + forfeit the character of a river. The Iris, on the other hand, + flowing with a swifter course than any river I know, for a short + space billows along the adjacent rock, and then, plunging over + it, rolls into a deep whirlpool, affording a most delightful view + to me and to every spectator, and abundantly supplying the needs + of the inhabitants, for it nurtures an incredible number of + fishes in its eddies. + + Why need I tell you of the sweet exhalations from the earth or + the breezes from the river? Other persons might admire the + multitude of the flowers, or of the lyric birds, but I have no + time to attend to them. But my highest eulogy of the spot is, + that, prolific as it is of all kinds of fruits from its happy + situation, it bears for me the sweetest of all fruits, + tranquillity; not only because it is free from the noises of + cities, but because it is not traversed by a single visitor + except the hunters, who occasionally join us. For, besides its + other advantages, it also produces animals--not bears and wolves, + like yours--heaven forbid! But it feeds herds of stags, and of + wild goats and hares, and creatures of that kind. Do you not then + observe what a narrow risk I ran, fool that I was, to change such + a spot for Tiberine, the depth of the habitable world? I am now + hastening to it, pardon me. For even Alcmæon, when he discovered + the Echinades, no longer endured his wanderings.[3] + +This highly-cultured prince of the Church clearly valued the place +quite as much for its repose, its idyllic solitude, for what we +moderns would call its romantic surroundings, sylvan and rugged at +once, as for its fertility and practical uses. But it is too much to +say, with Humboldt[4]: + + In this simple description of scenery and forest life, feelings + are expressed which are more intimately in unison with those of + modern tunes, than anything which has been transmitted to us from + Greek or Roman antiquity. From the lonely Alpine hut to which + Basil withdrew, the eye wanders over the humid and leafy roof of + the forest below.... The poetic and mythical allusion at the + close of the letter falls on the Christian ear like an echo from + another and earlier world. + +The Hellenic poets of the Anthology, and the younger Pliny in +Imperial days, held the same tone, elegiac and idyllic[5]; as +Villemain says, 'These pleasant pictures, these poetic allusions, do +not shew the austerity of the cloister.'[6] The specifically +Christian and monastic was hidden by the purely human. + +Other writings of Basil's express still more strongly the mild +dejection which longs for solitude. For instance, when Gregory had +been dwelling upon the emptiness of all earthly things, he said in +reply, that peace of soul must be man's chief aim, and could only be +attained by separation from the world, by solitude; 'for the +contemplation of Nature abates the fever of the soul, and banishes +all insincerity and presumption.' Therefore he loved the quiet corner +where he was undisturbed by human intercourse. + +He drew melancholy comparisons from Nature: men were compared to +wandering clouds that dissolve into nothing, to wavering shadows, and +shipwrecked beings, etc. + +His homilies on the Hexameron, too, shew thought of Nature. There is +a fine sense for the play of colour on the sea here: 'A pleasant +sight is the glistening sea when a settled calm doth hold it; but +pleasant too it is to behold its surface ruffled by gentle breezes, +and its colour now purple, now white, now dark; when it dasheth not +with violence against the neighbouring coast, but holdeth it in +tranquil embrace.'[7] + +There is enthusiastic admiration for Nature mixed with his profound +religious feeling in the whole description of the stars, the seasons, +etc. The expression of Ptolymäos, that when he gazed at the stars he +felt himself raised to the table of Zeus, is weak in comparison with +Basil's words, 'If, on a clear night, you have fixed your gaze upon +the beauty of the stars, and then suddenly turned to thoughts of the +artist of the universe, whoever he be, who has adorned the sky so +wonderfully with these undying flowers, and has so planned it that +the beauty of the spectacle is not less than its conformity to +law....if the finite and perishable world is so beautiful, what must +the infinite and invisible be?'[8] + +For him, as for modern minds, starlight brought thoughts of eternity: +'If the greatness of the sky is beyond human comprehension, what +mind, what understanding could fathom eternal things?' + +Gregory Nazianzen's feeling for Nature was intensely melancholy. His +poem _On Human Nature_ says: + + For yesterday, worn out with my grief alone, I sat apart in a + shady grove, gnawing my heart out. For somehow I love this remedy + in time of grief, to talk with mine own heart in silence. And the + breezes whispered to the note of the songster birds, and from the + branches brought to me sweet slumber, though my heart was + well-nigh broken. And the cicadas, friends of the sun, chirped + with the shrill note that issues from their breasts, and filled + the whole grove with sound. A cold spring hard by bedewed my feet + as it flowed gently through the glen; but I was held in the + strong grip of grief, nor did I seek aught of these things, for + the mind, when it is burdened with sorrow, is not fain to take + part in pleasure. + +The classic writers had also contrasted Nature with mind, as, for +example, Ibykos in his famous _Spring Song_[9]; but not with +Gregory's brooding melancholy and self-tormenting introspection. The +poem goes on to compare him to a cloud that wanders hither and +thither in darkness, without even a visible outline of that for which +he longed; without peace: + + I am a stream of troubled water: ever onward I move, nor hath any + part of me rest; thou wilt not a second time pass over that + stream thou didst before pass over, nor wilt thou see a second + time the man thou sawest before. + +In his dreamy enthusiasm he likes nothing better than solitude: +'Happy he who leads a lonely life, happy he who with the mighty force +of a pure mind seeth the glory of the lights of heaven.' + +The same tone constantly recurs in his writings. Human life is but +dust, blown by the wind; a stormy voyage, faded grass; kingdoms and +powers are waves of the sea, which suck under and drown; a charming +girl is a rose with thorns, etc. + +Gregory of Nyssa again praises the order and splendour of Nature and +her Creator in Old Testament style: 'Seeing the harmony of the whole, +of wonders in heaven and in earth, and how the elements of things, +though mutually opposed, are all by Nature welded together, and make +for one aim through a certain indefinable intercommunion.' + +With the pathos of Job he cries: + + Who has spread out the ground at my feet? + Who has made the sky firm over me as a dome? + Who carries the sun as a torch before me? + Who sends springs into the ravines? + Who prepares the path of the waters? + + And who gives my spirit the wing for that high flight in which I + leave earth behind and hasten through the wide ocean of air, know + the beauty of the ether, and lift myself to the stars and observe + all their splendour, and, not staying there, but passing beyond + the limits of mutable things, comprehend unchangeable Nature--the + immutable Power which is based upon itself, and leads and + supports all that exists? + +This, with its markedly poetic swing, is surprisingly like the +passage in Plato's _Phædo_, where Socrates says: 'If any man could +arrive at the exterior limit or take the wings of a bird and come to +the top, then, like a fish who puts his head out of the water and +sees this world, he would see a world beyond; and if the nature of +man could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this other +world was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the +true earth.' But even the thought, that the order and splendour of +Nature witnessed to the eternal powers which had created her, was not +strange to the Greek, as Aristotle proves in the remarks which Cicero +preserved to us in his treatise _On the Nature of the Gods_. + +Well then did Aristotle observe: 'If there were men whose habitations +had been always underground, in great and commodious houses, adorned +with statues and pictures, finished with everything which they who +are reputed happy abound with, and if, without stirring from thence, +they should be informed of a certain divine power and majesty, and +after some time the earth should open, and they should quit their +dark abode to come to us, where they should immediately behold the +earth, the seas, the heavens, should consider the vast extent of the +clouds and force of the winds, should see the sun, and observe his +grandeur and beauty, and also his generative power, inasmuch as day +is occasioned by the diffusion of his light through the sky, and when +night has obscured the earth, they should contemplate the heavens +bespangled and adorned with stars, the surprising variety of the moon +in her increase and wane, the rising and setting of all the stars and +the inviolable regularity of all their courses; when,' says he, 'they +should see these things, they would undoubtedly conclude that there +are gods, and that these are their mighty works.' + +Thus unconsciously the Greek Fathers of the Church took over the +thoughts of the great classic philosophers, only substituting a unity +for a plurality of godhead. To soar upon the wings of bird, wind, or +cloud, a _motif_ which we find here in Gregory of Nyssa, and which +reached its finest expression in Ganymede and the evening scene in +Faust, had reached a very modern degree of development in +antiquity.[10] + +Gregory of Nyssa was still more sentimental and plaintive than Basil +and Gregory Nazianzen: + + When I see every ledge of rock, every valley and plain, covered + with new-born verdure, the varied beauty of the trees, and the + lilies at my feet decked by Nature with the double charms of + perfume and of colour, when in the distance I see the ocean, + towards which the clouds are onward borne, my spirit is + overpowered by a sadness not wholly devoid of enjoyment. When in + autumn the fruits have passed away, the leaves have fallen, and + the branches of the trees, dried and shrivelled, are robbed of + their leafy adornments, we are instinctively led, amid the + everlasting and regular change in Nature, to feel the harmony of + the wondrous powers pervading all things. He who contemplates + them with the eye of the soul, feels the littleness of man amid + the greatness of the universe. + +Are not these thoughts, which Humboldt rightly strings together, +highly significant and modern? Especially in view of the opinion +which Du Bois Reymond, for example, expresses: 'In antiquity, +mediæval times, and in later literature up to the last century, one +seeks in vain for the expression of what we call a feeling for +Nature.'[11] + +Might not Werther have written them? They have all his sentimental +melancholy, coupled with that 'delight of sorrow' which owes its name +(Wonne der Wehmuth) to Goethe, although its meaning was known to +Euripides. + +Yet it was only in rare cases, such as Seneca and Aristotle, that +classic writers combined such appreciation of Nature's individual +traits with that lofty view of the universe which elevates and +humbles at once. + +Gregory shewed the blending of Christian with classic feeling; and +the deepening of the inner life through the new faith is quite as +clear in patristic writings as their close relationship to the +classic. + +But the thinkers and poets of the Middle Ages did not always see +Nature under the brilliant light of Hellenic influence; there were +wide spaces of time in which monkish asceticism held sway, and she +was treated with most unscientific contempt. For the development of +feeling did not proceed in one unswerving line, but was subject to +backward movements. The rosy afterglow of the classic world was upon +these Greek Fathers; but at the same time they suffered from the +sorrowfulness of the new religion, which held so many sad and +pessimistic elements. + +The classic spirit seemed to shudder before the eternity of the +individual, before the unfathomable depths which opened up for +mankind with this religion of the soul, which can find no rest in +itself, no peace in the world, unless it be at one with God in +self-forgetting devotion and surrender. + +Solitude, to which all the deeper minds at this time paid homage, +became the mother of new and great thoughts, and of a view of the +world little behind the modern in sentimentality. + +What Villemain says of the quotation from Gregory Nazianzen just +given, applies with equal force to the others: + + No doubt there is a singular charm in this mixture of abstract + thoughts and emotions, this contrast between the beauties of + Nature and the unrest of a heart tormented by the enigma of + existence and seeking to find rest in faith.... It was not the + poetry of Homer, it was another poetry.... It was in the new form + of contemplative poetry, in this sadness of man about himself, in + these impulses towards God and the future, in this idealism so + little known by the poets of antiquity, that the Christian + imagination could compete without disadvantage. It was there that + that poetry arose which modern satiety seeks for, the poetry of + reverie and reflection, which penetrates man's heart and + deciphers his most intimate thoughts and vaguest wishes. + +Contempt for art was a characteristic of the Fathers of the Church, +and to that end they extolled Nature; man's handiwork, however +dazzling, was but vanity in their eyes, whereas Nature was the +handiwork of the Creator. Culture and Nature were purposely set in +opposition to each other.[12] St Chrysostom wrote: + + If the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would lead + thy spirit astray, look upwards to the vault of heaven, and + around thee on the open fields, in which herds graze by the + water's side. Who does not despise all the creations of art, when + in the stillness of his soul he watches with admiration the + rising of the sun, as it pours its golden light over the face of + the earth; when resting on the thick grass beside the murmuring + spring, or beneath the sombre shade of a thick and leafy tree, + the eye rests on the far receding and hazy distance? + +The visible to them was but a mirror of the invisible; as Paul says +(13th of the 1st Corinthians): 'Here we see in a glass darkly,' and +Goethe: 'Everything transitory is but a similitude.' + + God (says St Chrysostom again) has placed man in the world as in + a royal palace gleaming with gold and precious stones; but the + wonderful thing about this palace is, that it is not made of + stone, but of far costlier material; he has not lighted up a + golden candelabra, but given lights their fixed course in the + roof of the palace, where they are not only useful to us, but an + object of great delight.[13] + +The Roman secular writers of the first Christian centuries had not +this depth of thought and sadness; but from them too we have notable +descriptions of Nature in which personal pleasure and sympathy are +evident motives as well as religious feeling. + +In the little _Octavius_ of Minucius Felix, a writing full of genuine +human feeling of the time of Commodus, the mixture of the heathen +culture and opinions of antiquity with the Christian way of thinking +has a very modern ring. The scenery is finely sketched. + + The heats of summer being over, autumn began to be temperate ... + we (two friends, a heathen and a Christian) agreed to go to the + delightful city of Ostia.... As, at break of day, we were + proceeding along the banks of the Tiber towards the sea, that the + soft breeze might invigorate our limbs, and that we might enjoy + the pleasure of feeling the beach gently subside under our + footsteps, Cæcilius observed an image of Serapis, and having + raised his hands to his lips, after the wont of the superstitious + vulgar, he kissed it.... Then Octavius said: 'It is not the part + of a good man, brother Marcus, thus to leave an intimate + companion and friend amidst blind popular ignorance, and to + suffer him, in such open daylight, to stumble against stones,' + etc.... Discoursing after this sort, we traversed the space + between Ostia and the sea, and arrived at the open coast. There + the gentle surges had smoothed the outermost sands like a + pleasure walk, and as the sea, although the winds blow not, is + ever unquiet, it came forward to the shore, not hoary and + foaming, but with waves gently swelling and curled. On this + occasion we were agreeably amused by the varieties of its + appearance, for, as we stood on the margin and dipped the soles + of our feet in the water, the wave alternately struck at us, and + then receding, and sliding away, seemed to swallow up itself. We + saw some boys eagerly engaged in the game of throwing shells in + the sea.... Cæcilius said: 'All things ebb into the fountain from + which they spring, and return back to their original without + contriver, author, or supreme arbiter ... showers fall, winds + blow, thunder bellows, and lightnings flash ... but they have no + aim.' Octavius answers: 'Behold the heaven itself, how wide it is + stretched out, and with what rapidity its revolutions are + performed, whether in the night when studded with stars, or in + the daytime when the sun ranges over it, and then you will learn + with what a wonderful and divine hand the balance is held by the + Supreme Moderator of all things; see how the circuit made by the + sun produces the year, and how the moon, in her increase, wanes + and changes, drives the months around.... Observe the sea, it is + bound by a law that the shore imposes; the variety of trees, how + each of them is enlivened from the bowels of the earth! Behold + the ocean, it ebbs and flows alternately. Look at the springs, + they trickle with a perpetual flow; at rivers, they hold on their + course in quick and continued motion. Why should I speak of the + ridges of mountains, aptly disposed? of the gentle slope of + hills, or of plains widely extended?... In this mansion of the + world, when you fully consider the heaven and the earth, and that + providence, order, and government visible in them, assure + yourself that there is indeed a Lord and Parent of the whole ... + do not enquire for the name of God--God is his name.... If I + should call Him Father, you would imagine Him earthly; if King, + carnal; and if Lord, mortal. Remove all epithets, and then you + will be sensible of His glory....' + +How like Faust's confession of faith to Gretchen: + + Him who dare name + And yet proclaim, + Yes! I believe... + The All-embracer, + All-sustainer, + Doth he not embrace, sustain, + Thee, me, Himself? + Lifts not the Heaven its dome above? + Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us rise?... + And beaming tenderly with looks of love + Climb not the everlasting stars on high?... + Fill thence thy heart, how large so e'er it be, + And in the feeling when thou'rt wholly blest, + Then call it what thou wilt--Bliss! Heart! Love! God! + I have no name for it--'tis feeling all + Name is but sound and smoke + Shrouding the glow of Heaven. + +Such statements of belief were not rare in the Apologists; but Nature +at this time was losing independent importance in men's minds, like +life itself, which after Cyprian was counted as nothing but a fight +with the devil.[14] + +There is deep reverence for Nature in the lyrics, the hymns of the +first centuries A.D., as a work of God and an emblem of moral ideas. +Ebert observes[15] + + In comparison with the old Roman, one can easily see the + peculiarities and perfect originality of these Christian lyrics. + I do not mean merely in that dominance of the soul life in which + man appeared to be quite merged, and which makes them such + profound expressions of feeling; but in man's relationship to + Nature, which, one might say, supplies the colour to the + painter's brush.[16] Nature appears here in the service of ideal + moral powers and robbed of her independence;[17] the servant of + her Creator, whose direct command she obeys. She is his + instrument for man's welfare, and also at times, under the + temporary mastery of the devil, for his destruction. Thus Nature + easily symbolizes the moral world. + +'Bountiful Giver of light, through whose calm brightness, when the +time of night is past and gone, the daylight is suffused abroad, +Thou, the world's true morning star, clearer than the full glorious +sun, Thou very dayspring, very light in all its fulness, that dost +illumine the innermost recesses of the heart,' sings St Hilary in his +Morning Hymn; and in another hymn, declaring himself unworthy to lift +his sinful eyes to the clear stars, he urges all the creatures, and +heaven, earth, sea and river, hill and wood, rose, lily, and star to +weep with him and lament the sinfulness of man. + +In the Morning Hymn of St Ambrose dawn is used symbolically; dark +night pales, the light of the world is born again, and the new birth +of the soul raises to new energy; Christ is called the true sun, the +source of light; 'let modesty be as the dawn, faith as the noonday, +let the mind know no twilight.' + +And Prudentius sings in a Morning Hymn [18]: 'Night and mist and +darkness fade, light dawns, the globe brightens, Christ is coming!' +and again: 'The herald bird of dawn announces day, Christ the awaker +calls us to life.' And in the ninth hymn: 'Let flowing rivers, waves, +the seashore's thundering, showers, heat, snow, frost, forest and +breeze, night, day, praise Thee throughout the ages.'[19] + +He speaks of Christ as the sun that never sets, never is obscured by +clouds, the flower of David, of the root of Jesse; of the eternal +Fatherland where the whole ground is fragrant with beds of purple +roses, violets, and crocuses, and slender twigs drop balsam. + +St Jerome united Christian genius, as Ebert says, with classic +culture to such a degree that his writings, especially his letters, +often shew a distinctly modern tone,[20] and go to prove that +asceticism so deepened and intensified character that even literary +style took individual stamp.[21] But the most perfect representative, +the most modern man, of his day was Augustine. + +As Rousseau's _Confessions_ revealed the revolutionary genius of the +eighteenth century, Augustine's opened out a powerful character, +fully conscious of its own importance, striving with the problems of +the time, and throwing search-lights into every corner of its own +passionate heart. He had attained, after much struggling, to a +glowing faith, and he described the process in characteristic and +drastic similes from Nature, which are scarcely suitable for +translation. He said on one occasion: + + For I burned at times in my youth to satiate myself with deeds of + hell, and dared to run wild in many a dark love passage.... In + the time of my youth I took my fill passionately among the wild + beasts, and I dared to roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves + beneath the shade; and my beauty consumed away and I was + loathsome in Thy sight, pleasing myself and desiring to please + the eyes of men.... The seething waves of my youth flowed up to + the shores of matrimony.... + +Comfortless at the death of his friend: + + I burned, I sighed, I wept, I was distraught, for I bore within + me a soul rent and bloodstained, that would no longer brook my + carrying; yet I found no place where I could lay it down, neither + in pleasant groves nor in sport was it at rest. All things, even + the light itself, were filled with shuddering. + +Augustine, like Rousseau, understood 'que c'est un fatal présent du +ciel qu'une ame sensible.' + +He looked upon his own heart as a sick child, and sought healing for +it in Nature and solitude, though in vain. + +The pantheistic belief of the Manicheans that all things, fire, air, +water, etc., were alive, that figs wept when they were picked and the +mother tree shed milky tears for the loss of them, that everything in +heaven and earth was a part of godhead, gave him no comfort; it was +rather the personal God of the Psalms whom he saw in the ordering of +Nature. + +The cosmological element in theism has never been more beautifully +expressed than in his words: + + I asked the earth, and she said: 'I am not He,' and all things + that are in her did confess the same. I asked the sea and the + depths and creeping things, and they answered: 'We are not thy + God, seek higher.' I asked the blowing breezes, and the whole + expanse of air with its inhabitants made answer: 'Anaxagoras was + at fault, I am not God.' I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the + stars, and with a loud voice did they exclaim: 'He made us.' My + question was the enquiry of my spirit, their answer was the + beauty of their form. + +In another place: + + Not with uncertain but with sure consciousness, Lord, I love + Thee. But behold, sea and sky and all things in them from all + sides tell me that I must love Thee, nor do they cease to give + all men this message, so that they are without excuse. Sky and + earth speak to the deaf Thy praises: when I love Thee, I love not + beauty of form, nor radiancy of light; but when I love my God, I + love the light, the voice, the sweetness, the food, the embrace + of my innermost soul. That is what I love when I love my God. + +Augustine's interest in Nature was thus religious. At the same time, +the soothing influence of quiet woods was not unknown to him. + +The likeness and unlikeness between the Christian and heathen points +of view are very clear in the correspondence between Ausonius, the +poet of the Moselle, and Paulinus, Bishop of Nola; and the deep +friendship expressed in it raises their dilettante verses to the +level of true poetry. + +Ausonius, thoroughly heathen as he was, carries us far forward into +Christian-Germanic times by his sentimentality and his artistic +descriptions of the scenery of the Moselle.[22] + +It is characteristic of the decline of heathendom, that the lack of +original national material to serve as inspiration, as the Æneas Saga +had once served, led the best men of the time to muse on Nature, and +describe scenery and travels. Nothing in classic Roman poetry attests +such an acute grasp of Nature's little secret charms as the small +poem about the sunny banks of the Moselle, vine-clad and crowned by +villas, and reflected in the crystal water below. It seemed as if the +Roman, with the German climate, had imbibed the German love of +Nature; as if its scenery had bewitched him like the German maiden +whom he compared to roses and lilies in his song. + +Many parts of his poetical epistles are in the same tone, and we +learn incidentally from them that a lengthy preamble about weather +and place belonged to letter-writing even then.[23] + +Feeling for Nature and love of his friend are interwoven into a truly +poetic appeal in No. 64, in which Ausonius complains that Paulinus +does not answer his letters: + + Rocks give answer to the speech of man, and his words striking + against the caves resound, and from the groves cometh the echo of + his voice. The cliffs of the coast cry out, the rivers murmur, + the hedge hums with the bees that feed upon it, the reedy banks + have their own harmonious notes, the foliage of the pine talks in + trembling whispers to the winds: what time the light south-east + falls on the pointed leaves, songs of Dindymus give answer in the + Gargaric grove. Nature has made nothing dumb; the birds of the + air and the beasts of the earth are not silent, the snake has its + hiss, the fishes of the sea as they breathe give forth their + note.... Have the Basque mountains and the snowy haunts of the + Pyrenees taken away thy urbanity?... May he, who advises thee to + keep silence, never enjoy the singing of sweet songs nor the + voices of Nature ... sad and in need may he live in desolate + regions, and wander silent in the rounded heights of the Alpine + range. + +The sounds of Nature are detailed with great delicacy in this appeal, +and we see that the Alps are referred to as desolate regions. + +In another letter (25) he reminded his friend of their mutual love, +their home at Burdigala, his country-house with its vine-slopes, +fields, woods, etc., and went on: + + Yet without thee no year advanceth with grateful change of + season; the rainy spring passeth without flower, the dog-star + burns with blazing heat, Pomona bringeth not the changing scents + of autumn, Aquarius pours forth his waters and saddens winter. + Pontius, dear heart, seest thou what thou hast done? + +Closing in the same tender strain with a picture of his hope +fulfilled: + + Now he leaves the snowy towns of the Iberians, now he holds the + fields of the Tarbellians, now passeth he beneath the halls of + Ebromagus, now he is gliding down the stream, and now he knocketh + at thy door! Can we believe it? Or do they who love, fashion + themselves dreams? + +The greater inwardness of feeling here, as contrasted with classic +times, is undeniable; the tone verges on the sentimentality of the +correspondences between 'beautiful souls' in the eighteenth century. + +Paulinus was touchingly devoted to his former teacher Ausonius, and +in every way a man of fine and tender feeling. He gave himself with +zeal to Christianity, and became an ascetic and bishop. + +It was a bitter grief to him that his Ausonius remained a heathen +when he himself had sworn allegiance to Christ and said adieu to +Apollo. There is a fine urbanity and humanity in his writings, but he +did not, like Ausonius, love Nature for her own sake. The one took +the Christian ascetic point of view, the other the classic heathen, +with sympathy and sentiment in addition. + +Paulinus recognized the difference, and contrasted their ideas of +solitude. 'They are not crazed, nor is it their savage fierceness +that makes men choose to live in lonely spots; rather, turning their +eyes to the lofty stars, they contemplate God, and set the leisure +that is free from empty cares, to fathom the depths of truth they +love.' + +In answer to his friend's praise of home, he praised Spain, in which +he was living, and many copious descriptions of time and place run +through his other writings[24]; but while he yielded nothing to +Ausonius in the matter of friendship, 'sooner shall life disappear +from my body than thy image from my heart,' he was without his quiet +musing delight in Nature. For her the heathen had the clearer eye and +warmer heart; the Christian bishop only acknowledged her existence in +relation to his Creator, declaring with pride that no power had been +given to us over the elements, nor to them over us, and that not from +the stars but from our own hearts come the hindrances to virtue. + +Lives of the saints and paraphrases of the story of creation were the +principal themes of the Christian poets of the fourth and fifth +centuries. In some of these the hermit was extolled with a dash of +Robinson Crusoe romance, and the descriptions of natural phenomena in +connection with Genesis often showed a feeling for the beauty of +Nature in poetic language. Dracontius drew a detailed picture of +Paradise with much self-satisfaction. + + Then in flight the joyous feathered throng passed through the + heavens, beating the air with sounding wings, various notes do + they pour forth in soothing harmony, and, methinks, together + praise for that they were accounted worthy to be created.[26] + +For the charming legend of Paradise was to many Christian minds of +this time what the long-lost bliss of Elysium and the Golden Age had +been to the Hellenic poets and the Roman elegist--the theme of much +vivid imagery and highly-coloured word-painting. + + Eternal spring softens the air, a healing flame floods the world + with light, all the elements glow in healing warmth; as the + shades of night fade, day rises.... Then the feathered flocks fly + joyfully through the air, beating it with their wings in the rush + of their passage, and with flattering satisfaction their voices + are heard, and I think they praise God that they were found + worthy to be created; some shine in snowy white, some in purple, + some in saffron, some in yellow gold; others have white feathers + round the eyes, while neck and breast are of the bright tint of + the hyacinth ... and upon the branches, the birds are moved to + and fro with them by the wind. + +This shews careful observation of detail; but, for the most part, +such idyllic feeling was checked by lofty religious thoughts. + +'Man,' he cries, 'should rule over Nature, over all that it contains, +over all earth offers in fruit, flowers, and verdure that tree and +vine, sea and spring, can give.' He summons all creation to praise +the Creator--stars and seasons, hail-storm and lightning, earth, sea, +river and spring, cloud and night, plants, animals, and light; and he +describes the flood in bold flights of fancy. + +In the three books of Avitus[27] we have 'a complete poem of the lost +Paradise, far removed from a mere paraphrase or versification of the +Bible,'[28] which shews artistic leanings and sympathetic feeling +here and there. As Catullus[29] pictures the stars looking down upon +the quiet love of mortals by night, and Theocritus[30] makes the +cypresses their only witnesses, the Christian poet surrounds the +marriage of our first parents with the sympathy of Nature: + + And angel voices joined in harmony and sang to the chaste and + pure; Paradise was their wedding-chamber, earth their dowry, and + the stars of heaven rejoiced with gladsome radiance.... The + kindness of heaven maintains eternal spring there; the tumultuous + south wind does not penetrate, the clouds forsake an air which is + always pure.... The soil has no need of rains to refresh it, and + the plants prosper by virtue of their own dew. The earth is + always verdant, and its surface animated by a sweet warmth + resplendent with beauty. Herbs never abandon the hills, the trees + never lose their leaves, etc. + +And when Adam and Eve leave it, they find all the rest of the +beautiful world ugly and narrow in comparison. 'Day is dark to their +eyes, and under the clear sun they complain that the light has +disappeared.' + +It was the reflection of their own condition in Nature. Among heathen +writers who were influenced, without being entirely swayed, by +Christian teaching, and imitated the rhetorical Roman style in +describing Nature, Apollonius Sidonius takes a prominent place. In +spite of many empty phrases and a stilted style, difficult to +understand as well as to translate, his poems, and still more his +letters, give many interesting pictures of the culture of his part of +the fifth century. In Carm. 2 he draws a highly--coloured picture of +the home of Pontius Leontas,[31] a fine country property, and paints +the charms of the villa with all the art of his rhetoric and some +real appreciation. The meeting of the two rivers, the Garonne and the +Dordogne, in the introduction is poetically rendered, and he goes on +to describe the cool hall and grottos, state-rooms, pillars--above +all, the splendid view: 'There on the top of the fortress I sit down +and lean back and gaze at the mountains covered by olives, so dear to +the Muse and the goats. I shall wander in their shade, and believe +that coward Daphne grants me her love.' He delighted in unspoilt +Nature, and describes: + + My fountain, which, as it flows from the mountain-side, is + overshadowed by a many-covered grotto with its wide circle. It + needs not Art; Nature has given it grace. That no artist's hand + has touched it is its charm; it is no masterpiece of skill, no + hammer with resounding blow will adorn the rocks, nor marble fill + up the place where the tufa is worn away. + +He lays stress upon the contrast between culture and Nature, town +luxury and country solitude, in his second letter to Domidius, and +describes the beauties of his own modest estate with sentimental +delight: + + You reproach me for loitering in the country; I might complain + with more reason that you stay in the town when the earth shines + in the light of spring, the ice is melting from the Alps, and the + soil is marked by the dry fissures of tortuous furrows ... the + stones in the stream, and the mud on the banks are dried up ... + here neither nude statues, comic actors, nor Hippodrome are to be + found ... the noise of the waters is so great that it drowns + conversation. From the dining-room, if you have time to spare at + meals, you can occupy it with the delight of looking at the + scenery, and watch the fishing ... here you can find a hidden + recess, cool even in summer heat, a place to sleep in. Here what + joy it is to listen to the cicadas chirping at noonday, and to + the frogs croaking when the twilight is coming on, and to the + swans and geese giving note at the early hours of the night, and + at midnight to the cocks crowing together, and to the boding + crows with three-fold note greeting the ruddy torch of the rising + dawn; and in the half light of the morning to hear the + nightingale warbling in the bushes, and the swallow twittering + among the beams.... Between whiles, the shepherds play in their + rustic fashion. Not far off is a wood where the branches of two + huge limes interlace, though their trunks are apart (in their + shade we play ball), and a lake that rises to such fury in a + storm that the trees that border it are wetted by the spray. + +In another letter to Domidius he described a visit to the +country-seat of two of his friends: + + We were torn from one pleasure to another--games, feastings, + chatting, rowing, bathing, fishing. + +As a true adherent even as a bishop of classic culture and humanity, +Sidonius is thus an interesting figure in these wild times, with his +Pliny-like enthusiasm for country rather than city, and his +susceptibility to woodland and pastoral life. + +The limit of extravagance in the bombastic rhetoric of the period was +reached in the travels of Ennodius,[32] who was scarcely more than a +fantastic prattler. The purest, noblest, and most important figure of +the sixth century was undoubtedly Boetius; but it is Cassiodorus, a +statesman of the first rank under Theodoric, who in his _Variorium +libris_ gives the most interesting view of the attitude of his day +towards Nature. He revelled in her and in describing her. After +praising Baja for its beauty[33] and Lactarius for its healthiness, +he said of Scyllacium: + + The city of Scyllacium hangs upon the hills like a cluster of + grapes, not that it may pride itself upon their difficult ascent, + but that it may voluptuously gaze on verdant plains and the blue + back of the sea. The city beholds the rising sun from its very + cradle, when the day that is about to be born sends forward no + heralding Aurora; but as soon as it begins to rise, the quivering + brightness displays its torch. It beholds Phoebus in his joy; it + is bathed in the brightness of that luminary so that it might be + thought to be itself the native land of the sun, the claims of + Rhodes to that honour being outdone.... It enjoys a translucent + air, but withal so temperate, that its winters are sunny and its + summers cool, and life passes there without sorrow, since hostile + seasons are feared by none. Hence, too, man himself is here freer + of soul than elsewhere, for this temperateness of the climate + prevails in all things.... Assuredly for the body to imbibe muddy + waters is a different thing from sucking in the transparency of a + sweet fountain. Even so the vigour of the mind is repressed when + it is clogged by a heavy atmosphere. Nature itself hath made us + subject to these influences.... clouds make us feel sad, and + again a bright day fills us with joy.... At the foot of the + Moscian Mount we hollowed out the bowels of the rock, and + tastefully introduced therein the eddying waves of Nereus. Here a + troop of fishes sporting in free captivity refreshes all minds + with delight, and charms all eyes with admiration. They run + greedily to the hand of man, and, before they become his food, + seek dainties from him. + +He described the town as rich in vineyards and olive woods, +cornfields and villas. + +He awarded the palm of beauty to Como and its lake, and although he +wrote in the clumsy language of a decaying literature, this +sixth-century sketch still strikes us as surprisingly complete and +artistic in feeling: + + Como, with its precipitous mountains and its vast expanse of + lake, seems placed there for the defence of the Province of + Liguria; and yet again, it is so beautiful, that one would think + it was created for pleasure only. + + To the south lies a fertile plain with easy roads for the + transport of provisions; on the north, a lake sixty miles long + abounding in fish, soothing the mind with delicious + recreation.... Rightly is it called Como, because it is adorned + with such gifts. The lake lies in a shell-like valley with white + margins. Above rises a diadem of lofty mountains, their slopes + studded with bright villas; a girdle of olives below, vineyards + above, while a crest of thick chestnut woods adorns the very + summit of the hills. Streams of snowy clearness dash from the + hill-sides into the lake. On the eastern side these unite to form + the river Addua, so called because it contains the added volume + of two streams.... So delightful a region makes men delicate and + averse to labour.... Therefore the inhabitants deserve special + consideration, and for this reason we wish them to enjoy + perpetually the royal bounty. + +This shews, beyond dispute, that the taste for the beauty of Nature, +even at that wild time, was not dead, and that the writer's attitude +was not mainly utilitarian. He noted the fertility of the land in +wine and grain, and of the sea in fish, but he laid far greater +stress upon its charms and their influence upon the inhabitants. + +On _a priori_ grounds (so misleading in questions of this kind) one +would scarcely expect the most disturbed period in the history of the +European people to have produced a Venantius Fortunatus, the greatest +and most celebrated poet of the sixth century. His whole personality, +as well as his poetry, shewed the blending of heathenism and +Christianity, of Germanism and Romanism, and it is only now and then +among the Roman elegists and later epic poets that we meet a feeling +for Nature which can be compared to his. Like all the poets of this +late period, his verse lacks form, is rugged and pompous, moving upon +the stilts of classic reminiscences, and coining monstrous new +expressions for itself; but its feeling is always sincere. It was the +last gleam of a setting sun of literature that fell upon this one +beneficent figure. He was born in the district of Treviso near +Venice, and crossed the Alps a little before the great Lombard +invasion, while the Merovingians, following in the steps of Chlodwig, +were outdoing each other in bloodshed and cruelty. In the midst of +this hard time Fortunatus stood out alone among the poets by virtue +of his talent and purity of character. His poems are often disfigured +by bombast, prolixity, and misplaced learning; but his keen eye for +men and things is undeniable, and his feeling for Nature shews not +only in dealing with scenery, but in linking it with the inner life. + +The lover's wish in _On Virginity_,[34] one of his longer poems, +suggests the Volkslieder: + + O that I too might go, if my hurrying foot could poise amid the + lights of heaven and hold on its starry course. But now, without + thee, night comes drearily with its dark wings, and the day + itself and the glittering sunshine is darkness to me. Lily, + narcissus, violet, rose, nard, amomum, bring me no joy--nay, no + flower delights my heart. That I may see thee, I pass hovering + through each cloud, and my love teaches my wandering eyes to + pierce the mist, and lo! in dread fear I ask the stormy winds + what they have to tell me of my lord. Before thy feet I long to + wash the pavement, and with my hair to sweep thy temples. + Whatever it be, I will bear it; all hard things are sweet; if + only I see thee, this penalty is my joy. But be thou mindful, for + thy vows do I yearn; I have thee in my heart, have me in thy + heart too. + +This is more tender in feeling than any poem by Catullus or Tibullus. +We can only explain it by two facts--the deepening of the inner life +through Christianity (we almost hear Christ's words about the 'great +sinner'), and the intimate friendship which Fortunatus enjoyed with a +German lady, who may justly be called the noblest and purest figure +of her time in Franconia. + +This was Radegunde, the unhappy daughter of a Thuringian king, who +first saw her father's kingdom lost, and then, fleeing from the +cruelty of her husband, the bloodstained Chlotaire, took the veil in +Poitiers and founded a convent, of which she made Agnes, a noble +Franconian lady, the abbess. When Fortunatus visited the place, these +ladies became his devoted friends, and he remained there as a priest +until the death of Radegunde. His poems to them, which were often +letters and notes written off-hand, are full of affection and +gratitude (he was, by the way, a gourmet, and the ladies made +allowance for this weakness in dainty gifts), and form an enduring +witness of a pure and most touching friendship. They contain many +pretty sketches of Nature and delicate offerings of flowers. In one +he said: 'If the season brought white lilies or blossomed in red +roses, I would send them to you, but now you must be content with +purple violets for a greeting'; and in another, because gold and +purple are not allowable, he sends her flowers, that she may have +'her gold in crocuses, her purple in violets, and they may adorn her +hair with even greater delight than she draws from their fragrance.' +Once, when following pious custom, she had withdrawn into her cell, +his 'straying thoughts go in search of her': + + How quickly dost thou hide the light from mine eyes! for without + thee I am o'erweighted by the clouds that bear me down, and + though thou flee and hide thyself here but for a few short days, + that month is longer than the whole hurrying year. Prithee, let + the joys of Easter bring thee back in safety, and so may a + two-fold light return to us at once. + +And when she comes out, he cries: + + Thou hadst robbed me of my happiness; now it returns to me with + thee, thou makest me doubly celebrate this solemn festival.... + Though the seedlings are only just beginning to shoot up from the + furrows, yet I to-day will reap my harvest in seeing thee once + more. To-day do I gather in the fruit and lay the peaceful + sheaves together. Though the field is bare, nor decked with ears + of corn, yet all, through thy return, is radiant fulness. + +The comparison is tedious and spun out; but the idea is poetic. We +find it in the classics: for instance, in Theocritus, when he praises +Nais, whose beauty draws even Nature under her sway, and whose coming +makes spring everywhere: + + Where has my light hidden herself from my straying eyes? When I + see not thee, I am ne'er satisfied. Though the heavens be bright, + though the clouds have fled, yet for me is the day sunless, if it + hide thee from me. + +The most touching evidence of this friendship is the poem _On the +Downfall of Thuringia_. + +'One must,' says Leo,[35] 'refer the chief excellence of the poem to +the lady who tells the tale, must grant that the irresistible power +of the description, the spectacle of the freshly open wounds, the +sympathy in the consuming sorrow of a friend, gave unwonted power of +the wing to this low-flying pen.' Radegunde is thinking of her only +remaining relative, Amalafried: + + When the wind murmurs, I listen if it bring me some news, but of + all my kindred not even a shadow presents itself to me.... And + thou, Amalafried, gentle son of my father's brother, does no + anxiety for me consume thy heart? Hast thou forgotten what + Radegunde was to thee in thy earliest years, and how much thou + lovedst me, and how thou heldst the place of the father, mother, + brother, and sister whom I had lost? An hour absent from thee + seemed to me eternal; now ages pass, and I never hear a word from + thee. A whole world now lies betwixt those who loved each other + and who of old were never separate. If others, for pity alone, + cross the Alps to seek their lost slaves, wherefore am I + forgotten?--I who am bound to thee by blood? Where art thou? I + ask the wind as it sighs, the clouds as they pass--at least some + bird might bring me news of thee. If the holy enclosure of this + monastery did not restrain me, thou shouldst see me suddenly + appear beside thee. I could cross the stormy seas in winter if it + were necessary. The tempest that alarms the sailors should cause + no fear to me who love thee. If my vessel were dashed to pieces + by the tempest, I should cling to a plank to reach thee, and if I + could find nothing to cling to, I should go to thee swimming, + exhausted. If I could but see thee once more, I should deny all + the perils of the journey.... + +There is little about Nature in this beautiful avowal of love and +longing, but the whole colouring of the mood forms a background of +feeling for his longer descriptions. His very long and tedious poem +about the bridal journey of Gelesiuntha, the Spanish princess, who +married King Chilperic, shews deep and touching feeling in parts. She +left her Toledo home with a heavy heart, crossing the Pyrenees, where +'the mountains shining with snow reach to the stars, and their sharp +peaks project over the rain clouds.' In the same vein as Ausonius, +when he urged Paulinus to write to him, she begs her sister for news: + + By thy name full oft I call thee, Gelesiuntha, sister mine: with + this name fountains, woods, rivers, and fields resound. Art thou + silent, Gelesiuntha? Answer as to thy sister stones and + mountains, groves and waters and sky, answer in language mute. + +In troubled thought and care she asked the very breezes, but of her +sister's safety all were silent. + +Fortunatus, like Ausonius, not only looked at Nature with sympathy, +but was a master in description of scenery. His lengthy descriptions +of spring are mostly only decorative work, but here and there we find +a really poetic idea. For example: + +At the first spring, when earth has doffed her frost, +the field is clothed with variegated grass; the mountains +stretch their leafy heads towards the sky, the +shady tree renews its verdant foliage, the lovely vine +is swelling with budding branches, giving promise that +a weight of grapes shall hang from its prolific stems. +While all joys return, the earth is dead and dull. + +And: + + The soft violets paint the field with their own purple, the + meadows are green with grass, the grass is bright with its fresh + shoots. Little by little, like stars, the bright flowers spring + up, and the sward is joyous and gay with flecks of colour, and + the birds that through the winter cold have been numb and silent, + with imprisoned song, are now recalled to their song. + +He describes the cold winter, and a hot summer's day, when + + Even in the forests no shade was to be found, and the traveller + almost fainted on the burning roads, longing for shade and cool + drinks. At last the rustle of a crystal stream is heard, he + hurries to it with delight, he lies down and lays his limbs in + the soft kisses of the grass. + +His poems about beautiful and noteworthy places include some on the +Garonne and Gers (Egircius): + + So dried up by heat that it is neither river nor land, and the + grumbling croak of the frog, sole ruler of the realm from which + the fish are banished, is heard in the lonely swamp; but when the + rain pours down, the flood swells, and what was a lake suddenly + becomes a sea. + +He has many verses of this sort, written with little wit but great +satisfaction. + +More attractive are descriptions of the Rhine and Moselle, recalling +Ausonius, and due to love partly of Nature, partly of verbal +scene-painting. The best and most famous of these is on his journey +by the Moselle from Metz to Andernach on the Rhine. Here he shews a +keen eye and fine taste for wide views and high mountains, as well as +for the minutiæ of scenery, with artistic treatment. He also blends +his own thoughts and feelings with his impressions of Nature, making +it clear that he values her not merely for decoration, but for her +own sake. + +He has been called the last Roman poet; in reality, he belonged not +only to the period which directly succeeded his own, when the Roman +world already lay in ruins, but to the fully-developed Middle +Ages--the time when Christianity and Germanism had mated with Roman +minds. + +In his best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the classic +tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of +bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and +under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all its +depth and intensity. His touching friendship with Radegunde is, as it +were, a symbol of the blending of the two elements out of which the +modern sprang. It was the stimulating influence of the noble Germanic +princess, herself Christian in soul, which fanned the dying sparks of +classic poetry into a flame. + +Fortunatus stood upon a borderland. Literature was retreating further +and further from the classic models, and culture was declining to its +fall. In Gaul, as in Spain and Italy, the shadows of coming night +were broadening over literary activity, thought, and feeling. + +It is a characteristic fact in Roman literature, that not only its +great lights, but the lesser ones who followed them, were +enthusiastically imitated. Latin poetry of the Middle Ages lived upon +recollections of the past, or tried to raise itself again by its +help; even so late a comer as Fortunatus became in his turn an object +of marvel, and was copied by poets who never reached his level. + +It is not surprising that feeling for Nature shewed a corresponding +shallowness and lassitude. + +Not only bucolic but didactic writing was modelled upon the classic. +Isodorus and Beda, in their works with identical titles 'concerning +the existence of things,' relied on Roman models no less than Alcuin, +who had formed himself on the pattern of Augustine's time in his +_Conflict between Winter and Spring_, as well as in many single +verses, directly inspired by Virgil.[36] + +His _Farewell to his Cell_ caught the idyllic tone very neatly: + + Beloved cell, retirement's sweet abode! + Farewell, a last farewell, thy poet bids thee! + Beloved cell, by smiling woods embraced, + Whose branches, shaken by the genial breeze, + To meditation oft my mind disposed. + Around thee too, their health-reviving herbs + In verdure gay the fertile meadows spread; + And murmuring near, by flowery banks confined, + Through fragrant meads the crystal streamlets glide, + Wherein his nets the joyful fisher casts, + And fragrant with the apple bending bough, + With rose and lily joined, the gardens smile; + While jubilant, along thy verdant glades + At dawn his melody each songster pours, + And to his God attunes the notes of praise. + +These heartfelt effusions express a feeling which certainly inspired +many monks when they turned from their gloomy cells to the gardens +and woods beyond--a feeling compounded of renunciation of the world +with idyllic comfort in their surroundings. If their fundamental +feeling was worship and praise of the Creator, their constant outdoor +work, which, during the first centuries, was strenuous cultivation of +the soil, must have roused a deep appreciation of Nature in the +nobler minds among them. Their choice of sites for monasteries and +hermitages fully bears out this view.[37] + +_The Conflict between Spring and Winter_, with its classic +suggestions, is penetrated by a truly German love of spring.[38] It +described the time when the cuckoo sings high in the branches, grass +clothes earth with many tints, and the nightingale sings untiringly +in the red-gold butcher's broom, captivating us with her changing +melodies. + +Among the savants whom Charlemagne gathered round him was Angilbert. +Virgil was his model, but the influence of the lighter fluency of +Fortunatus was visible, as in so many of his contemporaries. With a +vivid and artistic pen he described the wood and park of Aachen and +the Kaiser's brilliant hunt[39]; the great forest grove, the grassy +meadows with brooks and all sorts of birds flitting about, the +thicket stocked with many kinds of game. + +At the same time, his writing betrayed the conventional tone of +courts in its praise of his great secular lord, and a 'thoughtful +romantic inclination' for the eternal feminine, for the beautiful +women with splendid ornaments, and necks shining like milk or snow or +glowing like a rose, who, as Ebert puts it, 'lay far from the +asceticism of the poetry of the saints.' + +Naso Muadorinus in his pastorals took Calpurnius and Nemesianus for +his models, just as they had taken Virgil, and Virgil Theocritus. +Muadorinus imitated the latter in his pastorals. + +In an alternate song of his between an old man and a boy, the old man +draws an artistic contrast between the shady coolness of the wood and +the mid-day glow of the sun, while the boy praises Him whose songs +the creatures follow as once they followed Orpheus with his lute; and +at the end, Charlemagne, who was extolled at the beginning as a +second Cæsar, is exalted to heaven as the founder of a new Golden +Age. + +In the Carolingian Renaissance of the Augustine epoch of literature, +Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, takes first place. At any rate, he +described in a very superior way, and, like Fortunatus, with some +humour, the draining of the Larte at Le Mans, Feb. 820; also, in a +light and lively strain, the Battle of the Birds, and, with the same +strong colouring, Paradise. + +The idyll of the cloister garden, so often treated, became famous in +the much-read _Hortulus_ of Wahlafried.[40] + +Despite classical flourishes from Virgil and Columella, and +pharmaceutical handling of plants, there is a good deal of thoughtful +observation of Nature in these 444 hexameters. + +They contain descriptions of seasons, of recipes, flowers and +vegetables, of the gardener's pleasure in digging his fields in +spring, clearing them of nettles, and levelling the ground thrown up +by the moles, in protecting his seedlings from rain and sun, and, +later on, in his gay beds of deciduous plants. + +There is a touch here and there which is not unpoetic--for instance: + + A bright green patch of dark blue rue paints this shady grove; it + has short leaves and throws out short umbels, and passes the + breath of the wind and the rays of the sun right down to the end + of the stalk, and at a gentle touch gives forth a heavy scent. + +and: + + With what verse, with what song, can the dry thinness of my + meagre muse rightly extol the shining lily, whose whiteness is as + the whiteness of gleaming snow, whose sweet scent is as the scent + of Sabian woods? + +He closes pleasantly too, adjuring Grimald to read the book under the +shade of the peach tree, while his school-fellows play round and pick +the great delicate fruit which they can barely grasp with one hand. +In the poem to the layman Ruodbern (100 hexameters) he described the +dangers of Alpine travelling, both from weather and other foes. In +those days the difficulties of the road excluded all interest in +mountain beauty. There is a tender and expressive poem in Sapphic +metre, in which, homesick and cold in winter, he sang his longing for +beautiful Reichenau. But even he, like most of his predecessors and +all his followers, wielded his pen with labour, expression often +failing to keep pace with thought. + +It only remains to mention Wandalbert, a monk of the monastery at +Prün, who, in a postscript to the _Conclusio des Martyrologium_, +gives a charming account of a landowner's life in field, garden, and +hunt. + +In the cloister, then, idyllic comfort, delighting in Nature and a +quiet country life, was quite as much at home as scholarship and +classical study. But we shall look there in vain for any trace of the +sentimental, the profoundly melancholy attitude of the Fathers of the +Church, Basil and Gregory, or for Augustine's deep faith and devout +admiration of the works of creation: even the tone of Ausonius and +Fortunatus, in their charming descriptions of scenery, was now a +thing of the past. Feeling for Nature--sentimental, sympathetic, +cosmic, and dogmatic--had dwindled down to mere pleasure in +cultivating flowers in the garden, to the level Aachen landscape and +such like; and the power to describe the impression made by scenery +was, like the impression itself, lame and weary. + +It was the night of the decline breaking over Latin literature. + +And how did it stand with German literature up to the eleventh +century? A German Kingdom had existed from the treaties of Verdun and +Mersen (842), but during this period traces of German poetry are few, +outweighed by Latin. + +The two great Messianic poems, _Heliand_ and _Krist_, stand out +alone. In the _Heliand_ the storm on the lake of Gennesaret is +vividly painted: + + Then began the power of the storm; in the whirlwind the waves + rose, night descended, the sea broke with uproar, wind and water + battled together; yet, obedient to the command and to the + controlling word, the water stilled itself and flowed serenely. + +In _Krist_ there is a certain distinction in the description of the +Ascension, as the rising figures soar past the constellations of +stars, which disappear beneath their feet; for the rest, the symbolic +so supplants the direct meaning, that in place of an epic we have a +moralizing sermon. But there are traces of delight in the beauty of +the outer world, in the sunshine, and sympathy is attributed to +Nature: + + She grew very angry at such deeds. + +The poem _Muspilli_ (the world fire) shews the old northern feeling +for Nature; still more the few existing words of the _Wessobrunner +Prayer_: + + This I heard as the greatest marvel among men, + That once there was no earth nor heaven above, + The bright stars gave no light, the sun shone not, + Nor the moon, nor the glorious sea. + +How plainly 'the bright stars' and the 'glorious sea' shew joy in the +beauty of the world! + +In the oldest Scandinavian poems the inflexible character of the +Northerner and the northern landscape is reflected; the descriptions +are short and scanty; it is not mountain, rock, and sea which count +as beautiful, but pleasant, and, above all, fruitful scenery. The +imagery is bold: (Kenninger) the wind is the wolf of wood or sail, +the sea the pathway of the whale, the bath of the diving bird, etc. + +The Anglo-Saxon was especially distinguished by his forcible images +and epithets. In Rynerwulf we have 'night falls like a helmet, dark +brown covers the mountains.' 'The sky is the fortress of the storm, +the sun the torch of the world, the jewel of splendour.' 'Fire is +eager, wild, blind, and raging; the sea is the gray sea, and the +sparkling splendid sea; waves are graves of the dead,' etc. + +Vivid feeling for Nature is not among the characteristic features of +either Scandinavian or old German poetry. + +It is naive and objective throughout, and seldom weighty or forcible. + +The Waltharius shews the influence of Virgil's language, in +highly-coloured and sympathetic descriptions like those of the Latin +poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance. + +Animal saga probably first arose just before the twelfth century, and +their home was probably Franconia. + +Like the genial notices of plant life in the Latin poems of the +Carlovingian period, the animal poems shewed interest in the animal +world--the interest of a child who ponders individual differences and +peculiarities, the virtues and failings so closely allied to its own. +It was a naive 'hand-and-glove' footing between man and the +creatures, which attributed all his wishes and weaknesses to them, +wiped out all differences between them with perfect impartiality, and +gave the characteristics of each animal with exactness and poetry. + +The soil for the cultivation of poetry about animals was prepared by +the symbolic and allegorical way of looking at Nature which held sway +all through the Middle Ages. + +The material was used as a symbolic language for the immaterial, the +world of sense conceived of as a great picture-book of the truths of +salvation, in whose pages God, the devil, and, between them man, +figured: thus plant life suggested the flower of the root of Jesse, +foretold by Isaiah, red flowers the Saviour's wounds, and so forth. +In the earliest Christian times, a remarkable letter existed in +Alexandria, the so-called 'Physiologus,' which has affected the +proverbial turns of speech in the world's literature up to the +present day to an almost unequalled degree. + +It gave the symbolic meanings of the different animals. The lamb and +unicorn were symbols of Christ; sheep, fish, and deer, of his +followers; dragons, serpents, and bears, of the devil; swine, hares, +hyenas, of gluttony; the disorderly luxuriance of snow meant death, +the phoenix the resurrection, and so forth, indeed, whole categories +of animals were turned into allegories of the truths of +salvation.[41] The cleverest fables of animals were in _Isengrimen_, +published in Ghent about 1140 in Latin verse--the story of the sick +lion and his cure by the fox, and the outwitting of the wolf. Such +fables did not remain special to German national literature, but +became popular subjects in the literature of the whole world; and it +is a significant fact that they afterwards took root especially in +Flanders, where the taste for still life and delight in Nature has +always found a home, and which became the nursery, in later times, of +landscape, animal, and genre painting. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +THE NAIVE FEELING AT THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES + + +In the development and maturing of the race, as of the individual, +nothing is more helpful than contact with foreign elements, people of +other manners, thoughts, and feelings. Intimate intercourse between +different nationalities rouses what is best in the soul of a nation, +inviting, as it does, to discussion and opposition, as well as to the +acquisition of new ideas. The conquests of Alexander the Great opened +up a new world to the Greek, and a new culture arose--Hellenism. It +was a new world that rose before the astonished eyes of the +Crusader--in his case too, the East; but the resulting culture did +not last. The most diverse motives fused to bring about this great +migration to a land at once unknown and yet, through religion, +familiar; and a great variety of characters and nations met under the +banner of the Cross. + +Naturally this shaking up together, not only of Europeans among +themselves, but of the eastern with the western world, brought about +a complete revolution in manners, speech, art, science, trade, +manufacture, thought, and feeling, and so became an important factor +in general progress. + +The narrow boundaries of nationality, race, and education were broken +through; all felt equal before the leading idea; men, places, plants, +and animals were alike new and wonderful. Little wonder if German +knights returning home from the East wove fiction with their fact, +and produced the most fantastic and adventurous heroic songs. + +Many of the noblest of the nations joined the Crusades in pious +ardour for the cause, and it is easy to imagine the effect of the +complete novelty of scene upon them. With such tremendous new +impressions to cope with, it is not surprising that even the best +minds, untrained as they were, were unequal to the task, and that the +descriptions of real experiences or events in poetic form failed to +express what they meant. Besides this, there is no doubt that in many +ways the facts fell below their ideals; also that the Crusader's +mantle covered at the same time a rabble, which joined from the +lowest motives, the scum of Europe. It must also be remembered that +it is far easier to experience or feel than to pass on that +experience and feeling to others; that those who wrote did not always +belong to the most educated; and that they wrote, for the most part, +with difficulty in Greek or Latin. When all this has been weighed and +admitted, the fact remains that in existing accounts of the Crusades +there is great poverty of description of scenery, and lack of much +feeling for Nature. The historian, as such, was bound to give first +place to matters of fact and practical importance, and so to judge a +place by its value to an army passing through or occupying it; by its +fertility, water-supply, its swamps or stony ground, and so forth; +but still the modern reader is astonished to see how little +impression the scenery of the Holy Land made, judged by the accounts +we possess, upon the Crusaders. Even when it is conceded that other +important concerns came first, and that danger, want, and hunger must +often have made everything disagreeable, still, references to Nature +are very scanty, and one may look in vain for any interest in +beautiful scenery for its own sake. + +There is only matter-of-fact geographical and mythological +information in William of Tours' _History of the Crusades_; for +instance, in his description of the Bosphorus he does not waste a +word over its beauty. But, as 'fruitful' and 'pleasant' are +ever-recurring adjectives with him, one cannot say that he absolutely +ignored it. + +He said of Durazzo: 'They weather the bad seasons of the year in +fruitful districts rich in woods and fields, and all acceptable +conditions'; of Tyre, 'The town has a most excellent position on a +plain, almost entirely surrounded by mountains. The soil is +productive, the wood of value in many ways.' Of Antioch, 'Its +position is very convenient and pleasant, it lies in valleys which +have excellent and fertile soil, and are most pleasantly watered by +springs and streams. The mountains which enclose the town on both +sides are really very high; but send down very clear water, and their +sides and slopes are covered by buildings up to the very summits.' +There is nothing about beautiful views, unless one takes this, which +really only records a meteorological curiosity: 'From the top of one +mountain one can see the ball of the sun at the fourth watch of the +night, and if one turns round at the time when the first rays light +up the darkness, one has night on one side and day on the other.' + +Tyre is described again as 'conspicuous for the fertility of its soil +and the charm of its position.' Its great waterworks are especially +admired, since by their means 'not only the gardens and most fruitful +orchards flourish, but the cane from which sugar is made, which is so +useful to man for health and other purposes, and is sent by merchants +to the most distant parts of the world.' Other reporters were charmed +by the fertility and wealth of the East. 'On those who came from the +poorer and colder western countries, the rich resources of the sunny +land in comparison with the poverty of home made an impression of +overflowing plenty, and at times almost of inexhaustibleness. The +descriptions of certain districts, extolled for their special +richness, sound almost enthusiastic.[1] + +Burkhard von Monte Sion was enthusiastic about Lebanon's wealth of +meadows and gardens, and the plain round Tripolis, and considered the +Plain of Esdraelon the most desirable place in the world; but, on +exact and unprejudiced examination, there is nothing in his words +beyond homely admiration and matter-of-fact discussion of its great +practical utility. + +He says of La Boneia, 'That plain has many homesteads, and beautiful +groves of olive and fig and other trees of various kinds, and much +timber. Moreover, it abounds in no common measure in rivers and +pasture land'; closes a geographical account of Lebanon thus, 'There +are in Libanus and Antilibanus themselves fertile and well-tilled +valleys, rich in pasture land, vineyards, gardens, plantations--in a +word, in all the good things of the world'; and says of the Plain of +Galilee, 'I never saw a lovelier country, if our sins and wrong-doing +did not prevent Christians from living there.' + +He had some feeling too for a distant view. He wrote of Samaria: 'The +site was very beautiful; the view stretched right to the Sea of Joppa +and to Antipatris and Cæsarea of Palestine, and over the whole +mountain of Ephraim down to Ramathaym and Sophim and to Carmel near +Accon by the sea. And it is rich in fountains and gardens and olive +groves, and all the good things this world desires.' But it would be +going too far to conclude from the following words that he +appreciated the contrast between simple and sublime scenery: 'It must +be noticed too, that the river, from the source of Jordan at the foot +of Lebanon as far as the Desert of Pharan, has broad and pleasant +plains on both sides, and beyond these the fields are surrounded by +very high mountains as far as the Red Sea.' + +In dealing with Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, religious +enthusiasm suppresses any reference to scenery. + +These descriptions shew that the wealth and fertility of the country +were praised before its beauty, and that this was only referred to in +short, meagre phrases, which tell less about it than any raptures +without special knowledge. + +It was much the same with Phokas, who visited the Holy Land in +1135.[2] + +He was greatly impressed by the position of Antioch, 'with its +meadows and fruitful gardens, and the murmur of waters as the river, +fed by the torrents of the Castalian spring, flows quietly round the +town and besprinkles its towers with its gentle waves ... but most to +be admired of all is the mountain between town and sea, a noble and +remarkable sight--indeed, a delight to the beholder's eye ... the +Orontes flows with countless windings at the foot of it, and +discharges itself into the sea.' + +He thought Lebanon very beautiful and worthy its praise in Holy +Scripture: 'The sun lies like white hair upon its head; its valleys +are crowned with pines, cedars, and cypresses; streams, beautiful to +look at and quite cold, flow from the ravines and valleys down to the +sea, and the freshly melted snow gives the flowing water its crystal +clearness.' + +Tyre, too, was praised for its beauty: 'Strangers were particularly +delighted with one spring, which ran through meadows; and if one +stands on the tower, one can see the dense growth of plants, the +movement of the leaves in the glow of noon.' + +The plain of Nazareth, too, was 'a heaven on earth, the delight of +the soul.' + +But recollections of the sacred story were dearer to Phokas than the +scenery, and elsewhere he limited himself to noting the rich fruit +gardens, shady groups of trees, and streams and rivers with pleasant +banks. + +Epiphanius Monachus Hagiopolitæ, in his _Enarratio Syriæ_, was a very +dry pioneer; so, too, the _Anonymus de locis Hierosolymitanis_; +Perdiccas, in his _Hierosolyma_, describes Sion thus: 'It stands on +an eminence so as to strike the eye, and is beautiful to behold, +owing to a number of vines and flower gardens and pleasant spots.' + +It must be admitted then, that, beside utilitarian admiration of a +Paradise of fruitfulness, there is some record of simple, even +enthusiastic delight in its beauty; but only as to its general +features, and in the most meagre terms. The country was more +interesting to the Crusaders as the scene of the Christian story than +as a place in which to rest and dream and admire Nature for her own +sake. + +The accounts of German pilgrimages[3] of the fourteenth and fifteenth +centuries only contain dry notices, such as those of Jacob von Bern +(1346-47), Pfintzing (1436-40), and Ulrich Leman (1472-80). The +last-mentioned praises Damascus in this clumsy fashion: 'The town is +very gay, quite surrounded by orchards, with many brooks and springs +flowing inside and out, and an inexpressible number of people in it,' +etc. Dietrich von Schachten describes Venice in this way: 'Venice +lies in the sea, and is built neither on land nor on mountain, but on +wooden piles, which is unbelievable to one who has not seen it'; and +Candia: 'Candia is a beautiful town in the sea, well built; also a +very fruitful island, with all sorts of things that men need for +living.' He describes a ride through Southern Italy: 'Saturday we +rode from Trepalda, but the same day through chestnut and hazel +woods; were told that these woods paid the king 16,000 gulden every +year. After that we rode a German mile through a wood, where each +tree had its vine--many trees carried 3 ohms of wine, which is +pleasant to see--and came to Nola.' + +He called Naples 'very pretty and big,' and on: 'Then the king took +us to the sea and shewed us the ports, which are pretty and strong +with bulwarks and gates; we saw many beautiful ships too,' etc. One +does not know which is the more wonderful here, the poverty of the +description or the utter lack of personal observation: what the wood +produced, and how one was protected from the sea, was more important +to the writer than wood and sea themselves, and this, even in +speaking of the Bay of Naples, perhaps the most beautiful spot in +Europe. But instances like these are typical of German descriptions +at the time, and their Alpine travels fared no better.[4] + +Geographical knowledge of the Alps advanced very slowly; there was as +yet no æsthetic enjoyment of their beauty. The Frankish historians +(Gregory of Tours, Fredegar) chronicled special events in the Alps, +but very briefly. Fredegar, for instance, knew of the sudden +appearance of a hot spring in the Lake of Thun, and Gregory of Tours +notes that the land-slip in 563 at the foot of the Dent du Midi, +above the point where the Rhine enters the Lake of Geneva, was a +dreadful event. Not only was the Castle of Tauretunum overwhelmed, +but the blocking of the Rhine caused a deluge felt as far as Geneva. +The pious prince of the Church explained this as a portent of another +catastrophe, the pest, which ravaged Gaul soon after. + +There was much fabling at that time in the legends of saints, about +great mines of iron, gold, and silver, and about chamois and buck, +cattle-breeding and Alpine husbandry in the 'regio montana'; for +example, in von Aribo's _Vita S. Emmerani_. When the Alps became more +frequented, especially when, through Charlemagne, a political bridge +came to unite Italy and Germany, new roads were made and the whole +region was better known--in fact, early in mediæval times, not only +political, but ecclesiastical and mercantile life spread its threads +over a great part of the known world, and began to bind the lives of +nations together, so that the Alps no longer remained _terra +incognita_ to dwellers far and near. + +We have accounts of Alpine journeys by the Abbé Majolus v. Clugny +(970), Bernard v. Hildesheim (1101), Aribert v. Mailand, Anno v. +Coeln[5], but without a trace of orography. They scarcely refer to +the snow and glacier regions from the side of physical geography, or +even of æsthetic feeling; and do not mention the mountain monarchs so +familiar to-day--Mt. Blanc, the Jungfrau, Ortner, Glockner, +etc.--which were of no value to their life, practical or scientific. +These writers record nothing but names of places and their own +troubles and dangers in travelling, especially in winter. And even at +the end of the fifteenth century, German travels across the Alps were +written in the same strain--for example, the account of the voyage of +the Elector-Palatine Alexander v. Zweibrücken and Count Joh. Ludwig +zu Nassau (1495-96) from Zurich Rapperschwyl and Wesen to Wallensee: +'This is the real Switzerland; has few villages, just a house here +and a house there, but beautiful meadows, much cattle, and very high +mountains, on which snow lies, which falls before Christmas, and is +as hard as any rock.' As an exception to this we have a vivid and +poetic description of the famous Verona Pass in Latin verse by +Guntherus Ligurinus. + +Günther's description of this notorious ravine, between sky-high +Alps, with the torrent rushing at the bottom and a passage so narrow +that men could only move forward one by one, sounds like a personal +experience. This twelfth-century poem comes to us, in fact, like a +belated echo of Fortunatus. + +We must now enquire whether the chief representatives of German +literature at this time shewed any of the national love of Nature, +whether the influence of the Crusades was visible in them, how far +scenery took a place in epic and song, and whether, as moderns have +so often stated, mediæval Germany stood high above antiquity in this +respect. Gervinus, a classic example on the last point, in the +section of his history of German poetry which treats of the +difference between the German fables about animals on the one hand, +and Esop's and the Oriental on the other, said: + + The way in which animals are handled in the fables demanded a far + slighter familiarity between them and men; so exact a knowledge + as we see in the German fables, often involving knowledge of + their natural history, such insight into the 'privacy of the + animal world,' belonged to quite another kind of men. Antiquity + did not delight in Nature, and delight in Nature is the very + foundation of these poems. Remote antiquity neither knew nor + sought to know any natural history; but only wondered at Nature. + The art of hunting and the passion for it, often carried to + excess in the Middle Ages, was unknown to it. It is a bold remark + of Grimm's that he could smell the old smell of the woods in the + German animal poems, but it is one whose truth every one will + feel, who turns to this simple poetry with an open mind, who + cares for Nature and life in the open. + +This is a very tangle of empty phrases and misstatements. No people +stood in more heartfelt and naive relation to Nature, especially to +the animal world, than the Hindoos and Persians. In earlier +enquiries[6] we have reviewed the naive feeling displayed in Homer +and the sentimental in Hellenism, and have seen that the taste for +hunting increased knowledge of Nature in the open in Hellenic days +far more than in the Middle Ages. We shall see now that the level of +feeling reached in those and imperial Roman days was not regained in +European literature until long after the fall of Latin poetry, and +that it was the fertilizing influence of that classic spirit, and +that alone, which enabled the inborn German taste for Nature, and for +hunting, and plant and animal life, to find artistic expression. It +was a too superficial knowledge of classic literature, and an +inclination to synthesis, and clever _a priori_ argument (a style +impressed upon his day by Hegel's method, and fortunately fast +disappearing), which led Gervinus to exalt the Middle Ages at the +expense of antiquity. It sounds like a weak concession when he says +elsewhere: + + Joy in Nature, which is peculiar to modern times, in contrast to + antiquity, which is seen in the earliest mediæval poems, and in + which, moreover, expiring antiquity came to meet the German--this + joy in Nature, in dwelling on plant and animal life, is the very + soul of this (animal) poetry. As in its plastic art, so in all + its poetry, antiquity only concerned itself with gods and heroes; + its glance was always turned upwards. + +But, as a fact, no one has ever stood with feet more firmly planted +on this earth than the Greek, enjoying life and undeterred by much +scruple or concern as to the powers above; and centuries of +development passed before German literature equalled Greek in love of +Nature and expressive representation of her beauty. + +To rank the two national epics of Germany, the _Nibelungenlied_ and +_Gudrun_, side by side with the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ is to +exaggerate their value. And here, as ever, overstraining the +comparison is mischievous. + +The _Nibelungenlied_ is undeniably charming with its laconic and yet +plastic descriptions, its vigorous heroes, and the tragic course of +their fate; so is _Gudrun_, that melodious poem of the North Sea. But +they never, either in composition, method of representation, or +descriptive epithets, reach the perfect art of the Greek epics. What +moral beauty and plastic force there is in Homer's comparisons and in +his descriptions of times and seasons! what a clear eye and warm +heart he has for Nature in all her moods! and what raw and scanty +beginnings of such things we have in the _Nibelungenlied_! It is true +Homer had not attained to the degree of sympathy which finds in +Nature a friend, a sharer of one's joys and sorrows; she is pictured +objectively in the form of epic comparisons; but how faithfully, and +with what range and variety! + +There can scarcely be another epic in the world so poor in +descriptions of time and place as the _Nibelungenlied_; it cannot be +used to prove German feeling for Nature! + +India, Persia, and Greece made natural phenomena the counterparts of +human life, weaving into the tale, by way of comparison or +environment, charming genre pictures of plant and animal life, each +complete in itself; in the _Nibelungenlied_ Nature plays no part at +all, not even as framework. + +Time is indicated as sparsely as possible: + +'Upon the 7th day at Worms on the Rhine shore, the gallant horsemen +arrived.' + +'On a Whitsun morning we saw them all go by'; or 'When it grew +towards even, and near the sun's last ray, seeing the air was +cooler'; or 'He must hang, till light morning threw its glow through +the window.' The last is the most poetic; elsewhere it is 'Day was +over, night fell.' + +Terseness can be both a beauty and a force; but, in comparison with +Greece, how very little feeling for Nature these expressions contain! + +It is no better with descriptions of place: + +'From the Rhine they rode through Hesse, their warriors as well, +towards the Saxon country, where they to fighting fell.' + +'He found a fortress placed upon a mountain.' + +'Into a wide-roomed palace of fashion excellent, for there, beneath +it rushing, one saw the Danube's flood.' + +Even the story of the hunt and the murder of Siegfried is quite +matter-of-fact and sparse as to scenery: 'By a cold spring he soon +lost his life ... then they rode from there into a deep wood ... +there they encamped by the green wood, where they would hunt on the +broad mead ... one heard mountain and tree echo.' + +'The spring of water was pure and cool and good.' ... + +'There fell Chriemhild's husband among the flowers ... all round +about the flowers were wetted with his blood.' + +One thinks instinctively of Indian and Greek poetry, of Adonis and +the death of Baldur in the Northern Saga. But even here, where the +subject almost suggests it, there is no trace of Nature's sympathy +with man. + +References to the animal world too--Chriemhild's dreams of the +falcons seized by two eagles, and the two wild boars which attacked +Siegfried, the game hunted in the forests by the heroes who run like +panthers--all show it to be of no importance. + +Even such phrases as rosy-red, snow-white, etc., are rare--'Her +lovely face became all rosy-red with pleasure'; but there is a +certain tenderness in the comparisons of Chriemhild: + +'Then came the lovely maiden, even as morning red from sombre clouds +outbreaking,' and, 'just as the moon in brightness excels the +brightest stars, and suddenly outshining, athwart the clouds +appears,' so she excelled all other women. + +It has been said that one can hear the sighing of the north wind and +the roar of the North Sea in _Gudrun_, but this is scarcely more than +a pretty phrase. The 'dark tempestuous' sea, 'wild unfathomable' +waves, the shore 'wet from the blood of the slain,' are indeed +mentioned, but that is all. + +Wat of Sturmland says to the young warriors: 'The air is still and +the moon shines clear ... when the red star yonder in the south dips +his head in the brine, I shall blow on my great horn that all the +hosts shall hear'; but it is hope of morning, not delight in the +starry sky, that he is expressing. + +Indications of place too are of the briefest, just 'It was a broad +neck of land, called the Wülpensand,' or, 'In a few hours they saw +the shores where they would land, a little harbour lay in sight +enfolded by low hills clothed with dark fir trees.' + +The first trace of sympathy with Nature occurs in the account of the +effect of Horand's song. + +Like Orpheus, he charms the little birds and other creatures: 'He +sang with such a splendid voice, that the little birds ceased their +song.' + +'And as he began to sing again, all the birds in the copse round +ceased their sweet songs.' + +'The very cattle left their green pastures to hearken, the little +gold beetles stopped running among the grass, the fishes ceased to +shoot about in the brooks. He sang long hours, and it seemed but a +brief moment. The very church bells sounded sweet no longer; the folk +left the choir songs of the priests and ran to hear him. All who +heard his voice were heart-sick after the singer, so grand and sweet +was the strain.' + +Indications of time are rarely found more short and concise than +here: + + When night ended and day began. + On the 12th day they quitted the country. + In Maytime. On a cool morning. + +This is a little richer: + + It was the time when leaves spring up delightfully and birds of + all sorts sing their best in the woods. + +Much more definite and distinct is: + + It was about that time of the year when departing winter sheds + his last terrors upon the earth; a sharp breeze was blowing and + the sea was covered with broken up ice; but there were gleams of + sunshine upon the hills, and the little birds began to tune their + throats tremulously, that they might be ready to sing their lay + when the March weather was past. + + Gudrun trembled with cold; her wet garment clung close to her + white limbs; the wind dashed her golden hair about her face. + +And later, when the morning of Gudrun's deliverance breaks, the +indications of time, though short, are plastic enough: + + After the space of an hour the red star went down upon the edge + of the sea, and Wat of Sturmland, standing upon the hill, blew a + great blast on his horn, which was heard in the land for miles + round.... The sound of Wat's horn ... wakened a young maid, who, + stealing on tiptoe to the window, looked over the bay and beheld + the glimmering of spears and helms upon the sands.... 'Awake, + mistress,' she cried, 'the host of the Hegelings is at hand.' + +Companions are few; + + He sprang like a wild lion. + +The shower of stones flung down upon Wat 'is but an April shower.' + +Images are few too: + + This flower of hope, to find repose here on the shore, Hartmouth + and his friends did not bring to blossom. + +Wilhelm Grimm rightly observes: + + At this epoch the poetry of the Fatherland gave no separate + descriptions of Nature--descriptions, that is, whose only object + was to paint the impression of the landscape in glowing colours + upon the mind. The old German masters certainly did not lack + feeling for Nature, but they have left us no other expression of + it than such as its connection with historical events demanded. + +And further: + + The question, whether contact with Southern Italy, or, through + the Crusades, with Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, did not + enrich German poetry with new pictures of Nature, can only, as a + general rule, be answered in the negative. + +In the courtly epics of chivalry, the place of real Nature was taken +by a fabulous wonderworld, full of the most fantastic and romantic +scenery, in which wood, field, plants, and animals were all +distorted. For instance, in the Alexander saga (of Pfaffen Lamprecht) +Alexander the Great describes to his teacher Aristotle the wonders he +has seen, and how one day he came with his army to a dark forest, +where the interlacing boughs of tall trees completely shut out the +sunlight. Clear, cool streams ran through it down to the valley, and +birds' songs echoed in the shade. The ground was covered by an +enormous quantity of flower buds of wondrous size, which looked like +great balls, snow-white and rose-coloured, closely folded up. +Presently, the fragrant goblets opened, and out of all these +wonder-flowers stepped lovely maidens, rosy as dawn and white as day, +and about twelve years old. All these thousands of charming beings +raised their voices together and competed with the birds in song, +swaying up and down in charming lines, singing and laughing in the +cool shade. They were dressed in red and white, like the flowers from +which they were born; but if sun rays fell on them, they would fade +and die. They were only children of the woodland shade and the +summer, and lived no longer than the flowers, which May brings to +life and Autumn kills. In this wood Alexander and his host pitched +their tents, and lived through the summer with the little maids. But +their happiness only lasted three months and twelve days: + + When the time came to an end, our joy passed away too; the + flowers faded, and the pretty girls died; trees lost their + leaves, springs their flow, and the birds their song; all + pleasure passed away. Discomfort began to touch my heart with + many sorrows, as day by day I saw the beautiful maidens die, the + flowers fade: with a heavy heart, I departed with my men. + +This fairy-like tale, with its blending of human and plant life, is +very poetically conceived; but it is only a play of fancy, one of the +early steps towards the modern feeling. + +The battle scenes, as well as other scenes in this poem, are bold and +exaggerated. Armies meet like roaring seas; missiles fly from both +sides as thick as snow; after the dreadful bath of blood, sun and +moon veil their light and turn away from the murder committed there. + +Hartmann von der Aue, too, did not draw real Nature, but only one of +his own invention. + +For example, the wild forest with the magic spring in _Iwein_: + + I turned to the wilds next morning, and found an extensive + clearing, hidden in the forest, solitary and without husbandmen. + There, to my distress, I descried a sad delight of the + eyes--beasts of every kind that I know the names of, attacking + each other.... this spring is cold and very pure; neither rain, + sun, or wind reach it; it is screened by a most beautiful lime + tree. The tree is excessively tall and thick, so that neither sun + nor rain can penetrate its foliage, winter does not injure it, + nor lessen its beauty by one hair; 'tis green and blossoming the + whole year round.... Over the spring there is a wonderfully fine + stone ... the tree was so covered with birds that I could + scarcely see the branches, and even the foliage almost + disappeared. The sweet songs were pleasant and resounded through + the forest, which re-echoed them.... + + As I poured water upon the ruby, the sun, which had just come + out, disappeared, the birds' song round about ceased, a black + storm approached, dark heavy storm-clouds came from all four + quarters of the vault of heaven. It seemed no longer bright day + ... soon a thousand flashes of lightning played round me in the + forest ... there came storm, rain, and hail ... the storm became + so great that the forest broke down. + +He never shews a real love for Nature even in his lyrics, for the +wish for flowers in _Winter Complaint_ can hardly be said to imply +that: + + He who cares for flowers must lament much at this heavy, dismal + time; a wife helps to shorten the long nights. In this way I will + shorten long winter without the birds' song. + +Wolfram von Eschenbach, too, is very sparing of references to Nature: +time is given by such phrases as 'when twilight began,' or 'as the +day broke,' 'at the bright glow of morning' ... 'as day already +turned to evening.' + +His interest in real things was driven into the background by +love-making and adventures--_Arthur's Round Table_ and the _Holy +Grail_; all the romance of knighthood. When he described a forest or +a garden, he always decked it out lavishly. + +For instance, the garden in Orgeluse: + + A garden surrounding a mountain, planted with noble trees where + pomegranates, figs, olives, vines, and other fruits grew richly + ... a spring poured from the rock, and (for all this would have + been nothing to him without a fair lady) there he found what did + not displease him--a lady so beautiful and fair that he was + charmed at the sight, the flower of womanly beauty. + +Comparisons are few and not very poetic. In _Songs of the Heart_-- + + The lady of the land watered herself with her heart's tears. + + Her eyes rained upon the child. + + Her joy was drowned in lamentation. + +Gawan and Orgeluse, + + Spite their outer sweetness, as disagreeable as a shower of rain + in sunshine. + + There were many fair flowers, but their colours could not compare + with that of Orgeluse. + +His heroes are specially fond of birds. Young Parzival + + Felt little care while the little birds sang round him; it made + his heart swell, he ran weeping into the house. + +and Gawan + + Found a door open into a garden; he stept in to look round and + enjoy the air and the singing of the birds. + +So we see that in the _Nibelungenlied_ scarcely a plant grew, and +Hartmann and Wolfram's gardens belonged almost entirely to an unreal +region; there are no traces of a very deep feeling for Nature in all +this. + +But Gottfried von Strassburg, with his vivid, sensuous imagination +and keen eye for beauty, shewed a distinct advance both in taste and +achievement. He, too, notes time briefly: 'And as it drew towards +evening,' 'Now day had broke.' He repeats his comparisons: fair +ladies are 'the wonder rose of May,' 'the longing white rose.' The +two Isolts are sun and dawn. Brangäne is the full moon. The terrified +girl is thus described: + + Her rosy mouth paled; the fair colour, which was her ornament, + died out of her skin; her bright eyes grew dim like night after + day. + +Another comparison is: + + Like the siren's song, drawing a bark to the reef as by a magnet, + so the sweet young queen attracted many hearts. + +Love is a usurious plant, whose sun never goes down; a romance +sweetens the mood as May dew sweetens the blood. + +Constant friendship is one which takes the pleasure with the pain, +the thorn with the rose. The last comparisons shew more thought, and +still more is seen in the beginning of the poem, _Riwalin and +Blancheflur_, which has a charming description of Spring. + + Now the festival was agreed upon and arranged + For the four flowering weeks + When sweet May attracts, till he flies off again. + At Tinkapol upon a green plain + High up on a wonderful meadow with spring colour + Such as no eye has seen before or since. Soft sweet May + Had dressed it with his own charming extravagance. + There were little wood birds, a joy to the ear, + Flowers and grass and green plants and summer meads + That were a delight to eye and heart. + One found there whatever one would, whatever May should bring-- + Shade from the sun, limes by the brook, + A gentle breeze which brought the prattle + Of Mark's court people. May's friend, the green turf, + Had made herself a charming costume of flowers, + In which she shone back at the guests with a festival of her own; + The blossoming trees smiled so sweetly at every one, + That heart and mind smiled back again. + The pure notes of the birds, blessed and beautiful, + Touched heart and senses, filling hill and dale with joy. + The dear nightingale, + Sweet bird, may it ever be blessed! + Sang so lustily upon the bough + That many a heart was filled with joy and good humour. + There the company pitched itself + With great delight on the green grass. + The limes gave enough shade, + And many covered their tent roofs with green boughs. + +There is a heartfelt ring in this. We see that even this early period +of German mediæval poetry was not entirely lacking in clear voices to +sing of Nature with real sympathy. + +The description of the Minne grotto is famous, with its magical +accessories, its limes and other trees, birds, songs, and flowers, so +that 'eye and ear alike found solace'; but the romantic love episode, +interwoven as it is by the poet with the life of Nature, is more +interesting for our purpose. + + They had a court, they had a council which brought them nought + but joy. Their courtiers were the green trees, the shade and the + sunlight, the streamlet and the spring; flowers, grass, leaf, and + blossom, which refreshed their eyes. Their service was the song + of the birds, the little brown nightingales, the throstlets and + the merles and other wood birds. The siskin and the ringdove vied + with each other to do them pleasure, all day long their music + rejoiced ear and soul. Their love was their high feast.... The + man was with the woman, and the woman with the man; they had the + fellowship they most desired, and were where they fain would + be.... + + In the dewy morning they gat them forth to the meadow where grass + and flowers alike had been refreshed. The glade was their + pleasure-ground; they wandered hither and thither hearkening each + other's speech, and waking the song of the birds by their + footsteps. Then they turned them to where the cool clear spring + rippled forth, and sat beside its stream and watched its flow + till the sun grew high in the heaven, and they felt its shade. + Then they betook them to the linden, its branches offered them a + welcome shelter, the breezes were sweet and soft beneath its + shade, and the couch at its feet was decked with the fairest + grass and flowers. + +With these lovers, love of Nature is only second to love of each +other. So in the following: + + That same morning had Tristan and his lady-love stolen forth hand + in hand and come full early, through the morning dew, to the + flowery meadow and the lovely vale. Dove and nightingale saluted + them sweetly, greeting their friends Tristan and Iseult. The wild + wood birds bade them welcome in their own tongue ... it was as if + they had conspired among themselves to give the lovers a morning + greeting. They sang from the leafy branches in changeful wise, + answering each other in song and refrain. The spring that charmed + their eye and ear whispered a welcome, even as did the linden + with its rustling leaves. The blossoming trees, the fair meadow, + the flowers, and the green grass--all that bloomed laughed at + their coming; the dew which cooled their feet and refreshed their + heart offered a silent greeting. + +The amorous passion was the soil in which, in its early narrow +stages, sympathy for Nature grew up. Was it the thirteenth-century +lyrics, the love-songs of the Minnesingers, which unfolded the germ? +For the lyric is the form in which the deepest expression can be +given to feeling for Nature, and in which she either appears as +background, frame, or ornament, or, by borrowing a soul or +symbolizing thought and feeling, blends with the inner life. + +As the German court epics took their material from France, so the +German love-songs were inspired by the Provençal troubadours. The +national differences stand out clear to view: the vivid glowing +Provençal is fresher, more vehement, and mettlesome; the dreamy +German more monotonous, tame, and melancholy. The one is given to +proud daring, wooing, battle, and the triumph of victory; the other +to musing, loving, and brooding enthusiasm. The stamp of the +occasional, of improvisation, is upon all Provençal work; while with +the German Minnesingers, everything--Nature as well as love--tends to +be stereotyped, monotonous. + +The scanty remains of Troubadour songs[7] often shew mind and Nature +very strikingly brought together, either in harmony or contrast. For +example, Bernard von Ventadour (1195): + + It may annoy others to see the foliage fall from the trees, but + it pleases me greatly; one cannot fancy I should long for leaves + and flowers when she, my dear one, is haughty to me. + + Cold and snow become flowers and greenery under her charming + glance. + + As I slumber at night, I am waked by the sweet song of the + nightingale; nothing but love in my mind quite thrilled by + shudders of delight. + + God! could I be a swallow and sweep through the air, I would go + at midnight to her little chamber. + + When I behold the lark up spring + To meet the bright sun joyfully, + How he forgets to poise his wing + In his gay spirit's revelry. + Alas! that mournful thoughts should spring + E'en from that happy songster's glee! + Strange that such gladdening sight should bring + Not joy but pining care to me. + +A very modern thought which calls to mind Theodore Storm's touching +lines after the death of his wife: + + But this I cannot endure, that the sun smiles as before, clocks + strike and bells ring as in thy lifetime, and day and night still + follow each other. + +He connects spring with love: + + When grass grows green and fresh leaves spring + And flowers are budding on the plain, + When nightingales so sweetly sing + And through the greenwood swells the strain, + Then joy I in the song and in the flower, + Joy in myself but in my lady more; + All objects round my spirit turns to joy, + But most from her my rapture rises high. + +Arnold von Mareuil (about 1200) sings in the same way: + + O! how sweet the breeze of April + Breathing soft, as May draws near, + While through nights serene and gentle + Songs of gladness meet the ear. + Every bird his well-known language + Warbling in the morning's pride, + Revelling on in joy and gladness + By his happy partner's side.... + With such sounds of bliss around me, + Who could wear a saddened heart? + +He calls his lady-love + + The fairest creature which Nature has produced here below, fairer + than I can express and faker than a beautiful May day, than + sunshine in March, shade in summer, than May roses, April rain, + the flower of beauty, mirror of love, the key of Fame. + +Bertran de Born too sings: + + The beautiful spring delights me well + When flowers and leaves are growing, + And it pleases my heart to hear the swell + Of the bird's sweet chorus flowing + In the echoing wood, etc. + +The Greek lyrists up to Alexandrian times contented themselves with +implying indirectly that nothing delighted them so much as May and +its delights; but these singers implicitly state it. The German +Minnesingers too[8] are loud in praise of spring, as in that +anonymous song: + + I think nothing so good nor worthy of praise + As a fair rose and my good man's love; + The song of the little birds in the woods is clear to many a heart. + +and summer is greeted with: + + The good are glad that summer comes. See what a benefit it is to + many hearts. + +The Troubadour motive is here too: + + Winter and snow seem as beautiful flowers and clover to me, when + I have embraced her. + +and Kürenberg makes a lady sing: + + When I stand there alone in my shift and think of thee, noble + knight, I blush like a rose on its thorn. + +Delight in summer, complaint of winter--this is the fundamental chord +struck again and again; there is scarcely any trace of blending the +feelings of the lover with those of Nature. It is a monotonous +repetition of a few themes, of flowers and little birds as messengers +of love, and lady-loves who are brighter than the sun, whose presence +brings spring in winter or cheers a grey and snowy day. + +Deitmar von Eist greets spring with: + + Ah! now the time of the little birds' singing is coming for us, + the great lime is greening, the long winter is past, one sees + well-shaped flowers spread their glory over the heath. 'Tis a joy + to many hearts, and a comfort too to mine. + +In another song the birds and roses remind him of a happy past and of +the lady of his heart. + + A little bird sang on the lime o'erhead, + Its song resounded through the wood + And turned my heart back to another place; + And once again I saw the roses blow, + And they brought back the many thoughts + I cherish of a lady. + +A lady says to a falcon: + + You happy falcon you! You fly whither you will! + And choose the tree you like in the wood. + I have done the same. I chose a husband + For myself, whom my eyes chose. + So 'tis fitting for beautiful women. + +In winter he complains: + + Alas for summer delight! The birds' song has disappeared with the + leaves of the lime. Time has changed, the nightingales are dumb. + They have given up their sweet song and the wood has faded from + above. + +Uhland's beautiful motive in _Spring Faith_, that light and hope will +come back to the oppressed heart with the flowers and the green, is +given, though stiffly and dimly, by Heinrich von Veldegge: + + I have some delightful news; the flowers are sprouting on the + heath, the birds singing in the wood. Where snow lay before, + there is now green clover, bedewed in the morning. Who will may + enjoy it. No one forces me to, I am not free from cares. + +and elsewhere: + + At the time when flowers and grass come to us, all that made my + heart sad will be made good again. + +The loss of the beauty of summer makes him sad: + + Since the bright sunlight has changed to cold, and the little + birds have left off singing their song, and cold nights have + faded the foliage of the lime, my heart is sad. + +Ulrich von Guotenberg makes a pretty comparison: + + She is my summer joy, she sows flowers and clover + In my heart's meadow, whence I, whate'er befall, + Must teem with richer bliss: the light of her eyes + Makes me bloom, as the hot sun the dripping trees.... + Her fair salute, her mild command + Softly inclining, make May rain drop down into my heart. + +Heinrich von Rugge laments winter: + + The dear nightingale too has forgotten how beautifully she sang + ... the birds are mourning everywhere. + +and longs for summer: + + I always craved blissful days.... I liked to hear the little + birds' delightful songs. Winter cannot but be hard and + immeasurably long. I should be glad if it would pass away. + +Heinrich von Morungen: + + How did you get into my heart? + It must ever be the same with me. + As the noon receives her light from the sun, + So the glance of your bright eyes, when you leave me, + Sinks into my heart. + +He calls his love his light of May, his Easter Day: + + She is my sweetheart, a sweet May + Bringing delights, a sunshine without cloud. + +and says, in promising fidelity: 'My steady mind is not like the +wind.' + +Reinmar says: + + When winter is over + I saw the heath with the red flowers, delightful there.... + The long winter is past away; when I saw the green leaves + I gave up much of my sorrow. + +In a time of trouble he cried: + + To me it must always be winter. + +So we see that Troubadour references to Nature were drawn from a very +limited area. Individual grasp of scenery was entirely lacking, it +did not occur to them to seek Nature for her own sake. Their +comparisons were monotonous, and their scenes bare, stereotyped +arabesques, not woven into the tissue of lyric feeling. Their ruling +motives were joy in spring and complaint of winter. Wood, flowers, +clover, the bright sun, the moon (once), roses, lilies, and woodland +birds, especially the nightingale, served them as elementary or +landscape figures. + +Wilhelm Grimm says: + + The Minnesingers talk often enough of mild May, the nightingale's + song, the dew shining on the flowers of the heath, but always in + relation only to their own feelings reflected in them. To + indicate sad moods they used faded leaves, silent birds, seed + buried in snow. + +and Humboldt: + + The question, whether contact with Southern Italy, or the + Crusades in Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, have enriched the + art of poetry in Germany with new natural pictures, can only + generally be answered by the negative. It is not remarked that + the acquaintance with the East gave any new direction to the + songs of the minstrels. The Crusaders came little into actual + contact with the Saracens; they even lived in a state of great + restraint with other nations who fought in the same cause. One of + the oldest lyric poets was Friedrich of Hausen. He perished in + the army of Barbarossa. His songs contain many views of the + Crusades; but they chiefly express religious sentiments on the + pain of being separated from his dear friends. He found no + occasion to say anything concerning the country or any of those + who took part in the wars, as Reinmar the Elder, Rubin, Neidhart, + and Ulrich of Lichtenstein. Reinmar came a pilgrim to Syria, as + it appears, in the train of Leopold the 6th, Duke of Austria. He + complains that the recollections of his country always haunted + him, and drew away his thoughts from God. The date tree has here + been mentioned sometimes, when they speak of the palm branches + which pious pilgrims bore upon their shoulders. I do not remember + that the splendid scenery in Italy has excited the fancy of the + minstrels who crossed the Alps. Walther, who had wandered about, + had only seen the river Po; but Friedank was at Rome. He merely + remarked that grass grew in the palaces of those who formerly + bore sway there. + +As a fact, even the greatest Minnesinger, Walther, the master lyrist +of the thirteenth century, was not ahead of his contemporaries in +this matter. His _Spring Longing_ begins: + + Winter has wrought us harm everywhere, + Forest and field are dreary and bare + Where the sweet voices of summer once were, + Yet by the road where I see maiden fair + Tossing the ball, the birds' song is there. + +and _Spring and Women_: + + When flowers through the grass begin to spring + As though to greet with smiles the sun's bright rays, + On some May morning, and in joyous measure, + Small songbirds make the dewy forest ring + With a sweet chorus of sweet roundelays, + Hath life in all its store a purer pleasure? + 'Tis half a Paradise on earth. + Yet ask me what I hold of equal worth, + And I will tell what better still + Ofttimes before hath pleased mine eyes, + And, while I see it, ever will. + When a noble maiden, fair and pure, + With raiment rich and tresses deftly braided, + Mingles, for pleasure's sake, in company, + High bred, with eyes that, laughingly demure, + Glance round at times and make all else seem faded, + As, when the sun shines, all the stars must die. + Let May bud forth in all its splendour; + What sight so sweet can he engender + As with this picture to compare? + Unheeded leave we buds and blooms, + And gaze upon the lovely fair! + +The grace in this rendering of a familiar motive, and the +individuality in the following _Complaint of Winter_, were both +unusual at the time: + + Erewhile the world shone red and blue + And green in wood and upland too, + And birdlets sang on the bough. + But now it's grown grey and lost its glow, + And there's only the croak of the winter crow, + Whence--many a ruffled brow! + +Elsewhere he says that his lady's favour turns his winter to spring, +and adds: + + Cold winter 'twas no more for me, + Though others felt it bitterly; + To me it was mid May. + +He has many pictures of Nature and pretty comparisons, but the +stereotyped style predominates--heath, flowers, grass, and +nightingales. The pearl of the collection is the naive song which +touches sensuous feeling, like the _Song of Solomon_, with the magic +light of innocence: + + Under the lime on the heath where I sat with my love, + There you would find + The grass and the flowers all crushed-- + Sweetly the nightingale sang in the vale by the wood. + Tandaradei! + When I came up to the meadow my lover was waiting me there. + Ah! what a greeting I had! Gracious Mary, 'tis bliss to me still! + Tandaradei! Did he kiss me, you ask? Look at the red of my lips! + Of sweet flowers of all sorts he made us a bed, + I wager who passes now smiles at the sight, + The roses would still show just where my head lay. + Tandaradei! + But how he caressed me, that any but one + Should know that, God forbid! I were shamed if they did; + Only he and I know it, + And one little birdie who never will tell. + +So we see that interest in Nature in the literature of the Crusaders +very seldom went beyond the utilitarian bounds of pleasure and +admiration in fertility and pleasantness; and the German national +epics rarely alluded to her traits even by way of comparison. The +court epics shewed some advance, and sympathy was distinctly +traceable in Gottfried, and even attained to artistic expression in +his lyrics, where his own feelings chimed with Nature. + +For the rest, the Minnesingers' descriptions were all alike. The +charm of Nature apart from other considerations, delight in her for +her own sake alone, was unknown to the time. + +Hitherto we have only spoken of literature. + +Feeling for Nature reveals itself in plastic art also, especially in +painting; and since the mind of a people is one united organism, the +relation between poetry and painting is not one of opposition and +mutual exclusion--they rather enlarge and explain, or condition each +other. + +As concerns feeling for Nature, it may be taken as a universal rule +that landscape-painting only develops when Nature is sought for her +own sake, and that so long as scenery merely serves the purpose of +ornament in literature, so long it merely serves as accessory and +background in painting; whereas, when Nature takes a wider space in +prose and poetry, and becomes an end of representation in herself, +the moment for the birth of landscape-painting has come. We will +follow the stages of the development of painting very briefly, from +Woltmann and Woermann's excellent book,[9] which, if it throws no +fresh light upon our subject, illustrates what has just been said in +a striking manner. + +In the first centuries _Anno Domini_, painting was wholly proscribed +by Christendom. Its technique did not differ from that of antiquity; +but Christendom took up an attitude of antagonism. The picture +worship of the old religions was opposed to its very origin and +essence, and was only gradually introduced into the Christian cult +through heathen influences. It is a fact too, easy to explain, +especially through its Jewish origin, that Christianity at first felt +no need of art, and that this one-sidedness only ceased when the +specifically Jewish element in it had died out, and Christendom +passed to cultivated Greeks and Romans. In the cemeteries and +catacombs of the first three centuries, we find purely decorative +work, light vines with Cupids, but also remains of landscapes; for +instance, in the oldest part of the cemetery of Domitilla at Rome, +where the ceiling decoration consists of shepherds, fishers, and +biblical scenes. The ceiling picture in St Lucina (second century) +has apparently the Good Shepherd in the middle, and round it +alternate pictures of Him and of the praying Madonna; whilst in the +middle it has also charming divisions with fields, branches with +leaves and flowers, birds, masks, and floating genii. + +In Byzantine painting too, the influence of antiquity was still +visible, especially in a Psaltery with a Commentary and fourteen +large pictures. David appears here as a shepherd; a beautiful woman's +form, exhibiting the melody, is leaning with her left arm upon his +shoulder; a nymph's head peeps out of the foliage; and in front we +have Bethlehem, and the mountain god resting in a bold position under +a rock; sheep, goats, and water are close by, and a landscape with +classic buildings, streams, and mountains forms the background; it is +very poetically conceived. Elsewhere, too, personifications recur, in +which classic beauty is still visible, mixed with severe Christian +forms. + +At the end of the tenth century began the Romantic period, which +closed in the thirteenth. + +The brilliant progress made by architecture paved the way for the +other arts; minds trained in its laws began to look for law in +organic Nature too, and were no longer content with the old uncertain +and arbitrary shapes. But as no independent feeling for Nature, in +the widest sense of the term, existed, mediæval art treated her, not +according to her own laws, but to those of architecture. With the +development of the Gothic style, from the thirteenth century on, art +became a citizen's craft, a branch of industry. Heretofore it had +possessed but one means of expression--religious festival or +ceremony, severely ecclesiastical. This limit was now removed. The +artist lived a wide life, open to impressions from Nature, his +imagination fed by poetry with new ideas and feelings, and constantly +stimulated by the love of pleasure, which was so vehement among all +classes that it turned every civil and ecclesiastical event to +histrionic purposes, and even made its influence felt upon the +clergy. The strong religious feeling which pervaded the Middle Ages +still ruled, and even rose to greater enthusiasm, in accordance with +the spirit of the day; but it was no longer a matter of blind +submission of the will, but of conscious acceptance. + +It is true that knowledge of the external world was as yet very +limited; the painter had not explored and mastered it, but only used +it as a means to represent a certain realm of feeling, studying it +just so far as this demanded. We have seen the same in the case of +poetry. The beginnings of realistic painting were visible, although, +as, for example, in representing animals, no individuality was +reached. + +From the middle of the fourteenth century a new French school sprang +up. The external world was more keenly and accurately studied, +especially on its graceful side. It was only at the end of that +period that painting felt the need to develop the background, and +indicate actual surroundings by blue sky, hills, Gothic buildings, +and conventional trees. These were given in linear perspective; of +aerial perspective there was none. The earlier taste still ruled in +initialling and border decorations; but little flowers were added by +degrees to the thorn-leaf pattern, and birds, sometimes angels, +introduced. + +The altar-piece at Cologne, at the end of the fourteenth century, is +more subjective in conception, and full of lyric feeling. Poetic +feeling came into favour, especially in Madonna pictures of purely +idyllic character, which were painted with most charming +surroundings. Instead of a throne and worshipping figures, Mary was +placed sitting comfortably with the Child on flowery turf, and saints +around her; and although the background might be golden instead of +landscape, yet all the stems and blossoms in the grass were naturally +and accurately treated. In a little picture in the town museum at +Frankfort, the Madonna is seated in a rose garden under fruit trees +gay with birds, and reading a book; a table with food and drinks +stands close by, and a battlemented wall surrounds the garden. She is +absorbed in contemplation; three female saints are attending to +mundane business close by, one drawing water from a brook, another +picking cherries, the third teaching the child Christ to play the +zither. There is real feeling in the whole picture, and the landscape +is worked in with distinct reference to the chief idea. + +Hence, although there were many isolated attempts to shew that realistic +and individual study of Nature had begun, landscape-painting had not +advanced beyond the position of a background, treated in a way more or +less suited to the main subject of the picture; and trees, rocks, +meadows, flowers, were still only framework, ornament, as in the poetry +of the Minnesingers.[10] + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +INDIVIDUALISM AND SENTIMENTAL FEELING +AT THE RENAISSANCE + + +In a certain sense all times are transitional to those who live in +them, since what is old is always in process of being destroyed and +giving way to the new. But there are landmarks in the general +development of culture, which mark off definite periods and divide +what has been from what is beginning. Hellenism was such a landmark +in antiquity, the Renaissance in the Middle Ages. + +Without overlooking the differences between Greek and Italian, +classic and modern, which are relative and not absolute, it is +instructive to note the great likeness between these two epochs. The +limits of their culture will stand out more clearly, if, by the aid +of Helbig's researches and Burckhardt's masterly account of the +Renaissance, we range the chief points of that likeness side by side. + +They were epochs in which an icy crust, which had been lying over +human thought and feeling, melted as if before a spring breeze. It is +true that the theory of life which now began to prevail was not +absolutely new; the stages of growth in a nation's culture are never +isolated; it was the result of the enlargement of various factors +already present, and their fusion with a flood of incoming ones. + +The Ionic-Doric Greek kingdom widened out in Alexander's time to a +Hellenic-Asiatic one, and the barriers of the Romano-Germanic Middle +Ages fell with the Crusades and the great voyages of discovery. +Hellenism and the Renaissance brought about the transition from +antiquity and the mediæval to the specifically modern; the Roman +Empire inherited Hellenism, the Reformation the Renaissance. Both had +their roots in the past, both made new growth which blossomed at a +later time. In Hellenism, Oriental elements were mixed with the +Greek; in the Renaissance, it was a mixture of Germanic with the +native Italian which caused the revival of classic antiquity and new +culture. Burckhardt says[1]: + + Elsewhere in Europe men deliberately and with reflection borrowed + this or the other element of classical civilization; in Italy, + the sympathies both of the learned and of the people were + naturally engaged on the side of antiquity as a whole, which + stood to them as a symbol of past greatness. The Latin language + too was easy to an Italian, and the numerous monuments and + documents in which the country abounded facilitated a return to + the past. With this tendency, other elements--the popular + character which time had now greatly modified, the political + institutions imported by the Lombards from Germany, chivalry and + northern forms of civilization, and the influence of religion and + the Church--combined to produce the modern Italian spirit, which + was destined to serve as the model and ideal for the whole + western world. + +The distance between the works of the Greek artists and +poets--between Homer, Sophocles, and Phidias on the one hand, and the +Alexandrian Theocritus and Kallimachos and the Pergamos sculptures on +the other--is greater than lies between the _Nibelungenlied_ and the +Minnesingers, and Dante and Petrarch. In both cases one finds oneself +in a new world of thought and feeling, where each and all bears the +stamp of change, in matters political and social as well as artistic. +If, for example, by the aid of Von Helbig's researches,[2] we conjure +up a picture of the chief points in the history of Greek culture, we +are astonished to see how almost every point recurred at the +Renaissance, as described by Burckhardt. + +The chief mark of both epochs was individualism, the discovery of the +individual. In Hellenism it was the barriers of race and position +which fell; in the Renaissance, the veil, woven of mysticism and +delusion, which had obscured mediæval faith, thought, and feeling. +Every man recognized himself to be an independent unit of church, +state, people, corporation--of all those bodies in which in the +Middle Ages he had been entirely merged. + +Monarchical institutions arose in Hellenism; but the individual was +no longer content to serve them only as one among many; he must needs +develop his own powers. Private affairs began to preponderate over +public; the very physiognomy of the race shewed an individual stamp. + + After the time of Alexander the Great, portrait shewed most + marked individuality. Those of the previous period had a certain + uniform expression; one would have looked in vain among them for + the diversities in contemporary types shewn by comparing + Alexander's vivid face full of stormy energy, Menander's with its + peculiar look of irony, and the elaborate savant-physiognomy of + Aristotle. (HELBIG.) + +And Burckhardt says: + + At the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with + individuality; the charm laid upon human personality was + dissolved, and a thousand figures meet us each in its own special + shape and dress.... Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered + in the highest degree the individuality, not only of the tyrant + or Condottiere himself, but also of the men whom he protected or + used as his tools--the secretary, minister, poet, or companion. + +Political indifference brought about a high degree of +cosmopolitanism, especially among those who were banished. 'My +country is the whole world,' said Dante; and Ghiberti: 'Only he who +has learned everything is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune +and without friends, he is yet a citizen of every country, and can +fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.' + +In both Hellenism and the Renaissance, an effort was made in art and +science to see things as they really were. In art, detail was +industriously cultivated; but its naturalism, especially as to +undraped figures, was due to a sensuous refinement of gallantry and +erotic feeling. The sensuous flourished no less in Greek times than +in those of Boccaccio; but the most characteristic peculiarity of +Hellenism was its intentional revelling in feeling--its +sentimentality. There was a trace of melancholy upon many faces of +the time, and unhappy love in endless variations was the poet's main +theme. Petrarch's lyre was tuned to the same key; a melancholy +delight in grief was the constant burden of his song. + +In Greece the sight of foreign lands had furthered the natural +sciences, especially geography, astronomy, zoology, and botany; and +the striving for universality at the Renaissance, which was as much a +part of its individualism as its passion for fame, was aided by the +widening of the physical and mental horizons through the Crusades and +voyages of discovery. Dante was not only the greatest poet of his +time, but an astronomer; Petrarch was geographer and cartographer, +and, at the end of the fifteenth century, with Paolo Toscanelli, +Lucca Baccioli, and Leonardo da Vinci, Italy was beyond all +comparison the first nation in Europe in mathematics and natural +science. + + A significant proof of the wide-spread interest in natural + history is found in the zeal which shewed itself at an early + period for the collection and comparative study of plants and + animals. Italy claims to be the first creator of botanical + gardens.... princes and wealthy men, in laying out their pleasure + gardens, instinctively made a point of collecting the greatest + possible number of different plants in all their species and + varieties. (BURCKHARDT.) + +Leon Battista Alberti, a man of wide theoretical knowledge as well as +technical and artistic facility of all sorts, entered into the whole +life around him with a sympathetic intensity that might almost be +called nervous. + + At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears + ... more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful + landscape cured him. (BURCKHARDT.) + +He defined a beautiful landscape as one in which one could see in its +different parts, sea, mountain, lake or spring, dry rocks or plains, +wood and valley. Therefore he cared for variety; and, what is more +striking, in contrast to level country, he admired mountains and +rocks! + +In Hellenism, hunting, to which only the Macedonians had been +addicted before, became a fashion, and was enjoyed with Oriental pomp +in the _paradeisoi_. Writers drew most of their comparisons from it. +In the Renaissance, Petrarch did the same, and animals often served +as emblems of state--their condition ominous of good or evil--and +were fostered with superstitious veneration, as, for example, the +lions at Florence. + +Thus the growth of the natural sciences increased interest in the +external world, and sensitiveness brought about a sentimental +attitude towards Nature in Hellenism and in the Renaissance. + +Both discovered in Nature a source of purest pleasure; the +Renaissance feeling was, in fact, the extension and enhancement of +the Hellenic. Burckhardt overlooked the fact that beautiful scenery +was appreciated and described for its own sake in Hellenism, but he +says very justly; + + The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the + outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful.... By the + year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine hearty + enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found + lively expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which + gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena + of Nature--spring with its flowers, the green fields and the + woods. But these pictures are all foreground without perspective. + +Among the Minnesingers there were traces of feeling for Nature; but +only for certain stereotyped phases. Of the individuality of a +landscape, its characteristic colour, form, and light, not a word was +said. + +Even the Carmina Burana were not much ahead of the Minnesingers in +this respect, although they deserve a closer examination. + +These Latin poems of wandering clerks probably belong to the twelfth +century, and though no doubt a product in which the whole of Europe +had a share, their best pieces must be ascribed to a French hand. +Latin poetry lives again in them, with a freshness the Carlovingian +Renaissance never reached; they are mediæval in form, but full of a +frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, which hardly any +northerner of that day possessed. Often enough this degenerated into +frivolity; but the stir of national awakening after the long sleep of +the Middle Ages is felt like a spring breeze through them all. + +It is a far cry from the view of Nature we saw in the Carlovingian +monks, to these highly-coloured verses. The dim light of churches and +bare cell walls may have doubled the monks' appreciation of blue +skies and open-air life; but they were fettered by the constant fight +with the senses; Nature to them must needs be less a work of God for +man's delight, than a dangerous means of seduction. 'They wandered +through Nature with timid misgiving, and their anxious fantasy +depicted forms of terror or marvellous rescues.[3] The idyllic +pleasure in the simple charms of Nature, especially in the monastery +garden of the Carlovingian time, contrasts strikingly with the tone +of these very mundane _vagantes clerici_, for whom Nature had not +only long been absorbed and freed from all demoniac influence, but +peopled by the charming forms of the old mythic poems, and made for +the joy and profit of men, in the widest and naivest sense of the +words. + +Spring songs, as with the Minnesingers, take up most of the space; +but the theme is treated with greater variety. Enjoyment of life and +Nature breathes through them all. + +One runs thus: + + Spring cometh, and the earth is decked and studded with vernal + flowers. The harmony of the birds' returning song rouses the + heart to be glad. It is the time of joy. + +Songs 98 to 118 rejoice that winter is gone; for instance: + + Now in the mild springtime Flora opens the lap which the cold + frost had locked in cruel time of winter; the zephyr with gentle + murmur cometh with the spring; the grove is clad in leaves. The + nightingale is singing, the fields are gay with divers hues. It + is sweet to walk in the wooded glens, it is sweeter to pluck the + lily with the rose, it is sweetest of all to sport with a lovely + maiden. + +Another makes a similar confession, for Nature and amorous passion +are the two strings of these lyres: + + Beneath the pleasant foliage of a tree 'tis sweet to rest, while + the nightingale sings her plaintive song; sweeter still, to sport + in the grass with a fair maiden.... O, to what changeful moods is + the heart of the lover prone! As the vessel that wanders o'er the + waves without an anchor, so doth Love's uncertain warfare toss + 'twixt fear and hope. + +The beauties of Nature are drawn upon to describe the fair maiden; +her eyes are compared to stars, her colour to lilies and snow, her +mouth to a rose, her kiss 'doth rend in sunder all the clouds of +care.' + + In the flowery season I sat beneath a shady tree while the birds + sang in the groves ... and listened to my Thisbe's talk, the talk + I love and long for; and we spoke of the sweet interchange of + love, and in the doubtful balance of the mind wanton love and + chastity were wavering. + + I have seen the bright green of flowers, I have seen the flower + of flowers, I have seen the rose of May; I have seen the star + that is brighter than all other, that is glorious and fair above + all other, through whom may I ever spend my life in love. + +On such a theme the poet rings endless changes. The most charming is +the poem _Phyllis and Flora_. Actual landscape is not given, but +details are treated with freshness and care: + + In the flowery season of the year, under a sky serene, while the + earth's lap was painted with many colours, when the messenger of + Aurora had put to flight the stars, sleep left the eyes of + Phyllis and of Flora, two maidens whose beauty answered to the + morning light. The breeze of spring was gently whispering, the + place was green and gay with grass, and in the grass itself there + flowed a living brook that played and babbled as it went. And + that the sun's heat might not harm the maidens, near the stream + there was a spreading pine, decked with leaves and spreading far + its interweaving branches, nor could the heat penetrate from + without. The maidens sat, the grass supplied the seat.... They + intend to go to Love's Paradise: at the entrance of the grove a + rivulet murmurs; the breeze is fragrant with myrrh and balsam; + they hear the music of a hundred timbrels and lutes. All the + notes of the birds resound in all their fulness; they hear the + sweet and pleasant song of the blackbird, the garrulous lark, the + turtle and the nightingale, etc.... He who stayed there would + become immortal; every tree there rejoices in its own fruit; the + ways are scented with myrrh and cinnamon and amomum; the master + could be forced out of his house. + +The first to shew proof of a deepening effect of Nature on the human +spirit was Dante. + +Dante and Petrarch elaborated the Hellenistic feeling for Nature; +hence the further course of the Renaissance displayed all its +elements, but with increased subjectivity and individuality. + +No one, since the days of Hellenism, had climbed mountains for the +sake of the view--Dante was the first to do it. And although, in +ranging heaven, earth, hell, and paradise in the _Divina Commedia_, +he rarely described real Nature, and then mostly in comparisons; yet, +as Humboldt pointed out, how incomparably in a few vigorous lines he +wakens the sense of the morning airs and the light on the distant sea +in the first canto of Purgatorio: + + The dawn was vanquishing the matin hour, + Which fled before it,-so that from afar + I recognized the trembling of the sea. + +And how vivid this is: + + The air + Impregnate changed to water. Fell the rain: + And to the fosses came all that the land + Contain'd not, and, as mightiest streams are wont, + To the great river with such headlong sweep + Rush'd, that naught stayed its course. + + Through that celestial forest, whose thick shade + With lively greenness the new-springing day + Attempered, eager now to roam and search + Its limits round, forthwith I left the bank; + Along the champaign leisurely my way + Pursuing, o'er the ground that on all sides + Delicious odour breathed. A pleasant air, + That intermitted never, never veered, + Smote on my temples gently, as a wind + Of softest influence, at which the sprays, + Obedient all, lean'd trembling to that part + Where first the holy mountain casts his shade; + Yet were not so disordered; but that still + Upon their top the feather'd quiristers + Applied their wonted art, and with full joy + Welcomed those hours of prime, and warbled shrill + Amid the leaves, that to their jocund lays + Kept tenour; even as from branch to branch + Along the piny forests on the shore + Of Chiassi rolls the gathering melody, + When Eolus hath from his cavern loosed + The dripping south. Already had my steps, + Tho' slow, so far into that ancient wood + Transported me, I could not ken the place + Where I had enter'd; when behold! my path + Was bounded by a rill, which to the left + With little rippling waters bent the grass + That issued from its brink. + +and this of the heavenly Paradise: + + I looked, + And, in the likeness of a river, saw + Light flowing, from whose amber-seeming waves + Flash'd up effulgence, as they glided on + 'Twixt banks, on either side, painted with spring, + Incredible how fair; and, from the tide, + There, ever and anon outstarting, flew + Sparkles instinct with life; and in the flowers + Did set them, like to rubies chased in gold; + Then, as if drunk with odours, plunged again + Into the wondrous flood, from which, as one + Re-entered, still another rose. + +His numerous comparisons conjure up whole scenes, perfect in truth to +Nature, and shewing a keen and widely ranging eye. For example: + + Bellowing, there groaned + A noise, as of a sea in tempest torn + By warring winds. + (Inferno.) + + O'er better waves to steer her rapid course + The light bark of my genius lifts the sail, + Well pleased to leave so cruel sea behind. + (Purgatorio.) + + All ye, who in small bark have following sail'd, + Eager to listen on the adventurous track + Of my proud keel, that singing cuts her way. + (Paradiso.) + + As sails full spread and bellying with the wind + Drop suddenly collapsed, if the mast split, + So to the ground down dropp'd the cruel fiend. + (Inferno.) + + As, near upon the hour of dawn, + Through the thick vapours Mars with fiery beam + Glares down in west, over the ocean floor. + (Purgatorio.) + + As 'fore the sun + That weighs our vision down, and veils his form + In light transcendent, thus my virtue fail'd + Unequal. (Purgatorio.) + + As sunshine cheers + Limbs numb'd by nightly cold, e'en thus my look + Unloosed her tongue. + + And now there came o'er the perturbed waves, + Loud crashing, terrible, a sound that made + Either shore tremble, as if of a wind + Impetuous, from conflicting vapours sprung, + That, 'gainst some forest driving all his might, + Plucks off the branches, beats them down, and hurls + Afar; then, onward pressing, proudly sweeps + His whirlwind rage, while beasts and shepherds fly. + (Inferno.) + + As florets, by the frosty air of night + Bent down and closed, when day has blanch'd their leaves + Rise all unfolded on their spiry stems, + So was my fainting vigour new restored. + (Inferno.) + + As fall off the light autumnal leaves, + One still another following, till the bough + Strews all its honours on the earth beneath. + (Inferno.) + +Bees, dolphins, rays of sunlight, snow, starlings, doves, frogs, a +bull, falcons, fishes, larks, and rooks are all used, generally with +characteristic touches of detail. + +Specially tender is this: + + E'en as the bird, who 'mid the leafy bower + Has, in her nest, sat darkling through the night + With her sweet brood; impatient to descry + Their wished looks, and to bring home their food, + In the fond quest, unconscious of her toil; + + She, of the time prevenient, on the spray + That overhangs their couch, with wakeful gaze + Expects the sun, nor, ever, till the dawn + Removeth from the east her eager ken, + So stood the dame erect. + +The most important forward step was made by Petrarch, and it is +strange that this escaped Humboldt in his famous sketch in the second +volume of _Cosmos_, as well as his commentator Schaller, and +Friedlander. + +For when we turn from Hellenism to Petrarch, it does not seem as if +many centuries lay between; but rather as if notes first struck in +the one had just blended into distinct harmony in the other. + +The modern spirit arose from a union of the genius of the Italian +people of the thirteenth century with antiquity, and the feeling for +Nature had a share in the wider culture, both as to sentimentality +and grasp of scenery. Classic and modern joined hands in Petrarch. +Many Hellenic motives handed on by Roman poets reappear in his +poetry, but always with that something in addition of which antiquity +shewed but a trace--the modern subjectivity and individuality. It was +the change from early bud to full blossom. He was one of the first to +deserve the name of modern--modern, that is, in his whole feeling and +mode of thought, in his sentimentality and his melancholy, and in the +fact that 'more than most before and after him, he tried to know +himself and to hand on to others what he knew.' (Geiger.) It is an +appropriate remark of Hettner's, that the phrase, 'he has discovered +his heart,' might serve as a motto for Petrarch's songs and sonnets. +He knew that he had that sentimental disorder which he called +'acedia,' and wished to be rid of it. This word has a history of its +own. To the Greeks, to Apollonius, for instance,[4] it meant +carelessness, indifference; and, joined with the genitive [Greek: +nooio]--that is, of the mind--it meant, according to the scholiasts, +as much as [Greek: lypê] (Betrübnis)--that is, distress or grief. In +the Middle Ages it became 'dislike of intellect so far as that is a +divine gift'--that disease of the cloister which a monkish chronicler +defined as 'a sadness or loathing and an immoderate distress of mind, +caused by mental confusion, through which happiness of mind was +destroyed, and the mind thrown back upon itself as from an abyss of +despair.' + +To Dante it meant the state-- + + Sad + In the sweet air, made gladsome by the sun, + +distaste for the good and beautiful. + +The modern meaning which it took with Petrarch is well defined by +Geiger as being neither ecclesiastic nor secular sin,[5] but + + Entirely human and peculiar to the cleverest--the battle between + reality and seeming, the attempt to people the arid wastes of the + commonplace with philosophic thought--the unhappiness and despair + that arise from comparing the unconcern of the majority with + one's own painful unrest, from the knowledge that the results of + striving do not express the effort made--that human life is but a + ceaseless and unworthy rotation, in which the bad are always to + the fore, and the good fall behind ... as pessimism, melancholy, + world pain (Weltschmerz)--that tormenting feeling which mocks all + attempt at definition, and is too vitally connected with erring + and striving human nature to be curable--that longing at once for + human fellowship and solitude, for active work and a life of + contemplation. + +Petrarch knew too the pleasure of sadness, what Goethe called 'Wonne +der Wehmuth,' the _dolendi voluptas._ + + Lo, what new pleasure human wits devise! + For oftentimes one loves + Whatever new thing moves + The sighs, that will in closest order go; + And I'm of those whom sorrowing behoves; + And that with some success + I labour, you may guess, + When eyes with tears, and heart is brimmed with woe. + +In Sonnet 190: + + My chiefest pleasure now is making moan. + + Oh world, oh fruitless thought, + Oh luck, my luck, who'st led me thus for spite!... + For loving well, with pain I'm rent.... + Nor can I yet repent, + My heart o'erflowed with deadly pleasantness. + Now wait I from no less + A foe than dealt me my first blow, my last. + And were I slain full fast, + 'Twould seem a sort of mercy to my mind.... + My ode, I shall i' the field + Stand firm; to perish flinching were a shame, + In fact, myself I blame + For such laments; my portion is so sweet. + Tears, sighs, and death I greet. + O reader that of death the servant art, + Earth can no weal, to match my woes, impart. + +His poems are full of scenes and comparisons from Nature; for the +sympathy for her which goes with this modern and sentimental tone is +a deep one: + + In that sweet season of my age's prime + Which saw the sprout and, as it were, green blade + Of the wild passion.... + + Changed me + From living man into green laurel whose + Array by winter's cold no leaf can lose. + (Ode 1.) + +Love is that by which + + My darknesses were made as bright + As clearest noonday light. (Ode 4.) + +Elsewhere it is the light of heaven breaking in his heart, and +springtime which brings the flowers. + +In Sonnet 44 he plays with impossibilities, like the Greek and Roman +poets: + + Ah me! the sea will have no waves, the snow + Will warm and darken, fish on Alps will dwell, + And suns droop yonder, where from common cell + + The springs of Tigris and Euphrates flow, + Or ever I shall here have truce or peace + Or love.... + +and uses the same comparisons, Sestina 7: + + So many creatures throng not ocean's wave, + So many, above the circle of the moon, + Of stars were never yet beheld by night; + So many birds reside not in the groves; + So many herbs hath neither field nor shore, + But my heart's thoughts outnumber them each eve. + +Many of his poems witness to the truth that the love-passion is the +best interpreter of Nature, especially in its woes. The woes of love +are his constant theme, and far more eloquently expressed than its +bliss: + + So fair I have not seen the sun arise, + When heaven was clearest of all cloudy stain-- + The welkin-bow I have not after rain + Seen varied with so many shifting dyes, + But that her aspect in more splendid guise + Upon the day when I took up Love's chain + Diversely glowed, for nothing mortal vies + Therewith.... (Sonnet 112.) + + From each fair eyelid's tranquil firmament + So brightly shine my stars untreacherous, + That none, whose love thoughts are magnanimous, + Would from aught else choose warmth or guidance lent. + Oh, 'tis miraculous, when on the grass + She sits, a very flower, or when she lays + Upon its greenness down her bosom white. + (Sonnet 127.) + + Oh blithe and happy flowers, oh favoured sod, + That by my lady in passive mood are pressed, + Lawn, which her sweet words hear'st and treasurest, + Faint traces, where her shapely foot hath trod, + Smooth boughs, green leaves, which now raw juices load, + Pale darling violets, and woods which rest + In shadow, till that sun's beam you attest, + From which hath all your pride and grandeur flowed; + Oh land delightsome, oh thou river pure + Which bathest her fair face and brilliant eyes + And winn'st a virtue from their living light, + I envy you each clear and comely guise + In which she moves. (Sonnet 129.) + +These recall Nais in Theocritus: + + When she crept or trembling footsteps laid, + Green bright and soft she made + Wood, water, earth, and stone; yea, with conceit + The grasses freshened 'neath her palms and feet. + And her fair eyes the fields around her dressed + With flowers, and the winds and storms she stilled + With utterance unskilled + As from a tongue that seeketh yet the breast, + (Sonnet 25.) + + As oft as yon white foot on fresh green sod + Comelily sets the gentle step, a dower + Of grace, that opens and revives each flower, + Seems by the delicate palm to be bestowed. + (Sonnet 132.) + + I seem to hear her, hearing airs and sprays, + And leaves, and plaintive bird notes, and the brook + That steals and murmurs through the sedges green. + Such pleasure in lone silence and the maze + Of eerie shadowy woods I never took, + Though too much tow'r'd my sun they intervene. + (Sonnet 143.) + +and like Goethe's: + + I think of thee when the bright sunlight shimmers + Across the sea; + When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers + I think of thee.... + + I hear thee, when the tossing waves' low rumbling + Creeps up the hill; + I go to the lone wood and listen trembling + When all is still.... + +So Petrarch sings in Ode 15: + + Now therefore, when in youthful guise I see + The world attire itself in soft green hue, + I think that in this age unripe I view + That lovely girl, who's now a lady's mien. + Then, when the sun ariseth all aglow, + I trace the wonted show + Of amorous fire, in some fine heart made queen... + When leaves or boughs or violets on earth + I see, what time the winter's cold decays, + And when the kindly stars are gathering might, + Mine eye that violet and green portrays + (And nothing else) which, at my warfare's birth, + Armed Love so well that yet he worsts me quite. + I see the delicate fine tissue light + In which our little damsel's limbs are dressed.... + Oft on the hills a feeble snow-streak lies, + Which the sun smiteth in sequestered place. + Let sun rule snow! Thou, Love, my ruler art, + When on that fair and more than human face + I muse, which from afar makes soft my eyes.... + I never yet saw after mighty rain + The roving stars in the calm welkin glide + And glitter back between the frost and dew, + But straight those lovely eyes are at my side.... + If ever yet, on roses white and red, + My eyes have fallen, where in bowl of gold + They were set down, fresh culled by virgin hands, + There have I seemed her aspect to behold.... + But when the year has flecked + Some deal with white and yellow flowers the braes, + I forthwith recollect + That day and place in which I first admired + Laura's gold hair outspread, and straight was fired.... + That I could number all the stars anon + And shut the waters in a tiny glass + Belike I thought, when in this narrow sheet + I got a fancy to record, alas, + How many ways this Beauty's paragon + Hath spread her light, while standing self-complete, + So that from her I never could retreat.... + She's closed for me all paths in earth and sky. + +The reflective modern mind is clear in this, despite its loquacity. +He was yet more eloquent and intense, more fertile in comparisons, +when his happiest days were over. + +In Ode 24, standing at a window he watches the strange forms his +imagination conjures up--a wild creature torn in pieces by two dogs, +a ship wrecked by a storm, a laurel shattered by lightning: + + Within this wood, out of a rock did rise + A spring of water, mildly rumbling down, + Whereto approached not in any wise + The homely shepherd nor the ruder clown, + But many muses and the nymphs withal.... + But while herein I took my chief delight, + I saw (alas!) the gaping earth devour + The spring, the place, and all clean out of sight-- + Which yet aggrieves my heart unto this hour.... + At last, so fair a lady did I spy, + That thinking yet on her I burn and quake, + On herbs and flowers she walked pensively.... + A stinging serpent by the heel her caught, + Wherewith she languished as the gathered flower. + + Now Zephyrus the blither days brings on, + With flowers and leaves, his gallant retinue, + And Progne's chiding, Philomela's moan, + And maiden spring all white and pink of hue; + Now laugh the meadows, heaven is radiant grown, + And blithely now doth Love his daughter view; + Air, water, earth, now breathe of love alone, + And every creature plans again to woo. + Ah me! but now return the heaviest sighs, + Which my heart from its last resources yields + To her that bore its keys to heaven away. + And songs of little birds and blooming fields + And gracious acts of ladies, fair and wise, + Are desert land and uncouth beasts of prey. + (Sonnet 269.) + + The nightingale, who maketh moan so sweet + Over his brood belike or nest-mate dear, + So deft and tender are his notes to hear, + That fields and skies are with delight replete; + And all night long he seems with me to treat, + And my hard lot recall unto my ear. + (Sonnet 270.) + + In every dell + The sands of my deep sighs are circumfused. + (Ode 1.) + + Oh banks, oh dales, oh woods, oh streams, oh fields + Ye vouchers of my life's o'erburdened cause, + How often Death you've heard me supplicate. + (Ode 8.) + + Whereso my foot may pass, + A balmy rapture wakes + When I think, here that darling light hath played. + If flower I cull or grass, + I ponder that it takes + Root in that soil, where wontedly she strayed + Betwixt the stream and glade, + And found at times a seat + Green, fresh, and flower-embossed. (Ode 13.) + + Whenever plaintive warblings, or the note + Of leaves by summer breezes gently stirred, + Or baffled murmur of bright waves I've heard + Along the green and flowery shore to float, + Where meditating love I sat and wrote, + Then her whom earth conceals, whom heaven conferred, + I hear and see, and know with living word + She answereth my sighs, though so remote. + 'Ah, why art thou,' she pityingly says, + 'Pining away before thy hour?' + (Sonnet 238.) + + The waters and the branches and the shore, + Birds, fishes, flowers, grasses, talk of love, + And me to love for ever all invite. + (Sonnet 239.) + + Thou'st left the world, oh Death, without a sun.... + Her mourners should be earth and sea and air. + (Sonnet 294.) + +Here we have happiness and misery felt in the modern way, and Nature +in the modern way drawn into the circle of thought and feeling, and +personified. + +Petrarch was the first, since the days of Hellenism, to enjoy the +pleasures of solitude quite consciously. + + How often to my darling place of rest, + Fleeing from all, could I myself but flee, + I walk and wet with tears my path and breast. + (Sonnet 240.) + +He shared Schiller's thought: + + Oh Nature is perfect, wherever we stray, + 'Tis man that deforms it with care. + + As love from thought to thought, from hill to hill, + Directs me, when all ways that people tread + Seem to the quiet of my being, foes, + If some lone shore, or fountain-head, or rill + Or shady glen, between two slopes outspread, + I find--my daunted soul doth there repose.... + On mountain heights, in briary woods, I find + Some rest; but every dwelling place on earth + Appeareth to my eyes a deadly bane.... + Where some tall pine or hillock spreads a shade, + I sometimes halt, and on the nearest brink + Her lovely face I picture from my mind.... + Oft hath her living likeness met my sight, + (Oh who'll believe the word?) in waters clear, + On beechen stems, on some green lawny space, + Or in white cloud.... + Her loveliest portrait there my fancy draws, + And when Truth overawes + That sweet delusion, frozen to the core, + I then sit down, on living rock, dead stone, + And seem to muse, and weep and write thereon.... + Then touch my thoughts and sense + Those widths of air which hence her beauty part, + Which always is so near, yet far away.... + Beyond that Alp, my Ode, + Where heaven above is gladdest and most clear, + Again thou'lt meet me where the streamlet flows + And thrilling airs disclose + The fresh and scented laurel thicket near, + There is my heart and she that stealeth it. + (Ode 17.) + +It is the same idea as Goethe's in _Knowest thou the Land_? Again: + + Alone, engrossed, the least frequented strands + I traverse with my footsteps faint and slow, + And often wary glances round me throw, + To flee, should human trace imprint the sands. + (Sonnet 28.) + + A life of solitude I've ever sought, + This many a field and forest knows, and will. + (Sonnet 221.) + +Love of solitude and feeling for Nature limit or increase each other; +and Petrarch; like Dante, took scientific interest in her, and found +her a stimulant to mental work. + +Burckhardt says: 'The enjoyment of Nature is for him the favourite +accompaniment of intellectual pursuits; it was to combine the two +that he lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that +he from time to time fled from the world and from his age.' + +He wrote a book _On a Life of Solitude (De Vita Solitaria)_ by the +little river Sorgue, and said in a letter from Vaucluse: 'O if you +could imagine the delight with which I breathe here, free and far +from the world, with forests and mountains, rivers and springs, and +the books of clever men.' + +Purely objective descriptions, such as his picture of the Gulf of +Spezzia and Porto Venere at the end of the sixth book of the +_Africa_, were rare with him; but, as we have already seen, he +admired mountain scenery. He refers to the hills on the Riviera di +Levante as 'hills distinguished by most pleasant wildness and +wonderful fertility.'[6] + +The scenery of Reggio moved him, as he said,[7] to compose a poem. He +described the storm at Naples in 1343, and the earthquake at Basle. +As we have seen from one of his odes, he delighted in the wide view +from mountain heights, and the freedom from the oppression of the air +lower down. In this respect he was one of Rousseau's forerunners, +though his 'romantic' feeling was restrained within characteristic +limits. In a letter of April 26, 1335, interesting both as to the +period and the personality of the writer, he described to Dionisius +da Borgo San Sepolchro the ascent of Mt. Ventoux near Avignon which +he made when he was thirty-two, and greatly enjoyed, though those who +were with him did not understand his enjoyment. When they had +laboured through the difficulties of the climb, and saw the clouds +below them, he was immensely impressed. It was in accordance with his +love of solitude that lonely mountain tops should attract him, and +the letter shows that he fully appreciated both climb and view. + +'It was a long day, the air fine. We enjoyed the advantages of vigour +of mind, and strength and agility of body, and everything else +essential to those engaged in such an undertaking, and so had no +other difficulties to face than those of the region itself.' ... 'At +first, owing to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of +the great sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like one dazed. +I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and +Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things +from a mountain of less fame. I turned my eyes towards Italy, whither +my heart most inclined. The Alps, rugged and snow-capped, seemed to +rise close by, although they were really at a great distance.... The +Bay of Marseilles, the Rhone itself, lay in sight.' + +It was a very modern effect of the wide view that 'his whole past +life with all its follies rose before his mind; he remembered that +ten years ago, that day, he had quitted Bologna a young man, and +turned a longing gaze towards his native country: he opened a book +which was then his constant companion, _The Confessions of St +Augustine_, and his eye fell on the passage in the tenth chapter: + + And men go about and admire lofty mountains and broad seas, and + roaring torrents and the ocean, and the course of the stars, and + forget their own selves while doing so. + +His brother, to whom he read these words, could not understand why he +closed the book and said no more. His feeling had suddenly changed. + +He knew, when he began the climb, that he was doing something very +unusual, even unheard of among his contemporaries, and justified +himself by the example of Philip V. of Macedon, arguing that a young +man of private station might surely be excused for what was not +thought blamable in a grey-haired king. Then on the mountain top, +lost in the view, the passage in St Augustine suddenly occurred to +him, and he started blaming himself for admiring earthly things so +much. 'I was amazed ... angry with myself for marvelling but now at +earthly things, when I ought to have learnt long ago that nothing +save the soul was marvellous, and that to the greatness of the soul +nought else was great'; and he closed with an explanation flavoured +with theology to the taste of his confessor, to whom he was writing. +The mixture of thoroughly modern delight in Nature[8] with ascetic +dogma in this letter, gives us a glimpse into the divided feelings of +one who stood upon the threshold between two eras, mediæval and +modern, into the reaction of the mediæval mind against the budding +modern feeling. + +This is, at any rate, the first mountain ascent for pleasure since +Hellenic days, of which we have detailed information. From Greece +before Alexander we have nothing; but the Persian King Darius, in his +expedition against the Scythians in the region of Chalcedon, ascended +the mountain on which stood the Urios temple to Zeus, and there +'sitting in the temple, he took a view of the Euxine Sea, which is +worthy of admiration.' (Herodotus.) + +Philip V. of Macedon ascended the Hæmus B.C. 181, and Apollonios +Rhodios describes the panorama spread out before the Argonauts as +they ascended the Dindymon, and elsewhere recalls the view from Mt. +Olympus. These are the oldest descriptions of distant views conceived +as landscape in the classic literature preserved to us. Petrarch's +ascent comes next in order. + +This sentimental and subjective feeling for Nature, half-idyllic, +half-romantic, which seemed to arise suddenly and spontaneously in +Petrarch, is not to be wholly explained by a marked individuality, +nourished by the tendencies of the period; the influence of Roman +literature, the re-birth of the classic, must also be taken into +account. For the Renaissance attitude towards Nature was closely +allied to the Roman, and therefore to the Hellenic; and the fact that +the first modern man arose on Italian soil was due to the revival of +antiquity plus its union with the genius of the Italian people. Many +direct analogies can be traced between Petrarch and the Roman poets; +it was in their school that his eyes opened to the wonders of Nature, +and he learnt to blend the inner with the outer life. + +Boccaccio does not lead us much further. There is idyllic quality in +his description of a wood in the _Ameto_,[9] and especially in +_Fiammetta_, in which he praises country life and describes the +spring games of the Florentine youth. + +This is the description of a valley in the _Decameron_: 'After a walk +of nearly a mile, they came to the Ladies' Valley, which they entered +by a straight path, whence there issued forth a fine crystal current, +and they found it so extremely beautiful and pleasant, especially at +that sultry season, that nothing could exceed it, and, as some of +them told me afterwards, the plain in the valley was so exact a +circle, as if it had been described by a pair of compasses, though it +seemed rather the work of Nature than of art, and was about half a +mile in circumference, surrounded by six hills of moderate height, on +each of which was a palace built in the form of a little castle.... +The part that looks toward the south was planted as thick as they +could stand together with vines, olives, almonds, cherries, figs, and +most other kinds of fruit trees, and on the northern side were fine +plantations of oak, ash, etc., so tall and regular that nothing could +be more beautiful. The vale, which had only that one entrance, was +full of firs, cypress trees, laurels, and pines, all placed in such +order as if it had been done by the direction of some exquisite +artist, and through which little or no sun could penetrate to the +ground, which was covered with a thousand different flowers.... But +what gave no less delight than any of the rest was a rivulet that +came through a valley which divided two of the mountains, and running +through the vein of a rock, made a most agreeable murmur with its +fall, appealing, as it was dashed and sprinkled into drops, like so +much quicksilver.' + +Description of scenery for its own sake is scarcely more than +attempted here, nor do Petrarch's lyrics, with their free thought of +passion and overpowering consciousness of the joys and sorrows of +love, reach the level of Hellenism in this respect. Yet it advanced +with the Renaissance. Pope Pius II. (Æneas Sylvius) was the first to +describe actual landscape (Italian), not merely in a few subjective +lines, but with genuine modern enjoyment. He was one of those figures +in the world's history in whom all the intellectual life and feeling +of a time come to a focus. + +He had a heart for everything, and an all-round enthusiasm for Nature +unique in his day. Antiquity and Nature were his two passions, and +the most beautiful descriptions of Nature before Rousseau and Goethe +are contained in his _Commentaries_. + +Writing of the country round his home, he says: + +'The sweet spring time had begun, and round about Siena the smiling +hills were clothed with leaves and flowers, and the crops were rising +in plenty in the fields. Even the pasture land quite close to the +town affords an unspeakably lovely view; gently sloping hills, either +planted with homely trees or vines, or ploughed for corn, look down +on pleasant valleys in which grow crops, or green fields are to be +seen, and brooks are even flowing. There are, too, many plantations, +either natural or artificial, in which the birds sing with wondrous +sweetness. Nor is there a mound on which the citizens have not built +a magnificent estate; they are thus a little way out of the town. +Through this district the Pope walked with joyous head.' + +Again and again love of Nature drew him away even in old age from +town life and the circle of courtiers and flatterers; he was for ever +finding new reasons to prolong his _villeggiatura_, despite the +grumbling of his court, which had to put up with wretched inns or +monasteries overrun by mice, where the rain came through the roofs +and the necessaries of life were scanty.[10] + +His taste for these beautifully-situated monastic solitudes was a +riddle to those around him. He wrote of his summer residence in +Tibur: + +'On all sides round the town in summer there are most lovely +plantations, to which the Pope with his cardinals often retired for +relaxation, sitting sometimes on some green sward beneath the olives, +sometimes in a green meadow on the bank of the river Aino, whence he +could see the clear waters. There are some meadows in a retired glen, +watered by many streams; Pius often rested in these meadows near the +luxuriant streams and the shady trees. He lived at Tibur with the +Minorites on an elevation whence he could see the town and the course +of the Aino as it flowed into the plain beneath him and through the +quiet gardens, nor did anything else give him pleasure. + +'When the summer was over, he had his bedroom in the house +overlooking the Aino; from there the most beautiful view was to be +seen, and also from a neighbouring mountain on the other side of the +river, still covered with a green and leafy grove ... he completed a +great part of his journey with the greatest enjoyment.' + +In May 1462 he went to the baths at Viterbo, and, old man as he was, +gives this appreciative description of spring beauties by the way: + +'The road by which he made for Sorianum was at that time of the year +delightful; there was a tremendous quantity of genista, so that a +great part of the field seemed a mass of flowering yellow, while the +rest, covered as it was by shrubs and various grasses, brought purple +and white and a thousand different colours before the eyes. It was +the month of May, and everything was green. On one side were the +smiling fields, on the other the smiling woods, in which the birds +made sweet harmony. At early dawn he used to walk into the fields to +catch the exquisite breeze before the day should grow hot, and gaze +at the green crops and the flowering flax, which then, emulating +heaven's own blue, gave the greatest joy to all beholders.... Now the +crows are holding vigil, and the ringdoves; and the owl at times +utters lament with funeral note. The place is most lovely; the view +in the direction of Siena stretches as far as Amiata, and in the west +reaches Mt. Argentarius.' + +In the plains the plague was raging; the sight of the people +appealing to him as to a god, moved him to tears as he thought how +few of the children would survive in the heat. He travelled to a +castle charmingly placed on the lake of Bolsena, where 'there is a +shady circular walk in the vineyard under the big grapes; stone steps +shaded by the vine leaves lead down to the bank, where ilex oaks, +alive with the songs of blackbirds, stand among the crags.' Halfway +up the mountain, in the monastery of San Salvatore, he and his court +took up their quarters. + +'The most lovely scenery met the eye. As you look to the west from +the higher houses, the view reaches beyond Ilcinum and Siena as far +as the Pistorian Alps. To the north a variety of hills and the +pleasant green of woods presents itself, stretching a distance of +five miles; if your sight is good, your eye will travel as far as the +Apennine range and can see Cortona.' + +There he passed the time, shooting birds, fishing, and rowing. + +'In the cool air of the hills, among the old oaks and chestnuts, on +the green meadows where there were no thorns to wound the feet, and +no snakes or insects to hurt or annoy, the Pope passed days of +unclouded happiness.' + +This is thoroughly modern: 'Silvarum amator,' as he calls himself, he +includes both the details of the near and the general effect of the +far-distant landscape. + +And with age his appreciation of it only seemed to increase; for +instance, he says of Todi: + +'A most lovely view meets the eye wherever you turn; you can see +Perusia and all the valley that lies between, full of wide--spreading +forts and fertile fields, and honoured by the river Tiber, which, +drawing its coils along like a snake, divides Tuscia from Umbria, +and, close to the city itself, enters many a mountain, passing +through which it descends to the plain, murmuring as it goes, as +though constrained against its will.' + +This is his description of a lake storm, during an excursion to the +Albanian Mountains: + +As far as Ostia 'he had a delightful voyage; at night the sea began +to be most unwontedly troubled, and a severe storm arose. The east +wind rolled up the waters from their lowest depths, huge waves beat +the shore; you could have heard the sea, as it were, groaning and +wailing. So great was the force of the winds, that nothing seemed +able to resist it; they raged and alternately fled and put one +another to rout, they overturned woods and anything that withstood +them. The air glittered with frequent lightning, the sky thundered, +and terrific thunder-bolts fell from the clouds.... The night was +pitch dark, though the flashes of lightning were continuous.' + +And of a lake at rest he says: + +'The beauty of that lake is remarkable; everywhere it is surrounded +by high rocks, the water is transparently clear. Nature, so far +superior to art, provided a most pleasant journey. The Nemorian lake, +with its crystal-clear waters, reflects the faces of those that look +into it, and fills a deep basin. The descent from the top to the +bottom is wooded. The poetic genius would never be awakened if it +slept here; you would say it was the dwelling-place of the Muses, the +home of the Nymphs, and, if there is any truth in legends, the +hiding-place of Diana.' + +He visited the lakes among the mountains, climbing and resting under +the trees; the view from Monte Cavo was his favourite, from which he +could see Terracina, the lakes of Nemi and Albano, etc. He noted +their extent and formation, and added: + +'The genista, however, was especially delightful, covering, as it did +with its flowers, the greater part of the plains. Then, moreover, +Rome presented itself fully to the eyes, together with Soracte and +the Sabine Land, and the Apennine range white with snow, and Tibur +and Præneste.' + +It is clear that it was a thoroughly modern enthusiasm which +attracted Æneas Sylvius to the country and gave him this ready pen +for everything in Nature--everything, that is, except bare mountain +summits. + +It is difficult to attribute this faculty for enjoying and describing +scenery to the influence of antiquity alone, for, save the younger +Pliny, I know of no Roman under the Empire who possessed it, and, +besides, we do not know how far Pius II. was acquainted with Roman +literature. We know that the re-awakening of classic literature +exerted an influence upon the direction of the feeling for Nature in +general, and, for the rest, very various elements coalesced. Like +times produce like streams of tendency, and Hellenism, the Roman +Empire, and the Renaissance were alike to some extent in the +conditions of their existence and the results that flowed from them; +the causal nexus between them is undeniable, and makes them the chief +stepping-stones on the way to the modern. + +Theocritus, Meleager, Petrarch, and Æneas Sylvius may serve as +representatives of the development of the feeling for Nature from +classic to modern; they are the ancestors of our enthusiasm, the +links in the chain which leads up to Rousseau, Goethe, Byron, and +Shelley. + +From the autobiography of Æneas Sylvius and the lyrics of Petrarch we +gain a far truer picture of the feeling of the period up to the +sixteenth century than from any poetry in other countries. Even the +epic had a more modern tone in Italy; Ariosto's descriptions were far +ahead of any German epic. + +Humboldt pointed out very clearly the difference between the epic of +the people and the epic of art--between Homer and Ariosto. Both, he +said, are true painters of the world and Nature; but Ariosto pleases +more by his brilliance and wealth of colour, Homer by purity of form +and beauty of composition. Ariosto achieves through general effect, +Homer through perfection of form. Nature is more naive in Homer, the +subject is paramount, and the singer disappears; in Ariosto, Nature +is sentimental, and the poet always remains in view upon the stage. +In Homer all is closely knit, while Ariosto's threads are loosely +spun, and he breaks them himself in play. Homer almost never +describes, Ariosto always does. + +Ariosto's scenes and comparisons from Nature, being calculated for +effect, are more subjective, and far more highly-coloured than +Homer's. But they shew a sympathetic grasp. + +The modern bloom, so difficult to define, lies over them--something +at once sensuous, sentimental, and chivalrous. He is given to +describing lonely woodland scenery, fit places for trysts and lovers' +rendezvous. + +In the 1st Canto of _Mad Orlando_: + + With flowery thorns, vermilion roses near + Her, she upon a lovely bush doth meet, + That mirrored doth in the bright waves appear, + Shut out by lofty oaks from the sun's heat. + + Amidst the thickest shades there is a clear + Space in the middle for a cool retreat; + So mixed the leaves and boughs are, through them none + Can see; they are impervious to the sun. + +In the 6th Canto the Hippogriff carries Roger into a country: + + Nor could he, had he searched the whole world through, + Than this a more delightful country see.... + Soft meads, clear streams, and banks affording shade, + Hillocks and plains, by culture fertile made. + Fair thickets of the cedar, palm and no + Less pleasant myrtle, of the laurel sweet, + Of orange trees, where fruit and flow'rs did grow, + And which in various forms, all lovely, meet + With their thick shades against the fervid glow + Of summer days, afforded a retreat; + And nightingales, devoid of fear, among + Those branches fluttered, pouring forth their song. + Amid the lilies white and roses red, + Ever more freshened by the tepid air, + The stag was seen, with his proud lofty head, + And feeling safe, the rabbit and the hare.... + Sapphires and rubies, topazes, pearls, gold, + Hyacinths, chrysolites, and diamonds were + Like the night flow'rs, which did their leaves unfold + There on those glad plains, painted by the air + So green the grass, that if we did behold + It here, no emeralds could therewith compare; + As fair the foliage of the trees was, which + With fruit and flow'r eternally were rich. + Amid the boughs, sing yellow, white, and blue, + And red and green small feathered creatures gay; + The crystals less limpidity of hue + Than the still lakes or murmuring brooks display. + A gentle breeze, that seemeth still to woo + And never change from its accustomed way, + Made all around so tremulous the air + That no annoyance was the day's hot glare. + (Canto 34.) + +Descriptions of time are short: + + From the hard face of earth the sun's bright hue + Not yet its veil obscure and dark did rend; + The Lycaonian offspring scarcely through + The furrows of the sky his plough did send. + (Canto 80.) + +Comparisons, especially about the beauty of women, are very artistic, +recalling Sappho and Catullus: + + The tender maid is like unto the rose + In the fair garden on its native thorn; + Whilst it alone and safely doth repose, + Nor flock nor shepherd crops it; dewy morn, + Water and earth, the breeze that sweetly blows, + Are gracious to it; lovely dames adorn + With it their bosoms and their beautiful + Brows; it enamoured youths delight to cull. + (Canto 1.) + + Only, Alcina fairest was by far + As is the sun more fair than every star.... + Milk is the bosom, of luxuriant size, + And the fair neck is round and snowy white; + Two unripe ivory apples fall and rise + Like waves upon the sea-beach when a slight + Breeze stirs the ocean. (Canto 7.) + + Now in a gulf of bliss up to the eyes + And of fair things, to swim he doth begin. + (Canto 7.) + + So closely doth the ivy not enlace + The tree where firmly rooted it doth stand, + As clasp each other in their warm embrace + These lovers, by each other's sweet breath fanned. + Sweet flower, of which on India's shore no trace + Is, or on the Sabæan odorous sand. + (Canto 7.) + + Her fair face the appearance did maintain + That sometimes shewn is by the sky in spring, + When at the very time that falls the rain, + The sun aside his cloudy veil doth fling. + And as the nightingale its pleasant strain + Then on the boughs of the green trees doth sing, + Thus Love doth bathe his pinions at those bright + But tearful eyes, enjoying the clear light. + (Canto 11.) + + But as more fickle than the leaf was she, + When it in autumn doth more sapless grow, + And the old wind doth strip it from the tree, + And doth before it in its fury grow. + (Canto 21.) + +He uses the sea: + + As when a bark doth the deep ocean plough, + That two winds strike with an alternate blast, + 'Tis now sent forward by the one, and now + Back by the other in its first place cast, + And whirled from prow to poop, from poop to prow, + But urged by the most potent wind at last + Philander thus irresolute between + The two thoughts, did to the least wicked lean. + (Canto 21.) + + As comes the wave upon the salt sea shore + Which the smooth wind at first in thought hath fanned; + Greater the second is than that before + It, and the third more fiercely follows, and + Each time the humour more abounds, and more + Doth it extend its scourge upon the land: + Against Orlando thus from vales below + And hills above, doth the vile rabble grow. + (Canto 24.) + +These comparisons not only shew faithful and personal observation, +but are far more subjective and subtle than, for instance, Dante's. +The same holds good of Tasso. How beautiful in detail, and how +sentimental too, is this from _Jerusalem Delivered_: + + Behold how lovely blooms the vernal rose + When scarce the leaves her early bud disclose, + When, half unwrapt, and half to view revealed, + She gives new pleasure from her charms concealed. + But when she shews her bosom wide displayed, + How soon her sweets exhale, her beauties fade! + No more she seems the flower so lately loved, + By virgins cherished and by youths approved. + So swiftly fleeting with the transient day + Passes the flower of mortal life away. + +Not less subjective is: + + Like a ray of light on water + A smile of soft desire played in her liquid eyes. + (Sonnet 18.) + +The most famous lines in this poem are those which describe a +romantic garden so vividly that Humboldt says 'it reminds one of the +charming scenery of Sorrento.' It certainly proves that even epic +poetry tried to describe Nature for her own sake: + + The garden then unfolds a beauteous scene, + With flowers adorned and ever living green; + There silver lakes reflect the beaming day, + Here crystal streams in gurgling fountains play. + Cool vales descend and sunny hills arise, + And groves and caves and grottos strike the eyes. + Art showed her utmost power; but art concealed + With greater charm the pleased attention held. + It seemed as Nature played a sportive part + And strove to mock the mimic works of art: + By powerful magic breathes the vernal air, + And fragrant trees eternal blossoms bear: + Eternal fruits on every branch endure, + Those swelling from their buds, and these mature: + The joyous birds, concealed in every grove, + With gentle strife prolong the notes of love. + Soft zephyrs breathe on woods and waters round, + The woods and waters yield a murmuring sound; + When cease the tuneful choir, the wind replies, + But, when they sing, in gentle whisper dies; + By turns they sink, by turns their music raise + And blend, with equal skill, harmonious lays. + +But even here the scene is surrounded by an imaginary atmosphere; +flowers, fruit, creatures, and atmosphere all lie under a magic +charm. Tasso's importance for our subject lies far more in his +much-imitated pastorals. + +The _Arcadia_ of Jacopo Sannazaro, which appeared in 1504, a work of +poetic beauty and still greater literary importance,[11] paved the +way for pastoral poetry, which, like the sonnet, was interwoven with +prose. The shepherd's occupations are described with care, though +many of the songs and terms of expression rather fit the man of +culture than the child of Nature, and he had that genuine enthusiasm +for the rural which begets a convincing eloquence. ''Tis you,' he +says at the end, addressing the Muse, 'who first woke the sleeping +woods, and taught the shepherds how to strike up their lost songs.' + +Bembo wrote this inscription for his grave: + + Strew flowers o'er the sacred ashes, here lies Sannazaro; + With thee, gentle Virgil, he shares Muse and grave. + +Virgil too was industriously imitated in the didactic poetry of his +country. + +Giovanni Rucellai (born 1475) wrote a didactic poem, _The Bees_, +which begins: + +'O chaste virgins, winged visitants of flowery banks, whilst I +prepared to sing your praise in lofty verse, at peep of day I was +o'ercome by sleep, and then appeared a chorus of your tiny folk, and +from their rich mellifluous haunts, in a clear voice these words +flowed forth.... And I will sing how liquid and serene the air +distils sweet honey, heavenly gilt, on flowerets and on grass, and +how the bees, chaste and industrious, gather it, and thereof with +care and skill make perfumed wax to grace the altars of our God.' + +And a didactic poem by Luigi Alamanni (born 1495), called +_Husbandry_, has: 'O blessed is he who dwells in peace, the actual +tiller of his joyous fields, to whom, in his remoteness, the most +righteous earth brings food, and secure in well-being, he rejoices in +his heart. If thou art not surrounded by society rich with purple and +gems, nor with houses adorned with costly woods, statues, and +gold;... at least, secure in the humble dwelling of wood from the +copse hard by, and common stones collected close at hand, which thine +own hand has founded and built, whenever thou awakenest at the +approach of dawn, thou dost not find outside those who bring news of +a thousand events contrary to thy desires.... Thou wanderest at will, +now quickly, now slowly, across the green meadow, through the wood, +over the grassy hill, or by the stream. Now here, now there ... thou +handlest the hatchet, axe, scythe, or hoe.... To enjoy in sober +comfort at almost all seasons, with thy dear children, the fruits of +thine own tree, the tree planted by thyself, this brings a sweetness +sweet beyond all others.' + +These didactic writings, inspired by Virgilian Georgics, show a +distinct preference for the idyllic. + +Sannazaro's _Arcadia_ went through sixty editions in the sixteenth +century alone. Tasso reckoned with the prevalent taste of his day in +_Aminta_, which improved the then method of dramatizing a romantic +idyll. The whole poem bears the stamp of an idealizing and romantic +imagination, and embodies in lyric form his sentimental idea of the +Golden Age and an ideal world of Nature. Even down to its details +_Aminta_ recalls the pastorals of Longos; and Daphne's words (Act I. +Scene 1) suggest the most feeling outpourings of Kallimachos and +Nonnos: + + And callest thou sweet spring-time + The time of rage and enmity, + Which breathing now and smiling, + Reminds the whole creation, + The animal, the human, + Of loving! Dost thou see not + How all things are enamoured + Of this enamourer, rich with joy and health? + Observe that turtle-dove, + How, toying with his dulcet murmuring, + He kisses his companion. Hear that nightingale + Who goes from bough to bough + Singing with his loud heart, 'I love!' 'I love!'... + + The very trees + Are loving. See with what affection there, + And in how many a clinging turn and twine, + The vine holds fast its husband. Fir loves fir, + The pine the pine, and ash and willow and beech + Each towards the other yearns, and sighs and trembles. + That oak tree which appears + So rustic and so rough, + Even that has something warm in its sound heart; + And hadst thou but a spirit and sense of love, + Thou hadst found out a meaning for its whispers. + Now tell me, would thou be + Less than the very plants and have no love? + +One seems to hear Sakuntala and her friends talking, or Akontios +complaining. So, too, when the unhappy lover laments (Aminta): + + In my lamentings I have found + A very pity in the pebbly waters, + And I have found the trees + Return them a kind voice: + But never have I found, + Nor ever hope to find, + Compassion in this hard and beautiful + What shall I call her? + +Aminta describes to Tirsis how his love grew from boyhood up: + + There grew by little and little in my heart, + I knew not from what root, + But just as the grass grows that sows itself, + An unknown something which continually + Made me feel anxious to be with her. + +Sylvia kisses him: + + Never did bee from flower + Suck sugar so divine + As was the honey that I gathered then + From those twin roses fresh. + +In Act II. Scene 1, the rejected Satyr, like the rejected Polyphemus +or Amaryllis in Theocritus, complains in antitheses which recall +Longos: + + The woods hide serpents, lions, and bears under their green + shade, and in your bosom hatred, disdain, and cruelty dwell.... + Alas, when I bring the earliest flowers, you refuse them + obstinately, perhaps because lovelier ones bloom on your own + face; if I offer beautiful apples, you reject them angrily, + perhaps because your beautiful bosom swells with lovelier + ones.... and yet I am not to be despised, for I saw myself lately + in the clear water, when winds were still and there were no + waves. + +This is the sentimental pastoral poetry of Hellenism reborn and +intensified. + +So with the elegiac motive so loved by Alexandrian and Roman poets, +praise of a happy past time; the chorus sings in _Aminta_: + + O lovely age of gold, + Not that the rivers rolled + With milk, or that the woods wept honeydew; + Not that the ready ground + Produced without a wound, + Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew.... + But solely that.... the law of gold, + That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted, + Which Nature's own hand wrote--What pleases is permitted!... + Go! let us love, the daylight dies, is born; + But unto us the light + Dies once for all, and sleep brings on eternal night. + +Over thirty pastoral plays can be ascribed to Italy in the last third +of the sixteenth century. The most successful imitator of Tasso was +Giovanni Battista Guarini (born 1537) in _The True Shepherd (II +Pastor Fido)_. One quotation will shew how he outvied _Aminta_. In +Act I, Scene 1, Linko says: + + Look round thee, Sylvia; behold + All in the world that's amiable and fair + Is love's sweet work: heaven loves, the earth, the sea, + Are full of love and own his mighty sway. + Love through the woods + The fiercest beasts; love through the waves attends + Swift gliding dolphins and the sluggish whales. + That little bird which sings.... + Oh, had he human sense, + 'I burn with love,' he'd cry, 'I burn with love,' + And in his heart he truly burns, + And in his warble speaks + A language, well by his dear mate conceived, + Who answering cries, 'And I too burn with love.' + +He praises woodland solitude: + + Dear happy groves! + And them all silent, solitary gloom, + True residence of peace and of repose! + How willingly, how willingly my steps + To you return, and oh! if but my stars + Benightly had decreed + My life for solitude, and as my wish + Would naturally prompt to pass my days-- + No, not the Elysian fields, + Those happy gardens of the demi-gods, + Would I exchange for yon enchanting shades. + +The love lyrics of the later Renaissance are remarkably rich in vivid +pictures of Nature combined with much personal sentiment. Petrarch's +are the model; he inspired Vittoria Colonna, and she too revelled in +sad feelings and memories, especially about the death of her +husband:[12] + +'When I see the earth adorned and beautiful with a thousand lovely +and sweet flowers, and how in the heavens every star is resplendent +with varied colours; when I see that every solitary and lively +creature is moved by natural instinct to come out of the forests and +ancient caverns to seek its fellow by day and by night; and when I +see the plains adorned again with glorious flowers and new leaves, +and hear every babbling brook with grateful murmurs bathing its +flowery banks, so that Nature, in love with herself, delights to gaze +on the beauty of her works, I say to myself, reflecting: "How brief +is this our miserable mortal life!" Yesterday this plain was covered +with snow, to-day it is green and flowery. And again in a moment the +beauty of the heavens is overclouded by a fierce wind, and the happy +loving creatures remain hidden amidst the mountains and the woods; +nor can the sweet songs of the tender plants and happy birds be +heard, for these cruel storms have dried up the flowers on the +ground; the birds are mute, the most rapid streams and smallest +rivulets are checked by frost, and what was one hour so beautiful and +joyous, is, for a season, miserable and dead.' + +Here the two pictures in the inner and outer life are equally vivid +to the poetess; it is the real 'pleasure of sorrow,' and she lingers +over them with delight. + +Bojardo, too, reminds us of Petrarch; for example, in Sonnet 89:[13] + + Thou shady wood, inured my griefs to hear, + So oft expressed in quick and broken sighs; + Thou glorious sun, unused to set or rise + But as the witness of my daily fear; + + Ye wandering birds, ye flocks and ranging deer, + Exempt from my consuming agonies; + Thou sunny stream to whom my sorrow flies + 'Mid savage rocks and wilds, no human traces near. + + O witnesses eternal, how I live! + My sufferings hear, and win to their relief + That scornful beauty--tell her how I grieve! + + But little 'tis to her to hear my grief. + To her, who sees the pangs which I receive, + And seeing, deigns them not the least relief. + +Lorenzo de Medici's idylls were particularly rich in descriptions of +Nature and full of feeling. 'Here too that delight in pain, in +telling of their unhappiness and renunciation; here too those +wonderful tones which distinguish the sonnets of the fourteenth and +fifteenth centuries so favourably from those of a later time.' +(Geiger.) + +There is a delicate compliment in this sonnet: + + O violets, sweet and fresh and pure indeed, + Culled by that hand beyond all others fair! + What rain or what pure air has striven to bear + Flowers far excelling those 'tis wont to yield? + What pearly dew, what sun, or sooth what earth + Did you with all these subtle charms adorn; + And whence is this sweet scent by Nature drawn, + Or heaven who deigns to grant it to such worth? + O, my dear violets, the hand which chose + You from all others, that has made you fair, + 'Twas that adorned you with such charm and worth; + Sweet hand! which took my heart altho' it knows + Its lowliness, with that you may compare. + To that give thanks, and to none else on earth. + +Thus we see that the Italians of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and +fifteenth centuries were penetrated through and through by the modern +spirit--were, indeed, its pioneers. They recognized their own +individuality, pondered their own inner life, delighted in the charms +of Nature, and described them in prose and poetry, both as +counterparts to feeling and for her own sake. + +Over all the literature we have been considering--whether poetic +comparison and personification, or sentimental descriptions of +pastoral life and a golden age, of blended inner and outer life, or +of the finest details of scenery--there lies that bloom of the +modern, that breath of subjective personality, so hard to define. The +rest of contemporary Europe had no such culture of heart and mind, no +such marked individuality, to shew. + +The further growth of the Renaissance feeling, itself a rebirth of +Hellenic and Roman feeling, was long delayed. + +Let us turn next to Spain and Portugal--the countries chiefly +affected by the great voyages of discovery, not only socially and +economically, but artistically--and see the effect of the new scenery +upon their imagination. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +ENTHUSIASM FOR NATURE AMONG THE DISCOVERERS +AND CATHOLIC MYSTICS + + +The great achievement of the Italian Renaissance was the discovery of +the world within, of the whole deep contents of the human spirit. +Burckhart, praising this achievement, says: + + If we were to collect the pearls from the courtly and knightly + poetry of all the countries of the West during the two preceding + centuries, we should have a mass of wonderful divinations and + single pictures of the inward life, which at first sight would + seem to rival the poetry of the Italians. Leaving lyrical poetry + out of account, Godfrey of Strassburg gives us, in his _Tristram + and Isolt_, a representation of human passion, some features of + which are immortal. But these pearls lie scattered in the ocean + of artificial convention, and they are altogether something very + different from a complete objective picture of the inward man and + his spiritual wealth. + +The discovery of the beauty of scenery followed as a necessary +corollary of this awakening of individualism, this fathoming of the +depths of human personality. For only to fully-developed man does +Nature fully disclose herself. + +This had already been stated by one of the most philosophic minds of +the time, Pico della Mirandola, in his speech on the dignity of man. +God, he tells us, made man at the close of creation to know the laws +of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire its greatness. He +bound him to no fixed place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no +iron necessity; but gave him freedom to will and to move. + +'I have set thee,' said the Creator to Adam, 'in the midst of the +world, that thou mayest the more easily behold and see all that is +therein. I created thee a being neither heavenly nor earthly, neither +mortal nor immortal, only that thou mightest be free to shape and to +overcome thyself. Thou mayest sink into a beast, and be born again to +the Divine likeness. The brutes bring with them from their mothers' +body what they will carry with them as long as they live; the higher +spirits are from the beginning, or soon after, what they will be for +ever. To thee alone is given a growth and a development depending on +thine own free will. Thou bearest in thee the germs of a universal +life.' + +The best men of the Renaissance realized this ideal of an all-round +development, and it was the glory of Italy in the fourteenth and +fifteenth centuries, that she found a new realm in the inner man at +the very time that her discoveries across the seas were enlarging the +boundaries of the external world, and her science was studying it. +Mixed as the motives of the discoverers must have been, like those of +the crusaders before them, and probably, for the most part, +self-interested, it is easy to imagine the surprise they must have +felt at seeing ignorant people, who, to quote Peter Martyr (de rebus +oceanicis):[1] + + Naked, without weights or measures or death-dealing money, live + in a Golden Age without laws, without slanderous judges, without + the scales of the balance. Contented with Nature, they spend + their lives utterly untroubled for the future.... Theirs is a + Golden Age; they do not enclose their farms with trench or wall + or hurdle; their gardens are open. Without laws, without the + scales of the balance, without judges, they guard the right by + Nature's light. + +And their wonder at the novelties in climate and vegetation, the +strange forests, brilliant birds, and splendid stars of the tropics, +must have been no less. + +Yet it is one thing to feel, and another to find words to convey the +feeling to others; and the explorers often expressed regret for their +lack of skill in this respect. + +Also, and this is more important in criticizing what they wrote, +these seamen were mostly simple, unlettered folk, to whom a country's +wealth in natural products and their practical value made the +strongest appeal, and whose admiration of bays, harbours, trees, +fields of grain, etc., was measured by the same standard of utility. +Even such unskilled reporters did not entirely fail to refer to the +beauty of Nature; but had it not been for the original and powerful +mind of Christopher Columbus, we should have had little more in the +way of description than 'pleasant,' 'pretty,' and such words. + +Marco Polo described his journey to the coast of Cormos[2] in very +matter-of-fact fashion, but not without a touch of satisfaction at +the peculiarities of the place: + + You then approach the very beautiful plain of Formosa, watered by + fine rivers, with plantations of the date palms, and having the + air filled with francolins, parrots, and other birds unknown to + our climate. You ride two days to it, and then arrive at the + ocean, on which there is a city and a fort named Cormos. The + ships of India bring thither all kinds of spiceries, precious + stones, and pearls, cloths of silk and gold, elephants' teeth, + and many other articles.... They sow wheat, barley, and other + kinds of grain in the month of November, and reap them in March, + when they become ripe and perfect; but none except the date will + endure till May, being dried up by the extreme heat. + +Elsewhere he wrote of scenery in the same strain: of the Persian +deserts, and the green table-lands and wild gorges of Badachshan, +Japan with its golden roofed palaces, paradisaical Sunda Islands with +their 'abundance of treasure and costly spices,' Java the less with +its eight kingdoms, etc.; but naturally his chief interest was given +to the manners and customs of the various races, and the fertility +and uses of their countries. + +In Bishop Osorio's _History of Emmanuel, King of Portugal_, we see +some pleasure in the beauties of Nature peeping through the +matter-of-fact tone of the day. + +Thus, speaking of the companions of Vasco da Gama, he says that they +admired the far coast of Africa: + + They descried some little islands, which appeared extremely + pleasant; the trees were lofty, the meadows of a beautiful + verdure, and great numbers of cattle frisked about everywhere; + they could see the inhabitants walking upon the shore in vast + numbers.... + +Of Mozambique he says: + + The palm trees are of a great height, covered with long prickly + leaves; broad-spreading boughs afford an agreeable shade, and + bear nuts of a great size, called cocoes. + +Of Melinda: + + The city stands in a beautiful plain, surrounded with a variety + of fine gardens; these are stocked with all sorts of trees, + especially the orange, the flowers of which yield a most graceful + diffusive smell. The country is rich and plentiful, abounding not + only with tame and domestic cattle, but with game of all kinds, + which the natives hunt down or take with nets. + +Of Zanzibar: + + The soil of this place is rich and fertile, and it abounds with + springs of the most excellent water; the whole island is covered + with beautiful woods, which are extremely fragrant from the many + wild citrons growing there, which diffuse the most grateful + scent. + +Of Brazil, which is 'extremely pleasant and the soil fruitful': + + Clothed with a beautiful verdure, covered with tall trees, + abounding with plenty of excellent water ... and so healthy that + the inhabitants make no use of medicines, for almost all who die + here are not cut off by any distemper, but worn out by age. Here + are many large rivers, besides a vast number of delightful + springs. The plains are large and spacious, and afford excellent + pasture.... In short, the whole country affords a most beautiful + prospect, being diversified with hills and valleys, and these + covered with thick shady woods stocked with great variety of + trees, many of which our people were quite strangers to: of these + there was one of a particular nature, the leaves of which, when + cut, sent forth a kind of balsam. The trees used in dyeing + scarlet grow here in great plenty and to a great height. The soil + likewise produces the most useful plants. + +Of Ormuz, near Arabia: + + The name of the island seems to be taken from the ancient city of + Armuza in Caramania ... the place is sandy and barren, and the + soil so very poor that it produces nothing fit for human + sustenance, neither by nature nor by the most laborious + cultivation ... yet here you might see greater plenty of these, + as well as all luxurious superfluities, than in most other + countries of a richer and more fertile soil, for the place, poor + in itself, having become the great mart for the commodities of + India, Persia, and Arabia, was thus abundantly stocked with the + produce of all these countries. + +Peter Martyr's[3] point of view was much the same. He was full of +surprise at the splendour round him, and the advantages such +fertility offered to husbandry: + + Thus after a few days with cheerful hearts they espied the land + long looked for.... + + As they coasted along by the shore of certain of these islands, + they heard nightingales sing in the thick woods in the month of + November. + + They found also great rivers of fresh water and natural havens of + capacity to harbour great navies of ships.... They found there + wild geese, turtle-doves, and ducks, much greater than ours, and + as white as swans, with heads of purple colour. Also popinjays, + of the which some are green, some yellow, and having their + feathers intermingled with green, yellow, and purple, which + varieties delighted the sense not a little.... They entered into + a main large sea, having in it innumerable islands, marvellously + differing one from another; for some of them were very fruitful, + full of herbs and trees, other some very dry, barren, and rough, + with high rocky mountains of stone, whereof some were of bright + blue, or azurine colour, and other glistening white. + +He filled a whole page with descriptions of the wonderful wealth of +flowers, fruit, and vegetables of all kinds, which the ground yields +even in February. The richness of the prairie grass, the charm of the +rivers, the wealth of fruit, the enormous size of the trees (with a +view to native houses), the various kinds of pines, palms, and +chestnuts, and their uses, the immense downfall of water carried to +the sea by the rivers--all this he noted with admiration; but +industrial interest outweighed the æsthetic, even when he called +Spain happier than Italy. There is no trace of any real feeling for +scenery, any grasp of landscape as a whole; he did not advance beyond +scattered details, which attracted his eye chiefly for their material +uses. + +But there is real delight in Nature in the account of a journey to +the Cape Verde Islands, undertaken on the suggestion of Henry the +Navigator by Aloise da Mosto,[4] an intelligent Venetian nobleman: + + Cape de Verde is so called because the Portuguese, who had + discovered it about a year before, found it covered with trees, + which continue green all the year round. This is a high and + beautiful Cape, which runs a good length into the sea, and has + two hills or little mountains at the point thereof. There are + several villages of negroes from Senega, on and about the + promontory, who dwell in thatched houses close to the shore, and + in sight of those who sail by.... The coast is all low and full + of fine large trees, which are constantly green; that is, they + never wither as those in Europe do, for the new leaves grow + before the old ones fall off. These trees are so near the shore + that they seem to drink out of the sea. It is a most beautiful + coast to behold, and the author, who had sailed both in the East + and West, never saw any comparable with it. + +As Ruge says: + + The delight of this solid and prudent citizen of Strasburg in the + beauty of the tropics is lost in translation, but very evident in + the original account.[5] + +After reading it, we cannot quite say with Humboldt that Columbus was +the very first to give fluent expression to Nature's beauty on the +shores of the New World; none the less, and apart from his importance +in other respects, he remains the chief representative of his time in +the matter. Humboldt noted this in his critical examination of the +history of geography in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in +which he pointed out his deep feeling for Nature, and also, what only +those who know the difficulties of language at the time can +appreciate, the beauty and simplicity of his expression of it.[6] + +Columbus is a striking example of the fact that a man's openness to +Nature increases with his general inner growth. No one doubts that +uneducated sailors, like other unlettered people, are vividly +impressed by fine scenery, especially when it is new to them, if they +possess a spark of mental refinement. They have the feeling, but are +unable to express it in words. But, as Humboldt says, feeling +improves speech; with increased culture, the power of expression +increases. + +We owe a debt of gratitude to Fernandez de Navarrete[7] for the Diary +in which we can trace Columbus' love for Nature increasing to 'a deep +and poetic feeling for the majesty of creation.' + +He wrote, October 8th, 1492, in his diary: + + 'Thanks be to God,' says the Admiral, 'the air is very soft like + the April at Seville, and it is a pleasure to be there, so balmy + are the breezes.' + +And Humboldt says: + + The physiognomy and forms of the vegetation, the impenetrable + thickets of the forests, in which one can scarcely distinguish + the stems to which the several blossoms and leaves belong, the + wild luxuriance of the flowering soil along the humid shores, and + the rose-coloured flamingoes which, fishing at early morning at + the mouth of the rivers, impart animation to the scenery,--all in + turn arrested the attention of the old mariner as he sailed along + the shores of Cuba, between the small Lucayan Islands and the + Jardinillos. + +Each new country seemed to him more beautiful than the last; he +complained that he could not find new words in which to give the +Queen an impression of the beauty of the Cuban coast. + +It will repay us to examine the Diary more closely, since Humboldt +only treated it shortly and in scattered extracts, and it has been +partly falsified, unintentionally, by attempts to modernize the +language instead of adhering to literal translation. What Peschel +says, for instance, is pretty but distinctly exaggerated: + + Columbus was never weary of listening to the nightingales, + comparing the genial Indian climate with the Andalusian spring, + and admiring the luxuriant wilderness on these humid shores, with + their dense vegetation and forests so rich in all kinds of + plants, and alive with swarms of parrots ... with an open eye for + all the beauties of Nature and all the wonders of creation, he + looked at the splendour of the tropics very much as a tender + father looks into the bright eyes of his child.[8] + +The Diary of November 3rd says: + + He could see nothing, owing to the dense foliage of the trees, + which were very fresh and odoriferous; so that he felt no doubt + that there were aromatic herbs among them. He said that all he + saw was so beautiful that his eyes could never tire of gazing + upon such loveliness, nor his ears of listening to the songs of + birds. + +November 14th: + + He saw so many islands that he could not count them all, with + very high land covered with trees of many kinds and an infinite + number of palms. He was much astonished to see so many lofty + islands, and assured the Sovereigns that the mountains and + islands he had seen since yesterday seemed to him to be second to + none in the world, so high and clear of clouds and snow, with the + sea at their bases so deep. + +November 25th: + + He saw a large stream of beautiful water falling from the + mountains above, with a loud noise.... Just then the sailor boys + called out that they had found large pines. The Admiral looked up + the hill and saw that they were so wonderfully large, that he + could not exaggerate their height and straightness, like stout + yet fine spindles. He perceived that here there was material for + great store of planks and masts for the largest ships in Spain + ... the mountains are very high, whence descend many limpid + streams, and all the hills are covered with pines, and an + infinity of diverse and beautiful trees. + +November 27th: + + The freshness and beauty of the trees, the clearness of the water + and the birds, made it all so delightful that he wished never to + leave them. He said to the men who were with him that to give a + true relation to the Sovereigns of the things they had seen, a + thousand tongues would not suffice, nor his hand to write it, for + that it was like a scene of enchantment. + +December 13th: + + The nine men well armed, whom he sent to explore a certain place, + said, with regard to the beauty of the land they saw, that the + best land in Castille could not be compared with it. The Admiral + also said that there was no comparison between them, nor did the + Plain of Cordova come near them, the difference being as great as + between night and day. They said that all these lands were + cultivated, and that a very wide and large river passed through + the centre of the valley and could irrigate all the fields. All + the trees were green and full of fruit, and the plants tall and + covered with flowers. The roads were broad and good. The climate + was like April in Castille; the nightingale and other birds sang + as they do in Spain during that month, and it was the most + pleasant place in the world. Some birds sing sweetly at night, + the crickets and frogs are heard a good deal. + +All this shews a naive and spontaneous delight in Nature, as free +from sentimentality as from any grasp of landscape as a distinct +entity. + +In a letter about Cuba, which Humboldt gives, he says: + + The lands are high, and there are many very lofty mountains ... + all most beautiful, of a thousand different shapes, accessible + and covered with trees of a thousand kinds of such great height + that they seemed to reach the skies. I am told that the trees + never lose their foliage, and I can well believe it, for I + observed that they were as green and luxuriant as in Spain in the + month of May. Some were in bloom, others bearing fruit, and + others otherwise according to their nature. There were palm trees + of six or eight kinds, wonderful in their beautiful variety; but + this is the case with all the other trees; fruits and grasses, + trees, plants and fruits filled us with admiration. It contains + extraordinary pine groves and very extensive plains. + +Humboldt here comments that these often-repeated expressions of +admiration prove a strong feeling for the beauty of Nature, since +they are concerned with foliage and shade, not with precious metals. +The next letter shews the growing power of description: + + Reaching the harbour of Bastimentos, I put in.... The storm and a + rapid current kept me in for fourteen days, when I again set + sail, but not with favourable weather.... I had already made four + leagues when the storm recommenced and wearied me to such a + degree that I absolutely knew not what to do; my wound re-opened, + and for nine days my life was despaired of. Never was the sea + seen so high, so terrific, and so covered with foam; not only did + the wind oppose our proceeding onward, but it also rendered it + highly dangerous to run in for any headland, and kept me in that + sea, which seemed to me a sea of blood, seething like a cauldron + on a mighty fire. Never did the sky look more fearful; during one + day and one night it burned like a furnace, and emitted flashes + in such fashion that each time I looked to see if my masts and my + sails were not destroyed; these flashes came with such alarming + fury that we all thought the ship must have been consumed. All + this time the waters from heaven never ceased, not to say that it + rained, for it was like a repetition of the Deluge. The men were + at this time so crushed in spirit, that they longed for death as + a deliverance from so many martyrdoms. Twice already had the + ships suffered loss in boats, anchors, and rigging, and were now + lying bare without sails. + +These extracts shew how feeling for Nature in unlettered minds could +develop into an enthusiasm which begot to some extent its own power +of expression. Columbus was entirely deficient in all previous +knowledge of natural history; but he was gifted with deep feeling +(the account of the nocturnal visions in the _Lettera Rarissima_ is +proof of this)[9], mental energy, and a capacity for exact +observation which many of the other explorers did not possess, and +these faculties made up for what he lacked in education. + + In Cuba alone, he distinguishes seven or eight + different species of palm more beautiful and taller than + the date tree; he informs his learned friend Anghiera + that he has seen pines and palms wonderfully associated + together in one and the same plain, and he even + so acutely observed the vegetation around him, that he + was the first to notice that there were pines in the + mountains of Cibao, whose fruits are not fir cones but + berries like the olives of the Axarafe de Sevilla. + + (_Cosmos._) + +Most of Vespucci's narratives of travel, especially his letters to +the Medici, only contain adventures and descriptions of manners and +customs. He lacked the originality and enthusiasm which gave the +power of the wing to Columbus. + +That imposing Portuguese poem, the _Lusiad_ of Camoens, is full of +jubilation over the discovery of the New World. Camoens made his +notes of foreign places at first hand; he had served as a soldier, +fought at the foot of Atlas in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, had +doubled the Cape twice, and, inspired by a deep love for Nature, had +spent sixteen years in examining the phenomena of the ocean on the +Indian and Chinese shores. He was a great sea painter. His poetic and +inventive power remind one at times of Dante--for instance, in the +description of the Dream Face; and he pictures foreign lands with the +clearness and detail of the discoverers and later travellers. Here +and there his poetry is like the Diary of Columbus translated into +verse--epic verse. + +He had the same fiery spirit, nerve, and fresh insight, with the +poet's gift added. + +(None the less, the classic apparatus of deities in Thetys' _Apology_ +is no adornment.) + +Comparisons from Nature and animals are few but detailed: + + E'en as the prudent ants which towards their nest + Bearing the apportioned heavy burden go, + Exercise all their forces at their best, + Hostile to hostile winter's frost and snow; + There, all their toils and labours stand confessed, + There, never looked-for energy they show; + So, from the Lusitanians to avert + Their horrid Fate, the nymphs their power exert. + + Thus, as in some sequestered sylvan mere + The frogs (the Lycian people formerly), + If that by chance some person should appear + While out of water they incautious be, + Awake the pool by hopping here and there, + To fly the danger which they deem they see, + And gathering to some safe retreat they know, + Only their heads above the water show--So fly the Moors. + + E'en as when o'er the parching flame there glows + A flame, which may from some chance cause ignite, + (All while the whistling, puffing Boreas blows), + Fanned by the wind sets all the growth alight, + The shepherd's group, lying in their repose + Of quiet sleep, aroused in wild afright + At crackling flames that spread both wide and high, + Gather their goods and to the village fly; + So doth the Moor. + + E'en as the daisy which once brightly smiled, + Plucked by unruly hands before its hour, + And harshly treated by the careless child, + All in her chaplet tied with artless power. + Droops, of its colour and its scent despoiled, + So seems this pale and lifeless damsel flower; + The roses of her lips are dry and dead, + With her sweet life the mingled white and red. + +The following simile reminds us of the far-fetched comparison of +Apollonios Rhodios[11]: + + As the reflected lustre from the bright + Steel mirror, or of beauteous crystal fine, + Which, being stricken by the solar light, + Strikes back and on some other part doth shine; + And when, to please the child's vain curious sight, + Moved o'er the house, as may his hand incline, + Dances on walls and roof and everywhere, + Restless and tremulous, now here now there, + So did the wandering judgment fluctuate. + +He says of Diana: + + And, as confronted on her way she pressed, + So beautiful her form and bearing were, + That everything that saw her love confessed, + The stars, the heaven, and the surrounding air. + +The Indus and Ganges are personified in stanza xiv. 74, the Cape in +v. 50. + +His time references are mostly mixed up with ancient mythology: + + As soon, however, as the enamelled morn + O'er the calm heaven her lovely looks outspread, + Opening to bright Hyperion, new-born, + Her purple portals as he raised his head, + Then the whole fleet their ships with flags adorn. + +and: + + So soon, however, as great Sol has spread + His rays o'er earth, whom instantly to meet, + Her purple brow Aurora rising shews, + And rudely life around the horizon throws. + +He is at his best in writing of the sea. + +He says of the explorers on first setting sail: + + Now were they sailing o'er wide ocean bright, + The restless waves dividing as they flew; + The winds were breathing prosperous and light, + The vessels' hollow sails were filled to view; + The seas were covered o'er with foaming white + Where the advancing prows were cutting through + The consecrated waters of the deep.... + Thus went we forth these unknown seas to explore, + Which by no people yet explored had been; + Seeing new isles and climes which long before + Great Henry, first discoverer, had seen. + + Now did the moon in purest lustre rise + On Neptune's silvery waves her beams to pour, + With stars attendant glittered all the skies, + E'en like a meadow daisy-spangled o'er; + The fury of the winds all peaceful lies + In the dark caverns close along the shore, + But still the night-watch constant vigils keep, + As long had been their custom on the deep. + + To tell thee of the dangers of the sea + At length, which human understanding scare, + Thunder-storms, sudden, dreadful in degree, + Lightnings, which seem to set on fire the air, + Dark floods of rain, nights of obscurity, + Rollings of thunder which the world would tear, + Were not less labour than a great mistake, + E'en if I had an iron voice to speak. + +He describes the electric fires of St Elmo and the gradual +development of the waterspout: + + I saw, and clearly saw, the living light + Which sailors everywhere as sacred hold + In time of storm and crossing winds that fight, + Of tempest dark and desperation cold; + Nor less it was to all a marvel quite, + And matter surely to alarm the bold, + To observe the sea-clouds, with a tube immense, + Suck water up from Ocean's deep expanse.... + A fume or vapour thin and subtle rose, + And by the wind begin revolving there; + Thence to the topmost clouds a tube it throws, + But of a substance so exceeding rare.... + But when it was quite gorged it then withdrew + The foot that on the sea beneath had grown, + And o'er the heavens in fine it raining flew, + The jacent waters watering with its own. + +The storm at sea reminds us of Æschylus in splendour: + + The winds were such, that scarcely could they shew + With greater force or greater rage around, + Than if it were this purpose then to blow + The mighty tower of Babel to the ground.... + Now rising to the clouds they seem to go + O'er the wild waves of Neptune borne on end; + Now to the bowels of the deep below; + It seems to all their senses, they descend; + Notus and Auster, Boreas, Aquila, + The very world's machinery would rend; + While flashings fire the black and ugly night + And shed from pole to pole a dazzling light.... + But now the star of love beamed forth its ray, + Before the sun, upon the horizon clear, + And visited, as messenger of day, + The earth and spreading sea, with brow to cheer.... + +And, as it subsides: + + The mountains that we saw at first appeared, + In the far view, like clouds and nothing more. + +Off the coast of India: + + Now o'er the hills broke forth the morning light + Where Ganges' stream is murmuring heard to flow, + Free from the storm and from the first sea's fight, + Vain terror from their hearts is banished now. + +His magic island, the Ilha of Venus, could only have been imagined by +a poet who had travelled widely. All the delights of the New World +are there, with the vegetation of Southern Europe added. It is a +poet's triumphant rendering of impressions which the discoverers so +often felt their inability to convey: + + From far they saw the island fresh and fair, + Which Venus o'er the waters guiding drove + (E'en as the wind the canvas white doth bear).... + Where the coast forms a bay for resting-place, + Curved and all quiet, and whose shining sand + Is painted with red shells by Venus' hand.... + Three beauteous mounts rise nobly to the view, + Lifting with graceful pride their sweeling head, + O'er which enamelled grass adorning grew. + In this delightful lovely island glad, + Bright limpid streams their rushing waters threw + From heights with rich luxuriant verdure clad, + 'Midst the white rocks above, their source derive, + The streams sonorous, sweet, and fugitive.... + A thousand trees toward heaven their summits raise, + With fruits odoriferous and fair; + The orange in its produce bright displays + The tint that Daphne carried in her hair; + The citron on the ground its branches lays, + Laden with yellow weights it cannot bear; + The beauteous melons, which the whole perfume + The virgin bosom in their form assume. + The forest trees, which on the hills combine + To ennoble them with leafy hair o'ergrown, + Are poplars of Alcides; laurels shine, + The which the shining God loved as his own; + Myrtles of Cytherea with the pine + Of Cybele, by other love o'erthrown; + The spreading cypress tree points out where lies + The seat of the ethereal paradise.... + Pomegranates rubicund break forth and shine, + A tint whereby thou, ruby, losest sheen. + 'Twixt the elm branches hangs the jocund vine, + With branches some of red and some of green.... + Then the refined and splendid tapestry, + Covering the rustic ground beneath the feet, + Makes that of Achemeina dull to be, + But makes the shady valley far more sweet. + Cephisian flowers with head inclined we see + About the calm and lucid lake's retreat.... + 'Twas difficult to fancy which was true, + Seeing on heaven and earth all tints the same, + If fair Aurora gave the flowers their time, + Or from the lovely flowers to her it came; + Flora and Zephyr there in painting drew + The violets tinted, as of lovers' flame, + The iris, and the rose all fair and fresh + E'en as it doth on cheek of maiden blush.... + Along the water sings the snow-white swan, + While from the branch respondeth Philomel.... + Here, in its bill, to the dear nest, with care, + The rapid little bird the food doth bear. + +Subjective feeling for Nature is better displayed in the lyric than +the epic. + +The Spaniard, Fray Luis de Leon, was a typical example of a +sixteenth-century lyrist; full of mild enthusiasm for Nature, the +theosophico-mystical attitude of the Catholic. + +A most fervid feeling for Nature from the religious side breathed in +St Francis of Assisi--the feeling which inspired his hymn to Brother +Sun (_Cantico del Sole_), and led his brother Egidio, intoxicated +with love to his Creator, to kiss trees and rocks and weep over +them[12]: + + Praised by His creatures all, + Praised be the Lord my God + By Messer Sun, my brother above all, + Who by his rays lights us and lights the day-- + Radiant is she, with his great splendour stored, + Thy glory, Lord, confessing. + By Sister Moon and Stars my Lord is praised, + Where clear and fair they in the heavens are raised + By Brother Wind, etc.... + +His follower, Bonaventura, too, in his verses counted-- + + The smallest creatures his brothers and sisters, and called upon + crops, vineyards, trees, flowers, and stars to praise God. + +Bernard von Clairvaux made it a principle 'to learn from the earth, +trees, corn, flowers, and grass'; and he wrote in his letter to +Heinrich Murdach (Letter 106): + + Believe me, I have proved it; you will find more in the woods + than in books; trees and stones will teach you what no other + teacher can. + +He looked upon all natural objects as 'rays of the Godhead,' copies +of a great original. + +His contemporary, Hugo von St Victor, wrote: + + The whole visible world is like a book written by the finger of + God. It is created by divine power, and all human beings are + figures placed in it, not to shew the free-will of man, but as a + revelation and visible sign, by divine will, of God's invisible + wisdom. But as one who only glances at an open book sees marks on + it, but does not read the letters, so the wicked and sensual man, + in whom the spirit of God is not, sees only the outer surface of + visible beings and not their deeper parts. + +German mystics wrote in the same strain; for instance, the popular +Franciscan preacher, Berthold von Regensburg (1272), + + Whose sermons on fields and meadows drew many thousands of + hearers, and moved them partly by the unusual freshness and + vitality of his pious feeling for Nature, + +in spite of many florid symbolical accessories, such as we find again +in Ekkehart and other fifteenth-century mystics, and especially in +Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek. + +The northern prophetess and foundress of an Order Birgitta (1373) +held that the breath of the Creator was in all visible things: 'We +feel it pervading us in her visions,' says Hammerich,[13] + + Whether by gurgling brook or snow-covered firs. It is with us + when the prophetess leads us along the ridges of the Swedish + coast with their surging waves or down the shaft of a mine, or to + wander in the quiet of evening through vineyards between roses + and lilies, while the dew is falling and the bells ring out the + Ave Maria. + +Vincentius von Beauvais (1264) in his _Speculum Naturæ_ demonstrates +the value of studying Nature from a religious and moral point of +view; and the Carthusian general, Dionysius von Rickel (1471), in his +paper _On the beauty of the world and the glory of God (De venustate +mundi et de pulchritudine Dei)_ says in Chapter xxii.: 'All the +beauty of the animal world is nothing but the reflection and out-flow +of the original beauty of God,' and gives as special examples: + + Roses, lilies, and other beautiful and fragrant + flowers, shady woods, pine trees, pleasant meadows, + high, mountains, springs, streams and rivers, and the + broad arm of the immeasurable sea ... and above + all shine the stars, completing their course in the + clear sky in wonderful splendour and majestic order. + +Raymundus von Sabieude, a Spaniard, who studied medicine and +philosophy at Toulouse, and wrote his _Theologia Naturalis_ in 1436, +considered Nature, like Thomas Aquinas, from a mystical and +scholastic point of view, as made up of living beings in a graduated +scale from the lowest to the highest; and he lauded her in terms +which even Pope Clement VII. thought exaggerated. Piety in him went +hand in hand with a natural philosophy like Bacon's, and his interest +in Nature was rather a matter of intellect than feeling. + + God has given us two books--the book of all living beings, or + Nature, and the Holy Scriptures. The first was given to man from + the beginning when all things were created, for each living being + is but a letter of the alphabet written by the finger of God, and + the book is composed of them all together as a book is of letters + ... man is the capital letter of this book. This book is not like + the other, falsified and spoilt, but familiar and intelligible; + it makes man joyous and humble and obedient, a hater of evil and + a lover of virtue. + +Among the savants of the Renaissance who applied the inductive method +to Nature before Bacon,[14] we must include the thoughtful and pious +Spaniard Luis Vives (1540), who wrote concerning the useless +speculations of alchemists and astrologers about occult things: 'It +is not arguing that is needed here, but silent observation of +Nature.' Knowledge of Nature, he said, would serve both body and +soul. + +The tender religious lyrics of the mystic, Luis de Leon, followed +next.[15] His life (1521-1591) brings us up to the days of the +Inquisition. He himself, an excellent teacher and man of science, was +imprisoned for years for opinions too openly expressed in his +writings; but with all his varied fortunes he never lost his innate +manliness and tenderness. His biographer tells us, that as soon as +the holidays began, he would hurry away from the gloomy lecture rooms +and the noisy students at Salamanca, to the country, where he had +taken an estate belonging to a monastery at the foot of a hill by a +river, with a little island close by. + +It had a large uncultivated garden, made beautiful by fine old trees, +with paths among the vines and a stream running through it to the +river, and a long avenue of poplars whose rustle blended with the +noise of the mill-wheel. Beyond was a view of fields. Leon would sit +for hours here undisturbed, dipping his feet in the brook under a +poplar--the tree which was reputed to flourish on sand alone and give +shelter to all the birds under heaven--while the rustle of the leaves +sang his melancholy to sleep. His biographer goes on to say that he +had the Spaniard's special delight in Nature, and understood her +language and her secrets; and the veiled splendour of her tones, +colours, and forms could move him to tears. As he sat there gazing at +the clouds, he felt lifted up in heart by the insignificance of all +things in comparison with the spirit of man. + +In the pitching and tossing of his 'ships of thought' he never lost +the consciousness of Nature's beauty, and would pray the clouds to +carry his sighs with them in their tranquil course through heaven. He +loved the sunrise, birds, flowers, bees, fishes; nothing was +meaningless to him; all things were letters in a divine alphabet, +which might bring him a message from above. Nature was symbolic; the +glow of dawn meant the glow of divine love; a wide view, true +freedom; rays of sunshine, rays of divine glory; the setting sun, +eternal light; stars, flowers of light in an everlasting spring. + +His love for the country, especially for its peacefulness, was free +from the folly and excess of the pastoral poetry of his day. He did +not paint Nature entirely for her own sake; man was always her +master[16] in his poems, and he sometimes, very finely, introduced +himself and his affairs at the close, and represented Nature as +addressing himself. + +His descriptions are short, and he often tries to represent sounds +onomato-poetically. + +This is from his ode, _Quiet Life_[17]: + + O happy he who flies + Far from the noisy world away-- + Who with the worthy and the wise + Hath chosen the narrow way. + The silence of the secret road + That leads the soul to virtue and to God!... + O streams, and shades, and hills on high, + Unto the stillness of your breast + My wounded spirit longs to fly-- + To fly and be at rest. + Thus from the world's tempestuous sea, + O gentle Nature, do I turn to thee.... + A garden by the mountain side + Is mine, whose flowery blossoming + Shews, even in spring's luxuriant pride, + What Autumn's suns shall bring: + And from mountain's lofty crown + A clear and sparkling rill comes tumbling down; + Then, pausing in its downward force + The venerable trees among, + It gurgles on its winding course; + And, as it glides along, + Gives freshness to the day and pranks + With ever changing flowers its mossy banks. + The whisper of the balmy breeze + Scatters a thousand sweets around, + And sweeps in music through the trees + With an enchanting sound + That laps the soul in calm delight + Where crowns and kingdoms are forgotten quite. + +The poem, _The Starry Sky_,[18] is full of lofty enthusiasm for +Nature and piety: + + When yonder glorious sky + Lighted with million lamps I contemplate, + And turn my dazzled eye + To this vain mortal state + All mean and visionary, mean and desolate, + A mingled joy and grief + Fills all my soul with dark solicitude.... + List to the concert pure + Of yon harmonious countless worlds of light. + See, in his orbit sure + Each takes his journey bright, + Led by an unseen hand through the vast maze of night. + See how the pale moon rolls + Her silver wheel.... + See Saturn, father of the golden hours, + While round him, bright and blest, + The whole empyrean showers + Its glorious streams of light on this low world of ours. + But who to these can turn + And weigh them 'gainst a weeping world like this, + Nor feel his spirit burn + To grasp so sweet a bliss + And mourn that exile hard which here his portion is? + For there, and there alone, + Are peace and joy and never dying love: + Day that shall never cease, + No night there threatening, + No winter there to chill joy's ever-during spring. + Ye fields of changeless green + Covered with living streams and fadeless flowers; + Thou paradise serene, + Eternal joyful hours + Thy disembodied soul shall welcome in thy towers! + +It was chiefly in Spanish literature at this time that Nature was +used allegorically. Tieck[19] says: 'In Calderon's poetry, and that +of his contemporaries, we often find, in romances and song-like +metres, most charming descriptions of the sea, mountains, gardens, +and woody valleys, but almost always used allegorically, and with an +artistic polish which ends by giving us, not so much a real +impression of Nature, as one of clever description in musical verse, +repeated again and again with slight variations.' This is true of +Leon, but far more of Calderon, since it belongs to the very essence +of drama. But, despite his passion for description and his Catholic +and conventional tone, there is inexhaustible fancy, splendid colour, +and a modern element of individuality in his poems. His heroes are +conscious of their own ego, feel themselves to be 'a miniature +world,' and search out their own feelings 'in the wild waves of +emotion' (as Aurelian, for example, in _Zenobia_). + +Fernando says in _The Constant Prince_: + + These flowers awoke in beauty and delight + At early dawn, when stars began to set; + At eve they leave us but a fond regret, + Locked in the cold embraces of the night. + These shades that shame the rainbow's arch of light. + Where gold and snow in purple pomp are met, + All give a warning man should not forget, + When one brief day can darken things so bright. + 'Tis but to wither that the roses bloom-- + 'Tis to grow old they bear their beauteous flowers, + One crimson bud their cradle and their tomb. + Such are man's fortunes in this world of ours; + They live, they die; one day doth end their doom, + For ages past but seem to us like hours. + +The warning which Zenobia gives her captor in his hour of triumph to +beware of sudden reverses of fortune is finely conceived: + + Morn comes forth with rays to crown her, + While the sun afar is spreading + Golden cloths most finely woven + All to dry her tear-drops purely. + Up to noon he climbs, then straightway + Sinks, and then dark night makes ready + For the burial of the sea + Canopies of black outstretching-- + Tall ships fly on linen pinions, + On with speed the breezes send it, + Small the wide seas seem and straitened, + To its quick flight onward tending. + Yet one moment, yet one instant, + And the tempest roars, uprearing + Waves that might the stars extinguish, + Lifted for that ship's o'erwhelming. + Day, with fear, looks ever nightwards, + Calms must storm await with trembling; + Close behind the back of pleasure + Evermore stalks sadness dreary. + +In _Life's a Dream_ Prince Sigismund, chained in a dark prison, says: + + What sinned I more herein + Than others, who were also born? + Born the bird was, yet with gay + Gala vesture, beauty's dower, + Scarcely 'tis a winged flower + Or a richly plumaged spray, + Ere the aerial halls of day + It divideth rapidly, + And no more will debtor be + To the nest it hates to quit; + But, with more of soul than it, + I am grudged its liberty. + And the beast was born, whose skin + Scarce those beauteous spots and bars, + Like to constellated stars, + Doth from its greater painter win + Ere the instinct doth begin: + Of its fierceness and its pride, + And its lair on every side, + It has measured far and nigh; + While, with better instinct, I + Am its liberty denied. + Born the mute fish was also, + Child of ooze and ocean weed; + Scarce a finny bark of speed + To the surface brought, and lo! + In vast circuits to and fro + Measures it on every side + Its illimitable home; + While, with greater will to roam, + I that freedom am denied. + Born the streamlet was, a snake + Which unwinds the flowers among, + Silver serpent, that not long + May to them sweet music make, + Ere it quits the flowery brake, + Onward hastening to the sea + With majestic course and free, + Which the open plains supply; + While, with more life gifted, I + Am denied its liberty. + +In Act II. Clotardo tells how he has talked to the young prince, +brought up in solitude and confinement: + + There I spoke with him awhile + Of the human arts and letters, + Which the still and silent aspect + Of the mountains and the heavens + Him have taught--that school divine + Where he has been long a learner, + And the voices of the birds + And the beasts has apprehended. + +Descriptions of time and place are very rich in colour. + + One morning on the ocean, + When the half-awakened sun, + Trampling down the lingering shadows + Of the western vapours dun, + Spread its ruby-tinted tresses + Over jessamine and rose, + Dried with cloths of gold Aurora's + Tears of mingled fire and snows + Which to pearl his glance converted. + + Since these gardens cannot steal + Away your oft returning woes, + Though to beauteous spring they build + Snow-white jasmine temples filled + With radiant statues of the rose; + Come into the sea and make + Thy bark the chariot of the sun, + And when the golden splendours run + Athwart the waves, along thy wake + The garden to the sea will say + (By melancholy fears deprest)-- + 'The sun already gilds the west, + How very short has been this day.' + +There is a striking remark about a garden; Menon says: + + A beautiful garden surrounded by wild forest + Is the more beautiful the nearer it approaches its opposite. + +Splendour of colour was everything with Calderon, but it was +splendour of so stiff and formal a kind, that, like the whole of his +intensely severe, even inquisitorial outlook, it leaves us cold. + +We must turn to Shakespeare to learn how strongly the pulse of +sympathy for Nature could beat in contemporary drama. Goethe said: +'In Calderon you have the wine as the last artificial result of the +grape, but expressed into the goblet, highly spiced and sweetened, +and so given you to drink; but in Shakespeare you have the whole +natural process of its ripening besides, and the grapes themselves +one by one, for your enjoyment, if you will.' + +In _Worship at the Cross_ there is pious feeling for Nature and +mystical feeling side by side with an obnoxious fanaticism, +superstition, and other objectionable traits[20]; and mystical +confessions of the same sort may be gathered in numbers from the +works of contemporary monks and nuns. Even of such a fanatic and +self-tormentor as the Spanish Franciscan Petrus von Alcantara (1562), +his biographer says that despite his strict renunciation of the +world, he retained a most warm and deep feeling for Nature. + +'Whatever he saw of the outer world increased his devotion and gave +it wings. The starry sky seen through his little monastery window, +often kept him rapt in deep meditation for hours; often he was as if +beside himself, so strong was his pious feeling when he saw the power +and glory of God reflected in charming flowers and plants.' + +When Gregorio Lopez (1596), a man who had studied many sides of +Nature, was asked if so much knowledge confused him, he answered: 'I +find God in all things, great and small.' Similar remarks are +attributed to many others. + +Next to Leon, as a poet in enthusiasm and mysticism, came St Teresa +von Avila. She was especially notable for the ravishingly pretty +pictures and comparisons she drew from Nature to explain the soul +life of the Christian.[21] + +In all these outpourings of mystic feeling for Nature, there was no +interest in her entirely for her own sake; they were all more or less +dictated by religious feeling. It was in the later German and Italian +mystics--for example, Bruno, Campanella, and Jacob Boehme--that a +more subjective and individual point of view was attained through +Pantheism and Protestantism. + +The Protestant free-speaking Shakespeare shewed a far more intense +feeling for Nature than the Catholic Calderon. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +SHAKESPEARE'S SYMPATHY FOR NATURE + + +The poetry of India may serve as a measure of the part which Nature +can play in drama; it is full of comparisons and personifications, +and eloquent expressions of intimate sympathy with plants and +animals. In Greek tragedy, Nature stepped into the background; +metaphors, comparisons, and personifications are rarer; it was only +by degrees, especially in Sophocles and Euripides, in the choruses +and monologues, that man's interest in her appeared, and he began to +greet the light or the sky, land or sea, to attribute love, pity, or +hate to her, or find comfort in her lonely places. During the Middle +Ages, drama lay fallow, and the blossoming period of French tragedy, +educated to the pathos of Seneca, only produced cold declamation, +frosty rhetoric; of any real sympathy between man and Nature there +was no question. + +Over this mediæval void Calderon was the bridge to Shakespeare. + +Shakespeare reached the Greek standpoint and advanced far beyond it. +He was not only the greatest dramatist of modern times as to human +action, suffering, and character, but also a genius in the +interpretation of Nature.[1] + +In place of the narrow limits of the old dramatists, he had the wider +and maturer modern vision, and, despite his mastery of language, he +was free both from the exaggeration and redundance of Oriental drama, +and from the mere passion for describing, which so often carried +Calderon away. + +In him too, the subjectivity, which the Renaissance brought into +modern art, was still more fully developed. His metaphors and +comparisons shew this, and, most of all, the very perfect art with +which he assigns Nature a part in the play, and makes her not only +form the appropriate background, dark or bright as required, but +exert a distinct influence upon human fate. + +As Carrière points out: + + At a period which had painting for its leading art, and was + turning its attention to music, his mental accord produced + effects in his works to which antiquity was a stranger. + +Herder had already noted that Shakespeare gives colour and atmosphere +where the Greek only gave outline. And although Shakespeare's +outlines are drawn with more regard to fidelity than to actual +beauty, yet, like a great painter, he brings all Nature into sympathy +with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night in +_Hamlet_, breathe the bracing Highland air in _Macbeth_, the air of +the woods in _As You Like It_; the storm on the heath roars through +Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the pomegranate outside +Julia's window. + +'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,' when Love solves all +differences in the _Merchant of Venice_! On the other hand, when +Macbeth is meditating the murder of Duncan, the wolf howls, the owl +hoots, and the cricket cries. And since Shakespeare's characters +often act out of part, so that intelligible motive fails, while it is +important to the poet that each scene be raised to dramatic level and +viewed in a special light, Goethe's words apply: + + Here everything which in a great world event passes secretly + through the air, everything which at the very moment of a + terrible occurrence men hide away in their hearts, is expressed; + that which they carefully shut up and lock away in their minds is + here freely and eloquently brought to light; we recognize the + truth to life, but know not how it is achieved. + +Amorous passion in his hands is an interpreter of Nature; in one of +his sonnets he compares it to an ocean which cannot quench thirst. + +In Sonnet 130 he says: + + My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; + Coral is far more red than her lips' red; + If snow be white, why then her breasts are dim; + If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. + I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, + But no such roses see I in her cheeks; + And in some perfumes is there more delight + Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.... + And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare + As any she belied by false compare. + +His lady-love is a mirror in which the whole world is reflected: + + Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind.... + For if it see the rudest or gentlest sight, + The most sweet favour or deformed'st creature, + The mountain or the sea, the day or night, + The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature. + (Sonnet 113.) + + When she leaves him it seems winter even in spring: + 'For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, + And thou away, the very birds are mute.' + (Sonnet 97.) + +Here, as in the dramas,[2] contrasts in Nature are often used to +point contrasts in life: + + How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame + Which like a canker in the fragrant rose + Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! + O in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose! + (Sonnet 95.) + +and + + No more be grieved at that which thou hast done; + Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud; + Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, + And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. + (Sonnet 35.) + +In an opposite sense is Sonnet 70: + + The ornament of beauty is suspect + A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air, + For canker vice the sweetest buds did love, + And thou presentest a pure unstained prime. + +Sonnet 7 has: + + Lo! in the orient when the gracious light + Lifts up his burning head, each under eye + Doth homage to his new-appearing sight, + Serving with looks his sacred majesty. + +Sonnet 18: + + Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? + Thou art more lovely and more temperate, + Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, + And summer's lease hath all too short a date-- + But thy eternal summer shall not fade, + Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; + Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade, + When in eternal lines to time thou growest: + So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, + So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. + +Sonnet 60: + + Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, + So do our minutes hasten to their end; + Each changing place with that which goes before, + In sequent toil all forwards do contend. + +Sonnet 73: + + That time of life thou mayst in me behold, + When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang + Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, + Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang + In me thou see'st the twilight of such day + As after sunset fadeth in the west, + Which by-and-by black night doth take away, + Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. + In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire + That on the ashes of his youth doth lie + As the death-bed whereon it must expire, + Consumed with that which it was nourished by. + This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong + To love that well which thou must leave ere long. + +There are no better similes for the oncoming of age and death, than +the sere leaf trembling in the wind, the twilight of the setting sun, +the expiring flame. + +Almost all the comparisons from Nature in his plays are original, and +rather keen and lightning-like than elaborate, often with the +terseness of proverbs; + + The strawberry grows underneath the nettle. + (_Henry V._) + + Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep. + (_Henry VI._) + + The waters swell before a boisterous storm. + (_Richard III._) + +Sometimes they are heaped up, like Calderon's, 'making it' (true +love) + + Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, + Brief as the lightning in the collied night + That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth, + And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' + The jaws of darkness do devour it up. + (_Midsummer Night's Dream._) + +Compared with Homer's they are very bold, and shew an astonishing +play of imagination; in place of the naive simplicity and naturalness +of antiquity, this modern genius gives us a dazzling display of wit +and thought. To quote only short examples[3]: + + 'Open as day,' 'deaf as the sea,' 'poor as winter,' + 'chaste as unsunn'd snow.' + +He ranges all Nature. These are characteristic +examples: + + King Richard doth himself appear + As doth the blushing discontented sun + From out the fiery portal of the east, + When he perceives the envious clouds are bent + To dim his glory and to stain the track + Of his bright passage to the occident. + (_Richard II._) + + Since the more fair crystal is the sky, + The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly. + As when the golden sun salutes the morn, + And, having gilt the ocean with his beams, + Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach + And overlooks the highest peering hills, + So Tamora. (_Titus Andronicus._) + + As all the world is cheered by the sun, + So I by that; it is my day, my life. + (_Richard III._) + + So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not + To those fresh morning drops upon the rose, + As thy eye-beams, when their fresh rays have smote + The night of dew that on my cheek down flows; + Nor shines the silver moon one half so bright + Through the transparent bosom of the deep. + As doth thy face through tears of mine give light; + Thou shinest on every tear that I do weep. + (_Love's Labour's Lost._) + +This is modern down to its finest detail, and much richer in +individuality than the most famous comparisons of the same kind in +antiquity. + +Sea and stream are used: + + Like an unseasonable stormy day + Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores + As if the world were all dissolved to tears, + So high above his limits swells the rage + Of Bolingbroke. (_Richard II._) + + The current that with gentle murmur glides, + Thou know'st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage; + But when his fair course is not hindered, + He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones, + Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge + He overtaketh on his pilgrimage; + And so by many winding nooks he strays + With willing sport to the wild ocean. + Then let me go, and hinder not my course. + (_Two Gentlemen of Verona._) + + Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought. + You are the fount that makes small brooks to flow. + And what is Edward but a ruthless sea? + (_Henry VI._) + + If there were reason for these miseries, + Then into limits could I bind my woes; + When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'er-flow? + If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, + Threatening the welkin with his big-swoln face? + And wilt thou have a reason for this coil? + I am the sea: hark, how her sighs do blow! + She is the weeping welkin, I the earth; + Then must my sea be moved with her sighs; + Then must my earth with her continual tears + Become a deluge, overflow'd and drowned. + (_Titus Andronicus._) + + This battle fares like to the morning's war + When dying clouds contend with growing light, + What time the shepherd blowing of his nails + Can neither call it perfect day nor night. + Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea + Forced by the tide to combat with the wind; + Now sways it that way, like the self-same sea + Forced to retire by fury of the wind. + Sometime the flood prevails and then the wind: + Now one the better, then another best; + Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast, + Yet neither conqueror nor conquered. + So is the equal poise of this fell war. + (_Henry VI._) + +In the last five examples the epic treatment and the personifications +are noteworthy. + +Comparisons from animal life are forcible and striking: + + How like a deer, stricken by many princes, + Dost thou lie here! (_Julius Cæsar._) + +Richard III. is called: + + The wretched bloody and usurping boar + That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines, + Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his trough + In your embowell'd bosoms; this foul swine + Lies now even in the centre of this isle. + The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind. + (_Richard III._) + +The smallest objects are noted: + + As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; + They kill us for their sport. (_King Lear._) + + _Marcus_: Alas! my lord, I have but kill'd a fly. + + _Titus_: But how if that fly had a father and a mother? + How would he hang his slender gilded wings, + And buzz lamenting doings in the air! + Poor harmless fly! + That, with his pretty buzzing melody, + Came here to make us merry! and thou + Hast kill'd him! + (_Titus Andronicus._) + +Shakespeare has abundance of this idyllic miniature painting, for +which all the literature of the day shewed a marked taste. + +Tamora says: + + My lovely Aaron, wherefore look'st thou sad, + When everything doth make a gleeful boast? + The birds chant melody on every bush, + The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun, + The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind + And make a chequer'd shadow on the ground. + (_Titus Andronicus._) + +And Valentine in _Two Gentlemen of Verona_: + + This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods, + I better brook than flourishing peopled towns; + Here can I sit alone, unseen of any, + And to the nightingale's complaining notes + Tune my distresses and record my woes. + +Like this, in elegiac sentimentality, is Romeo: + + Before the worshipp'd sun + Peer'd forth the golden window of the east.... + Many a morning hath he there been seen + With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew. + +_Cymbeline, Winter's Tale_, and _As You Like It_ are particularly +rich in idyllic traits; the artificiality of court life is contrasted +with life in the open; there are songs, too, in praise of woodland +joys: + + Under the greenwood tree + Who loves to lie with me, + And tune his merry note + Unto the sweet bird's throat, + Come hither, come hither, come hither! + Here shall he see + No enemy + But winter and rough weather. + (_As You Like It._) + + Blow, blow, thou winter wind, + Thou art not so unkind + As man's ingratitude. + Thy tooth is not so keen, + Because thou art not seen + Altho' thy breath be rude. + Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho unto the green holly! + Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly![4] + (_As You Like It._) + +Turning again to comparisons, we find birds used abundantly: + + More pity that the eagle should be mewed + While kites and buzzards prey at liberty. + (_Richard III._) + + True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings. + (_Richard III._) + + As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye, + Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort + Rising and cawing at the gun's report + Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky, + So at his sight away his fellows fly. + (_Midsummer Night's Dream._) + +And plant life is touched with special tenderness: + + All the bystanders had wet their cheeks + Like trees bedashed with rain. + (_Richard III._) + + Why grow the branches when the root is gone? + Why wither not the leaves that want their sap? + (_Richard III._) + + Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, + Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other. + (_Richard III._) + + Ah! my tender babes! + My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets. + (_Richard III._) + +Romeo is + + To himself so secret and so close ... + As is the bud bit with an envious worm, + Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air + Or dedicate his beauty to the sun. + +It is astonishing to see how Shakespeare noted the smallest and most +fragile things, and found the most poetic expression for them without +any sacrifice of truth to Nature. + +Juliet is 'the sweetest flower of all the field.' Laertes says to +Ophelia: + + For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour + Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, + A violet in the youth of primy nature, + Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting, + The perfume and suppliance of a moment. + The canker galls the infants of the spring + Too oft before their buttons be disclosed; + And in the morn and liquid dew of youth + Contagious blastments are most imminent. + (_Hamlet._) + +Hamlet soliloquizes: + + How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable + Seems to me all the uses of this world. + Fie on't, O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden + That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature + Possess it merely. + + Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly + frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most + excellent canopy the air, look you--this brave o'erhanging + firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it + appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent + congregation of vapours. + +But the great advance which he made is seen far more in the +sympathetic way in which he drew Nature into the action of the play. + +He established perfect harmony between human fate and the natural +phenomena around it. + +There are moonlight nights for Romeo and Juliet's brief dream, when +all Nature, moon, stars, garden, seemed steeped in love together. + +He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet + + In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day + is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned + like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.) + +What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature in _Macbeth_! And in _Lear_, as +Jacobi says: + + What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and + unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither + and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and + there a lightning flash from God--a flash of Providence, rending + the clouds. + +One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to +justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies +at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms +one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry, +especially in Shakespeare. + +With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained +before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical +to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the +Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by +dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and +illuminated all and everything. + +Hense says[5]; + + The personification is plastic when Æschylus calls the heights + the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks + of hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are + foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive + army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who + enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of + Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls + laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his + back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did + not, and could not, exist in antiquity. + +The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his +feelings, the more he can see in Nature. + +Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors, +new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were +for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination. + +The motive of amorous passion, for instance, was a very divining-rod +in his hands, revealing the most delicate relations between Nature +and the soul. Ibykos had pointed the contrast between the gay spring +time and his own unhappy heart in which Eros raged like 'the Thracian +blast.' Theocritus had painted the pretty shepherdess drawing all +Nature under the spell of her charms; Akontios (Kallimachos) had +declared that if trees felt the pangs and longings of love, they +would lose their leaves; all such ideas, modern in their way, had +been expressed in antiquity. + +This is Shakespeare's treatment of them: + + How like a winter hath my absence been + From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! + What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! + What old December's bareness everywhere! + And yet this time removed was summer time, + The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ... + For summer and his pleasures wait on thee. + And thou away the very birds are mute, + Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer + That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near, + (Sonnet 97.) + + From you have I been absent in the spring, + When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim + Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, + That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. + Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell + Of different flowers in odour and in hue + Could make me any summer's story tell.... + Yet seem'd it winter still.... (Sonnet 98.) + +Or compare again the cypresses in Theocritus sole witnesses of secret +love; or Walther's + + One little birdie who never will tell, + +with + + These blue-veined violets whereon we lean + Never can blab, nor know not what we mean. + (_Venus and Adonis._) + +Comparisons of ladies' lips to roses, and hands to lilies, are common +with the old poets. How much more modern is: + + The forward violet thus did I chide; + Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells + If not from my love's breath?... + The lily I condemned for thy hand, + And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair; + The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, + One blushing shame, another white despair.... + More flowers I noted, yet I none could see + But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee. + (Sonnet 99.) + +And how fine the personification in Sonnet 33: + + Full many a glorious morning have I seen + Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, + Kissing with golden face the meadows green, + Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; + Anon permit the basest clouds to ride + With ugly rack on his celestial face, + And from the forlorn world his visage hide, + Stealing unseen to West with this disgrace: + Even so my sun one early morn did shine + With all triumphant splendour on my brow; + But out, alack! he was but one hour mine; + The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now. + Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; + Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth. + +This is night in _Venus and Adonis_: + + Look! the world's comforter with weary gait + His day's hot task hath ended in the West; + The owl, night's herald, shrieks 'tis very late; + The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest + And coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light, + Do summon us to part and bid good-night. + +And this morning, in _Romeo and Juliet_: + + The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night, + Checkering the Eastern clouds with streaks of light. + And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels + From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels; + Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye, + The day to cheer, and night's dank dew to dry ... + +Such wealth and brilliance of personification was not found again +until Goethe, Byron, and Shelley. + +He is unusually rich in descriptive phrases: + + The weary sun hath made a golden set, + And by the bright track of his golden car + Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow. + + The worshipp'd Sun + Peered forth the golden window of the East. + + The all-cheering sun + Should in the farthest East begin to draw + The shady curtains from Aurora's bed. + +The moon: + + Like to a silver bow + New bent in heaven. + +Titania says: + + I will wind thee in my arms.... + So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle + Gently entwist; the female ivy so + Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. + O how I love thee! + + That same dew, which sometime on the buds + Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls, + Stood now within the pretty flow'rets' eyes + Like tears. + (_Midsummer Night's Dream._) + + Daffodils + That come before the swallow dares, and take + The winds of March with beauty. + (_Winter's Tale._) + + Pale primroses + That die unmarried, ere they can behold + Bright Phoebus in his strength. + (_Winter's Tale._) + +Goethe calls winds and waves lovers. In _Troilus and Cressida_ we +have: + + The sea being smooth, + How many shallow bauble boats dare sail + Upon her patient breast, making their way + With those of nobler bulk! + But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage + The gentle Thetis, and anon behold + The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut, + Bounding between two moist elements + Like Perseus' horse. + +And further on in the same scene: + + What raging of the sea! shaking of earth! + Commotion in the winds! + ... the bounded waters + Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores. + +The personification of the river in _Henry IV._ is half mythical: + + When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank + In single opposition, hand to hand, + He did confound the best part of an hour + In changing hardiment with great Glendower; + Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink, + Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood; + Who, then affrighted with their bloody looks, + Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds, + And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank, + Blood-stained with these valiant combatants. + +Striking instances of personification from _Antony and Cleopatra_ +are: + + The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne + Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold; + Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that + The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver, + Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made + The water which they beat to follow faster + As amorous of their strokes. + +And Antony, enthron'd in the market-place, sat alone + + Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy + Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too + And made a gap in nature. + +Instead of accumulating further instances of these very modern and +individual (and sometimes far-fetched) personifications, it is of +more interest to see how Shakespeare used Nature, not only as +background and colouring, but to act a part of her own in the play, +so producing the grandest of all personifications. + +At the beginning of Act III. in _King Lear_, Kent asks: + + Who's there beside foul weather? + + _Gentleman_: One minded like the weather, most unquietly. + + _Kent_: Where's the King? + + _Gent_: Contending with the fretful elements. + Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea, + Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main, + That things might change or cease; tears his white hair, + Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage + Catch in their fury and make nothing of; + Strives in his little world of men to outscorn + The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain. + +In the stormy night on the wild heath the poor old man hears the echo +of his own feelings in the elements; his daughters' ingratitude, +hardness, and cruelty produce a moral disturbance like the +disturbance in Nature; he breaks out: + + Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow! + You cataracts and hurricanes, spout + Till you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks! + You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, + Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts, + Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, + Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! + Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once + That make ungrateful man.... + Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain! + + Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters, + I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness; + I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children, + You owe me no subscription; then, let fall + Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave, + A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man: + But yet I call you servile ministers, + That will with two pernicious daughters join + Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head + So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul! + +How closely here animate and inanimate Nature are woven together, the +reasoning with the unreasoning. The poet makes the storm, rain, +thunder, and lightning live, and at the same time endues his human +figures with a strength of feeling and passion which gives them +kinship to the elements. In _Othello_, too, there _is_ uproar in +Nature: + + Do but stand upon the foaming shore, + The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds.... + I never did like molestation view + On the enchafed flood. + +but even the unruly elements spare Desdemona: + + Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds, + The gather'd rocks and congregated sands. + Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel-- + As having sense of beauty, do omit + Their mortal natures, letting go safely by + The divine Desdemona. + +Cassio lays stress upon 'the great contention of the sea and skies'; +but when Othello meets Desdemona, he cries: + + O my soul's joy! + If after every tempest come such calms, + May the winds blow till they have wakened death! + And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas + Olympus-high, and duck again as low + As hell's from heaven. If it were now to die, + 'Twere now to be most happy. + +Iago calls the elements to witness his truthfulness: + + Witness, you ever-burning lights above, + You elements that clip us round about, + Witness, that here Iago doth give up + The execution of his wit, hands, heart, + To wrong'd Othello's service. + +Nature is disgusted at Othello's jealousy: + + Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks; + The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets, + Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth + And will not hear it. + +In terrible mental confusion he cries: + + O insupportable, O heavy hour! + Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse + Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe + Should yawn at alteration. + +Unhappy Desdemona sings: + + The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, + Sing all a green willow; + Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee, + Sing willow, willow, willow; + The fresh streams ran by her and murmur'd her moans, + Sing willow, willow, willow. + +A song in _Cymbeline_ contains a beautiful personification of +flowers: + + Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, + And Phoebus 'gins arise, + His steeds to water at those springs + On chalic'd flowers that lies; + And winking Mary-buds begin + To ope their golden eyes; + With everything that pretty is, + My lady sweet, arise; + Arise! Arise! + +The clearest expression of sympathy for Nature is in _Macbeth_. + +Repeatedly we meet the idea that Nature shudders before the crime, +and gives signs of coming disaster. + +Macbeth himself says: + + Stars, hide your fires! + Let not light see my black and deep desires; + The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be + Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. + +and Lady Macbeth: + + ... The raven himself is hoarse + That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan + Under my battlements.... Come, thick night, + And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, + That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, + Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark + To cry 'Hold! hold!'... + +The peaceful castle to which Duncan comes all unsuspectingly, is in +most striking contrast to the fateful tone which pervades the +tragedy. Duncan says: + + This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air + Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself + Unto our gentle senses. + +and Banquo: + + This guest of summer, + The temple-haunting martlet, does approve + By his loved masonry, that the heaven's breath + Smells wooingly here; no jetty, frieze, + Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this bird + Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle; + Where they most breed and haunt I have observ'd + The air is delicate. + +Perhaps the familiar swallow has never been treated with more +discrimination; and at this point of the tale of horror it has the +effect of a ray of sunshine in a sky dark with storm clouds. + +In Act II. Macbeth describes his own horror and Nature's: + + Now o'er the one half world + Nature seems dead.... Thou sure and firm-set earth, + Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear + Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts. + +Lady Macbeth says: + + It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman + Which gives the stern'st good-night. + +Lenox describes this night: + + The night has been unruly: where we lay + Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say, + Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death + And prophesying, with accents terrible, + Of dire combustion and confus'd events, + New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird + Clamour'd the live-long night: some say, the earth + Was feverish and did shake. + +and later on, an old man says: + + Three score and ten I can remember well; + Within the volume of which time I have seen + Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night + Hath trifled former knowings. + +Rosse answers him: + + Ah, good father, + Thou see'st the heavens, as troubled with man's act, + Threaten his bloody stage; by the clock 'tis day, + And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. + Is't night's predominance or the day's shame + That darkness does the-face of earth entomb + When living light should kiss it? + +The whole play is a thrilling expression of the sympathy for Nature +which attributes its own feelings to her--a human shudder in presence +of the wicked--a human horror of crime, most thrilling of all in +Macbeth's words: + + Come, seeling night, + Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, + And with thy bloody and invisible hand + Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond + Which keeps me pale. + +In _Hamlet_, too, Nature is shocked at man's mis-deeds: + + ... Such an act (the queen's) + That blurs the grace and blush of modesty + ... Heaven's face doth glow, + Yea, this solidity and compound mass + With tristful visage, as against the doom, + Is thought-sick at the act. + +But there are other personifications in this most wonderful of all +tragedies, such as the magnificent one: + + But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad. + Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill. + +The first player declaims: + + But, as we often see, against some storm + A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still, + The bold winds speechless, and the orb below + As hush as death.... + +Ophelia dies: + + When down her weedy trophies and herself + Fell in the weeping brook. + +and Laertes commands: + + Lay her i' the earth, + And from her fair and unpolluted flesh + May violets spring. + +Thus Shakespeare's great imagination gave life and soul to every +detail of Nature, and he obtained the right background for his +dramas, not only through choice of scenery, but by making Nature a +sharer of human impulse, happy with the happy, shuddering in the +presence of wickedness. + +He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which +stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy +with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so +closely allied to mythology. And this holds good not only in dealing +with the great elementary forces--storms, thunder, lightning, +etc.--but with flowers, streams, the glow of sunlight. Always and +everywhere the grasp of Nature was intenser, more individual, and +subjective, than any we have met hitherto. + +Idyllic feeling for Nature became sympathetic in his hands. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +THE DISCOVERY OF THE BEAUTY OF LANDSCAPE +IN PAINTING + + +The indispensable condition of landscape-painting--painting, that is, +which raises the representation of Nature to the level of its main +subject and paints her entirely for her own sake--is the power to +compose separate studies into a whole and imbue that with an artistic +idea. It was therefore impossible among people like the Hebrews,[1] +whose eyes were always fixed on distance and only noted what lay +between in a cursory way, and among those who considered detail +without relation to a whole, as we have seen in mediæval poetry until +the Renaissance. But just as study of the laws of aerial and linear +perspective demands a trained and keen eye, and therefore implies +interest in Nature, so the artistic idea, the soul of the picture, +depends directly upon the degree of the artist's feeling for her +Literature and painting are equal witnesses to the feeling for +Nature, and so long as scenery was only background in poetry, it had +no greater importance in painting. Landscape painting could only +arise in the period which produced complete pictures of scenery in +poetry--the sentimental idyllic period. + +We have seen how in the Italian Renaissance the fetters of dogma, +tradition, and mediæval custom were removed, and servility and +visionariness gave place to healthy individuality and realism; how +man and the world were discovered anew; and further, how among the +other Romanic nations a lively feeling for Nature grew up, partly +idyllic, partly mystic; and finally, how this feeling found dramatic +expression in Shakespeare. + +Natural philosophy also, in the course of its search for truth, as it +threw off both one-sided Christian ideas and ancient traditions, came +gradually to feel an interest in Nature; not only her laws, but her +beauty, became an object of enthusiastic study. By a very long +process of development the Hellenic feeling for Nature was reached +again in the Renaissance; but it always remained, despite its +sentimental and pantheistic elements, sensual, superficial, and +naive, in comparison with Christian feeling, which a warmer heart and +a mind trained in scholastic wisdom had rendered more profound and +abstract. Hence Nature was sometimes an object of attention in +detail, sometimes in mass.[2] + +As we come to the first landscape painters and their birthplace in +the Netherlands, we see how steady and orderly is the development of +the human mind, and how factors that seem isolated are really links +in one chain. + +In the Middle Ages, landscape was only background with more or less +fitness to the subject. By the fifteenth century it was richer in +detail, as we see in Pisanello and the Florentines Gozzoli and +Mantegna. The poetry of earth had been discovered; the gold grounds +gave way to field, wood, hill, and dale, and the blue behind the +heads became a dome of sky. In the sixteenth century, Giorgione +shewed the value of effects of light, and Correggio's backgrounds +were in harmony with his tender, cheerful scenes. Titian loved to +paint autumn; the sunny days of October with blue grapes, golden +oranges, and melons; and evening with deep harmonies of colour over +the sleeping earth. He was a great pioneer in the realm of landscape. +With Michael Angelo not a blade of grass grew; his problem was man +alone. Raphael's backgrounds, on the other hand, are life-like in +detail: his little birds could fly out of the picture, the stems of +his plants seem to curve and bend towards us, and we look deep into +the flower they hold out.[3] + +In the German Renaissance too, the great masters limited themselves +to charming framework and ingenious arabesques for their Madonnas and +Holy Families. But, as Lübke says,[4] one soon sees that Dürer +depended on architecture for borders and backgrounds far less than +Holbein; he preferred landscape. + +'The charm of this background is so great, the inwardness of German +feeling for Nature so strongly expressed in it, that it has a special +value of its own, and the master through it has become the father of +landscape painting.'[5] + +This must be taken with a grain of salt; but, at all events, it is +true that Dürer combined 'keen and devoted study of Nature (in the +widest sense of the word) with a penetration which aimed at tracing +her facts up to their source.'[6] It is interesting to see how these +qualities overcame his theoretical views on Nature and art.[7] +Dürer's deep respect for Nature proved him a child of the new era. +Melanchthon relates that he often regretted that he had been too much +attracted in his younger days by variety and the fantastic, and had +only understood Nature's simple truth and beauty later in life. + +His riper judgment preferred her to all other models. Nature, in his +remarks on the theory of art, includes the animate and the inanimate, +living creatures as well as scenery, and it is interesting to observe +that his admiration of her as a divine thing was due to deep +religious feeling. In his work on Proportion[8] he says: + +'Certainly art is hidden in Nature, and he who is able to separate it +by force from Nature, he possesses it. Never imagine that you can or +will surpass Nature's achievements; human effort cannot compare with +the ability which her Creator has given her. Therefore no man can +ever make a picture which excels Nature's; and when, through much +copying, he has seized her spirit, it cannot be called original work, +it is rather something received and learnt, whose seeds grow and bear +fruit of their own kind. Thereby the gathered treasure of the heart, +and the new creature which takes shape and form there, comes to light +in the artist's work.' + +Elsewhere Dürer says 'a good painter's mind is full of figures,' and +he repeatedly remarks upon the superabundant beauty of all living +things which human intelligence rarely succeeds in reproducing. + +The first modern landscapes in which man was only accessory were +produced in the Netherlands. Quiet, absorbed musing on the external +world was characteristic of the nation; they studied the smallest and +most trifling objects with care, and set a high value on minutiæ. + +The still-life work of their prime was only possible to such an +easy-going, life-loving people; the delightful animal pictures of +Paul Potter and Adrian van de Velde could only have been painted in +the land of Reineke Fuchs. Carrière says about these masters of genre +painting[9]: 'Through the emphasis laid upon single objects, they not +only revealed the national characteristics, but penetrated far into +the soul of Nature and mirrored their own feelings there, so +producing works of art of a kind unknown to antiquity. That divine +element, which the Greek saw in the human form, the Germanic race +divined in all the visible forms of Nature, and so felt at one with +them and able to reveal itself through them. + +'Nature was studied more for her own sake than in her relation to +man, and scenery became no longer mere background, but the actual +object of the picture. Animals, and even men, whether bathing in the +river, lying under trees, or hunting in the forest, were nothing but +accessories; inorganic Nature was the essential element. The greatest +Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and +stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible +crevasses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or +tropical luxuriance, but to common objects of everyday life. But +these they grasped with a precision and depth of feeling which gave +charm to the most trifling--it was the life of the universe divined +in its minutiæ. In its treatment of landscape their genre painting +displayed the very characteristics which had brought it into +being.'[10] + +The physical characters of the country favoured landscape painting +too. No doubt the moist atmosphere and its silvery sheen, which add +such freshness and brilliance to the colouring, influenced the +development of the colour sense, as much as the absence of sharp +contrasts in contour, the suggestive skies, and abundance of streams, +woods, meadows, and dales. + +But it was in devotional pictures that the Netherlanders first tried +their wings; landscape and scenes from human life did not free +themselves permanently from religion and take independent place for +more than a century later. The fourteenth-century miniatures shew the +first signs of the northern feeling for Nature in illustrations of +the seasons in the calendar pictures of religious manuscripts. +Beginnings of landscape can be clearly seen in that threshold picture +of Netherland art, the altar-piece at Ghent by the brothers Van Eyck, +which was finished in 1432. It shews the most accurate observation: +all the plants, grasses, flowers, rose bushes, vines, and palms, are +correctly drawn; and the luxuriant valley in which the Christian +soldiers and the knights are riding, with its rocky walls covered by +undergrowth jutting stiffly forward, is very like the valley of the +Maas. + +One sees that the charm of landscape has dawned upon the painters. + +Their skies are no longer golden, but blue, and flecked with +cloudlets and alive with birds; wood and meadow shine in sappy green; +fantastic rocks lie about, and the plains are bounded by low hills. +They are drinking deep draughts from a newly-opened spring, and they +can scarcely have enough of it. They would like to paint all the +leaves and fruit on the trees, all the flowers on the grass, even all +the dewdrops. The effect of distance too has been discovered, for +there are blue hill-tops beyond the nearer green ones, and a +foreground scene opens back on a distant plain (in the Ghent +altar-piece, the scene with the pilgrims); but they still possess +very few tones, and their overcrowded detail is almost all, from +foreground to furthest distance, painted in the same luminous strong +dark-green, as if in insatiable delight at the beauty of their own +colour. The progress made by Jan van Eyck in landscape was immense. + +To the old masters Nature had been an unintelligible chaos of detail, +but beauty, through ecclesiastical tradition, an abstract attribute +of the Holy Family and the Saints, and they had used their best +powers of imagination in accordance with this view. Hence they placed +the Madonna upon a background of one colour, generally gilded. But +now the great discovery was made that Nature was a distinct entity, a +revelation and reflection of the divine in herself. And Jan van Eyck +introduced a great variety of landscapes behind his Madonnas. One +looks, for instance, through an open window to a wide stretch of +country with fields and fortresses, and towns with streets full of +people, all backed by mountains. And whether the scene itself, or +only its background, lies in the open, the landscape is of the +widest, enlivened by countless forms and adorned by splendid +buildings. + +Molanus, the savant of Löwen, proclaimed Dierick Bouts, born like his +predecessor Ouwater at Haarlem, to be the inventor of landscape +painting (claruit inventor in describendo rare); but the van Eycks +were certainly before him, though he increased the significance of +landscape painting and shewed knowledge of aerial perspective and +gradations of tone. Landscape was a distinct entity to him, and could +excite the mood that suited his subject, as, for instance, in the +side picture of the Last Supper, where the foreground is drawn with +such exactness that every plant and even the tiny creatures crawling +on the grass can be identified. + +The scenery of Roger van der Weyden of Brabant--river valleys +surrounded by jagged rocks and mountains, isolated trees, and meadows +bright with sappy green--is clearly the result of direct Nature +study; it has a uniform transparent atmosphere, and a clear green +shimmer lies over the foreground and gradually passes into blue haze +further back. + +His pupil, Memling, shews the same fine gradations of tone. The +composition of his richest picture, 'The Marriage of St Catherine,' +did not allow space for an unbroken landscape, but the lines of wood +and field converge to a vista in such a way that the general effect +is one of unity. + +Joachim de Patenir, who appeared in 1515, was called a landscape +painter by his contemporaries, because he reduced his sacred figures +to a modest size, enlarged his landscape, and handled it with extreme +care. He was very far from grasping it as a whole, but his method was +synthetical; his river valleys, with masses of tree and bush and +romantic rocks, fantastic and picturesque, with fortresses on the +river banks, all shew this. + +Kerry de Bles was like him, but less accurate; with all the rest of +the sixteenth-century painters of Brabant and Flanders, he did not +rise to the idea of landscape as a whole. + +The most minute attention was given to the accurate painting of +single objects, especially plants; the Flemings caring more for +perfect truth to life, the Dutch for beauty. The Flemings generally +sought to improve their landscape by embellishing its lines, while +the Dutch gave its spirit, but adhered simply and strictly to Nature. +The landscapes of Peter Brueghel the elder, with their dancing +peasants surrounded by rocks, mills, groups of trees, are painful in +their thoroughness; and Jan Brueghel carried imitation of Nature so +far that his minutise required a magnifying-glass--it was veritable +miniature work. He introduced fruit and flower painting as a new +feature of art. + +Rubens and Brueghel often painted on each other's canvas, Brueghel +supplying landscape backgrounds for Rubens' pictures, and Rubens the +figures for Brueghel's landscapes. Yet Rubens himself was the best +landscapist of the Flemish school. He was more than that. For +Brueghel and his followers, with all their patience and industry, +their blue-green landscape with imaginary trees, boundless distance +and endless detail, were very far from a true grasp of Nature. It was +Rubens and his school who really made landscape a legitimate +independent branch of art. They studied it in all its aspects, quiet +and homely, wild and romantic, some taking one and some the other: +Rubens himself, in his large way, grasping the whole without losing +sight of its parts. They all lifted the veil from Nature and saw her +as she was (Falke). + +Brueghel put off the execution of a picture for which he had a +commission from winter to spring, that he might study the flowers for +it from Nature when they came out, and did not grudge a journey to +Brussels now and then to paint flowers not to be had at Antwerp. +There is a characteristic letter which he sent to the Archbishop of +Milan with a picture: + +'I send your Reverence the picture with the flowers, which are all +painted from Nature. I have painted in as many as possible. I believe +so many rare and different flowers have never been painted before nor +so industriously. It will give a beautiful effect in winter; some of +the colours almost equal Nature. I have painted an ornament under the +flowers with artistic medallions and curiosities from the sea. I +leave it to your reverence to judge whether the flowers do not far +exceed gold and jewels in colour.' + +He also painted landscapes in which people were only accessory, sunny +valleys with leafage, golden cornfields, meadows with rows of dancing +country folk or reapers in the wheat. + +Rubens, though he felt the influence of southern light and sunshine +as much as his fellows who had been in Italy, took his backgrounds +from his native land, from parts round Antwerp, Mechlin, and +Brussels. Foliage, water, and undulating ground were indispensable to +him--were, to a certain extent, the actual bearers of the impression +he wished to convey. + +Brueghel always kept a childlike attitude, delighting in details, and +proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the point of +deception. Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold +subjective way. He opened the book of Nature, so to speak, not to +spell out the words syllable by syllable, but to master her secret, +to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he +found there--in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape +painter. The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the +whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic +excitement and tension. Take, for instance, the evening scene with +the rainbow in the Louvre, marvellous in its delicate gradations of +atmospheric tone, and the equally marvellous thunderstorm in the +Belvedere at Vienna, where a rain-cloud bursts under sulphur +lightning, and a mountain stream, swollen to a torrent and lashed by +the hurricane, carries all before it--trees, rocks, animals, and men. + +In France, scarcely a flower had been seen in literature since the +Troubadour days, not even in the classical poetry of Corneille and +Racine. There were idyllic features in Fénelon's _Telemachus_, and +Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry +which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain. + +Honoré d'Urfé's famous _Astrée_ was much translated; but both his +shepherds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of +courts and carpet knights was over the whole, with a certain trace of +sadness. + +The case was different with French painting. After the Netherlands, +it was France, by her mediæval illustrated manuscripts, who chiefly +aided in opening the world's eyes to landscape. Both the Poussins +penetrated below the surface of Nature. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) +painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of trees in the +foreground, a hill with a classic building in the middle, and a chain +of mountains in the distance, and laid more stress on drawing than +colour. There was greater life in the pictures of his brother-in-law, +Caspar Doughet, also called Poussin; his grass is more succulent, his +winds sigh in the trees, his storm bends the boughs and scatters the +clouds. + +It was Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) who brought the ideal style to its +perfection. He inspired the very elements with mind and feeling; his +valleys, woods, and seas were just a veil through which divinity was +visible. All that was ugly, painful, and confused was purified and +transfigured in his hands. There is no sadness or dejection in his +pictures, but a spirit of serene beauty, free from ostentation, +far-fetched contrast, or artificial glitter. Light breezes blow in +his splendid trees, golden light quivers through them, drawing the +eye to a bright misty horizon; we say with Uhland, 'The sky is +solemn, as if it would say "this is the day of the Lord."' + +Artistic feeling for Nature became a worship with Claude Lorraine. + +The Netherlands recorded all Nature's phases in noble emulation with +ever-increasing delight. + +The poetry of air, cloudland, light, the cool freshness of morning, +the hazy sultriness of noon, the warm light of evening, it all lives +and moves in Cuyp's pictures and Wynant's, while Aart van der Meer +painted moonlight and winter snow, and Jan van Goyen the melancholy +of mist shot by sunlight. He, too--Jan van Goyen--was very clever in +producing effect with very small means, with a few trees reflected in +water, or a sand-heap--the art in which Ruysdael excelled all others. +The whole poetry of Nature--that secret magic which lies like a spell +over quiet wood, murmuring sea, still pool, and lonely pasture--took +form and colour under his hands; so little sufficed to enchant, to +rouse thought and feeling, and lead them whither he would. Northern +seriousness and sadness brood over most of his work; the dark trees +are overhung by heavy clouds and rain, mist and dusky shadows move +among his ruins. He had painted, says Carrière, the peace of woodland +solitude long before Tieck found the word for it. + +Beechwoods reflected in a stream, misty cloud masses lighted by the +rising sun; he moves us with such things as with a morning hymn, and +his picture of a swollen torrent forcing its way between graves which +catch the last rays of the sun, while a cloud of rain shrouds the +ruins of a church in the background, is an elegy which has taken +shape and colour. + +Ruysdael marks the culminating point of this period of development, +which had led from mere backgrounds and single traits of Nature--even +a flower stem or a blade of grass, up to elaborate compositions +imbued by a single motive, a single idea. + +To conjure up with slight material a complete little world of its +own, and waken responsive feeling, is not this the secret of the +charm in the pictures of his school--in the wooded hill or peasant's +courtyard by Hobbema, the Norwegian mountain scene of Albert van +Everdingen, the dusky fig-trees, rugged crags, and foaming cataract, +or the half-sullen, half-smiling sea-pieces of Bakhuysen and Van der +Velde? + +All these great Netherlander far outstripped the poetry of their +time; it was a hundred years later before mountain and sea found +their painter in words, and a complete landscape picture was not born +in German poetry until the end of the eighteenth century. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +HUMANISM, ROCOCO, AND PIGTAIL + + +Many decades passed before German feeling for Nature reached the +heights attained by the Italian Renaissance and the Netherland +landscapists. In the Middle Ages, Germany was engrossed with +ecclesiastical dogma--man's relation, not only to God, but to the one +saving Church--and had little interest for Science and Art; and the +great achievement of the fifteenth century, the Reformation, called +for word and deed to reckon with a thousand years of old traditions +and the slavery of intellectual despotism. The new time was born amid +bitter throes. The questions at issue--religious and ecclesiastical +questions concerned with the liberty of the Christian--were of the +most absorbing kind, and though Germany produced minds of individual +stamp such as she had never known before, characters of original and +marked physiognomy, it was no time for the quiet contemplation of +Nature. Mental life was stimulated by the new current of ideas and +new delight in life awakened: yet there is scarcely a trace of the +intense feeling for Nature which we have seen in Petrarch and Æneas +Sylvius. + +Largely as it was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, it is +certainly a mistake to reckon the Humanist movement in Germany, as +Geiger does,[1] as a 'merely imported culture, entirely lacking +independence.' The germ of this great movement towards mental freedom +was contained in the general trend of the time, which was striving to +free itself from the fetters of the Middle Ages in customs and +education as well as dogma. It was chiefly a polemical movement, a +fight between contentious savants. The writings of the Humanists at +this naively sensuous period were full of the joy of life and love of +pleasure; but scarcely any simple feeling for Nature can be found in +them, and there was neither poet nor poem fit to be compared with +Petrarch and his sonnets. + +Natural philosophy, too, was proscribed by scholastic wisdom; the +real Aristotle was only gradually shelled out from under mediæval +accretions. The natural philosopher, Conrad Summenhart[2] (1450-1501) +was quite unable to disbelieve the foolish legend, that the +appearance of a comet foretold four certain events--heat, wind, war, +and the death of princes. At the same time, not being superstitious, +he held aloof from the crazy science of astrology and all the fraud +connected with it. Indeed, as an observer of Nature, and still more +as a follower and furtherer of the scholastic Aristotelian natural +philosophy, he shewed a leaning towards the theory of development, +for, according to him, the more highly organized structures proceed +from those of lower organization, and these again form the inorganic +under the influence of meteors and stars. The poet laureate Conrad +Celtes (_b_. 1459), a singer of love and composer of four books about +it, was a true poet. His incessant wandering, for he was always +moving from place to place, was due in part to love of Nature and of +novelty, but still more to a desire to spread his own fame. He lacked +the naivete and openness to impressions of the true child of Nature; +his songs in praise of spring, etc., scatter a colourless general +praise, which is evidently the result of arduous thought rather than +of direct impressions from without; and his many references to +ancient deities shew that he borrowed more than his phrases. + +Though geography was then closely bound up with the writing of +history, as represented by Beatus Rhenanus (1485-1547) and Johann +Aventinus, and patriotism and the accounts of new lands led men to +wish to describe the beauties and advantages of their own, the +imposing discoveries across the seas did not make so forcible an +impression upon the German humanist as upon savants elsewhere, +especially in Italy and Spain. A mystico-theosophical feeling for +Nature, or rather a magical knowledge of her, flourished in Germany +at this time among the learned, both among Protestants and those who +were partially true to Catholicism. One of the strangest exponents of +such ideas was Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Cologne[3] (1535). +His system of the world abounded in such fantastic caprices as these: +everything depends on harmony and sympathy; when one of Nature's +strings is struck, the others sound with it: the analogical +correspondences are at the same time magical: symbolic relations +between natural objects are sympathetic also: a true love-bond exists +between the elm and vine: the sun bestows life on man; the moon, +growth; Mercury, imagination; Venus, love, etc. God is reflected in +the macrocosm, gives light in all directions through all creatures, +is adumbrated in man microcosmically, and so forth. + +Among others, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus +von Hohenheim (1541), ranked Nature and the Bible, like Agrippa, as +the best books about God and the only ones without falsehood. + +'One must study the elements, follow Nature from land to land, since +each single country is only one leaf in the book of creation. The +eyes that find pleasure in this true experience are the true +professors, and more reliable than all learned writings.' + +He held man to be less God's very image than a microcosmic copy of +Nature--the quintessence of the whole world. Other enthusiasts made +similar statements. Sebastian Frank of Donauwörth (1543) looked upon +the whole world as an open book and living Bible, in which to study +the power and art of God and learn His will: everything was His +image, all creatures are 'a reflection, imprint, and expression of +God, through knowledge of which man may come to know the true Mover +and Cause of all things.' + +He shewed warm feeling for Nature in many similes and descriptions[4]-- +in fact, much of his pithy drastic writing sounds pantheistic. But he +was very far from the standpoint of the great Italian philosophers, +Giordano Bruno and Campanella. Bruno, a poet as well as thinker, +distinguished Nature in her self-development--matter, soul, and +mind--as being stages and phases of the One. + + The material of all things issues from the original womb, + For Nature works with a master hand in her own inner depths; + She is art, alive and gifted with a splendid mind. + Which fashions its own material, not that of others, + And does not falter or doubt, but all by itself + Lightly and surely, as fire burns and sparkles. + Easily and widely, as light spreads everywhere, + Never scattering its forces, but stable, quiet, and at one, + Orders and disposes of everything together. + +Campanella, even in a revolting prison, sang in praise of the wisdom +and love of God, and His image in Nature. He personified everything +in her; nothing was without feeling; the very movements of the stars +depended on sympathy and antipathy; harmony was the central soul of +all things. + +The most extraordinary of all German thinkers was the King of +Mystics, Jacob Böhme. Theist and pantheist at once, his mind was a +ferment of different systems of thought. It is very difficult to +unriddle his _Aurora_, but love of Nature, as well as love of God, is +clear in its mystical utterances: + + God is the heart or source of Nature. + Nature is the body of God. + +'As man's mind rules his whole body in every vein and fills his whole +being, so the Holy Ghost fills all Nature, and is its heart and rules +in the good qualities of all things.' + +'But now heaven is a delightful chamber of pleasure, in which are all +the powers, as in all Nature the sky is the heart of the waters.' + +In another place he calls God the vital power in the tree of life, +the creatures His branches, and Nature the perfection and +self-begotten of God. + +Nature's powers are explained as passion, will, and love, often in +lofty and beautiful comparisons: + +'As earth always bears beautiful flowers, plants, and trees, as well +as metals and animate beings, and these finer, stronger, and more +beautiful at one time than another; and as one springs into being as +another dies, causing constant use and work, so it is in still +greater degree with the begetting of the holy mysteries[5] ... +creation is nothing else than a revelation of the all-pervading +superficial godhead ... and is like the music of many flutes combined +into one great harmony.' + +But the most representative man, both of the fifteenth century and, +in a sense, of the German race, was Luther. That maxim of Goethe's +for teaching and ethics,' Cheerfulness is the mother of all virtues, +might well serve as a motto for Luther; + +The two men had much in common. + +The one, standing half in the Middle Ages, had to free himself from +mental slavery by strength of will and courage of belief. + +The other, as the prophet of the nineteenth century, the incarnation +of the modern man, had to shake off the artificiality and weak +sentimentality of the eighteenth. + +To both alike a healthy joy in existence was the root of being. +Luther was always open to the influence of Nature, and, +characteristically, the Psalter was his favourite book. 'Lord, how +manifold are Thy works, in wisdom hast Thou made them all!' + +True to his German character, he could be profoundly sad; but his +disposition was delightfully cheerful and healthy, and we see from +his letters and table-talk, that after wife and child, it was in +'God's dear world' that he took the greatest pleasure. He could not +have enough of the wonders of creation, great or small. 'By God's +mercy we begin to see the splendour of His works and wonders in the +little flowers, as we consider how kind and almighty He is; therefore +we praise and thank Him. In His creatures we see the power of His +word--how great it is. In a peach stone, too, for hard as the shell +is, the very soft kernel within causes it to open at the right +time.'[6] Again, 'So God is present in all creatures, even the +smallest leaves and poppy seeds.' + +All that he saw of Nature inspired him with confidence in the +fatherly goodness of God. He wrote, August 5th, 1530, to Chancellor +Brneck: + + I have lately seen two wonderful things: the first, looking from + the window at the stars and God's whole beautiful sky dome, I saw + never a pillar to support it, and yet it did not fall, and is + still firm in its place. Now, there are some who search for such + pillars and are very anxious to seize them and feel them, and + because they cannot, fidget and tremble as if the skies would + certainly fall ... the other, I also saw great thick clouds sweep + over our heads, so heavy that they might be compared to a great + sea, and yet I saw no ground on which they rested, and no vats in + which they were contained, yet they did not fall on us, but + greeted us with a frown and flew away. When they had gone, the + rainbow lighted both the ground and the roof which had held them. + +Luther often used very forcible images from Nature. 'It is only for +the sake of winter that we lie and rot in the earth; when our summer +comes, our grain will spring up--rain, sun, and wind prepare us for +it--that is, the Word, the Sacraments, and the Holy Ghost.' + +His Bible was an orchard of all sorts of fruit trees; in the +introduction to the Psalter, he says of the thanksgiving psalms: +'There one looks into the hearts of the saints as into bright and +beautiful gardens--nay, as into heaven itself, where pure and happy +thoughts of God and His goodness are the lovely flowers.' + +His description of heaven for his little son John is full of simple +reverent delight in Nature, quite free from platonic and mystical +speculation as to God's relation to His universe; and Protestant +divines kept this tone up to the following century, until the days of +rationalism and pietism. + +Of such spontaneous hearty joy in Nature as this, the national songs +of a nation are always the medium. They were so now; for, while a +like feeling was nowhere else to be found, the Volkslieder expressed +the simple familiar relationship of the child of Nature to wood, +tree, and flower in touching words and a half-mythical, +half-allegorical tone which often revealed their old Germanic origin. + +There is a fourteenth-century song, probably from the Lower Rhine,[7] +which suggests the poems of the eighth and ninth centuries, about a +great quarrel between Spring, crowned with flowers, and hoary-headed +Winter, in which one praises and the other blames the cuckoo for +announcing Spring. + +In this song, Summer complains to mankind and other friends that a +mighty master is going to drive him away; this mighty master, Winter, +then takes up the word, and menaces Spring with the approach of +frost, who will slight and imprison him, and then kill him; ice and +hail agree with Winter, and storm, rain, snow, and bitter winds are +called his vassals, etc. + +There are naive verses in praise of Spring and Summer: + + When that the breezes blow in May, + And snow melts from the wood away, + Blue violets lift their heads on high, + And when the little wood-birds sing, + And flow'rets from the ground up-spring, + Then everybody's glad. + +Others complaining of Winter, who must have leave of absence, and the +wrongs it has wrought are poured out to Summer. The little birds are +very human; the owlet complains: + + Poor little owlet me! + I have to fly all alone through the wood to-night; + The branch I want to perch on is broken, + The leaves are all faded, + My heart is full of grief. + +The cuckoo is either praised for bringing good news, or made fun of +as the 'Gutzgauch.' + + A cuckoo will fly to his heart's treasure, etc. + +The fable songs[8] of animal weddings are full of humour. The fox +makes arrangements for his wedding: 'Up with you now, little birds! I +am going to take a bride. The starling shall saddle the horses, for +he has a grey mantle; the beaver with the cap of marten fur must be +driver, the hare with his light foot shall be outrider; the +nightingale with his clear voice shall sing the songs, the magpie +with his steady hop must lead the dances,' etc. + +The nightingale, with her rich tones, is beloved and honoured before +all the winged things; she is called 'the very dear nightingale,' and +addressed as a lady. + +'Thou art a little woodbird, and flyest in and out the green wood; +fair Nightingale, thou little woodbird, thou shalt be my messenger.' + +It is she who warns the girl against false love, or is the silent +witness of caresses. + +There were a great many wishing songs: 'Were I a little bird and had +two wings, I would fly to thee,' or 'Were I a wild falcon, I would +take flight and fly down before a rich citizen's house--a little maid +is there,' etc. 'And were my love a brooklet cold, and sprang out of +a stone, little should I grieve if I were but a green wood; green is +the wood, the brooklet is cold, my love is shapely.' The betrayed +maiden cries: 'Would God I were a white swan! I would fly away over +mountain and deep valley o'er the wide sea, so that my father and +mother should not know where I was.' + +Flowers were used symbolically in many ways; roses are always the +flowers of love. 'Pretty girls should be kissed, roses should be +gathered,' was a common saying; and 'Gather roses by night, for then +all the leaves are covered with cooling dew.' 'The roses are ready to +be gathered, so gather them to-day. He who does not gather in summer, +will not gather in winter.' There is tenderness in this: 'I only know +a little blue flower, the colour of the sky; it grows in the green +meadow, 'tis called forget-me-not.' + +These are sadder: + + There is a lime tree in this valley, + O God! what does it there? + It will help me to grieve + That I have no lover. + +'Alas! you mountains and deep valleys, is this the last time I shall +see my beloved? Sun, moon, and the whole sky must grieve with me till +my death.' + +Where lovers embrace, flowers spring out of the grass, roses and +other flowers and grasses laugh, the trees creak and birds sing;[9] +where lovers part, grass and leaves fade.[10] + +Most touching of all is the idea, common to the national songs of all +nations, that out of the grave of two lovers, lilies and roses spring +up, or climbing plants, love thus outliving death. + +We look in vain among the master singers of the fifteenth and +sixteenth centuries for such fresh heartfelt tones as these, although +honest Hans Sachs shews joy in Nature here and there; most charmingly +in the famous comparison of 'the Wittenberg Nightingale, which every +one hears everywhere now,' in praise of Luther: + +'Wake up, the dawn is nigh! I hear a joyous nightingale singing in +the green hedge, it fills the hills and valleys with its voice. The +night is stooping to the west, the day is rising from the east, the +morning red is leaping from the clouds, the sun looks through. The +moon quenches her light; now she is pale and wan, but erewhile with +false glamours she dazzled all the sheep and turned them from their +pasture lands and pastor....' + +Fischart too, in his quaint description of a voyage on the Rhine in +_Glückhaft Schiff_, shews little feeling for Nature; but in +_Simplicissimus_, on the other hand, that monument of literature +which reflected contemporary culture to a unique degree, it is very +marked; the more so since it appeared when Germany lay crushed by the +Thirty Years' War. + +When the hero as a boy was driven from his village home and fled into +the forest, he came upon a hermit who took care of him, and waking at +midnight, he heard the old man sing: + + Come, nightingale, comfort of the night, + Let your voice rise in a song of joy, come praise the Creator, + While other birds are sound asleep and cannot sing!... + The stars are shining in the sky in honour of God.... + My dearest little bird, we will not be the laziest of all + And lie asleep; we will beguile the time with praise + Till dawn refreshes the desolate woods. + +_Simplicissimus_ goes on: 'During this song, methinks, it was as if +nightingale, owl, and echo had combined in song, and if ever I had +been able to hear the morning star, or to try to imitate the melody +on my bagpipe, I should have slipt away out of the hut to join in the +melody, so beautiful it seemed; but I was asleep.' + +What was the general feeling for Nature in other countries during the +latter half of the seventeenth century? In Italy and Spain it had +assumed a form partly bucolic and idyllic, partly theosophically +mystical; Shakespeare's plays had brought sympathy to maturity in +England; the Netherlands had given birth to landscape painting, and +France had the splendid poetic landscapes of Claude Lorraine. But the +idealism thus reached soon degenerated into mannerism and +artificiality, the hatching of empty effect. + +The aberrations of taste which found expression in the periwig style +of Louis XIV., and in the pigtails of the eighteenth century, +affected the feeling for Nature too. The histories of taste in +general, and of feeling for Nature, have this in common, that their +line of progress is not uniformly straightforward, but liable to +zigzags. This is best seen in reviewing the different civilized races +together. Moreover, new ideas, however forcible and original, even +epoch-making, do not win acceptance at once, but rather trickle +slowly through resisting layers; it is long before any new gain in +culture becomes the common property of the educated, and hence +opposite extremes are often found side by side--taste for what is +natural with taste for what is artificial. Garden style is always a +delicate test of feeling for Nature, shewing, as it does, whether we +respect her ways or wish to impose our own. The impulse towards the +modern French gardening came from Italy. Ancient and modern times +both had to do with it. At the Renaissance there was a return to +Pliny's style,[11] which the Cinque cento gardens copied. In this +style laurel and box-hedges were clipt, and marble statues placed +against them, 'to break the uniformity of the dark green with +pleasant silhouettes. One looks almost in vain for flowers and turf; +even trees were exiled to a special wilderness at the edge of the +garden; but the great ornament of the whole was never missing, the +wide view over sunny plains and dome-capt towns, or over the distant +shimmering sea, which had gladdened the eyes of Roman rulers in +classic days.'[12] + +The old French garden as Maître Lenotre laid it out in Louis XIV.'s +time at Versailles, St Germain, and St Cloud, was architectural in +design, and directly connected, like Pliny's, with various parts of +the house, by open halls, pavilions, and colonnades. Every part of +it--from neat turf parterres bordered by box in front of the terrace, +designs worked out in flowers or coloured stones, and double rows of +orange spaliers, to groups of statues and fountains--belonged to one +symmetrical plan, the focus of which was the house, standing free +from trees, and visible from every point. Farther off, radiating +avenues led the eye in the same direction, and every little +intersecting alley, true to the same principle, ran to a definite +object--obelisk, temple, or what not. There was no lack of bowers, +giant shrubberies, and water-courses running canal-wise through the +park, but they all fell into straight lines; every path was ruled by +a ruler, the eye could follow it to its very end. Artifice was the +governing spirit. As Falke says: 'Nature dared not speak but only +supply material; she had to sacrifice her own inventive power to this +taste and this art. Hills and woods were only hindrances; the +straight lines of trees and hedges, with their medley of statues and +"cabinets de verdure," demanded level ground, and the landscape eye +of the period only tolerated woods as a finish to its cut and clipt +artificialities.'[13] + +Trees and branches were not allowed to grow at their own sweet will; +they were cut into cubes, balls, pyramids, even into shapes of +animals, as the gardener's fancy or his principles decreed; cypresses +were made into pillars or hearts with the apex above or below; and +the art of topiary even achieved complete hunting scenes, with +hunters, stags, dogs, and hares in full chase on a hedge. Of such a +garden one could say with honest Claudius, ''Tis but a tailor's joke, +and shews the traces of the scissors; it has nothing of the great +heart of Nature.' + +It was Nature in bondage: 'green architecture,' with all its parts, +walls, windows, roofs, galleries cut out of leafage, and theatres +with stage and wings in which silk and velvet marquises with +full-bottomed wigs and lace jabots, and ladies in hooped petticoats +and hair in towers, played at private theatricals. + +Where water was available, water devices were added. And in the midst +of all this unnaturalness Greek mythology was introduced: the story +of Daphne and Apollo appeared in one alley, Meleager and Atalanta in +another, all Olympus was set in motion to fill up the walls and +niches. And the people were like their gardens both in dress and +manners; imposing style was everything. + +Then came the Rococo period of Louis XV. The great periwig shrivelled +to a pigtail, and petty flourish took the place of Lenotre's +grandezza. + +'The unnatural remained, the imposing disappeared and caprice took +its place,' says Falke. Coquetry too. All the artistic output of the +time bears this stamp, painting included. Watteau's scenery and +people were unnatural and affected--mere inventions to suit the +gallant _fêtes_. But he knew and loved Nature, though he saw her with +the intoxicated eye of a lover who forgets the individual but keeps a +glorified impression of her beauty, whereas Boucher's rosy-blue +landscapes look as if he had never seen their originals. His world +had nothing in common with Nature, and with reality only this, that +its sensuousness, gaiety, falsity, and coquetry were true to the +period. But in both Watteau and Boucher there was a faint glimmer of +the idyllic--witness the dash of melancholy in Watteau's brightest +pictures. Feeling for Nature was seeking its lost path--the path it +was to follow with such increased fervour. + +German literature too, in the seventeenth century, stood under the +sign manual of the Pigtail and Periwig; it was baroque, stilted, +bombastic, affected, feeling and form alike were forced, not +spontaneous. Verses were turned out by machinery and glued together. +Martin Opitz,[14] the recognized leader and king of poets, had +travelled far, but there is no distinct feeling for Nature in his +poetry. His words to a mountain: + +'Nature has so arranged pleasure here, that he who takes the trouble +to climb thee is repaid by delight,' scarcely admit the inference +that he understood the charm of distance in the modern sense. He took +warmer interest in the bucolic side of country life; rhyming about +the delightful places, dwellings of peace, with their myrtles, +mountains, valleys, stones, and flowers, where he longed to be; and +his _Spring Song_, an obvious imitation of the classics (Horace's +_Beatus ille_ was his model for _Zlatna_), has this conventional +contrast between his heart and Nature. + +'The frosty ice must melt; snow cannot last any longer, Favonius; the +gentle breeze is on the, fields again. Seed is growing vigorously, +grass greening in all its splendour, trees are budding, flowers +growing ...thou, too my heart, put off thy grief.' + +There is more nostalgia than feeling for Nature in this: + +'Ye birches and tall limes, waste places, woods and fields, farewell +to you! + +'My comfort and my better dwelling-place is elsewhere!' + +But (and this Winter, strange to say, ignores) his pastorals have all +the sentimental elegiac style of the Pigtail period. + +There had been German adaptations of foreign pastorals, such as +Montreux, _Schãferei von der schönen Juliana_, since 1595; Urfé's +_Astrée_ and Montemayor's _Diana_ appeared in 1619, and Sidney's +_Arcadia_ ten years later. + +Opitz tried to widen the propaganda for this kind of poetry, and +hence wrote, not to mention little pastorals such as _Daphne, +Galatea, Corydon,_ and _Asteria_, his _Schãferei von der 'Nymphen +Hercinie.'_ + +His references to Nature in this are as exaggerated as everything +else in the poem. He tells how he did not wake 'until night, the +mother of the stars, had gone mad, and the beautiful light of dawn +began to shew herself and everything with her.... + +'I sprang up and greeted the sweet rays of the sun, which looked down +from the tops of the mountains and seemed at the same time to comfort +me.' + +He came to a spring 'which fell from a crag with charming murmur and +rustle,' cut a long poem in the fir bark, and conversed with three +shepherds on virtue, love, and travelling, till the nymph Hercynia +appeared and shewed him the source of the Silesian stream. One of the +shepherds, Buchner, was particularly enthusiastic about water: 'Kind +Nature, handmaid of the Highest, has shewn her best handiwork in sea, +river, and spring.' + +Fleming too, who already stood much higher as a lyrist and had +travelled widely, lacked the power of describing scenery, and must +needs call Oreads, Dryads, Castor and Pollux to his aid. He rarely +reached the simple purity of his fine sonnet _An Sich,_ or the +feeling in this: 'Dense wild wood, where even the Titan's brightest +rays give no light, pity my sufferings. In my sick soul 'tis as dark +as in thy black hollow.' + +In this time of decline the hymns of the Evangelical Church (to which +Fleming contributed) were full of feeling, and brought the national +songs to mind as nothing else did. + +A few lines of Paul Gerhardt's seem to me to out-weigh whole volumes +of contemporary rhymes--lines of such beauty as the _Evening Song_: + + Now all the woods are sleeping, + And night and stillness creeping + O'er field and city, man and beast; + The last faint beam is going, + The golden stars are glowing + In yonder dark-blue deep. + +And after him, and more like him than any one else, came Andreas +Gryphius. + +There was much rhyming about Nature in the poet schools of Hamburg, +Königsberg, and Nuremberg; but, for the most part, it was an idle +tinkle of words without feeling, empty artificial stuff with +high-flown titles, as in Philipp von Zesen's _Pleasure of Spring_, +and _Poetic Valley of Roses and Lilies_. + +'Up, my thoughts, be glad of heart, in this joyous pleasant March; +ah! see spring is reviving, earth opens her treasury,' etc. + +His romances were more noteworthy if not more interesting. He +certainly aimed high, striving for simplicity and clearness of +expressions in opposition to the Silesian poets, and hating foreign +words. + +His feeling for Nature was clear; he loved to take his reader into +the garden, and was enthusiastic about cool shady walks, beds of +tulips, birds' songs, and echoes. Idyllic pastoral life was the +fashion--people of distinction gave themselves up to country life and +wore shepherd costume--and he introduced a pastoral episode into his +romance, _Die adriatische Rosemund._[15] + +Rosemund, whose father places arbitrary conditions in the way of her +marriage with Markhold, becomes a shepherdess. + + Not far off was a delightful spot where limes and alders made + shade on hot summer days for the shepherds and shepherdesses who + dwelt around. The shady trees, the meadows, and the streams which + ran round it, and through it, made it look beautiful ... the + celestial Rosemund had taken up her abode in a little shepherd + hut on the slope of a little hill by a water-course, and shaded + by some lime trees, in which the birds paid her homage morning + and evening.... Such a place and such solitude refreshed the more + than human Rosemund, and in such peace she was able to unravel + her confused thoughts. + +She thought continually of Markhold, and spent her time cutting his +name in the trees. The following description of a walk with her +sister Stillmuth and her lover Markhold, gives some idea of the +formal affected style of the time. + + The day was fine, the sky blue, the weather everywhere warm. The + sun shone down on the globe with her pleasant lukewarm beams so + pleasantly, that one scarcely cared to stay indoors. They went + into the garden, where the roses had opened in the warmth of the + sun, and first sat down by the stream, then went to the grottos, + where Markhold particularly admired the shell decorations. When + this charming party had had enough of both, they finally betook + themselves to a leafy walk, where Rosemund introduced pleasant + conversation on many topics. She talked first about the many + colours of tulips, and remarked that even a painter could not + produce a greater variety of tints nor finer pictures than these, + etc. + +In describing physical beauty, he used comparisons from Nature; for +instance, in _Simson_[16]: + + The sun at its brightest never shone so brightly as her two eyes + ... no flower at its best can shew such red as blooms in the + meadow of her cheeks, no civet rose is so milk-white, no lily so + delicate and spotless, no snow fresh-fallen and untrodden is so + white, as the heaven of her brows, the stronghold of her mind. + +H. Anselm von Ziegler und Klipphausen also waxes eloquent in his +famous _Asiatischen Banise_: 'The suns of her eyes played with +lightnings; her curly hair, like waves round her head, was somewhat +darker than white; her cheeks were a pleasant Paradise where rose and +lily bloomed together in beauty--yea, love itself seemed to pasture +there.' Elsewhere too this writer, so highly esteemed by the second +Silesian school of poets, indulged in showy description and inflated +rhetoric. Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel tried more +elaborate descriptions of scenery; so that Chovelius says: + + The Duke's German character shews pleasantly in his delight in + Nature. The story often takes one into woods and fields; already + griefs and cares were carried to the running brook and mossy + stone, and happy lovers listened to the nightingale. + +His language is barely intelligible, but there is a pleasant breadth +about his drawing--for example, of the king's meadow and the grotto +in _Aramena_: + + Very cold crystal streams flowed through the fields and ran + softly over the stony ground, making a pleasant murmur. Whilst + the ear was thus contented, a distant landscape delighted the + eye. No more delightful place, possessing all this at once, could + have been found, etc. + + Looking through the numerous air-holes, the eye lost itself in a + deep valley, surrounded by nothing but mountains, where the + shepherds tended their flocks, and one heard their flutes + multiplied by the echo in the most delightful way. + +Mawkish shepherd play is mixed here with such verses as (Rahel): + + Thou, Chabras, thou art the dear stream, where Jacob's mouth gave + me the first kiss. Thou, clear brook, often bearest away the + passionate words of my son of Isaac ... on many a bit of wounded + bark, the writing of my wounds is to be found. + +The most insipid pastoral nonsense of the time was produced by the +Nuremberg poets, the Pegnitz shepherds Klaj and Harsdörfer. Their +strength lay in imitating the sounds of Nature, and they were much +admired. What is still more astonishing, Lohenstein's writings were +the model for thirty years, and it was the fashion for any one who +wrote more simply to apologize for being unable to reach the level of +so great a master! To us the bombast, artificiality, and hidden +sensuality of his poetry and Hoffmannswaldan's, are equally +repulsive. + +What dreary, manufactured stuff this is from Lohenstein's _Praise of +Roses sung by the Sun_[17]: + + This is the queen of flowers and plants, + The bride of heaven, world's treasure, child of stars! + For whom love sighs, and I myself, the sun, do pant, + Because her crown is golden, and her leaves are velvet, + Her foot and stylus emerald, her brilliance shames the ruby. + + Other beings possess only single beauties, + Nature has made the rose beautiful with all at once. + She is ashamed, and blushes + Because she sees all the other flowers stand ashamed before her. + +In _Rose Love_ he finds the reflection of love in everything: + + In whom does not Love's spirit plant his flame? + One sees the oil of love burn in the starry lamps, + That pleasant light can nothing be but love, + For which the dew from Phoebus' veil doth fall. + Heaven loves the beauteous globe of earth, + And gazes down on her by night with thousand eyes; + While earth to please the heaven + Doth clover, lilies, tulips in her green hair twine, + The elm and vine stock intertwine, + The ivy circles round the almond trees, + And weeps salt tears when they are forced apart. + And where the flowers burn with glow of Love, + It is the rose that shews the brightest flame, + For is the rose not of all flowers the queen, + The wondrous beauty child of sun and earth? + +Artificiality and bombast reached its highest pitch in these poets, +and feeling for Nature was entirely absent. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +SYMPTOMS OF A RETURN TO NATURE + + +It is refreshing to find, side by side with these mummified +productions, the traces of a pure national poetry flowing clear as +ever, 'breaking forth from the very heart of the people, ever +renewing its youth, and not misled by the fashion of the day.'[1] + +The traces prove that simple primitive love for Nature was not quite +dead. For instance, this of the Virgin Mary: 'Mary, she went across +the heath, grass and flowers wept for grief, she did not find her +son.' And the lines in which the youth forced into the cloister asks +Nature to lament with him: 'I greet you all, hill and dale, do not +drive me away--grass and foliage and all the green things in the wild +forest. O tree! lose your green ornaments, complain, die with +me--'tis your duty.' + +Then the Spring greetings: + + Now we go into the wide, wide world, + With joy and delight we go; + The woods are dressing, the meadows greening, + The flowers beginning to blow. + Listen here! and look there! We can scarce trust our eyes, + For the singing and soaring, the joy and life everywhere. + +And: + + What is sweeter than to wander in the early days of Spring + From one place to another in sheer delight and glee; + While the sun is shining brightly, and the birds exult around + Fair Nightingale, the foremost of them all? + +This has the pulse of true and naive feeling (the hunter is starting +for the hunt in the early morning): + + When I come into the forest, still and silent everywhere, + There's a look of slumber in it, but the air is fresh and cool. + Now Aurora paints the fir tops at their very tips with gold, + And the little finch sits up there launching forth his song of praise, + Thanking for the night that's over, for the day that's just awake + Gently blows the breeze of morning, rocking in the topmost twigs, + And it bends them down like children, like good children when they pray; + And the dew is an oblation as it drops from their green hair. + O what beauties in the forest he that we may see and know! + One could melt away one's heart before its wonders manifold! + +The sixth line in the original has a melody that reminds one of +Goethe's early work. + +But even amidst the artificial poetry then in vogue, there were a few +side streams which turned away from the main current of the great +poet schools, from the unnaturalness and bombast affected especially +by the Silesians. As Winter says, even the satirists Moscherosch and +Logau were indirectly of use in paving the way for a healthier +condition, through their severe criticisms of the corruption of the +language; and Logau's one epigram on May, 'This month is a kiss which +heaven gives to earth, that she may be a bride now, a mother +by-and-by,' outweighs all Harsdörfer's and Zesen's poetry about +Nature. + +But even by the side of Opitz and Fleming there was at least one poet +of real feeling, Friedrich von Spee.[2] With all his mystic and +pietist Christianity, he kept an open eye for Nature. His poems are +full of disdain of the world and joy in Nature,[3] longings for death +and lamentations over sin; he delighted in personifications of +abstract ideas, childish playing with words and feelings, and +sentimental enthusiasm. But mawkish and canting as he was apt to be, +he often shewed a fine appreciation of detail. He was even--a rare +thing then--fascinated by the sea. + + Now rages and roars the wild, wild sea, + Now in soft curves lies quietly; + Sweetly the light of the sun's bright glow + Mirrors itself in the water below. + + Sad winter's past--the stork is here, + Birds are singing and nests appear; + Bowery homes steal into the day, + Flow'rets present their full array; + Like little snakes and woods about, + The streams go wandering in and out. + +His motives, like his diminutives, are constantly recurring. He uses +many bold and poetic personifications; the sun 'combs her golden +hair,' the moon is a good shepherd who leads his sheep the stars +across the blue heath, blowing upon a soft pipe; the sun adorns +herself in spring with a crown and a girdle of roses, fills her +quiver with arrows, and sends her horses to gallop for miles across +the smooth sky; the wind flies about, stopping for breath from time +to time; shakes its wings and withdraws into its house when it is +tired; the brook of Cedron sits, leaning on a bucket in a hollow, +combing his bulrush hair, his shoulders covered by grass and water; +he sings a cradle song to his little brooks, or drives them before +him, etc. + +But the most gifted poet of the set, and the most doughty opponent of +Lohenstein's bombast, was the unhappy Christian Guenther.[4] + +He vents his feelings in verse because he must. There is a foretaste +of Goethe in his lyrics, poured put to free the soul from a burden, +and melodious as if by accident. As we turn over the leaves of his +book of songs, we find deep feeling for Nature mingled with his love +and sorrows.[5] + + Bethink you, flowers and trees and shades, + Of the sweet evenings here with Flavia! + 'Twas here her head upon my shoulder pressed; + Conceal, ye limes, what else I dare not say. + 'Twas here she clover threw and thyme at me, + And here I filled her lap with freshest flowers. + Ah! that was a good time! + I care more for moon and starlight than the pleasantest of days, + And with eyes and heart uplifted from my chamber often gaze + With an awe that grows apace till it scarcely findeth space. + +To his lady-love he writes: + + Here where I am writing now + 'Tis lonely, shady, cool, and green; + And by the slender fig I hear + The gentle wind blow towards Schweidnitz. + And all the time most ardently + I give it thousand kisses for thee. + +And at Schweidnitz: + + A thousand greetings, bushes, fields, and trees, + You know him well whose many rhymes + And songs you've heard, whose kisses seen; + Remember the joy of those fine summer nights. + +To Eleanora: + + Spring is not far away. Walk in green solitude + Between your alder rows, and think ... + As in the oft-repeated lesson + The young birds' cry shall bear my longing; + And when the west wind plays with cheek and dress be sure + He tells me of thy longing, and kisses thee a thousand times for me. + +In a time of despair, he wrote: + + Storm, rage and tear! winds of misfortune, shew all your tyranny! + Twist and split bark and twig, + And break the tree of hope in two + Stem and leaves are struck by this hail and thunder, + The root remains till storm and rain have laid their wrath. + +Again: + + The woods I'll wander through, + From men I'll flee away, + With lonely doves I'll coo, + And with the wild things stay. + When life's the prey of misery, + And all my powers depart, + A leafy grave will be + Far kinder than thy heart. + +True lyrist, he gave Nature her full right in his feelings, and found +comfort in return; but, as Goethe said of him, gifted but unsteady as +he was, 'He did not know how to restrain himself, and so his life and +poetry melted away.' + +Among those who made use of better material than the Silesian poets, +H. Barthold Brockes stood first. Nature was his one and only subject; +but in this he was not original, he was influenced by England. While +France was dictating a taste like the baroque, and Germany +enthusiastically adopting it (every petty prince in the land copied +the gardens at Versailles, Schwetzingen more closely than the rest), +a revolution which affected all Europe was brought about by England. +The order of the following dates is significant: William Kent, the +famous garden artist, died in 1748, James Thomson in the same year, +Brockes a year earlier; and about the same time the imitations of +Robinson Crusoe sprang up like mushrooms. + +We have considered Shakespeare's plays; English lyrists too of the +fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shewed deep feeling for Nature, and +invested scenery with their own feelings in a very delicate way. + +G. Chaucer (1400) praises the nightingale s song in _From the Floure +and Leafe_: + + So was I with the song + Thorow ravished, that till late and long + Ne wist I in what place I was ne where; ... + And at the last, I gan full well aspie + Where she sat in a fresh grene laurer tree + On the further side, even right by me, + That gave so passing a delicious smell + According to the eglentere full well.... + + On the sote grass + I sat me downe, for, as for mine entent, + The birddes song was more convenient, + And more pleasant to me by many fold + Than meat or drink or any other thing. + +Thomas Wyatt (1542) says of his lady-love: + + The rocks do not so cruelly + Repulse the waves continually, + As she my suit and affection + So that I am past remedy. + +Robert Southwell (1595), in _Love's Servile Lott_, compares love to +April: + + May never was the month for love, + For May is full of floures, + But rather Aprill, wett by kinde, + For love is full of showers.... + Like winter rose and summer yce, + Her joyes are still untymelye; + Before her hope, behind remorse, + Fayre first, in fyne unseemely. + +Edmund Spenser (1598) describes a garden in _The Faerie Queene_: + + There the most daintie Paradise on ground + It selfe did offer to his sober eye, + In which all pleasures plenteously abownd, + And none does others' happinesse envye; + The painted flowres, the trees upshooting hye, + The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space, + The trembling groves, the christall running by, + And, that which all fair workes doth most aggrace, + The art which all that wrought appeared in no place. + +Mountain scenery was seldom visited or described. + +Michael Drayton (1731) wrote an ode on the Peak, in Derbyshire: + + Though on the utmost Peak + A while we do remain, + Amongst the mountains bleak + Exposed to sleet and rain, + No sport our hours shall break + To exercise our vein. + +It is clear that he preferred his comfort to everything, for he goes +on: + + Yet many rivers clear + Here glide in silver swathes, + And what of all most dear + Buxton's delicious baths, + Strong ale and noble chear + T' assuage breem winter's scathes. + +Thomas Carew (1639) sings: + + Ask me no more where Jove bestows, + When June is past, the fading rose, + For in your beauties' orient deep + These flowers, as in their causes, sleep. + Ask me no more whither do stray + The golden atoms of the day, + For in pure love Heaven did prepare + Those powders to enrich your hair. + Ask me no more whither doth haste + The nightingale, when May is past, + For in your sweet dividing throat + She winters and keeps warm her note. + Ask me no more where these stars shine + That downwards fall in dead of night, + For in your eyes they sit, and there + Fixed become, as in their sphere. + Ask me no more if east or west + The phoenix builds her spicy nest, + For unto you at last she flies + And in your fragrant bosom dies. + +William Drummond (1746) avowed a taste which he knew to be very +unfashionable: + + Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove, + Far from the clamorous world, doth live his own + Though solitary, who is not alone, + But doth converse with that eternal love. + O how more sweet is birds' harmonious moan + Or the soft sobbings of the widow'd dove, + Than those smooth whisp'rings near a prince's throne.... + O how more sweet is zephyr's wholesome breath + And sighs perfum'd, which new-born flowers unfold. + +Another sonnet, to a nightingale, says: + + Sweet bird, that sing'st away the early hours + Of winters past or coming void of care, + Well pleased with delights which present are, + Fair seasons, budding sprays, sweet-smelling flowers; + To rocks, to springs, to rills, from leafy bowers + Thou thy Creator's goodness dost declare, + And what dear gifts on thee He did not spare, + A stain to human sense in sin that lowers, + What soul can be so sick which by thy songs + Attir'd in sweetness, sweetly is not driven + Quite to forget earth's turmoils, spites, and wrongs? + +He greets Spring: + + Sweet Spring, thou turn'st with all thy goodly train + Thy head with flames, thy mantle bright with flowers; + The zephyrs curl the green locks of the plain, + The clouds for joy in pearls weep down their showers. + +Robert Blair (1746) sings in _The Grave_: + + Oh, when my friend and I + In some thick wood have wander'd heedless on, + Hid from the vulgar eye, and sat us down + Upon the sloping cowslip-cover'd bank, + Where the pure limpid stream has slid along + In grateful errors through the underwood, + Sweet murmuring; methought the shrill-tongu'd + thrush + Mended his song of love, the sooty blackbird + Mellowed his pipe and soften'd every note, + The eglantine smell'd sweeter and the rose + Assum'd a dye more deep, whilst ev'ry flower + Vied with its fellow plant in luxury + Of dress. Oh! then the longest summer's day + Seem'd too, too much in haste, still the full heart + Had not imparted half; half was happiness + Too exquisite to last--Of joys departed + Not to return, how painful the remembrance! + +The great painter of Nature among the poets was James Thomson. He was +not original, but followed Pope, who had lighted up the seasons in a +dry, dogmatic way in _Windsor Forest_, and pastoral poems, and after +the publication of his _Winter_ the taste of the day carried him on. +His deep and sentimental affection for Nature was mixed up with piety +and moralizing. He said in a letter to his friend Paterson: + + Retirement and Nature are more and more my passion every day; and + now, even now, the charming time comes on; Heaven is just on the + point, or rather in the very act, of giving earth a green gown. + The voice of the nightingale is heard in our lane. You must know + that I have enlarged my rural domain ... walled, no, no! paled in + about as much as my garden consisted of before, so that the walk + runs round the hedge, where you may figure me walking any time of + day, and sometimes of the night.... May your health continue till + you have scraped together enough to return home and live in some + snug corner, as happy as the Corycius senex in Virgil's fourth + Georgic, whom I recommend both to you and myself as a perfect + model of the truest happy life. + +It is a fact that Solitude and Nature became a passion with him. He +would wander about the country for weeks at a time, noting every +sight and sound, down to the smallest, and finding beauty and divine +goodness in all. His _Seasons_ were the result. + +There is faithful portraiture in these landscapes in verse; some have +charm and delicacy, but, for the most part, they are only catalogues +of the external world, wholly lacking in links with the inner life. + +Scene after scene is described without pause, or only interrupted by +sermonizing; it is as monotonous as a gallery of landscape paintings. + +The human beings introduced are mere accessories, they do not live, +and the undercurrent of all is praise of the Highest. His +predilection is for still life in wood and field, but he does not +neglect grander scenery; his muse + + "Sees Caledonia, in romantic view: + Her airy mountains, from the waving main + Invested with a keen diffusive sky, + Breathing the soul acute; her forests huge, + Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature's hand + Planted of old; her azure lakes between, + Poured out extensive and of watery wealth + Full; winding, deep and green, her fertile vales, + With many a cool translucent brimming flood + Washed lovely...." + +And in _A Hymn_ we read: + + Ye headlong torrents rapid and profound, + Ye softer floods that lead the humid maze + Along the vale; and thou, majestic main, + A secret world of wonders in thyself. + +It is the lack of human life, the didactic tone, and the wearisome +detail which destroys interest in the _Seasons_--the lack of happy +moments of invention. Yet it had great influence on his +contemporaries in rousing love for Nature, and it contains many +beautiful passages. For example: + + Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come, + And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, + While music wakes around, veiled in a shower + Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend. + +His most artistic poem is Winter: + + When from the pallid sky the sun descends + With many a spot, that o'er his glaring orb + Uncertain wanders, stained; red fiery streaks + Begin to flush around. The reeling clouds + Stagger with dizzy poise, as doubting yet + Which master to obey; while rising slow, + Blank in the leaden-coloured east, the moon + Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns. + Seen through the turbid fluctuating air, + The stars obtuse emit a shivering ray; + Or frequent seem to shoot, athwart the gloom, + And long behind them trail the whitening blaze. + Snatched in short eddies plays the withered leaf, + And on the flood the dancing feather floats. + With broadened nostrils to the sky upturned, + The conscious heifer snuffs the stormy gale.... + Retiring from the downs, where all day long + They picked their scanty fare, a blackening train + Of clamorous rooks thick urge their weary flight + And seek the closing shelter of the grove, + Assiduous, in his bower, the wailing owl + Plies his sad song. The cormorant on high + Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land. + Loud shrieks the soaring heron, and with wild wing + The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky skies. + Ocean, unequal pressed, with broken tide + And blind commotion heaves, while from the shore, + Eat into caverns by the restless wave + And forest-rustling mountains, comes a voice + That solemn-sounding bids the world prepare. + +The elaboration of detail in such painting is certain evidence, not +only of a keen, but an enthusiastic eye for Nature. As he says in +Winter: + + Nature, great parent! whose unceasing hand + Rolls round the seasons of the changeful year! + How mighty, how majestic, are thy works! + With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul + That sees astonish'd, and astonish'd sings! + +Brockes was directly influenced by Pope and Thomson, and translated +the _Seasons_, when he had finished his _Irdisches Vergnügen in +Gott_. This unwieldy work, insipid and prosaic as it is, was still a +literary achievement, thanks to the dignity of the subject and the +high seriousness of its aim, at a time when frivolity was the fashion +in poetry. Its long pious descriptions of natural phenomena have none +of the imposing flow of Thomson's strophes. It treats of fire in 138 +verses of eight lines each, of air in 79, water in 78, earth in 74, +while flowers and fruit are dissected and analyzed at great length; +and all this rhymed botany and physics is loosely strung together, +but it shews a warm feeling for Nature of a moralizing and devotional +sort. He says himself[7] that he took up the study of poetry first as +an amusement, but later more seriously, and chose Nature as his +theme, not only because her beauty moved him, but as a means 'whereby +man might enjoy a permissible pleasure and be edified at the same +time.' + + So I resolved to sing the praises of the Creator to the best of + my powers, and felt the more bound to do it, because I held that + such great and almost inexcusable neglect and ingratitude was a + wrong to the Creator, and unbecoming in Christendom. I therefore + composed different pieces, chiefly in Spring, and tried my best + to describe the beauties of Nature, in order, through my own + pleasure, to rekindle the praise of the wise Creator in myself + and others, and this led at last to the first part of my + _Irdisches Vergnügen_. (1721.) + +His evidence from animal and plant life for the teleological argument +is very laughable; take, for example, the often-quoted chamois: + + The fat is good for phthisis, the gall for the face, chamois + flesh is good to eat, and its blood cures vertigo--the skin is no + less useful. Doth not the love as well as the wisdom and + almightiness of the Creator shine forth from this animal? + +For the rest, the following lines from _Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott_ +will serve to give an idea of his style; they certainly do honour to +his laborious attempt to miss none of the charms of the wood: + + Lately as I sat on the green grass + Shaded by a lime tree, and read, + I raised my eyes by chance and saw + Different trees here and there, some far, some near, + Some half, some all in light, and some in shade, + Their boughs bowed down by leaves. + I saw how beautifully both air and flowery mead + Were crowned and adorned. + To describe the green grace + And the landscape it makes so sweet, + And at the same time prolong my pleasure, + I took pencil and paper + And tried to describe the beautiful trees in rhyme, + To the glory of God their Creator. + Of all the beauty the world lays before our eyes, + There certainly is none which does not pale + Beside green boughs, + Nothing to compare for pure beauty with a wood. + The green roofing overhead + Makes me feel young again; + It hangs there, a living tapestry, + To the glory of God and our delight.... + Beyond many trees that lay in shade + I often saw one in full light; + A human eye would scarce believe + How sweetly twilight, light and darkness + Meet side by side in leafy trees. + Peering through the leaves with joy + We notice, as we see the leaves + Lighted from one side only, + That we can almost see the sun + Mixing gold with the tender green, etc. + +and so on for another twenty lines. + +Yet this rich Burgomaster of Hamburg, for all that he dealt chiefly +in rhymed prose, had his moments of rare elevation of thought and +mystical rapture about Nature; for instance, in the introduction to +_Ueber das Firmament_: + + As lately in the sapphire depths, + Not bound by earth nor water, aim nor end, + In the unplumbed aerial sea I gazed, + And my absorbed glance, now here, now there, + But ever deeper sank--horror came over me, + My eye grew dizzy and my soul aghast. + That infinite vast vault, + True picture of Eternity, + Since without birth or end + From God alone it comes.... + It overwhelmed my soul. + The mighty dome of deep dark light, + Bright darkness without birth or bound, + Swallowed the very world--burying thought. + My being dwindled to an atom, to a nought; + I lost myself, + So suddenly it beat me down, + And threatened with despair. + But in that salutary nothingness, that blessed loss, + All present God! in Thee--I found myself again. + +While English poetry and its German imitations were shewing these +signs of reaction from the artificiality of the time, and science and +philosophy often lauded Nature to the skies, as, for instance, +Shaftesbury[8] (1671-1713), a return to Nature became the principle +of English garden-craft in the first half of the eighteenth +century.[9] The line of progress here, as in taste generally, did not +run straightforward, but fluctuated. From the geometric gardens of +Lenotre, England passed to the opposite extreme; in the full tide of +periwig and hoop petticoat, minuets, beauty-patches and rouge, +Addison and Pope were banishing everything that was not strictly +natural from the garden. Addison would even have everything grow wild +in its own way, and Pope wrote: + + To build, to plant, whatever you intend, + To rear the column, or the arch to bend, + To swell the terrace or to sink the grot, + In all let Nature never be forgot. + +William Kent made allowance for this idea; but, as a painter, and +looking at his native scenery with a painter's eye, he noted its +characteristic features--the gentle undulations, the freshness of the +green, the wealth of trees--and based his garden-craft on these. + +The straight line was banished; in its place came wide spaces of lawn +and scattered groups of trees of different sorts--dark fir and alder +here, silver birch and grey poplar there; and flowery fields with +streams running through them stood out in relief against dark +woodland. + +Stiff walls, balustrades, terraces, statues, and so forth, +disappeared; the garden was not to contrast with the surrounding +landscape, but to merge into it--to be not Art, but a bit of Nature. +It was, in fact, to be a number of such bits, each distinct from the +rest--waterfall, sheltered sunny nook, dark wood, light glade. Kent +himself soon began to vary this mosaic of separate scenes by adding +ruins and pavilions; but it was Chambers the architect who developed +the idea of variety by his writings on the dwellings and manners of +the Chinese.[10] + +The fundamental idea that the garden ought to be a sample of the +landscape was common both to Kent and the Chinese; but, as China is +far richer than England in varieties of scenery, her gardens included +mountains, rocks, swamps, and deserts, as well as sunny fields and +plains, while English gardens were comparatively monotonous. When the +fashion for the Chinese style came in, as unluckily it did just when +we were trying to oust the Rococo, so that one pigtail superseded the +other, variety was achieved by groups of buildings in all sorts of +styles. Stables, ice-houses, gardeners' cottages took the form of +pavilions, pagodas, kiosks, and temples. + +Meanwhile, as a reaction against the Rococo, enthusiasm for Nature +increased, and feeling was set free from restraint by the growing +sentimentality. Richardson's novels fed the taste for the pleasures +of weeping sensibility, and garden-craft fell under its sway. In all +periods the insignificant and non-essential is unable to resist the +general stamp, if that only shews a little originality. + +These gardens, with temples to friendship and love, melancholy, +virtue, re-union, and death, and so forth, were suitable backgrounds +for the sentimental scenes described in the English novels, and for +the idyllic poets and moonshine singers of Germany. Here it was the +fashion to wander, tenderly intertwined, shedding floods of tears and +exchanging kisses, and pausing at various places to read the +inscriptions which directed them what to feel. At one spot they were +to laugh, at another to weep, at a third to be fired with devotion. + +Hermitages sprang up everywhere, with hermits, real or dummy. Any +good house near a wood, or in a shady position, was called a +hermitage, and dedicated to arcadian life, free from care and +ceremony. Classic and romantic styles competed for favour in +architecture; at one moment everything must needs be purely classic, +each temple Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric; at another Gothic, with the +ruins and fortresses of mediæval romance. And not only English +gardens, but those of Europe generally, though to a less degree, +passed through these stages of development, for no disease is so +infectious as fashion. + +It was not till the end of the eighteenth century that a healthy +reaction set in in England, when Repton turned back to Kent's +fundamental principle and freed it from its unnatural excrescences, +with the formula: the garden should be an artistic representation of +the landscape, a work of art whose materials are provided by Nature +herself, whether grass, flowers, bushes, trees, water, or whatever it +may be that she has to offer. Thus began our modern landscape +gardening. + +In another region too, a change was brought about from the Rococo to +a more natural style. It is true that Nature plays no direct _rôle_ +in _Robinson Crusoe_, and wins as little notice there as in its +numberless imitations; yet the book roused a longing for healthier, +more natural conditions in thousands of minds. It led the idyllic +tendency of the day back to its source, and by shewing all the +stages, from the raw state of Nature up to the culture of the +community, in the life of one man, it brought out the contrast +between the far-off age of innocence and the perverted present. + +The German _Simplicissimus_ closed with a Robinsonade, in which the +hero, after long wandering, found rest and peace on an island in the +ocean of the world, alone with himself and Nature. The readers of +_Robinson Crusoe_ were in much the same position. Defoe was not only +a true artist, but a man of noble, patient character, and his romance +proved a healing medicine to many sick minds, pointing the way back +to Nature and a natural fife, and creating a longing for the lost +innocence of man. + +Rousseau, who was also a zealous advocate of the English gardens, and +disgusted by the French Pigtail style, was more impressed by +_Robinson Crusoe_ than by any other book. It was the first book his +Emilia gave him, as a gospel of Nature and unspoilt taste. + + + + +CHAPTER X + +THE SENSITIVENESS AND EXAGGERATION OF +THE ELEGIAC IDYLLIC FEELING + + +This longing to return to the lost paradise of Nature gradually +produced a state of melancholy hyper-sensitiveness, an epidemic of +world pain, quite as unnatural as the Rococo. + +The heart came into its rights again and laid claim to absolute +dominion in its kingdom, and regret that it had lain so long deprived +of its own, gave rise to a tearful pensiveness, which added zest to +restitution. It was convalescence, but followed at once by another +complaint. Feeling swung from one extreme to the other. + +German feeling in the first half of the eighteenth century was +chiefly influenced, on the one hand, by Richardson's novels, which +left no room for Nature, and by the poetry of Young and Thomson; on +the other, by the pastoral idylls interspersed with anacreontic +love-passages, affected by the French. At first description and +moralizing preponderated. + +In 1729 Haller's _Alps_ appeared. It had the merit of drawing the +eyes of Europe to Alpine beauty and the moral worth of the Swiss, but +shewed little eye for romantic scenery. It is full of descriptive +painting, but not of a kind that appeals: scene follows scene with +considerable pathos, especially in dealing with the people; but +landscape is looked at almost entirely from the moralizing or +utilitarian standpoint. + +'Here, where the majestic Mount Gothard elevates its summit above the +clouds, and where the earth itself seems to approach the sun, Nature +has assembled in one spot all the choicest treasure of the globe. The +deserts of Libya, indeed, afford us greater novelties, and its sandy +plains are more fertile in monsters: but thou, favoured region, art +adorned with useful productions only, productions which can satisfy +all the wants of man. Even those heaps of ice, those frowning rocks +in appearance so sterile, contribute largely to the general good, for +they supply inexhaustible fountains to fertilize the land. What a +magnificent picture does Nature spread before the eye, when the sun, +gilding the top of the Alps, scatters the sea of vapours which +undulates below! Through the receding vale the theatre of a whole +world rises to the view! Rocks, valleys, lakes, mountains, and +forests fill the immeasurable space, and are lost in the wide +horizon. We take in at a single glance the confines of divers states, +nations of various characters, languages, and manners, till the eyes, +overcome by such extent of vision, drop their weary lids, and we ask +of the enchanted fancy a continuance of the scene. + +'When the first emotion of astonishment has subsided, how delightful +is it to observe each several part which makes up this sublime whole! +That mass of hills, which presents its graceful declivity covered +with flocks of sheep whose bleatings resound through the meadows; +that large clear lake, which reflects from its level surface sunbeams +gently curved; those valleys, rich in verdure, which compose by their +various outlines points of perspective which contract in the distance +of the landscape! Here rises a bare steep mountain laden with the +accumulated snow of ages; its icy head rests among the clouds, +repelling the genial rays of the moon and the fervid heat of the +dog-star: there a chain of cultivated hills spreads before the +delighted eye; their green pastures are enlivened by flocks, and +their golden corn waves in the wind: yet climates so different as +those are only separated by a cool, narrow valley. Behold that +foaming torrent rushing from a perpendicular height! Its rapid waves +dash among the rocks, and shoot even beyond their limits. Divided by +the rapidity of its course and the depth of the abyss where it falls, +it changes into a grey moving veil; and, at length scattered into +humid atoms, it shines with the tints of the rainbow, and, suspended +over the valley, refreshes it with plenteous dew. The traveller +beholds with astonishment rivers flowing towards the sky, and issuing +from one cloud, hide themselves in the grey veil of another. + +'Those desert places uncheered by the rays of the sun, those frozen +abysses deprived of all verdure, hide beneath their sterile sands +invaluable treasures, which defy the rigour of the seasons and all +the injuries of time! 'Tis in dark and marshy recesses, upon the damp +grottos, that crystal rocks are formed. Thus splendour is diffused +through their melancholy vaults, and their shadowy depths gutter with +the colours of the rainbow. O Nature, how various are thy operations, +how infinite thy fertility!' + +We cannot agree with Frey[1] that 'these few strophes may serve as +sufficient proof that Haller's poetry is still, even among the mass +of Alpine poetry, unsurpassed for intense power of direct vision, and +easily makes one forget its partial lack of flexibility of diction.' + +The truth is, flexibility is entirely lacking; but the lines do +express the taste for open-air life among the great sublimities and +with simple people. The poem is not romantic but idyllic, with a +touch of the elegiac. It is the same with the poem _On the Origin of +Evil_ (Book I.): + + On those still heights whence constant springs flow down, + I paused within a copse, lured by the evening breeze; + Wide country lay spread out beneath my feet, + Bounded by its own size alone.... + Green woods covered the hills, through which the pale tints of the fields + Shone pleasantly. + Abundance and repose held sway far as the eye could reach.... + And yonder wood, what left it to desire + With the red tints upon the half-bare beeches + And the rich pine's green shade o'er whitened moss? + While many a sun-ray through the interstices + A quivering light upon the darkness shed, + Blending in varying hues green night with golden day + How pleasant is the quiet of the copse! ... + Yea, all I see is given by Providence, + The world itself is for its burgher's joy; + Nature's inspired with the general weal, + The highest goodness shews its trace in all. + +Friedrich von Hagedorn, too, praises country pleasures in _The +Feeling of Spring_: + + Enamelled meadows! freshly decked in green, + I sing your praises constantly; + Nature and Spring have decked you out.... + Delightful quiet, stimulant of joy, + How enviable thou art! + +This idyllic taste for country life was common at the time, +especially among the so-called 'anacreontists.' Gleim, for instance, +in his _Praise of Country Life_: 'Thank God that I have fled from the +bustle of the world and am myself again under the open sky.' + +And in _The Countryman_: + + How happy is he who, free from cares, ploughs his father's + fields; every morning the sun shines on the grass in which he + lies. + +And Joh. Friedrich von Cronegk: + + Fly from sordid cares and the proud tumult of cities ... here in + the peaceful valley shy wisdom sports at ease, where the smiling + Muse crowns herself with dewy roses. + +With this idyllic tone it is not surprising to find the religious +feeling of many hymn writers; for instance, Gleim in _The Goodness of +God_: + + For whom did Thy goodness create the world so beautiful, O God? + For whom are the flowers on hill and dale? ... Thou gavest us + power to perceive the beauty. + +And above all, honest Gellert: + + The skies, the globe, the seas, praise the eternal glory. O my + Creator, when I consider Thy might and the wisdom of Thy ways.... + Sunshine and storm preach Thee, and the sands of the sea. + +Ewald von Kleist excelled Haller as much as Haller had excelled +Brockes. + +Julian Schmidt says[3]: 'Later on, descriptive poetry, like didactic, +fell into disgrace; but at that time this dwelling upon the minutiæ +of Nature served to enrich the imagination; Kleist's descriptions are +thoughtful and interesting.' It is easy to see that his longer poems +cost him much labour; they were not the pure songs of feeling that +gush out spontaneously like a spring from the rock. But in eloquence +and keenness of observation he excelled his contemporaries, although +he, too, followed the fashion of eighteenth-century literature, and +coquetted with Greek nymphs and deities, and the names of winds and +maidens. + +The tendency to depression, increased by his failure to adapt himself +to military life, made him incline more and more to solitude. + +_To Doris_ begins: + + Now spring doth warm the flakeless air, + And in the brook the sky reflects her blue, + Shepherds in fragrant flowers find delight ... + The corn lifts high its golden head, + And Zephyr moves in waves across the grain, + Her robe the field embroiders; the young rush + Adorns the border of each silver stream, + Love seeks the green night of the forest shade, + And air and sea and earth and heaven smile. + +_Sighs for Rest_: + + O silver brook, my leisure's early soother, + When wilt thou murmur lullabies again? + When shall I trace thy sliding smooth and smoother, + While kingfishers along thy reeds complain; + Afar from thee with care and toil opprest, + Thy image still can calm my troubled breast. + + O ye fair groves and odorous violet valleys, + Girt with a garland blue of hills around, + Thou quiet lake, where, when Aurora sallies, + Her golden tresses seem to sweep the ground: + Soft mossy turf, on which I wont to stray, + For me no longer bloom thy flow'rets gay. + As when the chilly nights of March arise + And whirl the howling dust in eddies swift, + The sunbeams wither in the dimmer skies, + O'er the young ears the sand and pebbles drift: + So the war rages, and the furious forces + The air with smoke bespread, the field with corses. + + The vineyard bleeds, and trampled is the com, + Orchards but heat the kettles of the camp.... + + As when a lake which gushing rains invade + Breaks down its dams, and fields are overflowed. + So floods of fire across the region spread, + And standing corn by crackling flames is mowed: + Bellowing the cattle fly; the forests burn, + And their own ashes the old stems in-urn. + + He too, who fain would live in purity, + Feels nature treacherous, hears examples urge, + As one who, falling overboard at sea, + Beats with his arms and feet the buoyant surge, + And climbs at length against some rocky brink, + Only beneath exhausted strength to sink. + + My cheek bedewed with holy tears in vain, + To love and heaven I vowed a spotless truth: + Too soon the noble tear exhaled again, + Example conquered, and the glow of youth + To live as live one's comrades seems allowed; + He who would be a man, must quit the crowd. + +He, too, wrote with hymn-like swing in praise of the Creator: 'Great +is the Lord! the unnumbered heavens are the chambers of his fortress, +storm and thunder-clouds his chariot.' + +The most famous of his poems, and the one most admired in his own +day, was _Spring_. This is full of love for Nature. It describes a +country walk after the muggy air of town, and conveys a vivid +impression of fresh germinating spring, though it is overlaid by +monotonous detail: + + Receive me, hallowed shades! Ye dwellings of sweet buss! + Umbrageous arches full of sleeping dark delights ... + Receive me! Fill my soul with longing and with rest ... + And you, ye laughing fields, + Valleys of roses, labyrinths of streams, + I will inhale an ecstasy with your balsamic breath, + And, lying in the shade, on strings of gold + Sing your indwelling joys.... + On rosy clouds, with rose and tulip crowned, + Spring has come down from heaven.... + The air grew softer, fields took varied hues, + The shades were leafy, and soft notes awoke + And flew and warbled round the wood in twilight greenery. + Brooks took a silver tint, sweet odours filled the air, + The early shepherd's pipe was heard by Echo in the dale.... + Most dear abode! Ah, were I but allowed + Down in the shade by yon loquacious brook + Henceforth to live! O sky! thou sea of love, + Eternal spring of health, will not thy waters succour me? + Must, my life's blossom wither, stifled by the weeds? + +Johann Peter Uz, who was undervalued because of his sickly style, +wrote many little songs full of feeling for Nature, though within +narrow limits. Their titles shew the pastoral taste[4]:--_Spring_, +_Morning, Shepherd's Morning Song, The Muse with the Shepherds, The +Meadow in the Country, Vintage, Evening, May, The Rose, Summer and +Wine, Winter Night, Longing for Spring_, etc. + +Many are fresh and full of warm feeling, especially the Spring Songs: + + See the blossoming of Spring! + Will't not taste the joys it showers? + Dost not feel its impulse thrill? + Friends! away our cares we'll fling! + In the joyous time of flowers, + Love and Bacchus have their will. + +and + + O forest, O green shady paths, + Dear place of spring's display! + My good luck from the thronging town + Has brought me here away. + + O what a fresh breeze flows + Down from the wooded hill, + How pleasantly the west wind flies + With rustling dewy wing + Across the vale, + Where all is green and blossoming. + +The personification is more marked in this: + + Thou hast sent us the Spring in his gleaming robe + With roses round his head. Smiling he comes, O God! + The hours conduct him to his flowery throne + Into the groves he enters and they bloom; fresh green is on the plain, + The forest shade returns, the west wind lovingly unfurls + Its dewy plumes, and happy birds begin to sing. + The face of Nature Thou hast deckt with beauty that enchants, + O Thou rich source of all the beautiful ... + My heart is lifted up to Thee in purest love. + +His feeling for Nature was warm enough, although most of his writing +was so artificial and tedious from much repetition of a few ideas, +that Kleist could write to Gleim[5]: 'The odes please me more the +more I read them. With a few exceptions, they have only one fault, +too many laurel woods; cut them down a little. Take away the marjoram +too, it is better in a good sausage than in a beautiful poem.' + +Joh. Georg Jacobi also belonged to the circle of poets gathered round +Gleim; but in many respects he was above it. He imitated the French +style[6] far less than the others--than Hagedorn, for example; and +though the Anacreontic element was strong in him, he overcame it, and +aimed at pure lyrical feeling. From his Life, written by a devoted +friend, we see that he had all the sentimentality of the day,[7] but +with much that was healthy and amiable in addition, and he touched +Nature with peculiar freshness and genuineness. + +In a poem to his brother, about the Saale valley near Halle, he +wrote: + + Lie down in early spring on yon green moss, + By yon still brook where heart with heart we spoke, + My brother.... + Will't see the little garden and the pleasant heights above, + So quiet and unspoilt? O friend, 'tis Nature speaks + In distant wood, near plain and careless glade, + Here on my little hill and in the clover.... + Dost hear the rustle of the streamlet through the wood? + +Jacobi was one whose heart, as he said of Gleim, took a warm interest +in all that breathed, even a violet, and sought sympathy and +companionship in the whole range of creation. + +This is from his _Morning Song_: + + See how the wood awakes, how from the lighted heights + With the soft waving breeze + The morning glory smiles in the fresh green.... + Here by the rippling brook and quivering flower, + We catch Love's rustle as she gently sweeps + Like Spring's own breath athwart the plains. + +Another song is; + + Tell me, where's the violet fled. + Late so gayly blowing. + Springing 'neath fair Flora's tread, + Choicest sweets bestowing? + Swain, the vernal scene is o'er, + And the violet blooms no more. + + Say, where hides the blushing rose, + Pride of fragrant morning, + Garland meet for beauty's brows, + Hill and dale adorning? + Gentle maid, the summer's fled, + And the hapless rose is dead. + + Bear me then to yonder rill, + Late so freely flowing, + Watering many a daffodil + On its margin glowing. + Sun and wind exhaust its store, + Yonder rivulet glides no more. + + Lead me to the bowery shade, + Late with roses flaunting, + Loved resort of youth and maid, + Amorous ditties chanting. + Hail and wind with fury shower, + Leafless mourns the rifled bower! + + Say, where bides the village maid, + Late yon cot adorning? + Oft I've met her in the glade + Fair and fresh as morning. + Swain, how short is beauty's bloom, + Seek her in her grassy tomb. + + Whither roves the tuneful swain + Who, of rural pleasures, + Rose and violet, rill and plain, + Sang in deftest measures? + Maiden, swift life's vision flies, + Death has closed the poet's eyes. + +_To Nature_ runs thus: + + Leaves are falling, mists are twining, and to winter sleep inclining + Are the trees upon the plain, + In the hush of stillness ere the snowflakes hide them, + Friendly Nature, speak to me again! + Thou art echo and reflection of our striving, + Thou art painter of our hopes and of our fears, + Thou art singer of our joys and of our sorrows, + Of our consolations and our groans.... + +While feeling for Nature was all of this character, idyllic, +sensitive, sympathetic, but within very narrow bounds, and the poets +generally were wandering among Greek and Latin bucolics and playing +with Damon, Myrtil, Chloe, and Daphnis, Salomon Gessner made a +speciality of elegiac pastoral poetry. He was a better landscapist +than poet, and his drawings to illustrate his idylls were better than +the poems themselves. The forest, for instance, and the felling of +the tree, are well drawn; whereas the sickly sweet Rococo verse in +imitation of the French, and reminding one more of Longos than +Theocritus, is lifeless. His rhapsody about Nature is uncongenial to +modern readers, but his love was real. + +The introduction 'to the Reader'[8] is characteristic: + + These Idylls are the fruits of some of my happiest hours; of + those hours when imagination and tranquillity shed their sweetest + influence over me, and, excluding all which belongs to the period + in which we live, recalled all the charms and delights of the + Golden Age. A noble and well-regulated mind dwells with pleasure + on these images of calm tranquillity and uninterrupted happiness, + and the scenes in which the poet delineates the simple beauties + of uncorrupted nature are endeared to us by the resemblance we + fancy we perceive in them to the most blissful moments that we + nave ourselves enjoyed. Often do I fly from the city and seek the + deepest solitudes; there, the beauties of the landscape soothe + and console my heart, and gradually disperse those impressions of + solicitude and disgust which accompanied me from the town; + enraptured, I give up my whole soul to the contemplation of + Nature, and feel, at such moments, richer than an Utopian + monarch, and happier than a shepherd of the Golden Age. + +This is a true picture of the time! Man knew that he was sick, and +fled from town and his fellows into solitude, there to dream himself +back to a happier past, and revel in the purity and innocence, the +healing breath, of forest and field. + +The magic of moonlight began to be felt. Mirtilla + + perceived his old father slumbering in the moonbeams.... Mirtilla + stood long contemplating him, and his eyes rested fondly on the + old man except when he raised them toward heaven through the + glistening leaves of the vine, and tears of filial love and joy + bedewed his cheeks.... How beautiful! how beautiful is the + landscape! How bright, how clear appears the deep blue of heaven + through the broken clouds! They fly, they pass away, these + towering clouds; but strew a shadow as they pass over the sunny + landscape.... Oh, what joy overwhelms my soul! how beautiful, how + excellent is all around, what an inexhaustible source of rapture! + From the enlivening sun down to the little plant that his mild + influence nourishes, all is wonderful! What rapture overpowers me + when I stand on the high hill and look down on the wide-spread + landscape beneath me, when I lay stretched along the grass and + examine the various flowers and herbs and their little + inhabitants; when at the midnight hour I contemplate the starry + heavens!... Wrapt in each other's arms, let us contemplate the + approach of morning, the bright glow of sunset, or the soft beams + of moonlight; and as I press thee to my trembling heart, let us + breathe out in broken accents our praises and thanksgivings. Ah! + what inexpressible joy, when with such raptures are blended the + transports of the tenderest love. + +Many prosaic writings of a different kind shew how universally +feeling, in the middle of the eighteenth century, turned towards +Nature. + +The æsthetic writer Sulzer (1750) wrote _On the Beauty of Nature_. +Crugot's widely-read work of edification, _Christ in Solitude_ +(1761), shewed the same point of view among the mystical and pietist +clergy; and Spalding's _Human Vocation_[9] (written with a warmth +that reminds one of Gessner) among the rationalists, whom he headed. +He says: + + Nature contains numberless pleasures, which, through my great + sensitiveness, nourish my mind... I open eye and ear, and through + these openings pleasures flow into my soul from a thousand sides: + flowers painted by the hand of Nature, the rich music of the + forest, the bright daylight which pours life and light all round + me.... How indifferent, tasteless, and dead is all the fantastic + glamour of artificial splendour and luxuriance in comparison with + the living radiance of the real beautiful world of Nature, with + the joyousness, repose, and admiration I feel before a meadow in + blossom, a rustling stream, the pleasant awesomeness of night, or + of the majesty of innumerable worlds. Even the commonest and most + familiar things in Nature give me endless delight, when I feel + them with a heart attuned to joy and admiration.... I lose + myself, absorbed in delight, in the consideration of all this + general beauty, of which I hold myself to be a not disfigured + part. + +Klopstock, the torch-bearer of Germany's greatest poets, owed much of +his power of the wing to religion. He introduced that new epoch in +the literature of his country which culminated in Goethe. As so often +happens in mental development, the reaction against prevailing +conditions and the advance to higher ones, in the middle of the +eighteenth century, led first of all to the opposite extreme--balance +was only reached by degrees. What chiefly made Klopstock a literary +reformer was the glowing enthusiasm and powerful imagination which +compelled the stiff poetic forms, clumsy as they were, to new rhythm +and melodious cadence. And although his style degenerated into +mannerism in the _Messias_, for the youthful impetus which had +carried his Pegasus over the clouds to the stars could not keep it +there without artificial aid, the immense value of his influence +remained. He is one of the most interesting representatives, not only +of his own, but of all similar periods of exaggerated feelings and +ideals. Despite his loftiness of thought and speech, and his seraphic +raptures, he was not without a full share of sensuous development, +and women's eyes, or a girl's rosy lips, would draw him away from the +finest view in the world. + +A mind so intent upon the noble and beautiful was sure to be +enthusiastic about Nature; his correspondence is the best witness to +this, and at the same time throws side-lights upon the period. + +It is difficult to-day to understand the influence which the +_Messias_ had upon its readers; even Friedenkende spent happy hours +reading it with pious tears of delight, and young and old were of the +same opinion. + +There is a pretty letter from Gustchen Stolberg[10] to Klopstock, +which runs thus: + + UETERSEN, + 25 _April_ 1776. + + In the garden. Yes, in the garden, dearest Klopstock! I have just + been walking about, it was so beautiful: the little birds were + singing, violets and other flowers wafted their fragrance to me, + and I began thinking very warmly of all whom I dearly, dearly + love, and so very soon came to my dear Klopstock, who certainly + has no truer friend than I am, though perhaps others express it + better ... Thanks, thanks, for your very delightful little + letter--how dear to me I don't tell you--can't tell you. + +C. F. Cramer was his enthusiastic panegyrist. It is not only what he +says of the private life and special taste of his adored friend which +is noteworthy, but the way in which he does it--the tone in which, as +a cultivated man of the day, he judged him. 'He will paint and paint +Nature. For this he must be acquainted with her. This is why he loves +her so well. This is why he strays by the brook and weeps. This is +why in spring he goes out into the fields of blossoms, and his eyes +run over with tears. All creation fills him with yearning and +delight. He goes from mountain to valley like a man in a dream. When +he sees a stream, he follows its course; when a hill, he must climb +it; when a river--oh! if only he could rush with it to the sea! A +rock--oh! to look down from its crags to the land below! A hawk +hovers over him--oh! to have its wings and fly so much nearer to the +stars! He stands for hours looking at a flower or moss, throws +himself down on the grass and decks his hat with ivy and cornflowers. +He goes by moonlight to visit the graves and think of death, +immortality, and eternal life. Nothing hinders his meditations. He +sees everything in relation to something else. Every visible object +has an invisible companion, so ardently, so entirely, so closely does +he feel it all.' + +This, coming straight from life, tells us more than a volume of odes; +it contains the real feeling of the time, sensitive, dreamy, elegiac. + +His friend goes on: 'He walks often and likes it, but generally looks +for sunny places; he goes very slowly, which is fatal for me, for I +run when I walk ... Often he stands still and silent, as if there +were knots which he could not untie (in his thoughts). And truly +there are unknown depths of feeling as well as thought.' + +In another place: 'He went out and gloated over the great scene of +immeasurable Nature. Orion and the Pleiades moved over his head, the +dear moon was opposite. Looking intently into her friendly face, he +greeted her repeatedly: "Moon, Moon, friend of my thoughts; hurry not +away, dear Moon, but stay. What is thy name? Laura, Cynthia, Cyllene? +Or shall I call thee beautiful Betty of the Sky?" ... He loved +country walks; we made for lonely places, dark fearsome thickets, +lonely unfrequented paths, scrambled up all the hills, spied out +every bit of Nature, came to rest at last under a shady rock ... +Klopstock's life is one constant enjoyment. He gives himself up to +feeling, and revels in Nature's feast ... Winter is his favourite +time of year....[11] He preaches skating with the unction of a +missionary to the heathen, and not without working miracles, ... the +ice by moonlight is a feast of the Gods to him ... only one rule, we +do not leave the river till the moon has gone.' Klopstock described +this in his _Skating_: + + O youth, whose skill the ice-cothurn + Drives glowing now, and now restrains, + On city hearths let faggots burn, + But come with me to crystal plains. + The scene is filled with vapouring light, + As when the winter morning's prime + Looks on the lake. Above it night + Scatters, like stars, the glittering rime. + How still and white is all around! + How rings the track with new sparr'd frost! + Far off the metal's cymbal sound + Betrays thee, for a moment lost ... + +Cramer tells how Klopstock paid a long-remembered visit to Count +Bernstoff at Schloss Stintenburg: + + It has a most romantic situation in a bewitching part of + Mecklenburg; 'tis surrounded by forest full of delightful gloom, + and a large lake, with a charming little island in the centre, + which wakes echoes. Klopstock is very fond of echoes, and is + always trying to find them in his walks. + +This illustrates the lines in _Stintenburg_: + + Isle of pious solitude, + Loved playmate of the echo and the lake, etc. + +but in this ode, as in so many of his, simple personal feeling gives +way to the stilted mannerism of the bard poetry. + +He wrote of Soroe,[12] one of the loveliest places in the Island of +Zealand, as 'an uncommonly pleasant place'; where 'By a sacred tree, +on a raised grass plot two hundred paces from the great alley, and +from a view over the Friedensburg Lake towards a little wooded island +... Fanny appeared to him in the silver evening clouds over the +tree-tops.' + +The day on which he composed _The Lake of Zurich_ was one of the +pleasantest in his life. Cramer says: 'He has often told me and still +tells, with youthful fervour, about those delightful days and this +excursion: the boat full of people, mostly young, all in good +spirits; charming girls, his wife Herzel, a lovely May morning.' + +But, unlike St Preux, he 'seemed less impressed by our scenery than +by the beauty of our girls,[13] and his letters bear out the +remark.[14] Yet delight in Nature was always with him: Klopstock's +lofty morality pours forth all through it. Nature, love, fame, wine, +everything is looked at from an ennobling point of view.' + + Fair is the majesty of all thy works + On the green earth, O Mother Nature fair! + But fairer the glad face + Enraptured with their view. + Come from the vine banks of the glittering lake, + Or--hast thou climbed the smiling skies anew-- + Come on the roseate tip + Of evening's breezy wing, + And teach my song with glee of youth to glow, + Sweet joy, like thee--with glee of shouting youths, + Or feeling Fanny's laugh. + + Behind us far already Uto lay. + At whose feet Zurich in the quiet vale + Feeds her free sons: behind-- + Receding vine-clad hills. + Uncloud'd beamed the top of silver Alps, + And warmer beat the heart of gazing youths, + And warmer to their fair + Companions spoke its glow. + And Haller's Doris sang, the pride of song; + And Hirzel's Daphne, dear to Kleist and Gleim; + And we youths sang and felt + As each were--Hagedorn. + + Soon the green meadow took us to the cool + And shadowy forest, which becrowns the isle. + Then cam'st thou, Joy; thou cam'st + Down in full tide to us; + Yes, goddess Joy, thyself; we felt, we clasp'd, + Best sister of humanity, thyself, + With thy dear innocence + Accompanied, thyself. + + Sweet thy inspiring breath, O cheerful Spring; + When the meads cradle thee, and their soft airs + Into the hearts of youths + And hearts of virgins glide, + Thou makest feeling conqueror. Ah! through thee + Fuller, more tremulous, heaves each blooming breast; + With lips spell-freed by thee + Young love unfaltering pleads. + Fair gleams the wine, when to the social change + Of thought, or heart-felt pleasure, it invites, + And the 'Socratic' cup + With dewy roses bound, + Sheds through the bosom bliss, and wakes resolves, + Such as the drunkard knows not--proud resolves + Emboldening to despair + Whate'er the sage disowns. + + Delightful thrills against the panting heart + Fame's silver voice--and immortality + Is a great thought.... + But sweeter, fairer, more delightful, 'tis + On a friend's arm to know oneself a friend.... + O were ye here, who love me though afar ... + How would we build us huts of friendship, here + Together dwell for ever. + +This is of Fredensborg on an August day: + + Here, too, did Nature tarry, when her hand + Pour'd living beauty over dale and hill, + And to adorn this pleasant land + Long time she lingered and stood still.... + The lake how tranquil! From its level brim + The shore swells gently, wooded o'er with green, + And buries in its verdure dim + The lustre of the summer e'en.... + +The inner and outer life are closely blended in _The Early Grave_: + + Welcome, O silver moon, + Fair still companion of the night! + Friend of the pensive, flee not soon; + Thou stayest, and the clouds pass light. + + Young waking May alone + Is fair as summer's night so still, + When from his locks the dews drop down, + And, rosy, he ascends the hill. + + Ye noble souls and true, + Whose graves with sacred moss are strawn. + Blest were I, might I see with you + The glimmering night, the rosy dawn. + +This is true lyric feeling, spontaneous, not forced. Many of his +odes, and parts of the _Messias_, shew great love for Nature. There +is a fine flight of imagination in _The Festival of Spring_: + + Not into the ocean of all the worlds would I plunge--not hover + where the first created, the glad choirs of the sons of light, + adore, deeply adore and sunk in ecstasy. Only around the drop on + the bucket, only around the earth, would I hover and adore. + Hallelujah! hallelujah! the drop on the bucket flowed also out of + the hand of the Almighty. + + When out of the hand of the Almighty the greater earth flowed, + when the streams of light rushed, and the seven stars began to + be--then flowedst thou, drop, out of the hand of the Almighty. + + When a stream of light rushed, and our sun began to be, a + cataract of waves of light poured, as adown the rock a + storm-cloud, and girded Orion, then flowedst thou, drop, out of + the hand of the Almighty. Who are the thousandfold thousands, who + all the myriads that inhabit the drop?... + + But thou, worm of Spring, which, greenly golden, art fluttering + beside me, thou livest and art, perhaps, ah! not immortal.... + + The storm winds that carry the thunder, how they roar, how with + loud waves they stream athwart the forest! Now they hush, slow + wanders the black cloud.... + + Ah! already rushes heaven and earth with the gracious rain; now + is the earth refreshed.... + + Behold Jehovah comes no longer in storm; in gentle pleasant + murmurs comes Jehovah, and under him bends the bow of peace. + +In another ode, _The Worlds_, he calls the stars 'drops of the +ocean.' + +Again, in _Death_ he shews the sense of his own nothingness, in +presence of the overpowering greatness of the Creator: + + Ye starry hosts that glitter in the sky, + How ye exalt me! Trancing is the sight + Of all Thy glorious works, Most High. + How lofty art Thou in Thy wondrous might; + What joy to gaze upon these hosts, to one + Who feels himself so little, God so great, + Himself but dust, and the great God his own! + Oh, when I die, such rapture on me wait! + +As regards our subject, Klopstock performed this function--he tuned +the strings of feeling for Nature to a higher pitch, thereby +excelling all his contemporaries. His poetry always tended to +extravagance; but in thought, feeling, and language alike, he was +ahead of his time. + +The idyllic was now cultivated with increased fervour, especially by +the Göttingen Brotherhood of Poets. The artificial and conventional +began to wane, and Nature's own voice was heard again. The songs of +Claudius were like a breath of spring.[15] His peasant songs have the +genuine ring; they are hail-fellow-well-met with Nature. Hebel is the +only modern poet like him. + + EVENING SONG + + The lovely day-star's run its course.... + Come, mop my face, dear wife, + And then dish up.... + The silvery moon will look down from his place + And preside at our meal over dishes and grace. + +He hated artificiality: + + Simple joy in Nature, free from artifice, gives as great a + pleasure as an honest lover's kiss. + +His _Cradle Song to be sung by Moonlight_ is delightful in its naive +humour (the moon was his special favourite): + + Sleep then, little one. Why dost thou weep? + Moonlight so tender and quiet so deep, + Quickly and easily cometh thy sleep. + Fond of all little ones is the good moon; + Girls most of all, but he even loves boys. + Down from up there he sends beautiful toys.... + He's old as a raven, he goes everywhere; + Even when father was young, he was there. + +The pearl of his poems is the exquisite _Evening Song_: + + The moon hath risen on high, + And in the clear dark sky + The golden stars all brightly glow; + And black and hushed the woods, + While o'er the fields and floods + The white mists hover to and fro. + + How still the earth, how calm! + What dear and home-like charm + From gentle twilight doth she borrow! + Like to some quiet room, + Where, wrapt in still soft gloom, + We sleep away the daylight's sorrow. + +Boie's _Evening Song_ is in the same key. None of the moonshine poets +of his day expressed night-fall like this: + + How still it is! How soft + The breezes blow! + The lime leaves lisp in whisper and echo answers low; + Scarce audibly the rivulet running amid the flower + With murmuring ripple laps the edge of yonder mystic bower. + And ever darker grows the veil thou weavest o'er the land, + And ever quieter the hush--a hush as of the grave.... + Listen! 'tis Night! she comes, unlighted by a star, + And with the slow sweep of her heavy wing + Awes and revives the timid earth. + +Bürger sings in praise of idyllic comfort in _The Village_, and +Hoelty's mild enthusiasm, touched with melancholy, turned in the same +direction. + + My predilection is for rural poetry and melancholy enthusiasm; + all I ask is a hut, a forest, a meadow with a spring in it, and a + wife in my hut. + +The beginning of his _Country Life_ shews that moralizing was still +in the air: + + Happy the man who has the town escaped! + To him the whistling trees, the murmuring brooks, + The shining pebbles preach + Virtue's and wisdom's lore.... + The nightingale on him sings slumber down; + The nightingale rewakes him, fluting sweet, + When shines the lovely red + Of morning through the trees. + Then he admires Thee in the plain, O God! + In the ascending pomp of dawning day, + Thee in Thy glorious sun. + The worm--the budding branch-- + Where coolness gushes in the waving branch + Or o'er the flowers streams the fountain, rests, + Inhales the breadth of prime + The gentle airs of eve. + His straw-decked thatch, where doves bask in the sun, + And play, and hop, invites to sweeter rest + Than golden halls of state + Or beds of down afford. + To him the plumy people + Chatter and whistle on his + And from his quiet hand + Peck crumbs or peas or grains + +His _Winter Song_ runs: + + Summer joys are o'er, + Flow'rets bloom no more; + Wintry joys are sweeping, + Through the snow-drifts peeping; + Cheerful evergreen + Rarely now is seen. + + No more plumèd throng + Charms the woods with song; + Ice-bound trees are glittering, + Merry snow-birds twittering, + Fondly strive to cheer + Scenes so cold and drear. + + Winter, still I see + Many charms in thee, + Love thy chilly greeting, + Snow-storms fiercely beating, + And the dear delights + Of the long, long nights. + +Hoeltz was the most sentimental of this group; Joh. Heinrich Voss was +more robust and cheerful. He put his strength into his longer poems; +the lyrics contain a great deal of nonsense. An extract from _Luise_ +will shew his idyllic taste: + + Wandering thus through blue fields of flax and acres of barley, + both paused on the hill-top, which commands such a view of the + whole lake, crisped with the soft breath of the zephyr and + sparkling in sunshine; fair were the forests of white barked + birch beyond, and the fir-trees, lovely the village at the foot + half hid by the wood. Lovely Luise had welcomed her parents and + shewn them a green mound under an old beech tree, where the + prospect was very inviting. 'There we propose,' said she, to + unpack and to spread the breakfast. Then we'll adjourn to the + boat and be rowed for a time on the water,' etc. + +We find the same taste, often expressed in a very original way, in +both the brothers Stolberg. In Christian Stolberg's _Elegy to +Hangwitz_, for instance, another poem has these lines: + + Thither, where 'mong the trees of life, + Where in celestial bowers + Under your fig-tree, bowed with fruit + And warranting repose, + Under your pine, inviting shady joy, + Unchanging blooms + Eternal Spring! + +Friedrich Stolberg was a very prophet of Nature; in his ode _Nature_ +he says: + + He who does not love Nature cannot be my friend. + +His prayer may serve as the motto of his day: + + Holy Nature, heavenly fair, + Lead me with thy parent care; + In thy footsteps let me tread + As a willing child is led. + When with care and grief opprest, + Soft I sink me on thy breast; + On thy peaceful bosom laid, + Grief shall cease, nor care invade. + O congenial power divine, + All my votive soul is thine. + Lead me with thy parent care, + Holy Nature, heavenly fair! + +He, too, sang the moon; but Klopstock's influence seems to have +carried him to higher flights than his contemporaries. He wrote in +fine language of wild scenery, even sea and mountains, which had +played no part in German poetry before. + + TO THE SEA + + Thou boundless, shining, glorious sea, + With ecstasy I gaze on thee; + Joy, joy to him whose early beam + Kisses thy lip, bright ocean stream. + Thanks for the thousand hours, old sea, + Of sweet communion held with thee; + Oft as I gazed, thy billowy roll + Woke the deep feelings of my soul. + +There are beautiful notes, reminding one of Goethe, in his +_Unsterbliche Jüngling, Ode to a Mountain Torrent_. + + Immortal youth! + Thou streamest forth from rocky caves; + No mortal saw + The cradle of thy might, + No ear has heard + Thy infant stammering in the gushing Spring. + How lovely art thou in thy silver locks! + How dreadful thundering from the echoing crags! + At thy approach + The firwood quakes; + Thou easiest down, with root and branch, the fir + Thou seizest on the rock, + And roll'st it scornful like a pebble on. + Thee the sun clothes in dazzling beams of glory, + And paints with colours of the heavenly bow + The clouds that o'er thy dusky cataracts climb. + Why hasten so to the cerulean sea? + Is not the neighbourhood of heaven good? + Not grand thy temple of encircling rocks? + Not fair the forest hanging o'er thy bed? + Hasten not so to the cerulean sea; + Youth, thou art here, + Strong as a god, + Free as a god, + Though yonder beckon treacherous calms below, + The wavering lustre of the silent sea, + Now softly silvered by the swimming moon, + Now rosy golden in the western beam; + Youth, what is silken rest, + And what the smiling of the friendly moon, + Or gold or purple of the evening sun, + To him who feels himself in thraldom's bonds? + Here thou canst wildly stream + As bids thy heart; + Below are masters, ever-changeful minds, + Or the dead stillness of the servile main. + Hasten not so to the cerulean sea; + Youth, thou art here, + Strong as a god, + Free as a god. + +Here we have, with all Klopstock's pathos, a love for the wild and +grandiose in Nature, almost unique in Germany, in this time of +idyllic sentimentality. But the discovery of the beauty of romantic +mountain scenery had been made by Rousseau some time before, for +Rousseau, too, was a typical forerunner, and his romances fell like a +bomb-shell among all the idyllic pastoral fiction of the day. + + + + +CHAPTER XI + +THE AWAKENING OF FEELING FOR THE ROMANTIC + + +Rousseau was one of those rare men who bring about a complete change +in the culture of their time by their revolutionary originality. In +such beings the world's history, so to speak, begins again. Out of +touch with their own day, and opposed to its ruling taste and mode of +thought, they are a law unto themselves, and naturally tend to +measure all things by themselves, while their too great subjectivity +is apt to be increased by a morbid sophistry of passion and the +conviction of the prophet. + +Of this type, unchecked by a broad sense of humanity, full of +subversive wilfulness, and not only untrained in moderation, but +degenerating into crass exaggeration, Rousseau was the first example. + +Hellenism, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, had only produced +forerunners. What in Petrarch was a tendency, became an established +condition in Rousseau: the acedia reached its climax. All that went +on in his mind was so much grit for his own mill, subject-matter for +his observation, and therefore of the greatest value to him. He lived +in introspection, a spectator of his own struggles, his own waverings +between an ideal of simple duty and the imperious demands of a +selfish and sensuous ego. His passion for Nature partially atoned for +his unamiable and doubtful character; he was false in many ways; but +that feeling rang true--it was the best part of him, and of that +'idealism of the heart' whose right of rule he asserted in an age of +artificiality and petty formalism. Those were no empty words in his +third letter to Malesherbes: + +'Which time of my life do you suppose I recall most often and most +willingly in my dreams? Not the pleasures of youth; they were too +few, too much mixed with bitterness, and they are too far away now. +It is the time of my retreat, of my solitary walks--those fast-flying +delicious days that I passed all alone by myself, with my good and +simple Thérèse, my beloved dog, my old cat, with the wild birds and +the roes of the forest, with all Nature and her inconceivable Maker. + +'When I got up early to go and watch the sunrise from my garden, when +I saw a fine day begin, my first wish was that neither letters nor +visitors might come to break its charm.... + +'Then I would seek out some wild place in the forest, some desert +spot where there was nothing to shew the hand of man, and so tell of +servitude and rule--some refuge which I could fancy I was the first +to discover, and where no importunate third party came between Nature +and me.... + +'The gold broom and the purple heather touched my heart; the majestic +trees that shaded me, the delicate shrubs around, the astonishing +variety of plants and flowers that I trod under foot, kept me +alternately admiring and observing.' + +His writings shew that with him return to Nature was no mere theory, +but real earnest; they condemned the popular garden-craft and carpet +fashions, and set up in their place the rights of the heart, and free +enjoyment of Nature in her wild state, undisturbed by the hand of +man. + +It was Rousseau who first discovered that the Alps were beautiful. +But to see this fact in its true light, we must glance back at the +opinions of preceding periods.[1] + +Though the Alpine countries were the arena of all sorts of +enterprise, warlike and peaceful, in the fifteenth century, most of +the interest excited by foreign parts was absorbed by the great +voyages of discovery; the Alps themselves were almost entirely +omitted from the maps. + +To be just to the time, it must be conceded that security and comfort +in travelling are necessary preliminaries to our modern mountain +rapture, and in the Middle Ages these were non-existent. Roads and +inns were few; there was danger from robbers as well as weather, so +that the prevailing feelings on such journeys were misery and +anxiety, not pleasure. Knowledge of science, too, was only just +beginning; botany, geology, and geognosy were very slightly diffused; +glacier theories were undreamt of. The sight of a familiar scene near +the great snow-peaks roused men's admiration, because they were +surprised to find it there; this told especially in favour of the +idyllic mountain valleys. + +Felix Fabri, the preacher monk of Ulm, visited the East in 1480 and +1483, and gave a lifelike description of his journeys through the +Alps in his second account. He said[2]: + +'Although the Alps themselves seem dreadful and rigid from the cold +of the snow or the heat of the sun, and reach up to the clouds, the +valleys below them are pleasant, and as rich and fruitful in all +earthly delights as Paradise itself. Many people and animals inhabit +them, and almost every metal is dug out of the Alps, especially +silver. 'Mid such charms as these men live among the mountains, and +Nature blooms as if Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres reigned there. No one +who saw the Alps from afar would believe what a delicious Paradise is +to be found amid the eternal snow and mountains of perpetual winter +and never-melting ice.' + +Very limited praise only extended to the valleys! + +In the sixteenth century we have the records of those who crossed the +Alps with an army, such as Adam Reissner, the biographer of the +Frundsberg, and mention their 'awe' at sight of the valleys, and of +those who had travelled to Italy and the East, and congratulated +themselves that their troublesome wanderings through the Alps were +over. Savants were either very sparing of words about their travels, +or else made rugged verses which shewed no trace of mountain +inspiration. There were no outbursts of admiration at sight of the +great snow-peaks; 'horrible' and 'dreadful' were the current +epithets. The æsthetic sense was not sufficiently developed, and +discount as we will for the dangers and discomforts of the road, and, +as with the earlier travellers to the East, for some lack of power of +expression, the fact remains that mountains were not appreciated. The +prevalent notion of beautiful scenery was very narrow, and even among +cultured people only meant broad, level country. + +B. Kiechel[3] (1585) was enthusiastic about 'the beautiful level +scenery' of Lichfeld, and found it difficult to breathe among the +Alps. Schickhart wrote: 'We were delighted to get away from the +horrible tedious mountains,' and has nothing to say of the Brenner +Pass except this poor joke: 'It did not burn us much, for what with +the ice and very deep snow and horribly cold wind, we found no heat.' +The most enthusiastic description is of the Lake of Como, by Paulus +Jovius (1552), praising Bellagio,'[4] In the seventeenth century +there was some admiration for the colossal proportions of the Alps, +but only as a foil to the much admired valleys. + +J.J. Grasser wrote of Rhoetia[5]: 'There are marble masses +projecting, looking like walls and towers in imitation of all sorts +of wonderful architecture. The villages lie scattered in the valleys, +here and there the ground is most fruitful. There is luxuriance close +to barrenness, gracefulness close to dreadfulness, life close to +loneliness. The delight of the painter's eye is here, yet Nature +excels all the skill of art. The very ravines, tortuous foot-paths, +torrents, alternately raging and meagre, the arched bridges, waves on +the lakes, varied dress of the fields, the mighty trees, in short, +whatever heaven and earth grant to the sight, is an astonishment and +a pastime to the enraptured eye of the wanderer.' + +But this pastime depended upon the contrast between the charming +valleys and the dreadful mountains. + +Joseph Furttenbach (1591) writing about the same district of Thusis, +described 'the little bridges, under which one hears the Rhine +flowing with a great roar, and sees what a horrible cruel wilderness +the place is.' In Conrad Gessner's _De admiratione Montium_ (1541)[6] +a passage occurs which shews that even in Switzerland itself in the +sixteenth century one voice was found to praise Alpine scenery in a +very different way, anticipating Rousseau. 'I have resolved that so +long as God grants me life I will climb some mountains every year, or +at least one mountain, partly to learn the mountain flora, partly to +strengthen my body and refresh my soul. What a pleasure it is to see +the monstrous mountain masses, and lift one's head among the clouds. +How it stimulates worship, to be surrounded by the snowy domes, which +the Great Architect of the world built up in one long day of +creation! How empty is the life, how mean the striving of those who +only crawl about on the earth for gain and home-baked pleasures! The +earthly paradise is closed to them.' + +Yet, just as after Rousseau, and even in the nineteenth century, +travellers were to be found who thought the Alps 'dreadful' (I refer +to Chateaubriand's 'hideux'), so such praise as this found no echo in +its own day. + +But with the eighteenth century came a change. Travelling no longer +subserved the one practical end of making acquaintance with the +occupations, the morals, the affairs generally, of other peoples; a +new scientific interest arose, geologists and physicists ventured to +explore the glaciers and regions of perpetual snow, and first +admiration, and then love, supplanted the old feeling of horror. + +Modern methods began with Scheuchzer's (1672-1733) _Itinera Alpina_. +Every corner of the Alps was explored--the Splugen, Julier, Furka, +Gotthard, etc.--and glaciers, avalanches, ores, fossils, plants +examined. Haller, as his verses shew, was botanist as well as +theologian, historian, and poet; but he did not appreciate mountain +beauty. + +Brockes to some extent did. He described the Harz Mountains in the +Fourth Book of his _Earthly Pleasure in God (Irdisches Vergüngen in +Gott)_; and in his _Observations on the Blankenburg Marble_ he said: +'In many parts the rough mountain heights were monstrously beautiful, +their size delights and appals us'; and wound up a discussion of wild +scenery in contrast to cultivated with: 'Ponder this with joy and +reverence, my soul. The mountain heights wild and beautiful shew us a +picture of earthly disorder.'[7] It was very long before expressions +of horror and fear entirely disappeared from descriptions of the +Alps. In Richardson's _Sir Charles Grandison_ we read: 'We bid adieu +to France and found ourselves in Savoy, equally noted for its poverty +and rocky mountains. We had left behind us a blooming Spring, which +enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we +passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers.... Every object +which here presents itself is excessively miserable.' Savoy is 'one +of the worst countries under Heaven.' + +Addison,[8] on the other hand, wrote of the Alps from Ripaille: 'It +was the pleasantest voyage in the world to follow the windings of +this river Inn through such a variety of pleasing scenes as the +course of it naturally led us. We had sometimes on each side of us a +vast extent of naked rocks and mountains, broken into a thousand +irregular steps and precipices ... but, as the materials of a fine +landscape are not always the most profitable to the owner of them, we +met with but little corn or pasturage,' etc. Lady Mary Wortley[9] +Montagu wrote from Lyons, Sept. 25, 1718: 'The prodigious aspect of +mountains covered with eternal snow, clouds hanging far below our +feet, and the vast cascades tumbling down the rocks with a confused +roaring, would have been solemnly entertaining to me, if I had +suffered less from the extreme cold that reigns here.' + +On the whole, Switzerland was little known at the beginning of the +eighteenth century. Many travellers still measured the value of +scenery entirely by fertility, like Keyssler,[10] who praised +garden-like level country such as that round Mantua, in contrast to +the useless wild Tyrolese mountains and the woods of Westphalia; and +Lüneburg or Moser,[11] who observed ironically to Abbt (1763), after +reading _Emilia_ and _La Nouvelle Héloise_: 'The far-famed Alps, +about which so much fuss has been made.' + +Rousseau was the real exponent of rapture for the high Alps and +romantic scenery in general. Isolated voices had expressed some +feeling before him, but it was he who deliberately proclaimed it, and +gave romantic scenery the first place among the beauties of Nature. +He did not, as so many would have it--Du Bois Reymond, for +example--discover our modern feeling for Nature; the great men of the +Renaissance, even the Hellenic poets, fore-ran him; but he directed +it, with feeling itself in general, into new channels.[12] + +In French literature he stood alone; the descriptions of landscape +before him were either borrowed blossoms of antiquity or sentimental +and erotic pastorals. He opened up again for his country the taste +for wood and field, sunshine and moonlight, for the idyllic, and, +above all, for the sublime, which had been lost under artificiality +and false taste. + +The primitive freshness, the genuine ring of his enthusiasm for +country life, was worth all the laboured pastorals and fables of +previous periods of literature. + +His _Confessions_ opened not only the eyes of France, but the heart. + +A Swiss by birth, and living in one of the most beautiful parts of +Europe, Rousseau was devotedly fond of his home on the Lake of +Geneva. As a boy he loved to leave the city and rove in the country. + +He describes how once on a Sunday in 1728 he wandered about, +forgetting the time. 'Before me were fields, trees, flowers; the +beautiful lake, the hill country, and high mountains unfolded +themselves majestically before my eyes. I gloated over the beautiful +spectacle while the sun was setting. At last, too late, I saw that +the city gates were shut.' + +From that time on he felt more drawn to Nature than to men. In the +Fourth Book of the _Confessions_ he says, speaking of 1732: + +'A view of the Lake of Geneva and its beautiful banks has had even in +my idea a particular attraction that I cannot describe, not arising +merely from the beauty of the prospect, but something, I know not +what, more interesting which affects and softens me. 'Every time I +have approached the Vaudois country, I have experienced an impression +composed of the remembrance of Mademoiselle de Warens, who was born +there; of my father, who lived there; of Mademoiselle de Wulson, who +had been my first love; and of several pleasant journeys I had made +there in my childhood, mingled with some nameless charm, more +powerfully attractive than all the rest. When that ardent desire for +a life of happiness and tranquillity (which ever follows me, and for +which I was born) inflames my mind, 'tis ever to the country of Vaud, +near the lake, on those charming plains, that imagination leads me. +An orchard on the banks of that lake, and no other, is absolutely +necessary; a firm friend, an amiable woman, a cow, and a little boat; +nor could I enjoy perfect happiness on earth without these +concomitants.... On my way to Vevey I gave myself up to the soft +melancholy ... I sighed and wept like a child.' + +He clung to Nature, and most of all when surrounded by human beings; +a morbid impulse to flee from them was always present as a negative +element in the background of his love for her. His Fifth Reverie, the +most beautiful one, shews this. + +He had gone to the Peter Island on the Lake of Bienne. So far as he +knew, no other traveller had paid any attention to the place; but +that did not disturb his confidence in his own taste. + +'The shores of the Lake of Bienne are wilder and more romantic than +those of the Lake of Geneva, because the rocks and woods come nearer +to the water; but they are not less radiant. With less cultivation +and fewer vineyards, towns, and houses, there are more green fields +and shady sheltered spots, more contrasts and irregularities. As +there are no good carriage roads on these happy shores, the district +is little frequented by travellers; but it is interesting for the +solitary contemplation of those who like to intoxicate themselves at +their leisure with Nature's charms, and to retire into a silence +unbroken by any sound but the eagle's cry, the intermittent warbling +of birds, and the roar of torrents falling from the mountains,' + +Here he had a delightful Robinson Crusoe existence. The only other +human beings were the Bernese manager with his family and labourers. +He counted his two months among the happiest of his life, and would +have liked to stay for ever. True to his character, he proceeded to +analyze the charm of the episode, and decided that it was made up of +the _dolce far niente_, solitude, absence of books and writing +materials, dealing with simple folk, healthy movement in the open +air, field labour, and, above all, intercourse with Nature, both in +admiring and studying her. He was seized with a passion for +botanizing, and planned a comprehensive Flora Petrinsularis, dividing +the whole island into quarters, so that no part might escape notice. + +'There is nothing more strange than the ravishment, the ecstasy, I +felt at each observation I made upon vegetable structure and +organization. + +'I would go by myself, throw myself into a boat when the water was +calm, and row to the middle of the lake, and then, lying full-length +in the boat with my eyes to the sky, I would let myself drift, +sometimes for hours, lost in a thousand confused but delicious +reveries.... Often when the sunset reminded me that it was time to +return, I found myself so far from the island that I was forced to +pull with all my strength to get back before night-fall. At other +times, instead of wandering about the lake, I amused myself by +skirting the green shores of the island where the limpid water and +cool shade often invited to a bathe.... When the lake was too rough +for rowing, I would spend the afternoon scouring the island, +botanizing right and left. I often sat down to dream at leisure in +sunny, lonely nooks, or on the terraces and hillocks, to gaze at the +superb ravishing panorama of the lake and its shores--one side +crowned by near mountains, the other spread out in rich and fertile +plains, across which the eye looked to the more distant boundary of +blue mountains.... When evening fell, I came down from the higher +parts of the mountains and sat by the shore in some hidden spot, and +there the sound of the waves and the movements of the water, making +me oblivious of all other distraction, would plunge me into delicious +reverie. The ebb and flow of the water, and the sound of it, +restrained and yet swelling at intervals, by striking eye and ear +without ceasing, came to the aid of those inner movements of the mind +which reverie destroys, and sufficed to make me pleasantly conscious +of existence without the trouble of thinking.... There is nothing +actual in all this to which the heart can attach itself; even in our +most intense enjoyment there is scarcely a moment of which the heart +can truly say "I should like it to stay for ever."' + +One thinks of Faust: 'O moment! tarry awhile, thou art so fair!' + +However, at the close of the Reverie he admits that he has often had +such moments--moments free from all earthly passion--on the lake and +on the island. His feeling was increased by botanical knowledge, and +later on in life the world of trees and plants became his one safe +refuge when pursued by delusions of persecution. + +The Seventh Reverie has a touching account of his pleasure in botany, +of the effect of 'earth in her wedding-dress, the only scene in the +world of which eyes and heart never weary,' the intoxicating sense +that he was part of a great system in which individual detail +disappears, and he only sees and hears the whole. + +'Shunning men, seeking solitude, no longer dreaming, still less +thinking, I began to concern myself with all my surroundings, giving +the preference to my favourites...brilliant flowers, emerald meadows, +fresh shade, streams, thickets, green turf, these purified my +imagination.... Attracted by the pleasant objects around, I note +them, study them, and finally learn to classify them, and so become +at one stroke as much of a botanist as one need be when one only +studies Nature to find ever new reasons for loving her. + +'The plants seem sown in profusion over the earth like the stars in +the sky, to invite man, through pleasure and curiosity, to study +them; but the stars are far off; they require preliminary knowledge +... while plants grow under our very feet--lie, so to speak, in our +very hands.' + +He had a peaceful sense of being free from his enemies when +he was pursuing his botany in the woods. He described one +never-to-be-forgotten ramble when he lost himself in a dense thicket +close to a dizzy precipice, where, save for some rare birds, he was +quite alone. He was just feeling the pride of a Columbus in the +discovery of new ground, when his eye fell upon a manufactory not far +off. His first feeling was a flash of delight at finding himself +again among men; but this gave way to the more lasting and painful +one, that even among the Alps there was no escape from his +tormentors. + +Years later, when he knew that he would never revisit the spot, the +leaves in his herbarium would carry him back to it in memory. + +So strong a personal attachment to Nature, solitude, and retirement +had not been known before; but it was thrown into this high relief by +the morbid dread of man and hatred of culture, which formed a +constant dark background to his mind. It was a state of mind which +naturally led to intense dislike of formal French gardens and open +admiration of the English park. He rejected all the garnish of +garden-craft, even grafted roses and fruit trees, and only admitted +indigenous plants which grew outdoors.[13] It is greatly due to his +feeling for English Park style that a healthier garden-craft gained +ground in Germany as well as France. The foremost maxim of his +philosophy and teaching, that everything is good as it comes from the +bosom of mother Nature, or rather from the hand of God, and that man +and his culture are responsible for all the evil, worked out in his +attitude towards Nature. + +He placed her upon a pedestal, worshipping her, and the Creator +through her, and this made him the first to recognize the fact that +study of Nature, especially of botany, should be an important factor +in the education of children. + +His _Confessions_, the truest photographs of a human character in +existence, shew at once the keenest introspection and intense love +for Nature. No one before Rousseau had been so aware of his own +individuality--that is, of himself, as a being--who in this +particular state only exists once, and has therefore not only +relative but absolute value. He gave this peculiarity its full value, +studying it as a thing outside himself, of which every detail was +important, watching with great interest his own change of moods, the +fluctuations of that double self which now lifted him to the ideal, +now cast him down to the lowest and commonest. His relation to Nature +was the best thing about him, and when he was happy, as he was for +the first time in the society of Mademoiselle de Warens, Nature +seemed lovelier than ever. + +The scattered passages about Nature in the _Confessions_ have a +youthful freshness: + +'The appearance of Aurora seemed so delightful one morning, that, +putting on my clothes, I hastened into the country to see the rising +of the sun. I enjoyed that pleasure to its utmost extent. It was one +week after midsummer: the earth was covered with verdure and flowers; +the nightingales, whose soft warblings were almost over, seemed to +vie with each other, and, in concert with birds of various kinds, to +bid adieu to spring and hail the approach of a beautiful summer's +day.' + +He loved rambling over hill and dale, even by night; thus, when he +was at Lyons: + +'It had been a very hot day, the evening was delightful, the dew +moistened the parched grass, no wind was stirring; the air was fresh +without chilliness, the setting sun had tinged the clouds with a +beautiful crimson, which was again reflected by the water, and the +trees bordering the terrace were filled with nightingales that were +constantly answering each other's songs. I walked along in a kind of +ecstasy, surrendering my heart and senses to the enjoyment of so many +delights, and sighing only from regret at enjoying them alone. +Absorbed in this pleasing reverie, I lengthened my walk till it grew +very late, without perceiving I was tired. At length I threw myself +on the steps of a kind of niche in a terrace wall. How charming was +that couch! The trees formed a stately canopy, a nightingale sat +directly over me, and with his soft notes lulled me to rest. How +delicious my repose! my awakening more so. It was broad day; on +opening my eyes, I saw the water, the verdure, and an adorable +landscape before me.' + +At the end of the Fourth Book he states his idea of beautiful +scenery: + +'I love to walk at my ease and stop at leisure ... travelling on foot +in a fine country with fine weather ... and having an agreeable +object to terminate my journey. It is already understood what I mean +by a fine country; never can a flat one, though ever so beautiful, +appear such to my eyes. I must have torrents, fir trees, black woods, +mountains to climb or descend, and rugged roads with precipices on +either side to alarm me. I experienced this pleasure to its utmost +extent as I approached Chambéry, not far from a mountain road called +the Pas d'Échelle. Above the main road, hewn through the solid rock, +a small river runs and rushes into fearful chasms, which it appears +to have been millions of ages in forming. The road has been hedged by +a parapet to prevent accidents, and I was thus enabled to contemplate +the whole descent and gain vertigoes at pleasure, for a great part of +my amusement in these steep rocks lies in their causing a giddiness +and swimming in my head, which I am particularly fond of, provided I +am in safety. Leaning therefore on the parapet, I remained whole +hours, catching from time to time a glance of the froth and blue +water whose rushing caught my ear, mingled with the cries of ravens +and other birds of prey that flew from rock to rock and bush to bush +at 600 feet below me.' + +His preference was for the wild and sublime, and he was glad that +this was not a popular taste; but he could write glowing descriptions +of more idyllic scenery and of village life. + +He said of a day at the Charmettes, a property near Chambéry, with +his beloved friend Madame de Warens, at the end of 1736: + +'I arose with the sun and was happy; I walked and was happy; I saw +Madame de Warens and was happy; I quitted her and still was happy. +Whether I rambled through the woods, over the hills, or strolled +along the valley; read, was idle, worked in the garden, or gathered +fruits, happiness continually accompanied me.' + +He offered his morning prayer from a hill-top, and in the evening, +before he left, stooped to kiss the ground and the trees, gazing till +they were out of sight at the places where he had been so happy. + +At the Hermitage with Thérèse there was a similar idyll. + +The most epoch--making event in European feeling for Nature was the +appearance of _La Nouvelle Héloise_ (1761). The book overflows with +Rousseau's raptures about the Lake of Geneva. St Preux says: + +'The nearer I drew to Switzerland, the greater were my emotions. That +instant in which I discovered the Lake of Geneva from the heights of +Jura, was a moment of ecstasy and rapture. The sight of my country, +my beloved country, where a deluge of pleasure had overflowed my +heart; the pure and wholesome air of the Alps, the gentle breeze of +the country, more sweet than the perfumes of the East; that rich and +fertile spot, that unrivalled landscape, the most beautiful that ever +struck the eye of man, that delightful abode, to which I found +nothing comparable in the vast tour of the globe; the mildness of the +season, the serenity of the climate, a thousand pleasing +recollections which recalled to my mind the pleasures I had +enjoyed;--all these circumstances together threw me into a kind of +transport which I cannot describe, and seemed to collect the +enjoyment of my whole life into one happy moment.' + +_La Nouvelle Héloise_ shewed the world three things in quite a new +light: the inner consciousness which was determined to give feeling +its rights again, though well aware that 'a feeling heart is an +unhappy gift from heaven'; the taste for solitude, 'all noble +passions are formed in solitude'; and closely bound up with these, +the love of romantic scenery, which it described for the first time +in glowing language. + +Such expressions as these of St Preux were unheard of at that time: +'I shall do my best to be free quickly, and able to wander at my ease +in the wild places that to my mind make the charm of this country.' +'I am of opinion that this unfrequented country deserves the +attention of speculative curiosity, and that it wants nothing to +excite admiration but a skilful spectator'; and 'Nature seems +desirous of hiding her real charms from the sight of men, because +they are too little sensible of them, and disfigure them when within +their reach; she flies from public places; it is on the tops of +mountains, in the midst of forests, on desert islands, that she +displays her most affecting charms.' + +Rousseau certainly announced his views with all the fervour of a +prophet proclaiming a newly-discovered truth. The sketch St Preux +gives of the country that 'deserved a year's study,' in the +twenty-third letter to Julia, is very poetic. He is ascending a rocky +path when a new view breaks upon him: + + One moment I beheld stupendous rocks hanging ruinous over my + head; the next, I was enveloped in a drizzling cloud, which arose + from a vast cascade that, dashing, thundered against the rocks + below my feet. On one side a perpetual torrent opened to my view + a yawning abyss, which my eyes could hardly fathom with safety; + sometimes I was lost in the obscurity of a hanging wood, and then + was greatly astonished with the sudden opening of a flowery + plain. + +He was always charmed by 'a surprising mixture of wild and cultivated +Nature': + + Here Nature seems to have a singular pleasure in acting + contradictory to herself, so different does she appear in the + same place in different aspects. Towards the east, the flowers of + spring; to the south, the flowers of autumn; and northwards, the + ice of winter. Add to that the illusions of vision, the tops of + the mountains variously illumined, the harmonious mixture of + light and shade.... + +After climbing, he reflects: + + Upon the top of mountains, the air being subtle and pure, we + respire with greater freedom, our bodies are more active, our + minds more serene, our pleasures less ardent, and our passions + much more moderate. Our meditations acquire a degree of sublimity + from the grandeur of the objects around us. It seems as if, being + lifted above all human society, we had left every low terrestrial + sentiment behind. + +He can find no words to express 'the amazing variety, magnitude, and +beauty of a thousand stupendous objects, the pleasure of gazing at an +entire new scene ... and beholding, as it were, another Nature and a +new world.' + +Earlier in the year he wrote his letters to Julia upon a block of +stone in his favourite wild spot, and the wintry landscape harmonized +with his feelings: + + I run to and fro, climb the rocks and explore my whole district, + and find everything as horrible without as I experienced it + within. There is no longer any verdure to be seen, the grass is + yellow and withered, the trees are stripped of their foliage, and + the north-east blast heaps snow and ice around me. In short, the + whole face of Nature appears as decayed to my outward senses as I + myself from within am dead to hope and joy. + +Julia, too, is enthusiastic about places, where 'no vestiges are seen +of human toil, no appearance of studied and laborious art; every +object presents only a view of the tender care of Nature, our common +mother.' + +When St Preux knows that she returns his love, his sympathy for +Nature overflows: + + I find the country more delightful, the verdure fresher and + livelier, the air more temperate, and the sky more serene than + ever I did before; even the feathered songsters seem to tune + their tender throats with more harmony and pleasure; the + murmuring rills invite to love-inspiring dalliance, while the + blossoms of the vine regale me from afar with the choicest + perfumes ... let us animate all Nature, which is absolutely dead + without the genial warmth of love. + +St Preux escorts his old love to the Meillerie, and it was with his +description of this that Rousseau unrolled the full charm of mountain +scenery, and opened the eyes of his readers to see it. + +They were climbing a mountain top on the Savoy side of the lake: + + This solitary spot formed a wild and desert nook, but full of + those sorts of beauties which are only agreeable to susceptible + minds, and appear horrible to others. A torrent, occasioned by + the melting of the snow, rolled in a muddy stream within twenty + paces of us, and carried dust, sand, and stones along with it, + not without considerable noise. Behind us, a chain of + inaccessible rocks divided the place where we stood from that + part of the Alps which they call the Ice house.... Forests of + gloomy fir trees afforded us a melancholy shade on the right, + while on the left was a large wood of oak, beyond which the + torrent issued; and beneath, that vast body of water which the + lake forms in the bay of the Alps, parted us from the rich coast + of the Pays de Vaud, crowning the whole landscape with the top of + the majestic Jura. + +Rousseau's influence upon feeling in general, and feeling for Nature +in particular, was an extraordinary one, widening and deepening at +once. + +By his strong personal impulse he impelled it into more natural +paths, and at the same time he discovered the power of the mountains. + +He brought to flower the germ which had lain dormant in Hellenism and +the Renaissance; and although his readers imbibed a sickly strain of +morbid sentimentality with this passion for the new region of +feeling, the total effect of his individuality and his idealism was +to intensify their love for Nature. His feelings woke the liveliest +echo, and it was not France alone who profited by the lessons he +taught. + +He was no mountaineer himself, but he pointed out the way, and others +soon followed it. Saussure began his climbing in 1760, exploring the +Alps with the indomitable spirit of the discoverer and the +scientist's craving for truth. He ascended Mont Blanc in 1787, and +only too soon the valleys of Chamounix filled with tourists and +speculators. One of the first results of Rousseau's imposing +descriptions of scenery was to rouse the most ardent of French +romance writers, Bernardin de St Pierre; and his writings, especially +his beautiful pictures of the Ile de France, followed hard in the +wake of _La Nouvelle Héloise_. + +In _Paul and Virginia_ vivid descriptions of Nature were interwoven +with an idyllic Robinson Crusoe romance: + + Within this enclosure reigns the most profound silence. The + waters, the air, all the elements are at peace. Scarcely does the + echo repeat the whispers of the palm trees spreading their broad + leaves, the long points of which are gently agitated by the + winds. A soft light illumines the bottom of this deep valley, on + which the sun shines only at noon. But even at break of day the + rays of light are thrown on the surrounding rocks, and their + sharp peaks, rising above the shadows of the mountain, appear + like tints of gold and purple gleaming upon the azure sky. + +Like Rousseau, St Pierre held that 'to take refuge in the wildest and +most desert places is an instinct common to all feeling and suffering +beings, as if rocks were ramparts against misfortune, and Nature's +calm could appease the sorrows of the soul'[14]; but he differed in +caring for Nature far more for her own sake, and not in opposition to +culture and a detested world. He wrote too, not as a philosopher +proclaiming a new gospel, but as a poet[15]; the poetry of Nature had +been revealed to French literature. + +St Pierre drew the beauty of the tropics in a poem, and George +Forster's _Voyage round the World_[16] shewed how quickly Rousseau's +influence told upon travels. It was a far cry from the Crusaders and +discoverers to the highly-cultured Forster, alive to everything that +was good and beautiful, and able to express it. He was the first to +describe countries and peoples from both the scientific and artistic +standpoint--a style of writing which Humboldt perfected, and some +later writers, Haeckel, for example, in _Indischen Briefen_, have +carried on with success. + +To quote Forster: + + The town of Santa Cruz in Madeira was abreast of us at six in the + afternoon. The mountains are here intersected by numerous deep + glens and valleys. On the sloping ground we observed several + country houses pleasantly situated amidst surrounding vineyards + and lofty cypresses, which gave the country altogether a romantic + appearance. Early on the 29th we were agreeably surprised with + the picturesque appearance of the city of Funchal.... + +In October 1772, off South Africa: + + The night was scarcely begun when the water all round us afforded + the most grand and astonishing sight that can be imagined. As far + as we could see, the whole ocean seemed to be in a blaze. Every + breaking wave had its summit illuminated by a light similar to + that of phosphorus, and the sides of the vessel, coming in + contact with the sea, were strongly marked by a luminous line.... + There was a singularity and a grandeur in the display of this + phenomenon which could not fail of giving occupation to the mind, + and striking it with a reverential awe, due to omnipotence. + + The ocean was covered to a great extent with myriads of + animalcules; these little beings, organized, alive, endowed with + locomotive power, a quality of shining whenever they please, of + illuminating every body with which they come in contact ... all + these ideas crowded upon us, and bade us admire the Creator, even + in His minutest works.... I hope I shall not have formed too + favourable an opinion of my readers, if I expect that the + generality will sympathize with me in these feelings. + +In Dusky Bay: + + We glided along by insensible degrees, wafted by light airs past + numerous rocky islands, each of which was covered with wood and + shrubberies, where numerous evergreens were sweetly contrasted + and mingled with the various shades of autumnal yellow. Flocks of + aquatic birds enlivened the rocky shores, and the whole country + resounded with the wild notes of the feathered tribe.... The view + of rude sceneries in the style of Rosa, of antediluvian forests + which clothed the rock, and of numerous rills of water which + everywhere rolled down the steep declivity, altogether conspired + to complete our joy. + +Cascade Cove in New Zealand: + + This waterfall at a distance of a mile and a half seems to be but + inconsiderable on account of its great elevation; but, after + climbing about 200 yards upwards, we ... found a view of great + beauty and grandeur before us. The first object which strikes the + beholder is a clear column of water eight or ten yards in + circumference, which is projected with great impetuosity from the + perpendicular rock at the height of 100 yards. Nearly at the + fourth part of the whole height this column meeting a part of the + same rock, which now acquires a little inclination, spreads on + its broad back into a limpid sheet of about twenty-five yards in + width. Here its surface is curled, and dashes upon every little + eminence in its rapid descent, till it is all collected in a fine + basin about sixty yards in circuit, included on three sides by + the natural walls of the rocky chasm, and in front by huge masses + of stone irregularly piled above each other. Between them the + stream finds its way, and runs foaming with the greatest rapidity + along the slope of the hill to the sea. The whole neighbourhood + of the cascade ... is filled with a steam or watery vapour.... We + ... were struck with the sight of a most beautiful rainbow of a + perfectly circular form, produced by the meridian rays of the sun + refracted in the vapour of the cascade. + + The scenery on the left consists of steep brown rocks fringed on + the summits with overhanging shrubs and trees; the enchanting + melody of various birds resounded on all sides, and completed the + beauty of this wild and romantic spot. + +He described: 'A waterspout, a phenomenon which carried so much +terrific majesty in it, and connected, as it were, the sea with the +clouds, made our oldest mariners uneasy and at a loss how to behave.' + +He begins his diary of August 1773 with O'Taheite: + + It was one of those beautiful mornings which the poets of all + nations have attempted to describe, when we saw the isle of + O'Taheite within two miles before us. The east wind, which had + carried us so far, was entirely vanished, and a faint breeze only + wafted a delicious perfume from the land, and curled the surface + of the sea. The mountains, clothed with forests, rose majestic in + various spiry forms, on which we already perceived the light of + the rising sun ... everything seemed as yet asleep; the morning + scarce dawned, and a peaceful shade still rested on the + landscape.... + + This spot was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and + could not fail of bringing to remembrance the most fanciful + descriptions of poets, which it eclipsed in beauty; we had a + prospect of the plain below us, and of the sea beyond it. In the + shade of trees, whose branches hung over the water, we enjoyed a + pleasant gale, which softened the heat of the day; and, amidst + the solemn uniform noise of the waterfall, which was but seldom + interrupted by the whistling of birds, we sat down.... + + We could have been well pleased to have passed the whole day in + this retirement ... however, feasting our eyes once more with the + romantic scenery, we returned to the plain. + +It was such descriptions as these which stimulated Humboldt. There is +a breath of poetry in his writings; his _Views of Nature_ and +_Cosmos_ give ample proof that love of Nature and knowledge of Nature +can condition and deepen each other. + +It is not surprising that in the flood of scientific 'Travels' which +followed, especially in imitation of Forster, there were some that +laid claim to a wonderful grade of feeling. For example, the +description of a day at the Equator by von Spix and v. Martius in +their Travels in Brazil in 1817 to 1820: + + In these seas the sun rises from the ocean with great splendour, + and gilds the clouds accumulated in the horizon, which in grand + and various groups seem to present to the eye of the spectator + continents with high mountains and valleys, with volcanoes and + seas, mythological and other strange creations of fancy. + + The lamp of day gradually rises in the transparent blue sky; the + damp grey fogs subside; the sea is calm or gently rises and + falls, with a surface smooth as a mirror, in a regular motion. At + noon a pale, faintly shining cloud rises, the herald of a sudden + tempest, which at once disturbs the tranquillity of the sea. + Thunder and lightning seem as if they would split our planet; but + a heavy rain of a salt taste, pouring down in the midst of + roaring whirlwinds, puts an end to the raging of the elements, + and several semi-circular rainbows, extended over the ocean like + gay triumphal arches, announce the peaceful termination of the + great natural phenomenon. As soon as the air and sea have + recovered their equilibrium, the sky again shews its transparent + azure.... As the sun gradually sinks in the clouded horizon, the + sea and sky assume a new dress, which is beyond description + sublime and magnificent. The most brilliant red, yellow, violet, + in infinite shades and contrasts, are poured out in profusion + over the azure of the firmament, and are reflected in still gayer + variety from the surface of the water. The day departs amid + continued lightning on the dusky horizon, while the moon in + silent majesty rises from the unbounded ocean into the cloudless + upper regions. Variable winds cool the atmosphere; numerous + falling stars, coming particularly from the south, shed a magic + light; the dark-blue firmament, reflected with the constellations + on the untroubled bosom of the water, represents the image of the + wholly starry hemisphere; and the ocean, agitated even by the + faintest breeze of the night, is changed into a sea of waving + fire.... The variety of the light and foliage of the trees, which + is seen in the forests, on the slopes of the mountains: the + blending of the most diverse colours, and the dark azure and + transparency of the sky, impart to the landscapes of the tropical + countries a charm to which even the pencil of a Salvator Rosa and + a Claude cannot do justice.... + + Except at noon, when all living creatures in the torrid zone seek + shade and repose, and when a solemn silence is diffused over the + scene, illumined by the dazzling beams of the sun, every hour of + the day calls into action another race of animals.... When the + sun goes down, most of the animals retire to rest ... myriads of + luminous beetles now begin to fly about like _ignes fatui_, and + the blood-sucking bats hover like phantoms in the profound + darkness of the night.... The traveller does not here meet with + the impressions of those sublime and rugged high Alps of Europe, + nor, on the other hand, those of a meaner nature; but the + character of these landscapes combines grandeur with simplicity + and softness.... + + He who has not personally experienced the enchantment of tranquil + moonlight nights in these happy latitudes can never be inspired, + even by the most faithful description, with those feelings which + scenes of such wondrous beauty excite in the mind of the + beholder. + + A delicate transparent mist hangs over the country, the moon + shines brightly amid heavy and singularly grouped clouds, the + outlines of the objects illuminated by it are clear and well + defined, while a magic twilight seems to remove from the eye + those which are in shade. Scarce a breath of air is stirring, and + the neighbouring mimosas, that have folded up their leaves to + sleep, stand motionless beside the dark crowns of the manga, the + jaca, and the ethereal jambos; or sometimes a sudden wind arises + and the juiceless leaves of the acaju rustle, the richly flowered + grumijama and pitanga let drop a fragrant shower of snow-white + blossoms; the crowns of the majestic palms wave slowly over the + silent roof which they overshade, like a symbol of peace and + tranquillity. + + Shrill cries of the cicada, the grasshopper, and tree frog make + an incessant hum, and produce by their monotony a pleasing + melancholy.... Every half-hour different balsamic odours fill the + air, and other flowers alternately unfold their leaves to the + night.... While the silent vegetable world, illuminated by scores + of fireflies as by a thousand moving stars, charms the night by + its delicate effluvia, brilliant lightnings play incessantly on + the horizon, and elevate the mind in joyful admiration to the + stars, which, glowing in solemn silence in the firmament above + the continent and ocean, fill the soul with a presentiment of + still sublimer wonders. + +Travels by sea were described at much greater length and with much +more effusion than travels by land; one might infer from the silence +of the people who moved about in Europe in the eighteenth century, +that no love of Nature existed. The extreme discomfort of the road up +to a hundred years ago may account for this silence within Germany. + +Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in 1716 of Saxon Switzerland: + + We passed by moonshine the frightful precipices that divide + Bohemia from Saxony, at the bottom of which runs the river Elbe + ... in many places the road is so narrow that I could not discern + an inch of space between the wheels and the precipice.... + +and her husband declared that + + he had passed the Alps five times in different places, without + having gone a road so dangerous. + +Scherr relates that in the late autumn of 1721 a citizen of +Schwabisch-Gmünd travelled to Ellwangen, a distance of eight hours' +posting. + +Before starting, he had a mass performed in St John's Church 'for the +safe conclusion of the coming journey.' He set off one Monday with +his wife and a maid in a two-horse vehicle called a small tilt waggon +(_Planwägelchen_), but in less than an hour the wheels stuck in mud, +and the whole party had to get out and push the carriage, up to their +knees in filth. In the middle of the village of Boebingen the driver +inadvertently drove the front left wheel into a manure hole, the +carriage was overturned, and the lady of the party had her nose and +cheek badly grazed by the iron hoops. + +From Moeggelingen to Aalen they were obliged to use three horses, and +yet it took fully six hours, so that they were obliged to spend the +night there. Next morning they set off early, and reached the village +of Hofen by mid-day without accidents. Here for a time the travelling +ceased, for a hundred paces beyond the village the carriage fell into +a puddle, and they were all terribly soiled; the maid's right +shoulder was dislocated, and the manservant's hand injured. The axle +of one of the wheels was broken, and a horse completely lamed in the +left forefoot. They had to put up a second time for the night, leave +horses, carriage, man, and maid in Hofen, and hire a rack waggon, in +which at last, pitifully shaken, they reached the gates of Ellwangen +on Wednesday at vesper bells. + +When Eva König, Lessing's _fiancée_, was on her way from Brunswick to +Nuremberg in 1772, she wrote to him from Rattelsdorf (two miles north +of Bamberg), on February 28th, as follows: + + You will certainly never in your life have heard of a village + called Rattelsdorf? We have been in it already twenty-four hours, + and who knows if we shall not have to stay four times as long! It + depends on the Maine, whether it falls or not; as it is now, one + could not cross it, even if one dared to. I have never in my life + met with so many hindrances, so many dangers and hardships, as on + this journey. I can hardly think of any misfortunes which we have + not already had. + +She goes on to describe that in thirty-eight hours two axles and two +poles had been broken, the horses had bolted with them, one horse had +fallen and died, and so on; on March 2nd they were still prisoners in +the wretched village. + +In 1750 a day's journey was still reckoned at five miles, two hours +to the mile; and when in July 1750 Klopstock travelled with Gleim +from Halberstadt to Magdeburg in a light carriage drawn by four +horses, at the rate of six miles in six hours, he thought this speed +remarkable enough to merit comparison with the racing in the Olympian +games. People of any pretensions shunned the discomforts of +travelling on foot--the bad roads, the insecurity, the dirty inns, +and the rough treatment in them; to walk abroad in good clothes and +admire the scenery was an unknown thing. (G. Freytag.) + +It was only after the widening of thoroughfares, the invention of +steamboats (the first was on the Weser 1827) and railways (1835), +that travelling became commoner and more popular, and feeling for +Nature was thereby increased. + +After the Swiss Alps had been discovered for them, people began to +feel interest in their native mountains; Zimmermann led the way with +his observations on a journey in the Harz 1775, and Gatterer in 1785 +published _A Guide to Travelling in the Harz_ in five volumes. + +In 1806 appeared Nicolas's _Guide to Switzerland_, in 1777 J.T. +Volkmar's _Journey to the Riesengebirge_, and before long each little +country and province, be it Weimar, Mecklenburg, or the Mark, had +discovered a Switzerland within its own boundaries, with mountains as +much like the Swiss Alps as a charming little girl is like a giant. + +It was the opening of men's eyes to the charms of romantic scenery at +home. + +The Isle of Rügen too, Swedish at that time, with its striking +contrasts of deep blue bays and inlets, chalk rocks and beech woods, +came into fashion with lovers of Nature, especially after the road +from Sagard to Stubbenkamer had been improved[17]--so much so, in +fact, that in 1805 Grümbke was complaining that many people only went +there to feast, not to enjoy the scene: + + You know I am no foe to pleasure, and appreciate my food and + drink after physical exertion as much as any one; but it is + desecration to make that the main object here. In this dreadfully + beautiful wilderness, under these green corridors of beeches, on + the battlements of this great dazzling temple, before this huge + azure mirror of the sea, only high and serious thoughts should + find a place--the whole scene, stamped as it is with majesty and + mystery, seems designed to attract the mind to the hidden life of + the unending world around it. For this, solitude and rest are + necessary conditions, hence one must visit Stubbenkamer either + alone or with intimate and congenial friends. + + + + +CHAPTER XII + +THE UNIVERSAL PANTHEISTIC FEELING OF +MODERN TIMES + + +The eighteenth century, so proudly distinguished as the century of +Frederic the Great and Maria Theresa, Kant and Lessing, Rousseau and +Voltaire, the age of enlightenment, and, above all, of the +Revolution, was the most sentimental period in history. Its feeling +for Nature bore the same stamp. Many of the Anacreontists and +Göttingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but +their horizon was narrow, and though F. Stolberg sang of the sea and +his native mountains, most of them only rang the changes on moonlight +and starlight, pastoral idylls, the joys of spring, and winter +excursions on the ice. Even Rousseau, the prophet of high mountains, +was the child of the same sentimental, self-adoring time; a morbid +strain, call it misanthropy, melancholy, what you will, underlay all +his passion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which +lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful +souls, moonshine poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, and +_La Nouvelle Héloise_, ennobled and purified the tone of the day and +freed it from convention! + +It was by dint of his genius for expression, the gift of finding the +one right word, that he became the world's greatest lyrist: what he +felt became a poem, what he saw a picture. + +To see and to fashion into poetry were one with him, whereas his +predecessors had called out the whole artillery of Olympus--nymphs, +Oreads, Chloe, Phyllis, Damon, Aurora, Echo, and Zephyr--even the +still heavier ordnance of the old Teutonic gods and half-gods, only +to repeat stereotyped ideas, and produce descriptions of scenery, +without lyric thought and feeling. + +But Goethe's genius passed through very evident stages of +development, and found forerunners in Lessing and Herder. + +Lessing's mind was didactic and critical, not lyric, so that his +importance here is a negative one. In laying down the limits of +poetry and painting in _Laocoon_, he attacked the error of his day +which used poetry for pictures, debasing it to mere descriptions of +seasons, places, plants, etc. + +He was dealing with fundamental principles when he said: + + Simonides called painting dumb poetry, and poetry speaking + painting; but ... many modern critics have drawn the crudest + conclusions possible from this agreement between painting and + poetry. At one time they confine poetry within the narrow limits + of painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide + sphere of poetry.... This fault-finding criticism has partially + misled the virtuosos themselves. In poetry a fondness for + description, and in painting a fancy for allegory, has arisen + from the desire to make the one a speaking picture without really + knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem + without having considered in how far painting can express + universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and + degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.... Since the + artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing Nature, and + the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to + a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to + be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently + the most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect must be + chosen. Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the + imagination. The more we see, the more we must be able to + imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see. + +And against descriptive poetry he said: + + When a poetaster, says Horace, can do nothing else, he falls to + describing a grove, an altar, a brook winding through pleasant + meadows, a rushing river, or a rainbow. Pope expressly enjoined + upon every one who would not prove himself unworthy the name of + poet, to abandon as early as possible this fondness for + description. A merely descriptive poem he declared to be a feast + made up of sauces. + +Acute as his distinction was between poetry as the representative art +of actions in time, and painting as the representative art of bodies +in space, he did not give due value to lyric feeling or landscape +painting.[1] They belong to a region in which his sharp, critical +acumen was not at home. + +But his discussions established the position that external objects of +any sort, including Nature in all her various shapes, are not proper +subjects for poetry when taken as Thomson, Brockes, and Haller took +them, by themselves alone, but must first be imbued with human +feeling. And the same holds good of landscape painting. Goethe's +lyrics are the most perfect examples of this blending of the outer +and inner world. + +Lessing's criticisms had a salutary, emancipating effect upon +prevalent taste; but a more positive influence came into play through +Herder's warm predilection for the popular songs, which had been so +long neglected, and for all that rises, as in the Psalms, Homer, +Shakespeare, Ossian, from primitive sources of feeling, and finds +spontaneous expression in poetry. The effect of his pioneering was +marked, especially upon Goethe. Herder understood the revulsion of +feeling from the unnatural restraint of the Pigtail period, and while +holding up the mirror to his own day, he at the same time led its +taste and the expression of it towards what was simple and natural, +by disclosing the treasures which lay hidden in the poetry of the +people. The lyric was freed from the artificiality and convention +which had so long ruled it, and although he did not carry out his +plan of a history of poetry, his collections and his profound remarks +upon them were of great service, sowing a seed that bore fruit in +succeeding days. + +The popular songs to him were children of the same mother as the +plants and flowers. 'All the songs of such unlettered folk,'[2] he +said, 'weave a living world around existing objects, actions, and +events. How rich and manifold they all become! And the eye can +actually see them, the mind realize them; they are set in motion. The +different parts of the song are no more connected together than the +trees and bushes in a wood, the rocks in a desert, or the scenes +depicted.' In another place[3] he put the history of feeling for +Nature very tersely: 'There is no doubt that the spirit of man is +made gentler by studying Nature. What did the classics aim at in +their Georgics, but under various shapes to make man more humane and +raise him gradually to order, industry, and prosperity, and to the +power to observe Nature?...' Hence, when poetry revived in the Middle +Ages, she soon recollected the true land of her birth among the +plants and flowers. The Provencal and the romantic poets loved the +same descriptions. Spenser, for instance, has charming stanzas about +beautiful wilds with their streams and flowers; Cowley's six books on +plants, vegetables, and trees are written with extraordinary +affection and a superfluity of imagination; and of our old Brockes, +Gessner says: 'He observed Nature's many beauties down to their +finest minutiæ, the smallest things move his tender feelings; a +dewdrop on a blade of grass in the sunshine inspires him. His scenes +are often too laboured, too wide in scope, but still his poems are a +storehouse of pictures direct from Nature. Haller's _Alps_, Kleist's +poems and Gessner's, Thomson's _Seasons_, speak for themselves.' + +He delighted in Shaftesbury's praises of Nature as the good and +beautiful in the _Moralists_, and translated it[4]; in fact, in +Herder we have already an æsthetic cult of the beauties of Nature. + +After the moral disquisitions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, etc., +Nature's influence on man, moral and æsthetic, became, as we have +already seen, a favourite theme in Germany too, both in pious and +rationalistic circles[5]; but there are few traces of any æsthetic +analysis. + +The most important one was Kant's, in his _Observations on the +Beautiful and Sublime_ in 1764. He distinguished, in the finer +feeling for Nature, a feeling for the sublime and a feeling for the +beautiful. + + Both touch us pleasantly, but in different ways. The sight of a + mountain with a snowy peak reaching above the clouds, the account + of a storm ... these excite pleasure, but mixed with awe; while + flowery meadows, valleys with winding streams and covered by + browsing herds, a description of Elysium ... also cause pleasant + feelings, but of a gay and radiant kind. To appreciate the first + sensations adequately, we must have a feeling for the sublime; to + appreciate the second, a feeling for the beautiful. + +He mentioned tall oaks, lonely shades in consecrated groves, and +night-time, as sublime; day, beds of flowers, low hedges, and trees +cut into shapes, as beautiful. + + Minds which possess the feeling for the sublime are inclined to + lofty thoughts of friendship, scorn of the world, eternity, by + the quiet stillness of a summer evening, when the twinkling + starlight breaks the darkness. The light of day impels to + activity and cheerfulness. The sublime soothes, the beautiful + stimulates. + +He goes on to subdivide the sublime: + + This feeling is sometimes accompanied by horror or by dejection, + sometimes merely by quiet admiration, at other times by a sense + of wide-spread beauty. I will call the first the terrible, the + second the noble, the third the splendid sublime. + + Profound solitude is sublime, but in a terrible way. This is why + great deserts, like the Desert of Gamo in Tartary, have always + been the supposed abode of fearful shades, hobgoblins, and + ghostly spectres. The sublime is always great and simple; the + beautiful may be small, elaborate, and ornamental. + +He tried, too, to define the romantic in Nature, though very vaguely: + + The dreadful variety of the sublime, when quite unnatural, is + adventurous. When sublimity or beauty is excessive, it is called + romantic. + +In his _Kalligone_, which appeared in 1800, Herder quoted Kant in +making one of the characters say, 'One calls day beautiful, night +sublime,' and tried to carry the idea a step further; 'The sublime +and beautiful are not opposed to each other, but stem and boughs of a +tree whose top is the most sublimely beautiful of all,' that is the +romantic. In the same book he attempted to analyze his impressions of +Nature, calling a rugged place odious, an insignificant one without +character tedious. 'In the presence of great mountains,' he says, +'the spirit is filled with bold aspirations, whereas in gentle +valleys it lies quiet.' Harmony in variety was his ideal, like the +sea in storm and calm. 'An ocean of beautiful forms in rest and +movement.' + +And in reference to the contrast between a place made 'dreadful and +horrible' by a torrent dashing over rocks and a quiet and charming +valley, he said: 'These changes follow unalterable laws, which are +recognized by our minds, and in harmony with our feelings.' He saw +the same order in variety among plants, from the highest to the +lowest, from palm tree to moss. In the second part of the book he +gave an enthusiastic description of the sublime in sky and sea. + +His beautiful words on the inspiration of Nature shew his insight +into her relation to the poet soul of the people: + + Everything in Nature must be inspired by life, or it does not + move me, I do not feel it. The cooling zephyr and the morning + sunbeam, the wind blowing through the trees, and the fragrant + carpet of flowers, must cool, warm, pervade us--then we feel + Nature. The poet does not say he feels her, unless he feels her + intensely, living, palpitating and pervading him, like the wild + Nature of Ossian, or the soft luxuriant Nature of Theocritus and + the Orientals. In Nature, the more varieties the better; for + instance, in a beautiful country I rustle with the wind and + become alive (and give life--inspire), I inhale fragrance and + exhale it with the flowers; I dissolve in water; I float in the + blue sky; I feel all these feelings. + +Herder touched the lyre himself with a skilful hand. Thought +predominated with him, but he could make Nature live in his song.[7] +'I greet thee, thou wing of heaven,' he sang to the lark; and to the +rainbow, 'Beautiful child of the sun, picture and hope over dark +clouds ... hopes are colours, are broken sun-rays and the children of +tears, truth is the sun.' + +In _By the Sea at Naples_ he wrote: + + A-weary of the summer's fiery brand, + I sat me down beside the cooling sea, + Where the waves heaving, rolled and kissed the strand + Of the grey shore, ... + And over me, high over in the air, + Of the blue skyey vault, rustled the tree ... + Queen of all trees, slender and beautiful, + The pine tree, lifting me to golden dreams. + +In _Recollections of Naples_: + + Yes! they are gone, those happy, happy hours + Joyous but short, by Posilippo's bay! + Sweet dream of sea and lake, of rock and hill, + Grotto and island, and the mirrored sun + In the blue water--thou hast passed away! + +and + + When the glow of evening softly fades + From the still sea, and with her gleaming host + The moon ascends the sky. + +_Night_ is very poetic: + + And comest thou again, + Thou Mother of the stars and heavenly thoughts? + Divine and quiet Mother, comest thou? + The earth awaits thee, from thy chalice cup + But one drop of thy heavenly dew to quaff, + Her flowers bend low their heads; + And with them, satiate with vision, droops + My overcharged soul.... + O starry goddess with the crown of gold, + Upon whose wide-spread sable mantle gleam + A thousand worlds ... + Silence divine, that filleth all the world, + Flowing so softly to the eternal shores + Of an eternal universe.... + +And in _St John's Night_, he exclaims: + + Infinite, ah! inexhaustible art thou, Mother Nature! + +Like the rest, Herder suffered from the over-sensitiveness of his +day. His correspondence with his _fiancée_ shews this[8]; one sees +Rousseau's influence: + + My pleasantest hours are when, quite alone, I walk in a charming + wood close to Bückeburg, or lie upon a wall in the shade of my + garden, or lastly, for we have had capital moonlight for three + nights, and the last was the best of all, when I enjoy these + hours of sweetly sleeping night with all the songs of the + nightingale. + + I reckon no hours more delightful than those of green solitude. I + live so romantically alone, and among woods and churches, as only + poets, lovers, and philosophers can live. + +And his _fiancée_ wrote: + + 'Tis all joy within and around me since I have known thee, my + best beloved: every plant and flower, everything in Nature, seems + beautiful to me. + +and + + I went early to my little room; the moon was quite covered by + clouds, and the night so melancholy from the croaking of the + frogs, that I could not leave the window for a long time: my + whole soul was dark and cloudy; I thought of thee, my dear one, + and that thought, that sigh, reduced me to tears. + +and + + Do you like the ears of wheat so much? I never pass a cornfield + without stroking them. + +Goethe focussed all the rays of feeling for Nature which had found +lyrical expression before him, and purged taste, beginning with his +own, of its unnatural and sickly elements. So he became the +liberating genius of modern culture. Not only did German lyric poetry +reach its climax in him; but he was the most accurate, individual, +and universal interpreter of German feeling for Nature. + +His wide original mind kept open house for the most diverse elements +of feeling, and exercised an ennobling control upon each and all at +will; Homer's naivete, Shakespeare's sympathy, Rousseau's enthusiasm, +even Ossian's melancholy, found room there. + +While most love lyrics of his day were false in feeling, mere raving +extravagances, and therefore poor in those metaphors and comparisons +which prove sympathy between Nature and the inner life, it could be +said of him that 'Nature wished to know what she looked like, and so +she created Goethe.' He was the microcosm in which the macrocosm of +modern times was reflected. + +He was more modern and universal than any of his predecessors, and +his insight into Nature and love for her have been rarely equalled in +later days. He did not live, like so many of the elegiac and idyllic +poets of the eighteenth century, a mere dream-life of the +imagination: Goethe stood firmly rooted among the actualities; from +boyhood up, as he said in _Wahrheit und Dichtung_, he had 'a warm +feeling for all objective things.' + +No poet, Klopstock not excepted, was richer in verbal invention, and +many of the phrases and epithets which he coined form in themselves +very striking evidence (which is lost in translation) of his close +and original observation of Nature. + +He has many beautiful comparisons to Nature: + +His lady-love is 'brightly beautiful as morning clouds on yonder +height.' + +'I was wont to look at thee as one looks at the stars and moon, +delighting in thee without the most distant wish in my quiet breast +to possess thee.' + +'I give kisses as the spring gives flowers.' + +'My feeling for thee was like seed, which germinates slowly in +winter, but ripens quickly in summer.' + +The stars move 'with flower feet.' + +The graces are 'pure as the heart of the waters, as the marrow of +earth.' + +A delicate poem is a rainbow only existing against a dark ground. + +In _Stella_: + + Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to + return to thy breast from the sandy desert world. + + I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning. + +In _Faust_: + + The cataract bursting through the rocks is the image of human + effort; its coloured reflection the image of life. + +When Werther feels himself trembling between existence and +non-existence, everything around him sinking away, and the world +perishing with him: + + The past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the + future. + +These are among his still more numerous metaphors: + +A sea of folly, an ocean of fragrance, the waves of battle, the +stream of genius, the tiger claw of despair, the sun-ray of the past. +Iphigenia says to Orestes: + + O let the pure breath of love blow lightly on thy heart's flame + and cool it. + +and Eleonora complains about Tasso: + + Let him go! But what twilight falls round me now! Formerly the + stream carried us along upon the light waves without a rudder. + +In Goethe we see very clearly how the inner life, under the pressure +of its own intensity, will, so to speak, overflow into the outer +world, making that live in its turn; and how this is especially the +case when the amorous passion is present to add its impetus to +feeling, and attribute its own fervour to all around. + +_May Song_, _On the Lake_, _Ganymede_, are instances of this. + +_Ganymede_: + + Oh, what a glow + Around me in morning's + Blaze thou diffusest, + Beautiful spring! + With the rapture of love but intenser, + Intenser and deeper and sweeter, + Nestles and creeps to my heart + The sensation divine + Of thy fervour eternal, + Oh, thou unspeakably fair! + +Beautiful personifications abound: + +The sun is proudly throned in heaven. + +The glowing sun gazes at the rugged peak or charms it with fiery +love, + +Or bathes like the moon in the ocean. + +The parting glance of Mother Sun broods on the grapes. + +'Morning came frightening away light sleep with its footsteps.' + +'The young day arose with delight.' + +The moon: 'Thou spreadest thy glance soothingly over my abode.' + +On a cloudy night: 'Evening already rocked earth, and night hung on +the mountains; from a hill of clouds the moon looked mournfully out +of the mist.' + +'The lofty stars turn their clear eyes down to me.' + +Even the rock lives: 'The hard rock opens its bosom, not envying +earth its deep springs.' + +The stream: 'Thou hurriest on with joyful light mood; see the rock +spring bright with the glance of the stars, yet no shady valley, no +flowers make him tarry ... his course winds downwards to the plain, +then he scatters in delightful spray, in cloud waves ... foams +gloomily to the abyss.' + + With gradual step from out the far-off grey, + Self-heralded draws on the storm. + Birds on the wing fly low across the water, weighted down, + And seamen hasten to reef in the sail + Before its stubborn wrath. + +His flowers are alive: + + The beauteous snowdrops + Droop o'er the plain, + The crocus opens + Its glowing bud ... + With saucy gesture + Primroses flare, + And roguish violets + Hidden with care. + +But these are only examples. To obtain a clear idea of Goethe's +attitude, we must take a more general survey of his work, for his +poetic relationship to Nature, like his mental development in +general, passed through various stages of growth. That it was a warm +one even in youth is shewn by the letter in 1766 from Leipzig[9]: + + You live contented in M. I even so here. Lonely, lonely, + altogether lonely. Dearest Riese, this loneliness has impressed + my soul with a certain sadness. + + This solitary joy is mine, + When far apart from all mankind, + By shady brook-side to recline. + And keep my loved ones in my mind.... + +He goes on with these lines: + + Then is my heart with sorrow filled, + Sad is mine eye. + The flooded brook now rages by, + That heretofore so gently rilled. + No bird sings in the bushes now, + The tree so green is dry, + The zephyr which on me did blow + So cheering, now storms northerly, + And scattered blossoms bears on high. + +He was already in full sympathy with Nature. A few of his earlier +poems[10] shew prevalent taste, the allusions to Zephyr and Lima, for +instance, in _Night_; but they are followed by lines which are all +his own. + +He had an incomparable way of striking the chords of love and Nature +together. + +Where his lady-love dwells, 'there is love, and goodness is Nature.' +He thinks of her + + When the bright sunlight shimmers + Across the sea, + When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers. + + Thou art seductive and charming; flowers, + Sun, moon, and stars only worship thee. + +There is passionate feeling for Nature in the _May Song_ of his +Sesenheimer period: + + How gloriously gleameth + All Nature to me! + How bright the sun beameth, + How fresh is the lea! + White blossoms are bursting + The thickets among, + And all the gay greenwood + Is ringing with song! + There's radiance and rapture + That nought can destroy, + Oh earth, in thy sunshine, + Oh heart, in thy joy. + Oh love! thou enchanter + So golden and bright, + Like the red clouds of morning + That rest on yon height, + It is them that art clothing + The fields and the bowers, + And everywhere breathing + The incense of flowers. + +Looking back in old age to those happy days of youth, he saw in +memory not only Frederica but the scenery around her. He said +(_Wahrheit und Dichtung_): 'Her figure never looked more charming +than when she was moving along a raised footpath; the charm of her +bearing seemed to vie with the flowering ground, and the +indestructible cheerfulness of her face with the blue sky.' In Alsace +he wrote: + + One has only to abandon oneself to the present in order to enjoy + the charms of the sky, the glow of the rich earth, the mild + evenings, the warm nights, at the side of one's love, or near + her. + +and one of the poems to Frederica says: + + The world lies round me buried deep in mist, but + In one glance of thine lies sunshine and happiness. + +There is a strong pulse of life--life that overflows into Nature--in +_The Departure_: + + To horse! Away, o'er hill and steep, + Into the saddle blithe I spring; + The eve was cradling earth to sleep, + And night upon the mountains hung. + With robes of mist around him set, + The oak like some huge giant stood, + While, with its hundred eyes of jet, + Peer'd darkness from the tangled wood. + Amid a bank of clouds the moon + A sad and troubled glimmer shed; + The wind its chilly wings unclosed, + And whistled wildly round my head. + Night framed a thousand phantoms dire, + Yet did I never droop nor start; + Within my veins what living fire! + What quenchless glow within my heart! + +And very like it, though in a minor key, is the Elegy which begins, +'A tender, youthful trouble.' + +He tells in _Wahrheit und Dichtung_ how he found comfort for his love +troubles in Frankfort: + + They were accustomed to call me, on account of wandering about + the district, the 'wanderer.' In producing that calm for the + mind, which I felt under the open sky, in the valleys, on the + heights, in the fields, and in the woods, the situation of + Frankfort was serviceable.... On the setting in of winter a new + world was revealed to us, since I at once determined to skate.... + For this new joyous activity we were also indebted to Klopstock, + to his enthusiasm for this happy species of motion.... To pass a + splendid Sunday thus on the ice did not satisfy us, we continued + in movement late into the night.... The full moon rising from the + clouds, over the wide nocturnal meadows which were frozen into + fields of ice, the night breeze which rustled towards us on our + course, the solemn thunder of the ice which sunk as the water + decreased, the strange echo of our own movements, rendered the + scenes of Ossian just present to our minds. + +His attachment, to Lotte, stirred far deeper feelings than the +earlier ones to Frederica and Lilli: + + (If I, my own dear Lilli, loved thee not, How should I joy to + view this scene so fair! And yet if I, sweet Lilli, loved thee + not, Should I be happy here or anywhere?) + +and drew him correspondingly nearer to Nature. + +There is no book in any language which so lives and moves and has its +being in Nature as _Werther_.[11] In _Wahrheit und Dichtung_ Goethe +said of the 'strange element' in which _Werther_ was designed and +written: + + I sought to free myself internally from all that was foreign to + me, to regard the external with love, and to allow all beings, + from man downwards, as low as they were comprehensible, to act + upon me, each after its own kind. Thus arose a wonderful affinity + with the single objects of Nature, and a hearty concord, a + harmony with the whole, so that every change, whether of place or + region, or of the times of the day and year, or whatever else + could happen, affected me in the deepest manner. The glance of + the painter associated itself with that of the poet; the + beautiful rural landscape, animated by the pleasant river, + increased my love of solitude and favoured my silent observations + as they extended on all sides. + +The strong influence of _La Nouvelle Héloise_ upon _Werther_ was very +evident, but there was a marked difference between Goethe's feeling +for Nature and Rousseau's. Rousseau had the painter's eye, but not +the keen poetic vision. + +Goethe's romances are pervaded by the penetrating quality peculiar to +his nation, and by virtue of which in _Werther_, the outer world, the +scenery, was not used as framework, but was always interwoven with +the hero's mood. The contrast between culture and Nature is always +marked in Rousseau, and his religion was deism; Goethe resolves +Nature into feeling, and his religion was a growing pantheism. As a +work of art, _Werther_ is excellent, _La Nouvelle Héloise_ is not. +Goethe used his hero's bearing towards Nature with marvellous effect +to indicate the turns and changes of his moods, just as he indicated +the threatening calamity and the growing apprehension of it by +skilful stress laid upon some of her little traits--a faculty which +only Theodore Storm among later poets has caught from him. + +The growth of amorous passion is portrayed as an elementary force, +and the revolutionary element in the book really consists in the +strength of this passion and the assertion of its natural rights. +Everything artificial, forced, conventional, in thought, act, and +feeling--and what at that time was not?--was repugnant to Werther; +what he liked most of all was the simplicity of children and +uneducated people. + + Nothing distresses me more than to see men torment each other; + particularly when in the flower of their age, in the very season + of pleasure, they waste their few short days of sunshine in + quarrels and disputes, and only perceive their error when it is + too late to repair it. + +To such intense sympathy as this, all that had been sung ere now by +German poets had to give place. Nature, which hitherto had played no +_rôle_ at all in fiction, not even among the English, was Werther's +truest and most intimate friend. + +Werther is sensitive and sentimental, though in a single-hearted way, +with a sentimentality that reminds us more and more, as the story +proceeds, of the gloomy tone of Ossian and Young. He is a thoroughly +original character, who feels that he is right so to be; and although +he falls a prey to his melancholy, yet there is much more force and +thought in his outpourings than in all the moonshine tirades that +preceded him. It is the work of a true poet, in the best days of a +brilliant youth. + +Werther, like Rousseau, was happiest in solitude. Solitude, in the +'place like paradise,' was precious balm to his feeling heart, which +he considers 'like a sick child'; and the 'warm heavenly imagination +of the heart' illuminates Nature round him--his 'favourite valley,' +the 'sweet spring morning,' Nature's 'unspeakable beauty.' He was +absorbed in artistic feeling, though he could not draw; 'I could not +draw them, not a stroke, and have never been a greater artist than at +that moment.' His power lay in imbuing his whole subject with +feeling; he felt the heart of Nature beating, and its echo in his own +breast. + + When the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the + meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable + foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the + inner sanctuary, then I throw myself down in the tall grass by + the trickling stream; and as I lie close to the earth, a thousand + unknown plants discover themselves to me. When I hear the buzz of + the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the + countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I + feel the presence of the Almighty who formed us in His own image, + and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains + us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my + friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth + seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the idea of a + beloved mistress, then I often long and think: O that you could + describe these conceptions, that you could impress upon paper all + that lives so full and warm within you, that it might be the + mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite + God! + + O! my friend! but it is too much for my strength. I sink under + the weight of the grandeur of these visions. + +Werther could not express all his love for Nature, but the secret of +it lay in the power to bring his own world of thought and feeling +into communion with her, and so give her speech. He divined something +immortal in her akin to himself. 'The true feeling of Nature,' he +said, 'is love.' He poured 'the stream of his genius' over her, and +she became 'dear and familiar' to him.... The simple homely scenery +delighted him--the valley, the brook, the fine walnut trees. + + When I go out at sunrise in the morning to Walheim, and with my + own hands gather the peas in the garden, which are to serve for + my dinner; when I sit down to shell them and read my Homer during + the intervals, and then, selecting a saucepan from the kitchen, + fetch my own butter, put my mess on the fire, cover it up.... + Nothing fills me with a more pure and genuine sense of happiness + than those traits of patriarchal life, which, thank heaven, I can + imitate without affectation. + +With the growth of his love-passion his feeling for Nature increased; +on July 24th he wrote: + + I never felt happier, I never understood Nature better, even down + to the veriest stem or smallest blade of grass. + +Then Albert came on the scene, and love became a torment, and Nature +a tormentor: + + _August_ 18.--Must it ever be thus, that the source of our + happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and + ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of Nature, + overwhelming me with a torrent of delight, and which brought all + paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a + demon which perpetually pursues and harasses me. When in bye-gone + days I gazed from these rocks upon yonder mountains across the + river and upon the green flowery valley before me, and saw all + nature budding and bursting around--the hills clothed from foot + to peak with tall thick forest trees, the valleys in all their + varied windings shaded with the loveliest woods, and the soft + river gliding along amongst the lisping reeds, mirroring the + beautiful clouds which the soft evening breeze wafted across the + sky--when I heard the groves about me melodious with the music of + birds, and saw the million swarms of insects dancing in the last + golden beams of the sun, whose setting rays awoke the humming + beetles from their grassy beds, whilst the subdued tumult around + directed my attention to the ground, and I there observed the + arid rock compelled to yield nutriment to the dry moss, whilst + the heath flourished upon the barren sands below me--all this + displayed to me the inner warmth which animates all Nature, and + filled and glowed within my heart. I felt myself exalted by this + overflowing fulness to the perception of the Godhead, and the + glorious forms of an infinite universe became visible to my + soul.... From the inaccessible mountains across the desert, which + no mortal foot has trod, far as the confines of the unknown + ocean, breathes the spirit of the eternal Creator, and every atom + to which He has given existence finds favour in His sight. Ah! + how often at that time has the flight of a bird soaring above my + head inspired me with the desire of being transported to the + shores of the immeasurable waters, there to quaff the pleasure of + life from the foaming goblet of the infinite, and to partake, if + but for a moment, even with the confined powers of my soul, the + beatitude of the Creator, who accomplishes all things in himself + and through himself.... It is as if a curtain had been drawn from + before my eyes.... My heart is wasted by the thought of that + destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal + nature--Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself + and every object near it; so that, surrounded by earth, and air, + and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart, + and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring + its own offspring.... If in such moments I find no sympathy ... I + either wander through the country, climb some precipitous cliff, + or force a path through the trackless thicket, where I am + lacerated and torn by thorns and briars, and thence I find + relief. + +Then, as he was going away, he felt how sympathetic the place had +been to him: + + I was walking up and down the very avenue which was so dear to + me--a secret sympathy had frequently drawn me thither.... + +the moon rose from behind a hill, increasing his melancholy, and +Charlotte put his feeling into words, saying (like Klopstock): + + _September_ 10.--Whenever I walk by moonlight, it brings to my + remembrance all my beloved and departed friends, and I am filled + with thoughts of death and futurity. + +Even in his misery he realises the [Greek: charisgoôn] of Euripides, +Petrarch's _dolendi voluptas_--the _Wonne der Wehmuth_. + +On September 4th he wrote: + + It is even so! As Nature puts on her autumn tints, it becomes + autumn with me and around me. My leaves are sere and yellow, and + the neighbouring trees are divested of their foliage. + +It was due to this autumn feeling that he could say: + + Ossian has superseded Homer in my heart. To what a world does the + illustrious bard carry me! To wander over pathless wilds, + surrounded by impetuous whirlwinds, where, by the feeble light of + the moon, we see the spirits of our ancestors; to hear from the + mountain tops, 'mid the roar of torrents, their plaintive sounds + issuing from deep caverns.... And this heart is now dead; no + sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry, and my senses, no more + refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my + brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life, + that active sacred power which created worlds around me, and it + is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills and + behold the morning sun breaking through the mists and + illuminating the country round it which is still wrapt in + silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows + which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all + her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are + ineffectual to attract one tear of joy from my withered heart.... + +On November 30th he wrote: 'About dinner-time I went to walk by the +river side, for I had no appetite,' and goes on in the tone of +Ossian: + + Everything around me seemed gloomy: a cold and damp easterly wind + blew from the mountains, and black heavy clouds spread over the + plain. + +and in the dreadful night of the flood: + + Upon the stroke of twelve I hastened forth. I beheld a fearful + sight. The foaming torrents rolled from the mountains in the + moonlight; fields and meadows, trees and hedges, were confounded + together, and the entire valley was converted into a deep lake + which was agitated by the roaring wind. And when the moon shone + forth and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous + torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand + impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of awe and + delight. With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss, + and cried 'Plunge!' For a moment my senses forsook me, in the + intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a + plunge into that gulf. + +To his farewell letter he adds: + + Yes, Nature! put on mourning. Your child, your friend, your + lover, draws near his end. + +The genuine poetic pantheism, which, for all his melancholy and +sentimentality, was the spring of Werther's feeling, is seen in +loftier and more comprehensive form in the first part of _Faust_, +when Faust opens the book and sees the sign of macrocosmos: + + How all things live and work, and ever blending, + Weave one vast whole from Being's ample range! + How powers celestial, rising and descending, + Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange. + Their flight on rapture-breathing pinions winging, + From heaven to earth their genial influence bringing, + Through the wide whole their chimes melodious ringing. + +And the Earth spirit says: + + In the currents of life, in action's storm, + I float and I wave + With billowy motion,-- + Birth and the grave + A limitless ocean. + +Not only of knowledge of, but of feeling for, Nature, it is said: + + Inscrutable in broadest light, + To be unveiled by force she doth refuse. + +But Faust is in deep sympathy with her; witness: + + Thou full-orbed moon! Would thou wert gazing now + For the last time upon my troubled brow! + +and + + Loos'd from their icy fetters, streams and rills + In spring's effusive, quick'ning mildness flow, + Hope's budding promise every valley fills. + And winter, spent with age, and powerless now, + Draws off his forces to the savage hills. + +and the idyllic evening mood, which gives way to a burst of longing: + + In the rich sunset see how brightly glow + Yon cottage homes girt round with verdant green. + Slow sinks the orb, the day is now no more; + Yonder he hastens to diffuse new light. + Oh! for a pinion from the earth to soar, + And after, ever after him to strive! + Then should I see the world outspread below, + Illumined by the deathless evening beams, + The vales reposing, every height aglow, + The silver brooklets meeting golden streams.... + Alas! that when on Spirit wing we rise, + No wing material lifts our mortal clay. + But 'tis our inborn impulse, deep and strong, + To rush aloft, to struggle still towards heaven, + When far above us pours its thrilling song + The skylark lost amid the purple even, + When on extended pinion sweeps amain + The lordly eagle o'er the pine-crowned height. + And when, still striving towards its home, the crane + O'er moor and ocean wings its onward flight. + +But the most complete expression of Goethe's attitude, not only in +the period of _Werther_ and the first part of _Faust_, but generally, +is contained in the _Monologue_, which was probably written not +earlier than the spring of 1788: + + Spirit sublime! Thou gav'st me, gav'st me all + For which I prayed. Not vainly hast thou turn'd + To me thy countenance in flaming fire; + Thou gav'st me glorious Nature for my realm, + And also power to feel her and enjoy; + Not merely with a cold and wond'ring glance, + Thou didst permit me in her depths profound, + As in the bosom of a friend, to gaze; + Before me thou dost lead her living tribes, + And dost in silent grove, in air and stream, + Teach me to know my kindred.... + +His feeling was not admiration alone, nor reverence alone, but the +sympathy of _Childe Harold_: + + Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part + Of me and of my soul, as I of them? + Is not the love of these deep in my heart + With a pure passion? Should I not contemn + All objects, if compared with these? + +and the very confession of faith of such poetic pantheism is in +Faust's words: + + Him who dare name, + And yet proclaim, + Yes, I believe?... + The All-embracer, + All-sustainer, + Doth he not embrace, sustain + Thee, me, himself? + Lifts not the heaven its dome above? + Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us rise? + And beaming tenderly with looks of love, + Climb not the everlasting stars on high? + +The poems which date directly after the Wetzlar period are full of +this sympathetic pantheistic love for Nature--_Mahomet's Song_, for +example, with its splendid comparison of pioneering genius to a +mountain torrent: + + Ho! the spring that bursts + From the mountain height + Joyous and bright, + As the gleam of a star.... + Down in the vale below + Flowers bud beneath his tread ... + And woo him with fond eyes. + And the streamlets of the mountains + Shout to him, and cry out 'Brother'! + Brother! take thy brothers with thee, + With thee to thine ancient father, + To the eternal Ocean, + Who with outstretch'd arms awaits us.... + And so beareth he his brothers + To their primal sire expectant, + All his bosom throbbing, heaving, + With a wild, tumultuous joy. + +We see the same pathos--the pathos of Pindar and the Psalms--in the +comparison: + + Like water is the soul of man, + From heaven it comes, to heaven it goes, + And back again to earth in ceaseless change. + +in the incomparable _Wanderer_, in _Wanderer's Storm Song,_ and, +above all, in _Ganymede_, already given, of which Loeper remarks: + + The poem is, as it were, a rendering of that letter (Werther's of + May 10th) in rhythm. The underlying pantheism had already shewn + itself in the _Wanderer's Storm Song_. It was not the delight in + God of a Brockes, not the adoration of a Klopstock, not sesthetic + enjoyment of Nature, not, as in later years, scientific interest; + it was rather a being absorbed in, identified with, Nature, a + sympathy carried so far that the very ego was surrendered to the + elements. + +On the Lake of Zurich he wrote, June 15th, 1775: + + And here I drink new blood, fresh food, + From world so free, so blest; + How sweet is Nature and how good, + Who holds me to her breast. + +and Elmire sings in _Ermin and Elmire_: + + From thee, O Nature, with deep breath + I drink in painful pleasure. + +One of the gems among his Nature poems is _Autumn Feelings_ (it was +the autumn of his love for Lilli): + + Flourish greener as ye clamber, + O ye leaves, to seek my chamber; + Up the trellised vine on high + May ye swell, twin-berries tender, + Juicier far, and with more splendour + Ripen, and more speedily. + O'er ye broods the sun at even, + As he sinks to rest, and heaven + Softly breathes into your ear + All its fertilizing fulness, + While the moon's refreshing coolness, + Magic-laden, hovers near. + And alas! ye're watered ever + By a stream of tears that rill + From mine eyes--tears ceasing never, + Tears of love that nought can still. + +The lyrical effect here depends upon the blending of a single +impression of Nature with the passing mood--an occasional poem rare +even for Goethe. + +In a letter to Frau von Stein he admitted that he was greatly +influenced by Nature: + + I have slept well and am quite awake, only a quiet sadness lies + upon my soul.... The weather agrees exactly with my state of + mind, and I begin to believe that it is the weather around me + which has the most immediate effect upon me, and the great world + thrills my little one with her own mood. + +Again, _To the Moon_, in the spring 1778, expresses perfect communion +between Nature and feeling: + + Flooded are the brakes and dells + With thy phantom light, + And my soul receives the spell + Of thy mystic night. + To the meadow dost thou send + Something of thy grace, + Like the kind eye of a friend + Beaming on my face. + Echoes of departed times + Vibrate in mine ear, + Joyous, sad, like spirit chimes, + As I wander here. + Flow, flow on, thou little brook, + Ever onward go! + Trusted heart and tender look + Left me even so! + Richer treasure earth has none + Than I once possessed-- + Ah! so rich, that when 'twas gone + Worthless was the rest. + Little brook! adown the vale + Rush and take my song: + Give it passion, give it wail, + As thou leap'st along! + Sound it in the winter night + When thy streams are full, + Murmur it when skies are bright + Mirror'd in the pool. + Happiest he of all created + Who the world can shun, + Not in hate, and yet unhated, + Sharing thought with none, + Save one faithful friend, revealing + To his kindly ear + Thoughts like these, which o'er me stealing, + Make the night so drear. + +In January 1778, he wrote to Frau von Stein about the fate of the +unhappy Chr. von Lassberg, who had drowned himself in the Ilm: + + This inviting grief has something dangerously attractive about + it, like the water itself; and the reflections of the stars, + which gleam from above and below at once, are alluring. + +To the same year belongs _The Fisher_, which gave such melodious +voice to the magic effect of a shimmering expanse of water, 'the +moist yet radiant blue,' upon the mood; just as, later on, _The +Erlking_, with the grey of an autumn evening woven ghostlike round +tree and shrub, made the mind thrill with foreboding. + +Goethe was always an industrious traveller. In his seventieth year he +went to Frankfort, Strassburg, the Rhine, Thuringia, and the Harz +Mountains (Harzreise, 1777): 'We went up to the peaks, and down to +the depths of the earth, and hammered at all the rocks.' His love for +Nature increased with his science; but, at the same time, poetic +expression of it took a more objective form; the passionate +vehemence, the really revolutionary attitude of the _Werther_ period, +gave way to one equally spiritual and intellectual, but more +temperate. + +This transition is clearly seen in the Swiss letters. In his first +Swiss travels, 1775, he was only just free from _Werther_, and his +mind was too agitated for quiet observation: + + Hasten thee, Kronos!... + Over stock and stone let thy trot + Into life straightway lead.... + Wide, high, glorious the view + Gazing round upon life, + While from mount unto mount + Hovers the spirit eterne, + Life eternal foreboding.... + +Far more significant and ripe--in fact, mature--are the letters in +1779, shewing, as they do, the attitude of a man of profound mind, in +the prime of his life and time. He was the first German poet to fall +under the spell of the mountains--the strongest spell, as he held, +which Nature wields in our latitudes. 'These sublime, incomparable +scenes will remain for ever in my mind'; and of one view in +particular, over the mountains of Savoy and Valais, the Lake of +Geneva, and Mont Blanc, he said: 'The view was so great, man's eye +could not grasp it.' + +He wrote of his feelings with perfect openness to Frau von Stein, and +these letters extended farther back than those from Switzerland, and +were partly mixed with them. + +From Selz: + + An uncommonly fine day, a happy country--still all green, only + here and there a yellow beech or oak leaf. Meadows still in their + silver beauty--a soft welcome breeze everywhere. Grapes improving + with every step and every day. Every peasant's house has a vine + up to the roof, and every courtyard a great overhanging arbour. + The air of heaven soft, warm, and moist. The Rhine and the clear + mountains near at hand, the changing woods, meadows, fields like + gardens, do men good, and give me a kind of comfort which I have + long lacked. + +The pen remains as ever the pen of a poet, but he looks at +Switzerland now with a mature, settled taste, analyzing his +impressions, and studying mountains, glaciers, boulders, +scientifically. + +Of the Staubbach Fall, near Lauterbrunnen (Oct. 9th, 1779): + + The clouds broke in the upper air, and the blue sky came through. + Clouds clung to the steep sides of the rocks; even the top where + the Staubbach falls over, was lightly covered. It was a very + noble sight ... then the clouds came down into the valley and + covered all the foreground. The great wall over which the water + falls, still stood out on the right. Night came on.... In the + Munsterthal, through which we came, everything was lofty, but + more within the mind's power of comprehension than these. In + comparison with the immensities, one is, and must remain, too + small. + +And after visiting the Berne glacier from Thun (Oct. 14): + + It is difficult to write after all this ... the first glance from + the mountain is striking, the district is surprisingly extensive + and pleasant ... the road indescribably beautiful ... the view + from the Lake of Brienz towards the snow mountains at sunset is + great. + +More eloquent is the letter of October 3rd, from the Munsterthal: + + The passage through this defile roused in me a grand but calm + emotion. The sublime produces a beautiful calmness in the soul, + which, entirely possessed by it, feels as great as it ever can + feel. How glorious is such a pure feeling, when it rises to the + very highest without overflowing. My eye and my soul were both + able to take in the objects before me, and as I was preoccupied + by nothing, and had no false tastes to counteract their + impression, they had on me their full and natural effect. When we + compare such a feeling with that we are sensible of, when we + laboriously harass ourselves with some trifle, and strain every + nerve to gain as much as possible for it, and, as it were, to + patch it out, striving to furnish joy and aliment to the mind + from its own creation; we then feel sensibly what a poor + expedient, after all, the latter is.... + + When we see such objects as these for the first time, the + unaccustomed soul has to expand itself, and this gives rise to a + sort of painful joy, an overflowing of emotion which agitates the + mind and draws from us the most delicious tears.... If only + destiny had bidden me to dwell in the midst of some grand + scenery, then would I every morning have imbibed greatness from + its grandeur, as from a lonely valley I would extract patience + and repose. + + One guesses in the dark about the origin and existence of these + singular forms.... These masses must have been formed grandly and + simply by aggregation. Whatever revolutions may subsequently have + up-heaved, rent, and divided them ... the idea of such nightly + commotions gives one a deep feeling of the eternal stability of + the masses.... One feels deeply convinced that here there is + nothing accidental, that here there is working an eternal law + which, however slowly, yet surely governs the universe. + +By the Lake of Geneva, where he thought of Rousseau, he went up the +Dole: + + The whole of the Pays de Vaux and de Gex lay like a plan before + us ... we kept watching the mist, which gradually retired ... one + by one we distinctly saw Lausanne ... Vevey.... There are no + words to express the beauty and grandeur of this view ... the + line of glittering glaciers was continually drawing the eye back + again to the mountains. + +From Cluse he wrote: + + The air was as warm as it usually is at the beginning of + September, and the country we travelled through beautiful. Many + of the trees still green; most of them had assumed a + brownish-yellow tint, but only a few were quite bare. The crops + were rich and verdant, the mountains caught from the red sunset a + rosy hue blended with violet, and all these rich tints were + combined with grand, beautiful, and agreeable forms of the + landscape. + +At Chamouni, about effects of light: + + Here too again it seemed to us as if the sun had first of all + attracted the light mists which evaporated from the tops of the + glaciers, and then a gentle breeze had, as it were, combed the + fine vapours like a fleece of foam over the atmosphere. I never + remember at home, even in the height of summer, to have seen any + so transparent, for here it was a perfect web of light. + +At the Col de Baume: + + Whilst I am writing, a remarkable phenomenon is passing along the + sky. The mists, which are shifting about and breaking in some + places, allow you through their openings, as through skylights, + to catch a glimpse of the blue sky, while at the same time the + mountain peaks, rising above our roofs of vapour, are illuminated + by the sun's rays.... + +At Leukertad, at the foot of the Gemmi, he wrote (Nov. 9th): + + The clouds which gather here in this valley, at one time + completely hiding the immense rocks and absorbing them in a waste + impenetrable gloom, or at another letting a part of them be seen + like huge spectres, give to the people a cast of melancholy. In + the midst of such natural phenomena, the people are full of + presentiments and forebodings ... and the eternal and intrinsic + energy of his (man's) nature feels itself at every nerve moved to + forebode and to indulge in presentiments. + +On the way across the Rhine glacier to the Furka, he felt the +half-suggestive, half-distressing sense of mountain loneliness: + + It was a strange sight ... in the most desolate region of the + world, in a boundless monotonous wilderness of mountains + enveloped in snow, where for three leagues before and behind you + would not expect to meet a living soul, while on both sides you + had the deep hollows of a web of mountains, you might see a line + of men wending their way, treading each in the deep footsteps of + the one before him, and where, in the whole of the wide expanse + thus smoothed over, the eye could discern nothing but the track + they left behind them. The hollows, as we left them, lay behind + us grey and boundless in the mist. The changing clouds + continually passed over the pale disc of the sun, and spread over + the whole scene a perpetually moving veil. + +He sums up the impressions made on him with: + + The perception of such a long chain of Nature's wonders, excites + within me a secret and inexpressible feeling of enjoyment. + +The most profound change in his mental life was brought about by his +visit to Italy, 1786-87. The poetic expression of this refining +process, this striving towards the classic ideal, towards Sophrosyne, +was _Iphigenia_. + +Its effect upon his feeling for Nature appeared in a more +matter-of-fact tone; the man of feeling gave way to the scientific +observer. + +He had, as he said (Oct. 30th, 1887), lately 'acquired the habit of +looking only at things, and not, as formerly, seeing with and in the +things what actually was not there.' + +He no longer imputed his feelings to Nature, and studied her +influence on himself, but looked at her with impersonal interest. +Weather, cloud, mountain formation, the species of stone, landscape, +and social themes, were all treated almost systematically as so much +diary memoranda for future use. There was no artistic treatment in +such jottings; meteorology, botany, and geology weighed too heavily. + +The question, 'Is a place beautiful?' paled beside 'Is its soil +clay?' 'Are its rocks quartz, chalk, or mica schist?' The problem of +the archetypal plant was more absorbing than the finest groups of +trees. The years of practical life at Weimar, and, above all, the +ever-growing interest in science, were the chief factors in this +change, which led him, as he said in his _Treatise on Granite_, + + from observation and description of the human heart, that part of + creation which is the most youthful, varied, unstable, and + destructible, to observation of that Son of Nature, which is the + oldest, deepest, most stable, most indestructible. + +The enthusiastic subjective realism of stormy youth was replaced by +the measured objective realism of ripe manhood. Hence the difference +between his letters from Switzerland and those from Italy, where this +inner metamorphosis was completed; as he said, 'Between Weimar and +Palermo I have had many changes.' + +For all that, he revelled in the beauty of Italy. As he once said: + + It is natural to me to revere the great and beautiful willingly + and with pleasure; and to develop this predisposition day by day + and hour by hour by means of such glorious objects, is the most + delightful feeling. + +The sea made a great impression upon him: + + I set out for the Lido...landed, and walked straight across the + isthmus. I heard a loud hollow murmur--it was the sea! I soon saw + it; it crested high against the shore as it retired, it was about + noon and time of ebb. I have then at last seen the sea with my + own eyes, and followed it on its beautiful bed, just as it + quitted it. + +But further on he only remarks: 'The sea is a great sight.' +Elsewhere, too, it is only noticed very shortly. + +Rome stimulated his mind to increased productiveness, and, partly for +this reason, he could not assimilate all the new impressions which +poured in upon him from without, from ruins, paintings, churches, +palaces, the life of the people. He drew a great deal too; from +Frascati he wrote (Nov. 15th, 1786): + + The country around is very pleasant; the village lies on the side + of a hill, or rather of a mountain, and at every step the + draughtsman comes upon the most glorious objects. The prospect is + unbounded. Rome lies before you, and beyond it on the right is + the sea, the mountains of Tivoli, and so on. + +In Rome itself (Feb. 2nd, 1787): + + Of the beauty of a walk through Rome by moonlight it is + impossible to form a conception without having witnessed it. + +During Carnival (Feb. 21st): + + The sky, so infinitely fine and clear, looked down nobly and + innocently upon the mummeries. + +In the voyage to Sicily: + + At noon we went on board; the weather being extremely fine, we + enjoyed the most glorious of views. The corvette lay at anchor + near to the Mole. With an unclouded sun the atmosphere was hazy, + giving to the rocky walls of Sorrento, which were in the shade, a + tint of most beautiful blue. Naples with its living multitudes + lay in full sunshine, and glittered brilliantly with countless + tints. + +and on April 1st: + + With a cloudy sky, a bright but broken moonlight, the reflection + on the sea was infinitely beautiful. + +At first, Italy, and especially Rome, felt strange to him, in +scenery, sky, contour, and colour. It was only by degrees that he +felt at home there. + +He refers to this during his second visit to Rome in a notable +remark, which aptly expresses the faculty of apperception--the link +between us and the unfamiliar, which enables mental growth. + +June 16th, 1787: + + One remark more! Now for the first time do the trees, the rocks, + nay, Rome itself, grow dear to me; hitherto I have always felt + them as foreign, though, on the other hand, I took pleasure in + minor subjects having some resemblance to those I saw in youth. + +On August 18th, 1787, he wrote: + + Yesterday before sunrise I drove to Acqua Acetosa. Verily, one + might well lose his senses in contemplating the clearness, the + manifoldness, the dewy transparency, the heavenly hue of the + landscape, especially in the distance. + +In October, when he heard of the engagement of a beautiful Milanese +lady with whom he had fallen in love: + + I again turned me instantly to Nature, as a subject for + landscapes, a field I had been meanwhile neglecting, and + endeavoured to copy her in this respect with the utmost fidelity. + I was, however, more successful in mastering her with my eyes.... + All the sensual fulness which that region offers us in rocks and + trees, in acclivities and declivities, in peaceful lakes and + lively streams, all this was grasped by my eye more + appreciatively, if possible, than ever before, and I could hardly + resent the wound which had to such degree sharpened my inward and + outward sense. + +On leaving Rome, he wrote: + + Three nights before, the full moon shone in the clearest heaven, + and the enchantment shed over the vast town, though often felt + before, was never felt so keenly as now. The great masses of + light, clear as in mild daylight, the contrast of deep shades, + occasionally relieved by reflexions dimly portraying details, all + this transported us as if into another, a simpler and a greater, + world. + +The later diaries on his travels are sketchy throughout, and more +laconic and objective: for example, at Schaffhausen (Sept. 18th): + + Went out early, 7.30, to see the Falls of the Rhine; colour of + water, green--causes of this, the heights covered by mist--the + depths clear, and we saw the castle of Laufen half in mist; + thought of Ossian. Love mist when moved by deep feeling. + +At Brunnen: + + Green of the lake, steep banks, small size of boatman in + comparison to the enormous masses of rock. One saw precipices + grown over by trees, summits covered by clouds. Sunshine over the + scene, one felt the formless greatness of Nature. + +He was conscious of the great change in himself since his last visit +there, and wrote to Schiller (Oct. 14th, 1797): + + I remember the effect these things had upon me twenty years ago. + The total impression remained with me, but the details faded, and + I had a wonderful longing to repeat the whole experience and + correct my impressions. I had become another man, and therefore + it must needs appear different to me. + +In later years he travelled a great deal in the Harz Mountains, to +Carlsbad, Toplitz, the Maine, Marienbad, etc. After the death of his +great friends, Schiller and Carl August, he was more and more lonely, +and his whole outlook, with increasing years, grew more impersonal, +his attitude to Nature more abstract and scientific; the archetypal +plant was superseded by the theory of colours. But he kept fresh eyes +for natural beauty into ripe age; witness this letter from +Heidelberg, May 4th, 1808, to Frau von Stein: + + Yesterday evening, after finishing my work, I went alone to the + castle, and first scrambled about among the ruins, and then + betook myself to the great balcony from which one can overlook + the whole country. It was one of the loveliest of May evenings + and of sunsets. No! I have really never seen such a fine view! + Just imagine! One looked into the beautiful though narrow Neckar + valley, covered on both sides with woods and vineyards and fruit + trees just coming into flower. Further off the valley widened, + and one saw the setting sun reflected in the Rhine as it flowed + majestically through most beautiful country. On its further side + the horizon was bounded by the Vosges mountains, lit up by the + sun as if by a fire. The whole country was covered with fresh + green, and close to me were the enormous ruins of the old castle, + half in light and half in shade. You can easily fancy how it + fascinated me. I stood lost in the view quite half an hour, till + the rising moon woke me from my dreams. + +Goethe's true lyrical period was in the seventies, before his Italian +journeys; during and after that time he wrote more dramatic and epic +poetry, with ballads and the more narrative kind of epic. In sending +_Der Jüngling und der Mühlbach_ to Schiller from Switzerland in 1797, +he wrote: 'I have discovered splendid material for idylls and +elegies, and whatever that sort of poetry is called.' + +Nature lyrics were few during his Italian travels, as in the journey +to Sicily, 1787; among them were _Calm at Sea_: + + Silence deep rules o'er the waters, + Calmly slumbering lies the main. + +and _Prosperous Voyage_: + + The mist is fast clearing, + And radiant is heaven, + Whilst Æolus loosens + Our anguish-fraught bond. + +The most perfect of all such short poems was the _Evening Song_, +written one September night of 1783 on the Gickelhahn, near Ilmenau. +He was writing at the same time to Frau von Stein: 'The sky is +perfectly clear, and I am going out to enjoy the sunset. The view is +great and simple--the sun down.' + + Every tree top is at peace. + E'en the rustling woods do cease + Every sound; + The small birds sleep on every bough. + Wait but a moment--soon wilt thou + Sleep in peace. + + The hush of evening, the stilling of desire in the silence of the + wood, the beautiful resolution of all discords in Nature's + perfect concord, the naive and splendid pantheism of a soul which + feels itself at one with the world--all this is not expressed in + so many words in the _Night Song_; but it is all there, like the + united voicesin a great symphony. (SCHURÉ.) + +The lines are full of that pantheism which not only brings subject +and object, Mind and Nature, into symbolic relationship, but works +them into one tissue. Taken alone with _The Fisher_ and _To the +Moon_, it would suffice to give him the first place as a poet of +Nature. + +He was not only the greatest poet, but the greatest and most +universal thinker of modern times. With him feeling and knowledge +worked together, the one reaching its climax in the lyrics of his +younger days, the other gradually moderating the fervour of passion, +and, with the more objective outlook of age, laying greater stress +upon science. His feeling for Nature, which followed an unbroken +course, like his mental development generally, stands alone as a type +of perfectly modern feeling, and yet no one, despite the many +intervening centuries, stood so near both to Homer and to +Shakespeare, and in philosophy to Spinoza. + +But because with Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his pantheism +is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise man of +Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the postulate of +this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and the inner +life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and +encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his +religion. In his youth, in the period of _Werther, Ganymede_, and the +first part of _Faust_, this pantheism was a nameless, unquenchable +aspiration towards the divine--for wings to reach, like the rays of +light, to unmeasured heights; as he said in the Swiss mountains, +'Into the limitless spaces of the air, to soar over abysses, and let +him down upon inaccessible rocks.' + +After the Italian journeys science took the lead, the student of +Nature supplanted the lover, even his symbolism took a more abstract +and realistic form. But he never, even in old age, lost his love for +the beauties of Nature, and, holding to Spinoza's fundamental ideas +of the unchangeableness and eternity of Nature's laws, and the +oneness of the Cosmos, he sought to think it out and base it upon +scientific grounds, through the unbroken succession of animal and +vegetable forms of life, the uniform 'formation and transformation of +all organic Nature.' He wrote to Frau von Stein: 'I cannot express to +you how legible the book of Nature is growing to me; my long spelling +out has helped me. It takes effect now all of a sudden; my quiet +delight is inexpressible; I find much that is new, but nothing that +is unexpected--everything fits in and conforms, because I have no +system, and care for nothing but truth for its own sake. Soon +everything about living things will be clear to me.'[13] + +Poetic and scientific intuition were simultaneous with him, and their +common bond was pantheism. This pantheism marked an epoch in the +history of feeling. For Goethe not only transformed the unreal +feeling of his day into real, described scenery, and inspired it with +human feeling, and deciphered the beauty of the Alps, as no one else +had done, Rousseau not excepted; but he also brought knowledge of +Nature into harmony with feeling for her, and with his wonderfully +receptive and constructive mind so studied the earlier centuries, +that he gathered out all that was valuable in their feeling. + +As Goethe in Germany, so Byron in England led the feeling for Nature +into new paths by his demoniac genius and glowing pantheism. Milton's +great imagination was too puritan, too biblical, to allow her +independent importance; he only assigned her a _rôle_ in relation to +the Deity. In fiction, too, she had no place; but, on the other hand, +we find her in such melancholy, sentimental outpourings as Young's +_Night Thoughts_: + + Night, sable Goddess! from her ebon throne + In rayless majesty now stretches forth + Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world... + Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse + Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause; + An awful pause, prophetic of her end...etc. + +There is a wealth of imagery and comparison amid Ossian's melancholy +and mourning; clouds and mist are the very shadows of his struggling +heroes. For instance: + + His spear is a blasted pine, his shield the rising moon. He sat + on the shore like a cloud of mist on the rising hill. + + Thou art snow on the heath; thy hair is the mist of Cromla, when + it curls on the hill, when it shines to the beam of the west. Thy + breasts are two smooth rocks seen from Branno of streams. + + As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high; + as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of + battle. + + As autumn's dark storms pour from two echoing hills, towards each + other approached the heroes. + + The clouds of night came rolling down, Darkness rests on the + steeps of Cromla. The stars of the north arise over the rolling + of Erin's waves; they shew their heads of fire through the flying + mist of heaven. A distant wind roars in the wood. Silent and dark + is the plain of death. + +Wordsworth's influence turned in another direction. His real taste +was pastoral, and he preached freer intercourse with Nature, glossing +his ideas rather artificially with a theism, through which one reads +true love of her, and an undeniable, though hidden, pantheism. + +In _The Influence of Natural Objects_ he described how a life spent +with Nature had early purified him from passion: + + Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me + With stinted kindness. In November days, + When vapours, rolling down the valleys, made + A lonely scene more lonesome, among woods + At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights, + When by the margin of the trembling lake + Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went + In solitude, such intercourse was mine. + 'Twas mine among the fields both day and night, + And by the waters all the summer long, + And in the frosty season, when the sun + Was set, and visible for many a mile, + The cottage windows through the twilight blazed, + I heeded not the summons.... + +Like Klopstock, he delighted in sledging + + while the stars + Eastward were sparkling bright, and in the west + The orange sky of evening died away. + +Far more characteristic of the man is the confession in _Tintern +Abbey_: + + Nature then + (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days + And their glad animal movements all gone by) + To me was all in all. I cannot paint + What then I was. The sounding cataract + Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, + The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, + The colours and their forms, were then to me + An appetite, a feeling and a love + That had no need of a remoter charm + By thought supplied, or any interest + Unborrow'd from the eye. + +Beautiful notes, to be struck again more forcibly by the frank +pantheism of Byron. + +What Scott had been doing for Scotland,[14] and Moore for Ireland, +Wordsworth, with still greater fidelity to truth, tried to do for +England and her people; in contrast to Byron and Shelley, who forsook +home to range more widely, or Southey, whose _Thalaba_ begins with an +imposing description of night in the desert: + + How beautiful is night! + A dewy freshness fills the silent air, + No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain + Breaks the serene of heaven; + In full-orb'd glory yonder Moon divine + Rolls through the dark blue depths. + Beneath her steady ray + The desert-circle spreads + Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky. + How beautiful is night! + +But all that previous English poets had done seemed harmless and +innocent in comparison with Byron's revolutionary poetry. Prophecy in +Rousseau became poetry in Byron. + +There was much common ground between these two passionate aspiring +spirits, who never attained to Goethe's serenity. Both were +melancholy, and fled from their fellows; both strove for perfect +liberty and unlimited self-assertion; both felt with the wild and +uproarious side of Nature, and found idyllic scenes marred by +thoughts of mankind. + +Byron's turbulence never subsided; and his love for Nature, +passionate and comprehensive as it was, was always 'sickled o'er' +with misanthropy and pessimism, with the 'world-pain.' + +He turned to her first through disdain of his kind and love of +introspection, and later on, when he was spurned by the London world +which had been at his feet, and disdain grew into hatred and disgust, +from a wish to be alone. But, as Boettger says: + + Though this heart, in which the whole universe is reflected, is a + sick one, it has immeasurable depths, and an intensified spirit + life which draws everything under its sway and inspires it, + feeling and observing everything only as part of itself. + +The basis of Byron's feeling for Nature was a revolutionary +one--elementary passion. The genius which threw off stanza after +stanza steeped in melody, was coupled with an unprecedented +subjectivity and individualism. When the first part of _Childe +Harold_ came out, dull London society was bewitched by the music and +novelty of this enthusiastic lyric of Nature, with its incomparable +interweaving of scenery and feeling: + + The sails were fill'd, and fair the light winds blew, + As glad to waft him from his native home.... + But when the sun was sinking in the sea, + He seized his harp... + Adieu, adieu! my native shore + Fades o'er the waters blue; + The night winds sigh, the breakers roar, + And shrieks the wild sea-mew; + Yon sun that sets upon the sea + We follow in his flight; + Farewell awhile to him and thee, + My native land, good-night! + +He says of the beauty of Lusitania: + + Oh Christ! it is a goodly sight to see + What Heaven hath done for this delicious land. + What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree! + What goodly prospects o'er the hills expand!... + The horrid crags, by toppling convent crown'd, + The cork trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep, + The mountain moss, by scorching skies imbrown'd, + The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep. + The tender azure of the unruffled deep, + The orange tints that gild the greenest bough, + The torrents that from cliff to valley leap, + The vine on high, the willow branch below, + Mix'd in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow. + +Yet his spirit drives him away, 'more restless than the swallow in +the skies.' + +The charm of the idyllic is in the lines: + + But these between, a silver streamlet glides.... + Here leans the idle shepherd on his crook, + And vacant on the rippling waves doth look, + That peaceful still 'twixt bitterest foemen flow. + +The beauty of the sea and night in this: + + The moon is up; by Heaven a lovely eve! + Long streams of light o'er dancing waves expand.... + How softly on the Spanish shore she plays, + Disclosing rock, and slope, and forest brown + Distinct.... + + Bending o'er the vessel's laving side + To gaze on Dian's wave-reflected sphere. + +He reflects that: + + To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, + To slowly trace the forest's shady scene.... + To climb the trackless mountain all unseen + With the wild flock that never needs a fold, + Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean,-- + This is not solitude; 'tis but to hold + Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd. + But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, + To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, + And roam along, the world's tired denizen, + With none who bless us, none whom we can bless ... + This is to be alone--this, this is solitude. + +His preference for wild scenery shews here: + + Dear Nature is the kindest mother still, + Though always changing, in her aspect mild; + From her bare bosom let me take my fill, + Her never-wean'd, though not her favour'd child. + O she is fairest in her features wild, + Where nothing polish'd dares pollute her path; + To me by day or night she ever smiled, + Though I have mark'd her when none other hath, + And sought her more and more, and loved her best in wrath. + +He observes everything--now 'the billows' melancholy flow' under the +bows of the ship, now the whole scene at Zitza: + + Where'er we gaze, around, above, below, + What rainbow tints, what magic charms are found! + Rock, river, forest, mountain, all abound, + And bluest skies that harmonize the whole; + Beneath, the distant torrent's rushing sound + Tells where the volumed cataract doth roll + Between those hanging rocks, that shock yet please the soul. + +This is full of poetic vision: + + Where lone Utraikey forms its circling cove, + And weary waves retire to gleam at rest, + How brown the foliage of the green hill's grove, + Nodding at midnight o'er the calm bay's breast, + As winds come lightly whispering from the west, + Kissing, not ruffling, the blue deep's serene;-- + Here Harold was received a welcome guest; + Nor did he pass unmoved the gentle scene, + For many a job could he from Night's soft presence glean. + +Feeling himself 'the most unfit of men to herd with man,' he is happy +only with Nature: + + Once more upon the waters! yet once more! + And the waves bound beneath me as a steed + That knows his rider. Welcome to the roar! + Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead. + + Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends; + Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home; + Where a blue sky and glowing clime extends, + He had the passion and the power to roam; + The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam, + Were unto him companionship; they spake + A mutual language, clearer than the tome + Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake + For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake. + +Again: + + I live not in myself, but I become + Portion of that around me, and to me + High mountains are a feeling, but the hum + Of human cities torture; I can see + Nothing to loathe in Nature save to be + A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, + Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee, + And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain + Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain. + + Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part + Of me and of my soul, as I of them? + Is not the love of these deep in my heart + With a pure passion? Should I not contemn + All objects, if compared with these? + +Love of Nature was a passion with him, and when he looked + + Upon the peopled desert past + As on a place of agony and strife, + +mountains gave him a sense of freedom. + +He praised the Rhine: + + Where Nature, nor too sombre nor too gay, + Wild but not rude, awful yet not austere, + Is to the mellow earth as autumn to the year. + +and far more the Alps: + + Above me are the Alps, + The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls + Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, + And throned eternity in icy halls + Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls + The avalanche, the thunderbolt of snow! + All that expands the spirit, yet appals, + Gather around these summits, as to shew + How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below. + +On the Lake of Geneva: + + Ye stars which are the poetry of heaven... + All heaven and earth are still--though not in sleep, + But breathless, as we grow when feeling most; + And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep. + All heaven and earth are still: from the high host + Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain coast, + All is concenter'd in a life intense, + Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost, + But hath a part of being, and a sense + Of that which is of all Creator and defence. + + And this is in the night. Most glorious night, + Thou wert not sent for slumber; let me be + A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, + A portion of the tempest and of thee! + How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, + And the big rain comes dancing to the earth! + And now again 'tis black--and now, the glee + Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain mirth, + As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth. + But where of ye, oh tempests, is the goal? + Are ye like those within the human breast? + Or do ye find, at length, like eagles, some high nest? + + The morn is up again, the dewy morn + With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom, + Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn, + And living as if earth contained no tomb. + +In Clarens: + + Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love, + Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought, + Thy trees take root in Love; the snows above + The very glaciers have his colours caught, + And sunset into rose-hues sees them wrought + By rays which sleep there lovingly; the rocks, + The permanent crags, tell here of Love. + +Yet + + Ever and anon of griefs subdued + There comes a token like a scorpion's sting, + Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued; + And slight withal may be the things which bring + Back on the heart the weight which it would fling + Aside for ever; it may be a sound, + A tone of music, summer's eve or spring, + A flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound, + Striking the electric chain with which we are darkly bound. + +The unrest and torment of his own heart he finds reflected in Nature: + + The roar of waters! from the headlong height + Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice; + The fall of waters! rapid as the light + The flashing mass foams, shaking the abyss; + The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss, + And boil in endless torture; while the sweat + Of their great agony, wrung out from this + Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet + That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set, + And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again + Returns in an unceasing shower, which round + With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain + Is an eternal April to the ground, + Making it all one emerald; how profound + The gulf, and how the giant element + From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound, + Crushing the cliffs, which downward, worn and rent + With his fierce footsteps, yields in chasms a fearful rent.... + Horribly beautiful! but, on the verge + From side to side, beneath the glittering morn, + An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge, + Like Hope upon a deathbed. + +The 'enormous skeleton' of Rome impresses him most by moonlight: + + When the rising moon begins to climb + Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there; + When the stars twinkle through the loops of time, + And the low night breeze waves along the air! + +Underlying all his varying moods is this note: + + There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, + There is a rapture on the lonely shore, + There is society, where none intrudes, + By the deep sea, and music in its roar: + I love not man the less, but Nature more, + From these our interviews, in which I steal + From all I may be, or have been before, + To mingle with the Universe and feel + What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. + +The sea, the sky with its stars and clouds, and the mountains, are +his passion: + + Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll! + Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; + Man marks the earth with ruin--his control + Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain + The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain + A shadow of man's ravage, save his own, + When, for a moment, like a drop of rain + He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, + Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown. + (_Childe Harold_.) + + The day at last has broken. What a night + Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven! + Though varied with a transitory storm, + More beautiful in that variety!... + And can the sun so rise, + So bright, so rolling back the clouds into + Vapours more lovely than the unclouded sky, + With golden pinnacles and snowy mountains, + And billows purpler than the ocean's, making + In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth. + (_Sardanapalus.)_ + +He had loved the Scotch Highlands in youth: + + Amidst Nature's native scenes, + Loved to the last, whatever intervenes + Between us and our childhood's sympathy + Which still reverts to what first caught the eye. + He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue + Will love each peak that shews a kindred hue, + Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face, + And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace. + (_The Island_.) + +and in _The Island_ he says: + + How often we forget all time, when lone, + Admiring Nature's universal throne, + Her woods, her wilds, her waters, the intense + Reply of hers to our intelligence! + Live not the stars and mountains? Are the waves + Without a spirit? Are the dropping cares + Without a feeling in their silent tears? + No, no; they woo and clasp us to their spheres, + Dissolve this clog and clod of clay before + Its hour, and merge our soul in the great shore. + (_The Island_.) + +Byron's feeling was thus, like Goethe's in _Werther_ and _Faust_, a +pantheistic sympathy. But there was this great difference between +them--Goethe's mind passed through its period of storm and stress, +and attained a serene and ripe vision; Byron's never did. Melancholy +and misanthropy always mingled with his feelings; he was, in fact, +the father of our modern 'world-pain.' + +Still more like a brilliant meteor that flashes and is gone was +Shelley, the most highly strung of all modern lyrists. With him, too, +love of Nature amounted to a passion; but it was with her remote +aerial forms that he was most at home. His imagination, a cosmic one, +revelling among the spheres, was like Byron's in its preference for +the great, wide, and distant; but unlike his in giving first place to +the serene and passionless. As Brandes says: 'In this familiarity +with the great forms and movements of Nature, Shelley is like Byron; +but like him as a fair genius is like a dark one, as Ariel is like +the flame-bringing angel of the morning star.' + +We see his love for the sea, especially at rest, in the 'Stanzas +written in dejection near Naples,' which contain the beautiful line +which proved so prophetic of his death: + + The sun is warm, the sky is clear, + The waves are dancing fast and bright; + Blue isles and snowy mountains wear + The purple noon's transparent might.... + I see the deep's untrampled floor + With green and purple sea-weeds strewn; + I see the waves upon the shore + Like light dissolved, in star showers thrown.... + Yet now despair itself is mild, + Even as the winds and waters are; + I could lie down like a tired child + And weep away the life of care + Which I have borne, and yet must bear,-- + Till death like sleep might steal on me, + And I might feel in the warm air + My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea + Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. + +In his _Essay on Love_, speaking of the irresistible longing for +sympathy, he says: + + In solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by + human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the + flowers, the grass, and the water and the sky. In the motion of + the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a + secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the + tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the + rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable + relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a + dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious + tenderness to the eyes, like the voice of one beloved singing to + you alone. + +As Brandes says: 'His pulses beat in secret sympathy with Nature's. +He called plants and animals his dear sisters and brothers, and the +words which his wife inscribed upon his tombstone in Rome, "cor +cordium," are true of his relation to Nature also.' + +_The Cloud_, with its marvellously vivid personification, is a +perfect example of his genius. + +It gives the measure of his unlikeness to the more homekeeping +imaginations of his contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, and +Moore; and at the same time to Byron, for here there are no morbid +reflections; the poem is pervaded by a naive, childlike tone, such as +one hears in the old mythologies. + +_The Cloud_: + + I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers + From the seas and the streams; + I bear light shade for the leaves when laid + In their noonday dreams. + From my wings are shaken the dews that waken + The sweet buds every one, + When rocked to rest on their Mother's breast + As she dances about the sun. + I wield the flail of the lashing hail, + And whiten the green plains under; + And then again I dissolve it in rain, + And laugh as I pass in thunder. + + I sift the snow on the mountains below, + And their great pines groan aghast, + And all the night 'tis my pillow white + While I sleep in the arms of the Blast.... + From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, + Over a torrent sea, + Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, + The mountains its columns be. + The triumphal arch through which I march, + With hurricane, fire, and snow, + When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, + Is the million-coloured bow; + The Sphere-fire above its soft colours wove + While the moist earth was laughing below. + I am the daughter of Earth and Water, + And the nursling of the Sky. + +As Brandes puts it; When the cloud sings thus of the moon: + + When + That orbed maiden with white fire laden, + Whom Mortals call the Moon, + Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor + By the midnight breezes strewn; + And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, + Which only the angels hear, + May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, + The Stars peep behind her and peer. + +or of-- + + The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, + +the reader is carried back, by dint of the virgin freshness of the +poet's imagination, to the time when the phenomena of Nature were +first moulded into mythology. + +This kinship to the myth is very clear in the finest of all his +poems, the _Ode to the West Wind_, when the poet says to the wind: + + O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,... + Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, + Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed. + Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean. + Angels of rain and lightning, there are spread + On the blue surface of thine airy surge, + Like the bright hair uplifted from the head + Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge + Of the horizon to the zenith's height, + The locks of the approaching storm. + +He calls the wind the 'breath of Autumn's being,' the one + + Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed + The winged seeds. + +And cries to it: + + If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; + If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; + A wave to pant beneath thy power and share + The impulse of thy strength, only less free + Than thou, O uncontrollable!... + 0 lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! + I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed! + A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed + One too like thee, tameless, and swift, and proud. + Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is; + What if my leaves are falling like its own? + The tumult of thy mighty harmonies + Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, + Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, + My spirit. Be thou me, impetuous one! + Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, + Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth; + And by the incantation of this verse, + Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth + Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! + Be through my lips to unawakened earth + The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, + If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? + +His poems are full of this power of inspiring all the elements with +life, breathing his own feeling into them, and divining love and +sympathy in them; for instance: + + The fountains mingle with the river, + And the river with the ocean; + The winds of heaven mix for ever + With a sweet emotion.... + See the mountains kiss high heaven, + And the waves clasp one another... + And the sunlight clasps the earth, + And the moonbeams kiss the sea. + +and: + + I love all thou lovest, + Spirit of Delight; + The fresh earth in new leaves dressed, + And the starry night, + Autumn evening and the morn + When the golden mists are born. + I love snow and all the forms + Of the radiant frost; + I love waves and winds and storms-- + Everything almost + Which is Nature's, and may be + Untainted by man's misery. + +To Goethe, Byron, and Shelley, this pantheism, universal love, +sympathy with Nature in all her forms, was the base of feeling; but +both of England's greatest lyrists, dying young, failed to attain +perfect harmony of thought and feeling. There always remained a +bitter ingredient in their poetry. + +Let us now turn to France. + + +LAMARTINE AND VICTOR HUGO + +Rousseau discovered the beauty of scenery for France; St Pierre +portrayed it poetically, not only in _Paul and Virginia_, but in +_Chaumiére Indienne_ and _Etudes de la Nature_. The science which +these two writers lacked, Buffon possessed in a high degree; but he +had not the power to delineate Nature and feeling in combination: he +lacked insight into the hidden analogies between the movements of the +mind and the phenomena of the outer world. Chateaubriand, on the +contrary, had this faculty to its full modern extent. It is true that +his ego was constantly to the fore, even in dealing with Nature, but +his landscapes were full of sympathetic feeling. He had Rousseau's +melancholy and unrest, and cared nothing for those 'oppressive +masses,' mountains, except as backgrounds; but he was enthusiastic +about the scenery which he saw in America, the virgin forests, and +the Mississippi--above all, about the sea. His Réné, that life-like +figure, half-passionate, half-_blasé_, measuring everything by +himself, and flung hither and thither by the waves of passion, shewed +a lover's devotion to the sea and to Nature generally.[15] 'It was +not God whom I contemplated on the waves in the magnificence of His +works: I saw an unknown woman, and the miracle of his smile, the +beauties of the sky, seemed to me disclosed by her breath. I would +have bartered eternity for one of her caresses. I pictured her to +myself as throbbing behind this veil of the universe which hid her +from my eyes. Oh! why was it not in my power to rend the veil and +press the idealized woman to my heart, to spend myself on her bosom +with the love which is the source of my inspiration, my despair, and +my life?' + +In subjectivity and dreaminess both Chateaubriand and Lamartine were +like the German romanticists, but their fundamental note was theism, +not pantheism. The storm of the French Revolution, which made radical +changes in religion, as in all other things, was followed by a +reaction. Christianity acquired new power and inwardness, and Nature +was unceasingly praised as the mirror of the divine idea of creation. + +In his _Génie du Christianisme_, Chateaubriand said: + + The true God, in entering into His Works, has given his immensity + to Nature... there is an instinct in man, which puts him in + communication with the scenes of Nature. + +Lamartine was a sentimental dreamer of dreams, a thinker of lofty +thoughts which lost themselves in the inexpressible. His +_Meditations_ shew his ardent though sad worship of Nature; his love +of evening, moonlight, and starlight. For instance, _L'Isolement_: + + Ici gronde le fleuve aux vagues écumantes, + Il serpente et s'enfonce en un lointain obscur: + Là le lac immobile étend ses eaux dormantes + Oò l'étoile du soir se lève dans l'azur. + An sommet de ces monts couronnés de bois sombres, + Le crépuscule encore jette un dernier rayon; + Et le char vaporeux de la reine des ombres + Monte et blanchit déjà les bords de l'horizon. + +_Le Soir_: + + Le soir ramène le silence.... + Venus se lève à l'horizon; + A mes pieds l'étoile amoureuse + De sa lueur mystérieuse + Blanchit les tapis de gazon. + De ce hêtre au feuillage sombre + J'entends frissonner les rameaux; + On dirait autour des tombeaux + Qu'on entend voltiger une ombre, + Tout-à-coup, détaché des cieux, + Un rayon de l'astre nocturne, + Glissant sur mon front taciturne, + Vient mollement toucher mes yeux. + Doux reflet d'un globe de flamme + Charmant rayon, que me veux-tu? + Viens-tu dans mon sein abattu + Porter la lumière à mon âme? + Descends-tu pour me révéler + Des mondes le divin mystére, + Ces secrets cachés dans la sphère + Où le jour va te rappeler? + +In the thought of happy past hours, he questions the lake: + + Un soir, t'en souvient-il, nous voguions en silence; + On n'entendait au loin, sur l'onde et sous les cieux, + Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence + Tes flots harmonieux. + O lac! rochers muets! grottes! forêt obscure! + Vous que le temps épargne ou qu'il peut rajeunir + Gardez de cette nuit, gardez, belle nature, + Au moins le souvenir!... + Que le vent qui gémit, le roseau qui soupire + Que les parfums légers de ton air embaumé, + Que tout ce qu'on entend, l'on voit, ou l'on respire, + Tout dise: 'ils out aimés! + +_La Prière_ has: + + Le roi brillant du jour, se couchant dans sa gloire, + Descend avec lenteur de son char de victoire; + Le nuage éclatant qui le cache à nos yeux + Conserve en sillons d'or sa trace dans les cieux, + Et d'un reflet de pourpre inonde l'étendue. + Comme une lampe d'or dans l'azur suspendue, + La lune se balance aux bords de l'horizon; + Ses rayons affaiblis dorment sur le gazon, + Et le voile des nuits sur les monts se déplie. + C'est l'heure, où la nature, un moment recueillie, + Entre la nuit qui touche et le jour qui s'enfuit + S'élève au créateur du jour et de la nuit, + Et semble offrir à Dieu dans son brillant langage, + De la création le magnifique hommage. + Voilà le sacrifice immense, universelle! + L'univers est le temple, et la terre est l'autel; + Les cieux en sont le dôme et ses astres sans nombre, + Ces feux demi-voilés, pâle ornement de l'ombre, + Dans la voûte d'azur avec ordre semés, + Sont les sacrés flambeaux pour ce temple allumés... + Mais ce temple est sans voix... + + ...Mon coeur seul parle dans ce silence-- + La voix de l'univers c'est mon intelligence. + Sur les rayons du soir, sur les ailes du vent, + Elle s'élève à Dieu... + +_Le Golfe de Baia_: + + Vois-tu comme le flot paisible + Sur le rivage vient mourir? + Mais déjà l'ombre plus épaisse + Tombe et brunit les vastes mers; + Le bord s'efface, le bruit cesse, + Le silence occupe les airs. + C'est l'heure où la Mélancholie + S'assied pensive et recueillie + Aux bords silencieux des mers. + +The decay of autumn corresponds to his own dolorous feelings: + + Oui, dans ces jours d'automne où la nature expire, + A ses regards voilés je trouve plus d'attraits; + C'est l'adieu d'un ami, c'est le dernier sourire + Des lèvres que la mort va fermer pour jamais. + +This is from _Ischia_: + + Le Soleil va porter le jour à d'autres mondes; + Dans l'horizon désert Phébé monte sans bruit, + Et jette, en pénétrant les ténébres profondes, + Un voile transparent sur le front de la nuit. + Voyez du haut des monts ses clartés ondoyantes + Comme un fleuve de flamme inonder les coteaux, + Dormir dans les vallons on glisser sur les pentes, + Ou rejaillir au loin du sein brillant des eaux.... + Doux comme le soupir d'un enfant qui sommeille, + Un son vague et plaintif se répand dans les airs.... + Mortel! ouvre ton âme à ces torrents de vie, + Reçois par tous les sens les charmes de la nuit.... + +He sees the transitoriness of all earthly things reflected in Nature: + + L'onde qui baise ce rivage, + De quoi se plaint-elle à ses bords? + Pourquoi le roseau sur la plage, pourquoi le ruisseau sous l'ombrage, + Rendent-ils de tristes accords? + De quoi gémit la tourterelle? Tout naist, tout paise. + +Such a depth of sympathy and dreamy dolorous reverie was new to +France, but Rousseau had broken the ice, and henceforward feeling +flowed freely. To Lamartine the theist, as to the pantheists Goethe, +Shelley, and Byron, Nature was a friend and lover. + +Victor Hugo was of the same mind, but his poetry is clearer and more +plastic than Lamartine's. We quote from his finest poems, the +_Feuilles d'Automne_. He was a true lyrist, familiar both with the +external life of Nature and the inner life of man. His beautiful 'Ce +qu'on entend sur la montagne' has the spirit of _Faust_. He imagines +himself upon a mountain top, with earth on one side, the sea on the +other; and there he hears two voices unlike any ever heard before: + + L'une venait des mers, chant de gloire! hymne heureux! + C'était la voix des flots qui se parlaient entre eux.... + Or, comme je l'ai dit, l'Océan magnifique + Epandait une voix joyeuse et pacifique + Chantant comme la harpe aux temples de Sion, + Et louait la beauté de la création. + +while from the other voice: + + Pleurs et cris! L'injure, l'anatheme.... + C'était la terre et l'homme qui pleuraient!... + L'une disait, Nature! et l'autre, Humanité! + +The personifications in this poem are beautiful. He, too, like +Lamartine, loves sea and stars most of all. These verses from _Les +Orientales_ remind one of St Augustine: + + J'étais seul près des flots par une nuit d'étoiles, + Pas un nuage aux cieux; sur les mers pas de voiles, + Et les bois et les monts et toute la nature + Semblaient interroger dans confus murmure + Les flots des mers, les feux du ciel. + Et les étoiles d'or, légions infinies, + A voix haute, à voix basse, avec mille harmonies + Disaient en inclinant leurs couronnes de feu, + Et les flots bleus, que rien gouverne et n'arrête, + Disaient en recourbant l'écume de leur crête: + C'est le Seigneur Dieu, le Seigneur Dieu! + + Parfois lorsque tout dort, je m'assieds plein de joie + Sous le dôme étoilé qui sur nos fronts flamboie; + J'écoute si d'en haut il tombe quelque bruit; + Et l'heure vainement me frappe de son aile + Quand je contemple ému cette fête eternelle + Que le ciel rayonnant donne au monde la nuit! + Souvent alors j'ai cru que ces soleils de flamme + Dans ce monde endormi n'échauffaient que mon âme; + Qu'à les comprendre seul j'étais prédestiné; + Que j'étais, moi, vaine ombre obscure et taciturne, + Le roi mystérieuse de la pompe nocturne; + Que le ciel pour moi seul s'était illuminé! + +The necessary condition of delight in Nature is very strikingly +given: + + Si vous avez en vous, vivantes et pressées, + Un monde intérieur d'images, de pensées, + De sentimens, d'amour, d'ardente passion + Pour féconder ce monde, échangez-le sans cesse + Avec l'autre univers visible qui vous presse! + Mêlez toute votre âme à la création.... + Que sous nos doigts puissans exhale la nature, + Cette immense clavier! + +His lyrics are rich in fine scenes from Nature, unrolled in cold but +stately periods, and the poetic intuition which always divines the +spirit life brought him near to that pantheism which we find in all +the greatest English and German poets of his time,[16] and which lay, +too, at the root of German romanticism. + + +THE GERMAN ROMANTICISTS + +Schiller did not possess the intrinsically lyrical genius of Goethe; +his strength lay, not in song, but drama, and in a didactic form of +epic--the song not of feeling, but of thought. + +Descriptions of Nature occur here and there in his epics and dramas; +but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his +contemporaries, he passed through a sentimental period; _Evening_ +shews this, and _Melancholy, to Laura_: + + Laura, a sunrise seems to break + Where'er thy happy looks may glow.... + Thy soul--a crystal river passing, + Silver clear and sunbeam glassing, + Mays into blossom sad autumn by thee: + Night and desert, if they spy thee, + To gardens laugh--with daylight shine, + Lit by those happy smiles of thine! + +With such ecstatic extravagances contrast the excellent descriptions +of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems--for instance, +the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in _The Diver_, +evening in _The Hostage_, and landscape in _William Tell_ and _The +Walk_. In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery +is made a 'frame for a kind of phenomenology of mankind.' + + Flowers of all hue are struggling into glow + Along the blooming fields; yet their sweet strife + Melts into one harmonious concord. Lo! + The path allures me through the pastoral green + And the wide world of fields! The labouring bee + Hums round me, and on hesitating wing + O'er beds of purple clover, quiveringly + Hovers the butterfly. Save these, all life + Sleeps in the glowing sunlight's steady sheen-- + E'en from the west no breeze the lull'd airs bring. + Hark! in the calm aloft I hear the skylark sing. + The thicket rustles near, the alders bow + Down their green coronals, and as I pass, + Waves in the rising wind the silvering grass; + Come! day's ambrosial night! receive me now + Beneath the roof by shadowy beeches made + Cool-breathing, etc. + +Schiller's interest in Nature was more a matter of reflection than +direct observation; its real tendency was philosophical and ethical. +He called Nature naive (he included naturalness in Nature); those who +seek her, sentimental; but he overlooked (as we saw in an earlier +chapter) the fact that antiquity did not always remain naive, and +that not all moderns are sentimental. + +As Rousseau's pupil he drew a sharp distinction between Nature and +Art, and felt happy in solitude where 'man with his torment does not +come,' lying, as he says in _The Bride of Messina_, like a child on +the bosom of Nature. + +In Schiller's sense of the word, perhaps no poet has been more +sentimental about Nature than Jean Paul. + +He was the humorous and satirical idyllist _par excellence_, and laid +the scenes of his romances in idyllic surroundings, using the +trifling events of daily life to wonderful purpose. There is an +almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious +metaphors and mixture of ideas. With the exception of Lake Maggiore +in _Titan_, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all his +references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated with +the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling. They +all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own +countryside, finding the reflection of their feelings in her. There +is a constant interweaving of the human soul and the universe; +therein lies his pantheistic trait. 'To each man,' he said,[17] +'Nature appears different, and the only question is, which is the +most beautiful? Nature is for ever becoming flesh for mankind; outer +Nature takes a different form in each mind.' Certainly the nature of +Jean Paul was different from the Nature of other mortals. Was she +more beautiful? He wrote of her in his usual baroque style, with a +wealth of thought and feeling, and everywhere the sparkle of genius; +but it is all presented in the strangest motley, as exaggerated and +unenjoyable as can be. For example, from _Siebenkâs_: + + I appeared again then on the last evening of the year 1794, on + the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne + away to the ocean of eternity. + + To the butterfly--proboscis of Siebenkäs, enough honey--cells + were still open in every blue thistle-blossom of destiny. + + When they had passed the gate--that is to say, the + un-Palmyra-like ruins of it--the crystal reflecting grotto of the + August night stood open and shining above the dark green earth, + and the ocean-calm of Nature stayed the wild storm of the human + heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of + silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it) up above the + world, and down beneath it the reaped corn stood in the sheaves + without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a + poor old man gathering snails for the snail pits, seemed to be + the only things that dwelt in the far-reaching darkness. + +When it was autumn in his heart: + + Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead; + above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim + phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over + the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in + clinging folds, as if all Nature, trembling into dust, must + vanish in its wreaths.... But one bright thought pierced these + dark fogs of Nature and the soul, turning them to a white + gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and + gently lighting upon flowers. + +When his married life grew more unhappy, in December: + + The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet, as he stood + upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of Nature. + +and in spring + + it seemed to him as if his life dwelt, not in a bodily heart, but + in some warm and tender tear, as if his heavy-laden soul were + expanding and breaking away through some chink in its prison, and + melting into a tone of music, a blue ether wave. + +And _Titan_ expresses that inner enfranchisement which Nature bestows +upon us: + + Exalted Nature! when we see and love thee, we love our fellow-men + more warmly, and when we must pity or forget them, thou still + remainest with us, reposing before the moist eye like a verdant + chain of mountains in the evening red. Ah! before the soul in + whose sight the morning dew of its ideals has faded to a cold, + grey drizzle ... thou remainest, quickening Nature, with thy + flowers and mountains and cataracts, a faithful comforter; and + the bleeding son of the gods, cold and speechless, dashes the + drop of anguish from his eyes, that they may rest, far and clear, + on thy volcanoes, and on thy springs and on thy suns. + +This is sunset in his abstruse artistic handling: + + The sun sinks, and the earth closes her great eye like that of a + dying god. Then smoke the hills like altars; out of every wood + ascends a chorus; the veils of day, the shadows, float around the + enkindled transparent tree-tops, and fall upon the gay, gem-like + flowers. And the burnished gold of the west throws back a dead + gold on the east, and tinges with rosy light the hovering breast + of the tremulous lark--the evening bell of Nature. + +And this sunrise: + + The flame of the sun now shot up ever nearer to the kindled + morning clouds; at length in the heavens, in the brooks and + ponds, and in the blooming cups of dew, a hundred suns rose + together, while a thousand colours floated over the earth, and + one pure dazzling white broke from the sky. It seemed as if an + almighty earthquake had forced up from the ocean, yet dripping, a + new-created blooming plain, stretching out beyond the bounds of + vision, with all its young instincts and powers; the fire of + earth glowed beneath the roots of the immense hanging garden, and + the fire of heaven poured down its flames and burnt the colours + into the mountain summits and the flowers. Between the porcelain + towers of white mountains the coloured blooming heights stood as + thrones of the Fruit-Goddess; over the far-spread camp of + pleasure blossom-cups and sultry drops were pitched here and + there like peopled tents; the ground was inlaid with swarming + nurseries of grasses and little hearts, and one heart detached + itself after another with wings, or fins, or feelers, from the + hot breeding-cell of Nature, and hummed and sucked and smacked + its little lips, and sung: and for every little proboscis some + blossom-cup of; joy was already open. The darling child of the + infinite mother, man, alone stood with bright joyful eyes upon + the market-place of the living city of the sun, full of + brilliance and noise, and gazed, delighted, around him into all + its countless streets; but his eternal mother rested veiled in + immensity, and only by the warmth which went to his heart did he + feel that he was lying upon hers. + +For very overflow of thought and imagery and ecstasy of feeling, Jean +Paul never achieved a balanced beauty of expression. + +The ideal classic standard which Winckelmann and Lessing had laid +down--simple and plastic, calm because objective, crystal-clear in +thought and expression--and which Goethe and Schiller had sought to +realize and imbue with modern ideas, was too strictly limited for the +Romanticists. Hyperion's words expressed their taste more accurately: +'O, man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks!' and they +laid stress upon restless movement, fantastic, highly-coloured +effects, a crass subjectivity, a reckless licence of the imagination. + +Actual and visible things were disregarded; they did not accord with +this claim for infinity and the nebulous, for exploring the secret +depths of the soul. + +It was perhaps a necessary reaction from Goethe's classicism; but it +passed like a bad dream, after tending, thanks to its heterogeneous +elements, now to the mediæval period, now to that of Storm and +Stress, and now to Goethe, Herder, and Winckelmann. It certainly +contained germs of good, which have grown and flourished in our own +day. + +In keeping with its whole character, the Romantic feeling for Nature +was subjective and fantastic to excess, mystically enthusiastic, +often with a dreamy symbolism at once deep and naive; its inmost core +was pantheistic, with a pantheism shading off imperceptibly into +mysticism. + +After _Werther_, there is perhaps no work of modern fiction in which +Nature plays so artistic a part as in Holderlin's _Hyperion_. + +Embittered by life's failure to realize his ideals, he cries: 'But +thou art still visible, sun in the sky! Thou art still green, sacred +earth! The streams still rush to the sea, and shady trees rustle at +noon. The spring's song of joy sings my mortal thoughts to sleep. The +abundance of the universe nourishes and satiates my famished being to +intoxication.' + +This mystical pantheism could not be more clearly expressed than +here: + + O blessed Nature! I know not how it happens when I lift my eyes + to your beauty; but all the joy of the sky is in the tears which + I shed before you--a lover before the lady of his love. When the + soft waves of the air play round my breast, my whole being is + speechless and listens. Absorbed in the blue expanse, I often + look up to the ether and down to the holy sea; and it seems as if + a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of + loneliness were lost in the divine life. To be one with all that + lives, in blessed self-forgetfulness to return to the All of + Nature, that is the height of thought and bliss--the sacred + mountain height, the place of eternal rest, where noon loses its + sultriness and thunder its voice, and the rough sea is like the + waves in a field of wheat. + +To such feeling as this the actualities are but fetters, hindering +aspiration. + +'O, if great Nature be the daughter of a father, is the daughter's +heart not his heart? Is not he her deepest feeling? But have I found +it? Do I know it?' + +He tries to discern the 'soul of Nature,' hears 'the melody of +morning light begin with soft notes.' He says to the flower, 'You are +my sister,' and to the springs, 'We are of one race': he finds +symbolic resemblance between his heart and all the days and seasons: +he feels the beauty of the 'land like paradise,' while scarcely ever, +except in the poem _Heidelberg_, giving a clear sketch of scenery. A +number of fine comparisons from Nature are scattered through his +writings [18]: + + The caresses of the charming breezes. + + She light, clear, flattering sea. + + Sacred air, the sister of the mind which moves and + lives in us with fiery force, present everywhere immortal. + + Earth, 'one of the flowers of the sky.' + + Heaven, 'the unending garden of life.' + + Beauty, that 'which is one and all.' + +He describes his love in a mystical form: + + We were but one flower, and our souls lived in each other as + flowers do, when they love and hide their joy within a closed + calyx.... The clear starry night had now become my element, for + the beautiful life of my love grew in the stillness as in the + depths of earth gold grows mysteriously. + +He delights 'thus to drink the joy of the world out of one cup with +the lady of his love.' + +'Yea, man is a sun, seeing all and transfiguring all when he loves; +and when he does not love, he is like a dark dwelling in which a +little smelly lamp is burning.' All this is soft and feminine, but it +has real poetic charm. + +Beautiful too, though sad and gloomy, is his _Song of Fate_: + + Nowhere may man abide, + But painfully from hour to hour + He stumbles blindly on to the unknown, + As water falls from rock to rock + The long year through. + +His pantheism finds expression in the odes--in _To Nature_, for +instance: + + Since my heart turneth upward to the sun + As one that hears her voice, + Hailing the stars as brothers, and the spring + As melody divine; + Since in the breath that stirs the wood thy soul, + The soul of joy, doth move + On the still waters of my heart--therefore, + O Nature! these are golden days to me! + +Tieck, too, was keenly alive to Nature. Spring[19]: + + Look all around thee how the spring advances! + New life is playing through the gay green trees! + See how in yonder bower the light leaf dances + To the bird's tread and to the quivering breeze! + How every blossom in the sunlight glances! + The winter frost to his dark cavern flees, + And earth, warm wakened, feels through every vein + The kindling influence of the vernal rain. + Now silvery streamlets, from the mountain stealing, + Dance joyously the verdant vales along; + Cold fear no more the songster's tongue is sealing, + Down in the thick dark grove is heard his song. + And all their bright and lovely hues revealing, + A thousand plants the field and forest throng; + Light comes upon the earth in radiant showers, + And mingling rainbows play among the flowers. + +All his writings seem intoxicated with Nature. The hero of his novel +_William Lovell_, scamp though he is, a man of criminal egotism whose +only law is licence, is deeply in love with Nature. + +He wrote from Florence: + + Nature refreshes my soul with her endless beauty. I am often full + of enthusiasm at the thousand charms of Nature and Art ... at + last my longing to travel to wonderful distant places is + satisfied. Even as a child, when I stood outside my father's + country-house, and gazed at the distant mountains and discovered + a windmill on the very line of the horizon, it seemed to beckon + me as it turned, my blood pulsed more quickly, my mind flew to + distant regions, a strange longing often filled my eyes with + tears. + + Often it seems to me as if the enigma in ourselves were about to + be unriddled, as if we were suddenly to see the transformation of + all our feelings and strange experiences. Night surrounded me + with a hundred terrors, the transparent moonlight sky was like a + crystal dome overhead--in this world the most unusual feelings + were as shadows. + +'Franz Sternbald' had the same intoxicated feeling for Nature: + + I should like to fill the whole world with songs of love, to move + moonrise and sunrise to echo back my joys and sorrows; and trees, + twigs, leaves, grasses to catch the melody and all repeat my + music with a thousand tongues.[20] + +To the Romantic School, Music and Nature were a passion; they longed +to resolve all their feelings, like Byron, at one flash, into music. +'For thought is too distant.' Night and the forest, moonlight and +starlight, were in all their songs. + +There is a background of landscape all through _Franz Sternbald's +Wanderings_. + +In the novels of the eighteenth century landscape had had no place; +Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an +extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he +only wanted to fill up the page. + +Rousseau altered this; Sophie la Roche, in her _Freundschaftlichen +Frauenzimmerbriefen_, introduced ruins, moonlight scenery, hills, +vales, and flowering hedges, etc., into scenes of thought and +feeling; and most of all, Goethe in _Werther_ tunes scenery and soul +to one key. In his later romances he avoided descriptions of scenery. +Jean Paul, like Tieck in _Franz Sternbald_, never spares us one +sunset or sunrise. Some of Tieck's concise descriptions are very +telling, like Theodore Storm's at the present day: + + Rosy light quivered on the blades of grass, and morning moved in + waves along them. + + The redder the evening grew, the heavier became his dreams; the + darkened trees, the shadows lengthening across the fields, the + smoke from the roofs of a little village, and the stars coming + into view one by one in the sky--all this moved him deeply, moved + him to a wistful compassion for himself. + +As Franz wanders about the wood: + + He observes the trees reflected in a neighbouring pond. He had + never looked at landscape with this pleasure, it had never been + given to him to discern the various colours and their shadows, + the charm of the stillness, the effect of the foliage, as now in + the clear water. Till now he had never drawn a landscape, only + looked at it as a necessary adjunct to many historical pictures, + had never felt that lifeless Nature could herself compose + something whole and complete in itself, and so worthy to be + represented. + +Tieck's shorter stories, fairy tales and others, shew taste for the +mysterious and indefinite aspects of Nature--reflections in water, +rays of light, cloud forms: + + They became to him the most fitting characters in which to record + that indefinite inexpressible feeling which gave its special + colour to his spiritual life.[21] + +The pantheism of Boehme, with whom he was closely associated, always +attracted him, and in Jena he came under the influence of Steffens, +and also of Schelling, whose philosophy of Nature called Nature a +mysterious poem, a dreaming mind. This mind it became the chief aim +of Novalis, as well as Tieck, to decipher. + +From simple descriptions of Nature he went on to read mystic meanings +into her, seeking, psychologically in his novels and mystically in +his fairy tales, to fathom the connection between natural phenomena +and elementary human feeling. _Blond Egbert_ was the earliest example +of this: + + Night looked sullenly through the windows, and the trees without + rustled in the wet cold ... the moon looked fitfully through + breaks in the driving clouds.[22] + +In the same book Bertha describes the horror of loneliness, the vague +longings, and then the overwhelming delight in new impressions, which +seized her when she fled from home as a child and lost herself among +the mountains. + +_The Runenberg_ gives in a very powerful way the idea of the weird +fascination which the subterranean powers were supposed to exert over +men, alluring and befooling them, and rousing their thirst for gold. + +The demoniacal elements in mountain scenery, its crags and abysses, +are contrasted with idyllic plains. The tale is sprinkled over with +descriptions of Nature, which give it a fairy-like effect.[23] + +The most extraordinary product of this School was Novalis. With him +everything resolved itself into presentiment, twilight, night, into +vague longings for a vague distant goal, which he expressed by the +search for 'the blue flower.' This is from _Heinrich von +Ofterdingen_: + +'The cheerful pageant of the glorious evening rocked him in soft +imaginings; the flower of his heart was visible now and then as by +sheet lightning.' He looked at Nature with the mystic's eye, and +described her fantastically: + + I am never tired of looking minutely at the different plants. + Growing plants are the direct language of the earth; each new + leaf, each remarkable flower, is a mystery which projects itself, + and because it cannot move with love and longing, nor attain to + words, is a dumb, quiet plant. When in solitude one finds such a + flower, does it not seem as if all around it were brightened, + and, best of all, do not the little feathered notes around it + remain near? One could weep for joy, and there, far from the + world, stick hands and feet into the earth, to take root, and + never more leave so delightful a spot. This green mysterious + carpet of love is drawn over the whole earth. + +It is not surprising that night should attract this unnaturally +excited imagination most of all: + + Sacred, inexpressible, mysterious Night, delicious balsam drops + from thy hands, from the poppy sheaf; thou upliftest the heavy + wings of the Spirit.[24] + +Night and death are delight and bliss. + +The fairy-like tale of _Hyacinth and Little Rose,_ with its charming +personifications, is refreshing after all this: + + The violet told the strawberry in confidence, she told her friend + the gooseberry, who never ceased to jeer when Hyacinth went, so + the whole garden and wood soon knew it, and when Hyacinth went + out, voices from all sides cried out, 'Little Rose is my + favourite.' When he goes into the wide world to find the land of + Isis, he asks the way of the animals, and of springs, rocks, and + trees, and the flowers smile at him, the springs offer him a + fresh drink, and there is wonderful music when he comes home. 'O + that men could understand the music of Nature!' cries the + listener in the tale. Then follows a description of 'the sweet + passion for the being of Nature and her enchanting raptures,' and + the charm of the poetic imagination which finds 'a great sympathy + with man's heart' in all the external world. For example, in the + breath of wind, which 'with a thousand dark and dolorous notes + seems to dissolve one's quiet grief into one deep melodious sigh + of all Nature.' + + 'And am I myself other than the stream when I gaze gloomily down + into its waters and lose my thoughts in its flow?' And in ecstasy + the youth exclaims: 'Whose heart does not leap for joy, when he + feels Nature's innermost life in its fulness, when that powerful + feeling, for which language has no other name than love and + bliss, spreads like a vapour through his being, and he sinks, + palpitating, on the dark alluring breast of Nature, and his poor + self is lost in the overwhelming waves of joy?'[25] + +Here we have the key to the romantic feeling for Nature--communion of +the soul with Nature in a twilight mood of dreamy absorption. + +Yet amidst all this, real delight in romantic scenery was not quite +lacking: witness Hulsen's[26] _Observations on Nature on a Journey +through Switzerland_; and the genuine lyric of Nature, untainted by +mystic and sickly influences, was still to be heard, as in +Eichendorff's beautiful songs and his _Tautgenichts_. + +The Romantic School, in fact, far as it erred from the path, did +enlarge the life of feeling generally, and with that, feeling for +Nature, and modern literature is still bound to it by a thousand +threads. + +Our modern rapture has thus been reached by a path which, with many +deviations in its course, has come to us from a remote past, and is +still carrying us farther forward. + +Its present intensity is due to the growth of science, for although +feeling has become more realistic and matter-of-fact in these days of +electricity and the microscope, love for Nature has increased with +knowledge. Science has even become the investigator of religion, and +the pantheistic tendency of the great poets has passed into us, +either in the idea of an all-present God, or in that of organic force +working through matter--the indestructible active principle of life +in the region of the visible. Our explorers combine enthusiasm for +Nature with their tireless search for truth--for example, Humboldt, +Haeckel, and Paul Güssfeldt; and though, as the shadow side to this +light, travelling and admiration of Nature have become a fashion, yet +who nowadays can watch a great sunset or a storm over the sea, and +remain insensible to the impression? + +Landscape painting and poetry shew the same deviations from the +straight line of development as in earlier times. Our garden craft, +like our architecture, is eclectic; but the English park style is +still the most adequate expression of prevalent taste: spaces of turf +with tree groups, a view over land or sea, gradual change from garden +to field; to which has been added a wider cultivation of foreign +plants. In landscape painting the zigzag course is very marked: +landscapes such as Bocklin's, entirely projected by the imagination +and corresponding to nothing on earth, hang together in our galleries +with the most faithful studies from Nature. It is the same with +literature. In fiction, novels which perpetuate the sentimental +rhapsodies of an early period, and open their chapters with forced +descriptions of landscape, stand side by side with the masterly work +of great writers--for example, Spielhagen, Wilhelmine von Hillern, +and Theodore Storm. + +In poetry, the lyric of Nature is inexhaustible. Heine, the greatest +lyrist after Goethe, though his poetry has, like the Nixie, an +enchantingly fair body with a fish's tail, wrote in the _Travels in +the Harz_: 'How infinitely blissful is the feeling when the outer +world of phenomena blends and harmonizes with the inner world of +feeling; when green trees, thoughts, birds' songs, sweet melancholy, +the azure of heaven, memory, and the perfume of flowers, run together +and form the loveliest of arabesques.' + +But his delight in Nature was spoilt by irony and straining after +effect--for example, in _The Fig Tree_; and although _The Lotos +Flower_ is a gem, and the _North Sea Pictures_ shew the fine eye of a +poet who, like Byron and Shelley, can create myths, his +personifications as a whole are affected, and his personal feeling is +forced upon Nature for the sake of a witty effect. + +Every element of Nature has found skilled interpreters both in poetry +and painting, and technical facility and truth of representation now +stand on one level with the appreciation of her charms. + + + + +NOTES + +INTRODUCTION + + +[Footnote 1: _Kritische Gänge_. Comp. Vischer, _Ueber den optischen +Formsinn,_ and Carl du Prel, _Psychologie der Lyrik_.] + +[Footnote 2: As in elegy _Ghatarkarparam_.] + +[Footnote 3: Comp. Humboldt, _Cosmos_. Schnaase, _Geschichte der +bildenden Künste_.] + +[Footnote 4: See _Die Entwickelung des Naturgefühls bei den Griechen +und Römern_, Biese.] + + +CHAPTER I + +[Footnote 1: Lucos ac nemora consecrant deorumque nominibus adpellant +secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident, Tac. Germ. Comp. Grimm, +_Deutsche Mythologie_.] + +[Footnote 2: Grimm. Simrock, _Handbuch der Mythologie_.] + +[Footnote 3: Grimm.] + +[Footnote 4: Grimm.] + +[Footnote 5: Grimm.] + +[Footnote 6: _Geschichte der bildenden Künste_. Comp. Grimm, +_Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer_.] + +[Footnote 7: Grimm.] + +[Footnote 8: Carrière, _Die Poesie_.] + + +CHAPTER II + +[Footnote 1: Clement of Rome, i _Cor._ 19, 20. Zoeckler, _Geschichte +der Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft_.] + +[Footnote 2: Comp. _Vita S. Basilii_.] + +[Footnote 3: _Basilii opera omnia_. Parisus, 1730.] + +[Footnote 4: _Cosmos_.] + +[Footnote 5: Biese, _Die Entwickelung des Naturgefühls bei den +Griechen und Römern_.] + +[Footnote 6: _Mélanges philosophiques, historiques, et littéraires_.] + +[Footnote 7: _Homily_ 4.] + +[Footnote 8: _Homily_ 6.] + +[Footnote 9: Biese, _Die Entwickelung des Naturgefühls bei den +Griechen und Römern_. + +'In spring the Cydmian apple trees give blossom watered by river +streams in the hallowed garden of the nymphs; in spring the buds grow +and swell beneath the leafy shadow of the vine branch. But my heart +knoweth no season of respite; nay, like the Thracian blast that +rageth with its lightning, so doth it bear down from Aphrodite's +side, dark and fearless, with scorching frenzy in its train, and from +its depths shaketh my heart with might.'] + +[Footnote 10: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 11: _Deutsche Rundschau_, 1879.] + +[Footnote 12: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 13: Chrysostom was not only utilitarian, but praised and +enjoyed the world's beauty. From the fifth to third century, Greek +progress in feeling for Nature can be traced from unconscious to +conscious pleasure in her beauty.] + +[Footnote 14: _De Mortalitate_, cap. 4.] + +[Footnote 15: _Geschichte der christlich-lateinischen Literatur_.] + +[Footnote 16: When one thinks of Sappho, Simonides, Theocritus, +Meleager, Catullus, Ovid, and Horace, it cannot be denied that this +is true of Greek and Roman lyric.] + +[Footnote 17: As in the Homeric time, when each sphere of Nature was +held to be subject to and under the influence of its special deity. +But it cannot be admitted that metaphor was freer and bolder in the +hymns; on the contrary, it was very limited and monotonous.] + +[Footnote 18: In _Cathemerinon_.] + +[Footnote 19: Comp. fragrant gardens of Paradise, Hymn 3. + +In Hamartigenia he says that the evil and ugly in Nature originates +in the devil.] + +[Footnote 20: Ebert.] + +[Footnote 21: The Robinsonade of the hermit Bonosus upon a rocky +island is interesting.] + +[Footnote 22: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 23: Comp. _ad Paulinum_, epist. 19, _Monum. German._ v. 2.] + +[Footnote 24: _Carm. nat. 7._] + +[Footnote 25: _Ep._ xi.] + +[Footnote 26: _Migne Patrol_ 60.] + +[Footnote 27: _Migne Patrol_ 59.] + +[Footnote 28: Ebert.] + +[Footnote 29: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 30: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 31: _Migne Patrol_ 58.] + +[Footnote 32: _Carm._ lib. i.] + +[Footnote 33: _Amoenitas loci_: Variorum libri Lugduni, 1677.] + +[Footnote 34: _Monum. Germ._, 4th ed., Leo, lib. viii.] + +[Footnote 35: _Deutsche Rundschau_, 1882.] + +[Footnote 36: _Monum. German Histor., poet. lat. medii ævi_, I. +Berlin 1881, ed. Dümmler. Alcuin, _Carmen_ 23.] + +[Footnote 37: Zoeckler, _Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen +Theologie und Naturwissenschaft_. 'On rocky crags by the sea, on +shores fringed by oak or beech woods, in the shady depths of forests, +on towering mountain tops, or on the banks of great rivers, one sees +the ruins or the still inhabited buildings which once served as the +dwellings of the monks who, with the cross as their only weapon, were +the pioneers of our modern culture. Their flight from the life of +traffic and bustle in the larger towns was by no means a flight from +the beauties of Nature.' The last statement is only partly true. In +the prime of the monastic era the beauties of Nature were held to be +a snare of the devil. Still, in choosing a site, beauty of position +was constantly referred to as an auxiliary motive. 'Bernhard loved +the valley,' 'but Bernhard chose mountains,' are significant +phrases.] + +[Footnote 38: Comp. Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_, on the old Germanic +idea of a conflict between winter and spring.] + +[Footnote 39: Dümmler, vi. _Carolus et Leo papa._] + +[Footnote 40: Walahfridi Strabi, _De cultura hortorum_.] + +[Footnote 41: Comp. H. von Eichen, _Geschichte und System der +mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung_. Stuttg. Cotta, 1887.] + + +CHAPTER III + +[Footnote 1: Prutz, _Geschichte der Kreuzzüge_. Berlin, 1883.] + +[Footnote 2: Allatius, _Symmicta_. Coeln, 1653.] + +[Footnote 3: _Deutsche Pilgerreisen nach dem heiligen Lande_, +Roehricht und Meissner. Berlin, 1880.] + +[Footnote 4: For excellent bibliographical evidence see _Die +geographische Kenntnis der Alpen im Mittelalter_ in supplement to +_Münchner Allgem. Zeitung_, January 1885.] + +[Footnote 5: Comp. Oehlmann, _Die Alpenpässe im Mittelalter, Jahrbuch +für Schweizer_.] + +[Footnote 6: Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 7: Fr. Diez, _Leben und Werke der Troubadours_. Zwickau, +1829] + +[Footnote 8: _Des Minnesangs Frühling_, von Lachmann-Haupt.] + +[Footnote 9: _Geschichte der Malerei._ Woermann und Wottmann.] + +[Footnote 10: 'Detailed study of Nature had begun; but the attempt to +blend the separate elements into a background landscape in +perspective betrayed the insecurity and constraint of dilettante work +at every point.' Ludwig Kämmerer on the period before Van Eyck in +_Die Landschaft in der deutschen Kunst bis zum Tode Albrecht Dürers_. +Leipzig, 1880] + + +CHAPTER IV + +[Footnote 1: _Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien._] + +[Footnote 2: _Untersuchungen über die kampanische Wandmalerei._ +Leipzig, 1873.] + +[Footnote 3: Comp. Schnaase, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 4: _Argon_, ii. 219; iii. 260, 298. Comp. Cic. _ad Att._, +iv. 18, 3.] + +[Footnote 5: _Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland._ +Berlin, 1882. (Oncken, _Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstettungen_, +ii. 8.)] + +[Footnote 6: _Itinerar. syr._, Burckhardt ii.] + +[Footnote 7: _Loci specie percussus_, Burckhardt i.] + +[Footnote 8: In his paper 'Kulturgeschichte und Naturwissenschaft' +(_Deutsche Rundschau_, vol. xiii.), which is full both of original +ideas and of exaggerated summary opinions, Du Bois Reymond fails to +do justice to this, and altogether misjudges Petrarch's feeling for +Nature. After giving this letter in proof of mediæval feeling, he +goes on to say: 'Full of shame and remorse, he descends the mountain +without another word. The poor fellow had given himself up to +innocent enjoyment for a moment, without thinking of the welfare of +his soul, and instead of gloomy introspection, had looked into the +enticing outer world. Western humanity was so morbid at that time, +that the consciousness of having done this was enough to cause +painful inner conflict to a man like Petrarch--a man of refined +feeling, and scientific, though not a deep thinker.' Even granting +this, which is too tragically put, the world was on the very eve of +freeing itself from this position, and Petrarch serves as a witness +to the change.] + +[Footnote 9: Comp., too, _De Genealogia Deorum_, xv., in which he +says of trees, meadows, brooks, flocks and herds, cottages, etc., +that these things 'animum mulcent,' their effect is 'mentem in se +colligere.'] + +[Footnote 10: Comp. Voigt, _Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini als Papst +Pius II. und sein Zeitalter_.] + +[Footnote 11: Comp. Geiger and Ad. Wolff, _Die Klassiker aller Zeiten +und Nationen_.] + +[Footnote 12: Quando mira la terra ornata e bella. Rime di V. +Colonna.] + +[Footnote 13: Ombrosa selva che il mio duolo ascolti.] + + +CHAPTER V + +[Footnote 1: Ruge, _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen._ +Berlin, 1881. (_Allgem. Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen_, von +Oncken.) _Die neu Welt der Landschaften_, etc. Strasburg, 1534.] + +[Footnote 2: _De rebus oceanicis et novo orbi Decades tres Petri +Martyris at Angleria Mediolanensis, Coloniæ_, 1574.] + +[Footnote 3: _Il viaggio di Giovan Leone e Le Navagazioni, di Aloise +da Mosto. di Pietro, di Cintra. di Anxone, di un Piloto Portuguese e +di Vasco di Gama quali si leggono nella raccolta di Giovambattista +Ramusio._ Venezia, 1837.] + +[Footnote 4: For example, this from Ramusio: 'And the coast is all +low land, full of most beautiful and very tall trees, which are +evergreen, as the leaves do not wither as do those in our country, +but a new leaf appears before the other is cast off: the trees extend +right down into the marshy tract of shore, and look as if flourishing +on the sea. The coast is a most glorious sight, and in my opinion, +though I have cruised about in many parts both in the East and in the +West, I have never seen any coast which surpassed this in beauty. It +is everywhere washed by many rivers, and small streams of little +importance, as big ships will not be able to enter them.] + +[Footnote 5: Ideler, _Examen critique_. Cosmos.] + +[Footnote 6: _Coleccion de los viajes y decubrimientos que hicieron +por mar los espanoles desde fines del siglo XV. con varios documentos +ineditos ... co-ordinata e illustrada por Don Martin Fernandez de +Navarrete._ Madrid, 1858.] + +[Footnote 7: _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen._] + +[Footnote 8: As he lay sick and despairing off Belem, an unknown +voice said to him compassionately: 'O fool! and slow to believe and +serve thy God.... He gave thee the keys of those barriers of the +ocean sea which were closed with such mighty chains, and thou wast +obeyed through many lands, and hast gained an honourable fame +throughout Christendom.' In a letter to the King and Queen of Spain +in fourth voyage.] + +[Footnote 9: Humboldt.] + +[Footnote 10: Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 11: Zoeckler, _Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen +Theologie und Naturwissenschaft_.] + +[Footnote 12: F. Hammerich, _St Birgitta._] + +[Footnote 13: Zoeckler, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 14: Comp. Wilkens' _Fray Luis de Leon_. Halle, 1866.] + +[Footnote 15: Comp. Wilkens' _Fray Luis de Leon_. Halle, 1866.] + +[Footnote 16: Comp. Wilkens' _Fray Luis de Leon_. Halle, 1866.] + +[Footnote 17: Comp. Wilkens' _Fray Luis de Leon_. Halle, 1866.] + +[Footnote 18: Humboldt.] + +[Footnote 19: Comp. Carrière, _Die Poesie_.] + +[Footnote 20: Zoeckler, in Herzog's _Real-Encykl._, xxi., refers to +'Le Solitaire des Indes ou la Vie de Gregoire Lopez.' Goerres, _Die +christliche Mystik_; S. Arnold, _Leben der Gläubigen_; French, _Life +of St Teresa_.] + + +CHAPTER VI + +[Footnote 1: In _Shakespeare Studien_, chap. 4, Hense treats +Shakespeare's attitude towards Nature very suggestively; but I have +gone my own way.] + +[Footnote 2: _Hamlet_, i. 3: 'The canker galls the infants of the +spring too oft before their buttons be disclosed.' Comp. i. 1; _Romeo +and Juliet_, i. 1; _Henry VI._, part 2, iii. 1; _Tempest_, i. 2.] + +[Footnote 3: Comp. Henkel, _Das Goethe'sche Gleichnis_; _Henry IV._, +2nd pt., iv. 4; _Richard II._, i. i; _Othello_, iii. 3, and v. 2; +_Cymbeline_, ii. 4; _King John_, ii. 2; _Hamlet_, iii. 1; _Tempest_, +iv. 2.] + +[Footnote 4: See Hense for bucolic idyllic traits.] + +[Footnote 5: _Poetische Personifikation in griechischen Dichtungen._] + + +CHAPTER VII + +[Footnote 1: Comp. Woermann, _Ueber den landschaftlichen Natursinn +der Griechen und Römer, Vorstudien zu einer Arckäologie der +Landschaftsmalerei_. München, 1871.] + +[Footnote 2: Comp. Schnaase, _Geschichte der bildenden Künste im 15 +Jahrhundert_, edited by Lübke. Stuttgart, 1879.] + +[Footnote 3: Falke, _Geschichte des modernen Geschmacks_. Leipzig, +1880] + +[Footnote 4: _Geschichte der deutschen Renaissance_. Stuttgart, +1873.] + +[Footnote 5: Comp. also Kaemmerer, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 6: Lûbke, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 7: Lûbke refers to A. von Zahn's searching work, _Durer's +Kunstlehre und sein Verhältnis zur Renaissance_. Leipzig, 1866.] + +[Footnote 8: Proportion III., B.T. iii. b. Nuremberg, 1528.] + +[Footnote 9: _Op. cit._] + +[Footnote 10: In what follows, I have borrowed largely from +Rosenberg's interesting writings (_Greuzboten_, Nos. 43 and 44, +1884-85), and still more from Schnaase, Falke, and Carrière, as I +myself only know the masters represented at Berlin and Munich.] + +[Footnote 11: Kaemmerer, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 12: Kaemmerer, _op. cit._] + + +CHAPTER VIII + +[Footnote 1: _Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und +Deutschland._] + +[Footnote 2: _Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und +Deutschland._] + +[Footnote 3: Zoeckler.] + +[Footnote 4: Comp. Hase, _Sebastian Frank von Woerd der +Schwarmgeist_.] + +[Footnote 5: Comp. Hubert, _Kleine Schriften_.] + +[Footnote 6: Zoeckler, etc.] + +[Footnote 7: Comp. Uhland, _Schriften zur Geschichte der Dichtung und +Sage_. Alte hoch und nieder deutsche Volkslieder, where plants, ivy, +holly, box, and willow, represent summer and winter.] + +[Footnote 8: Uhland.] + +[Footnote 9: Uhland.] + +[Footnote 10: Wunderhorn.] + +[Footnote 11: Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 12: Fred Cohn, '_Die Gärten in alter und neuer Zeit,' D. +Rundschau_ 18, 1879. In Italy in the sixteenth century there was a +change to this extent, that greenery was no longer clipt, but allowed +to grow naturally, and the garden represented the transition from +palace to landscape, from bare architectural forms to the free +creations of Nature. The passion for flowers--the art of the pleasure +garden, flourished in Holland and Germany. (Falke.)] + +[Footnote 13: W.H. Riehl states (_Kulturstudien aus drei +Jahrhunderten_) that Berlin, Augsburg, Leipzig, Darmstadt, and +Mannheim were described in the seventeenth century as having 'very +fine and delightful positions'; and the finest parts of the Black +Forest, Harz and Thuringian mountains as 'very desolate,' deserted, +and monotonous, or, at best, as not particularly pleasant scenery. If +only a region were flat and treeless, a delicious landscape could be +charmed out of it. Welcker, Court physician at Hesse Cassel, +describing Schlangenbad in 1721, said that it lay in a desolate, +unpleasing district, where nothing grew but foliage and grass, but +that through ingenious planting of clipt trees in lines and cross +lines, some sort of artistic effect had been produced. Clearly the +principles of French garden-craft had become a widely accepted dogma +of taste. Riehl contrasts the periwig period with the mediæval, and +concludes that the mediæval backgrounds of pictures implied feeling +for the wild and romantic. He says: 'In the Middle Ages the painters +chose romantic jagged forms of mountains and rocks for backgrounds, +hence the wild, bare, and arid counted as a prototype of beautiful +scenery, while some centuries later such forms were held to be too +rustic and irregular for beauty.' One cannot entirely agree with +this. He weakens it himself in what follows. 'It was not a real scene +which rose Alp-like before their mind's eye, but an imaginary and +sacred one; their fantastic, romantic ideal called for rough and +rugged environment': and adds, arguing in a circle, 'Their minds +passed then to real portraiture of Nature, and decided the landscape +eye of the period.' My own opinion is that the loftiness of the +'heroic' mountain backgrounds seemed suitable for the sacred subjects +which loomed so large and sublime in their own minds, and that these +backgrounds did not reveal their ideal of landscape beauty, nor 'a +romantic feeling for Nature,' nor 'a taste for the romantic,' nor yet +a wondrous change of view in the periwig period.] + +[Footnote 14: In his _Harburg Program_ of 1883 _(Beiträge zur +Geschichte des Naturgefühls_), after an incomplete survey of ancient +and modern writings on the subject, Winter sketches the development +of modern feeling for Nature in Germany from Opitz to 1770, as shewn +in the literature of that period, basing his information chiefly upon +Goedeke's _Deutsche Dichtung._] + +[Footnote 15: Comp. Chovelius _Die bedeutendsten deutschen Romanz des +17 Jahrhunderts_. Leipzig, 1866.] + +[Footnote 16: Chovelius.] + +[Footnote 17: Daniel Lohenstein's _Blumen_. Breslau, 1689.] + + +CHAPTER IX + +[Footnote 1: Freiherr von Ditfurth, _Deutsche Volks und +Gesellschaftslieder des 17 und 18 Jahrhunderts_, 1872.] + +[Footnote 2: Goedeke-Tittmannschen Sammlung, xiii., +_Trutz-Nachtigall._] + +[Footnote 3: _Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur_.] + +[Footnote 4: Tittmann's _Deutsche Dichter des 17 Jahrhunderts_, vol. +vi.] + +[Footnote 5: Comp., too, iv. 5: 'Die ihr alles hört und saget, Luft +and Forst und Meer durchjaget; Echo, Sonne, Mond, und Wind, Sagt mir +doch, wo steckt mein Kind?' + +21. 'Den sanften West bewegt mein Klagen, Es rauscht der Bach den +Seufzern nach Aus Mitleid meiner Plagen; Die Vögel schweigen, Um nur +zu zeigen Dass diese schöne Tyrannei Auch Tieren überlegen sei.' +_Abendlied_ contains beautiful personifications: 'Der Feierabend ist +gemacht, Die Arbeit schläft, der Traum erwacht, Die Sonne führt die +Pferde trinken; Der Erdkreis wandert zu der Ruh, Die Nacht drückt ihm +die Augen zu, Die schon dem süssen Schlafe winken.'] + +[Footnote 6: Hettner, _Litteraturgeschichte des 18 Jahrhunderts_.] + +[Footnote 7: Lappenberg in _Zeitschrift für Hamburgische Geschichte_, +ii. Hettner, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 8: 'Ye fields and woods, my refuge from the toilsome world +of business, receive me in your quiet sanctuaries and favour my +Retreat and thoughtful Solitude. Ye verdant plains, how gladly I +salute ye! Hail all ye blissful Mansions! Known Seats! Delightful +Prospects! Majestick Beautys of this earth, and all ye rural Powers +and Graces! Bless'd be ye chaste Abodes of happiest Mortals who here +in peaceful Innocence enjoy a Life unenvy'd, the Divine, whilst with +its bless'd Tranquility it affords a happy Leisure and Retreat for +Man, who, made for contemplation and to search his own and other +natures, may here best meditate the cause of Things, and, plac'd +amidst the various scenes of Nature, may nearer view her Works. O +glorious Nature! supremely fair and sovereignly good! All-loving and +All-lovely All-Divine! Whose looks are so becoming, and of such +infinite grace, whose study brings such Wisdom, and whose +contemplation such Delight.... Since by thee (O Sovereign mind!) I +have been form'd such as I am, intelligent and rational; since the +peculiar Dignity of my Nature is to know and contemplate Thee; permit +that with due freedom I exert those Facultys with which thou hast +adorn'd me. Bear with my ventrous and bold approach. And since not +vain Curiosity, nor fond Conceit, nor Love of aught save Thee alone, +inspires me with such thoughts as these, be thou my Assistant, and +guide me in this Pursuit; whilst I venture thus to tread the +Labyrinth of wide Nature, and endeavour to trace thee in thy Works.'] + +[Footnote 9: Comp. Jacob von Falke, '_Der englische Garten_' (_Nord +und Süd_, Nov. 1884), and his _Geschichte des modernen Geschmacks_.] + +[Footnote 10: _Dessins des édifices, meubles, habits, machines, et +utensils des Chinois_, 1757.] + + +CHAPTER X + +[Footnote 1: '_Die Alpen im Lichte verschiedener Zeitalter_,' +_Sammlung wissenschaftlicher Vorträge_, Virchow und Holtzendorff. +Berlin, 1877.] + +[Footnote 2: + + Geschäfte Zwang und Grillen Entweihn nicht diese Trift; + Ich finde hier im Stillen Des Unmuts Gegengift. + Es webet, wallt, und spielet, Das Laub um jeden Strauch, + Und jede Staude fühlet Des lauen Zephyrs Hauch. + Was mir vor Augen schwebet Gefällt und hüpft und singt, + Und alles, alles lebet, Und alles scheint verjüngt. + Ihr Thäler und ihr Höhen Die Lust und Sommer schmückt! + Euch ungestört zu sehen, Ist, was mein Herz erquickt. + Die Reizung freier Felder Beschämt der Gärten Pracht, + Und in die offnen Wälder Wird ohne Zwang gelacht.... + In jährlich neuen Schätzen zeigt sich des Landmanns Glück, + Und Freiheit und Ergötzen Erheitern seinen Blick.... + Ihm prangt die fette Weide Und die betante Flur; + Ihm grünet Lust und Freude Ihm malet die Natur.'] + +[Footnote 3: _Litteratur geschichte_.] + +[Footnote 4: _Sämtliche poetische Werke_, J.P. Uz. Leipzig, 1786.] + +[Footnote 5: _Sämtliche Werke_. Berlin, 1803.] + +[Footnote 6: _Sämtliche Werke_, J.G. Jacobi, vol. viii. Zurich, +1882.] + +[Footnote 7: He said of his garden at Freiburg, which was laid out in +terraces on a slope, that all that Flora and Pomona could offer was +gathered there. It had a special Poet's Corner on a hillock under a +poplar, where a moss-covered seat was laid for him upon some +limestone rock-work; white and yellow jasmine grew round, and laurels +and myrtles hung down over his head. Here he would rest when he +walked in the sun; on his left was a mossy Ara, a little artificial +stone altar on which he laid his book, and from here he could gaze +across the visible bit of the distant Rhine to the Vosges, and give +himself up undisturbed to his thoughts.] + +[Footnote 8: Gessners _Schriften_. Zurich, 1770.] + +[Footnote 9: Spalding, _Die Bestimmung des Menschen_. Leipzig, 1768.] + +[Footnote 10: Klopstock's _Briefe_. Brunswick, 1867.] + +[Footnote 11: Comp. _Odes_, 'Die Kunst Tialfs' and 'Winterfreuden.'] + +[Footnote 12: _Briefe_.] + +[Footnote 13: Julian Schmidt.] + +[Footnote 14: Comp. his letters from Switzerland, which contain +nothing particular about the scenery, although he crossed the Lake of +Zurich, and 'a wicked mountain' to the Lake of Zug and Lucerne.] + +[Footnote 15: Claudius, who, at a time when the lyric both of poetry +and music was lost in Germany in conventional tea and coffee songs, +was the first to rediscover the direct expression of feeling--that +is, Nature feeling. (Storm's _Hausbuch_.)] + + +CHAPTER XI + +[Footnote 1: I have obtained much information and suggestion from +'_Ueber die geographische Kenntnis der Alpen im Mittelalter_,' and +'_Ueber die Alpine Reiselitteratur in fruherer Zeit_,' in _Allgem. +Zeitung_. Jan. 11, 1885, and Sept. 1885, respectively.] + +[Footnote 2: _Evagatorium 3, Bibliothek d. litterar. Vereins_. +Stuttgart, 1849.] + +[Footnote 3: _Bibliothek des litterar. Vereins_. Stuttgart, 1886.] + +[Footnote 4: _Descriptio Larii lacus_. Milan, 1558.] + +[Footnote 5: _Itinerarium Basil_. 1624.] + +[Footnote 6: Osenbrüggen, _Wanderungen in der Schweiz_, 1867; +_Entwickelungsgeschichte des Schweizreisens_; Friedländer, _Ueber die +Entstehung und Entwickelung_.] + +[Footnote 7: Comp. Erich Schmidt, _Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe_. +Jena, 1875.] + +[Footnote 8: Remarks on several parts of Italy. London, 1761.] + +[Footnote 9: Letters of Lady M. Wortley Montagu, Sept. 25, 1718.] + +[Footnote 10: Friedländer, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 11: Schmidt. Moser's description of a sensitive soul in +_Patriotischen Phantasien_ is most amusing.] + +[Footnote 12: Laprade adduces little of importance in his book _Le +Sentiment de la Nature_ (2nd edition), the first volume of which I +have dealt with elsewhere. I have little in common with Laprade, +although he is the only writer who has treated the subject +comprehensively and historically. His standpoint is that of Catholic +theology; he never separates feeling for Nature from religion, and is +severe upon unbelievers. The book is well written, and in parts +clever, but only touches the surface and misses much. His position is +thus laid down: 'Le vrai sentiment de la Nature, le seul poétique, le +seul fécond et puissant, le seul innocent de tout danger, est celui +qui ne sépare jamais l'idée des choses visibles de la pensée de +Dieu.' He accounts for the lack of any important expressions of +feeling for Nature in French classics with: 'Le génie de la France +est le génie de l'action.' and 'L'âme humaine est le but de la +poésie.' He recognizes that even with Fénélon 'la Nature reste à ses +yeux comme une simple décoration du drame que l'homme y joue, le +poëte en lui ne la regarde jamais à travers les yeux du mystique.' Of +the treatment of Nature in La Fontaine's Fables, he says: 'Ce n'est +pas peindre la Nature, c'est l'abolir'; and draws this conclusion: +'Le sentiment de l'infini est absent de la poésie du dix-septième +siècle aussi bien que le sentiment de la Nature'; and again: +'L'esprit général du dix-huitième siècle est la négation même de la +poésie ... l'amour de la Nature n'était guerre autre chose qu'une +haine déguisée et une déclaration de guerre a la société et a la +réligion. Il n'y a pai trace du sentiment légitime et profond qui +attire l'artiste et le poëte vers les splendeurs de la création, +révélatrices du monde invisible. Ne demandez pas an dix-huitème +siècle la poésie de la Nature, pas plus que celle du coeur.' Buffon +shews 'l'état poétique des sciences de la Nature,' but his brilliant +prose painting lacks 'la présence de Dieu, la révélation de l'infini +les harmonies de l'âme et de la Nature n'existent pas pour Buffon.... +plus de la rhétorique que de vrai sentiment de la Nature.'] + +[Footnote 13: Comp. the garden of Elysium in _La Nouvelle Héloise:_ +Where the gardener's hand is nowhere to be discerned, nothing +contradicts the idea of a desert island, and I cannot perceive any +footsteps of men ... you see nothing here in an exact row, nothing +level, Nature plants nothing by the ruler.'] + +[Footnote 14: _OEuvres de Jacques Bernardin Henri de Saint Pierre_.] + +[Footnote 15: 'B. de S. Pierre a plus que Rousseau les facultés +propres du paysagiste, l'amour même du pittoresque, la vive curiosité +des sites, des animaux, et des plants, la couleur et une certaine +magie spéciale du pinceau,' Laprade adds the reproof: 'Sa pensée +réligieuse est au-dessous de son talent d'artiste et en abaisse le +niveau.'] + +[Footnote 16: _Voyage round the World_, 1772-1775.] + +[Footnote 17: Paul Lemnius, 1597, _Landes Rugiae_; Kosegarten, +1777-1779; Rellstab, 1799, _Ausflucht noch der Insel Rügen;_ Navest, +1800, _Wanderungen durch die Insel Rügen_; Grümbke, 1805; _Indigena, +Streifzüge durch das Rügenland_. J.P. Hackert in 1762, and K. D. +Friedrichs in 1792, painted the scenery. Comp. E. Boll, _Die Inset +Rügen_, 1858.] + + +CHAPTER XII + +[Footnote 1: Comp. Gottschall, _Poetik_. Breslau, 1853.] + +[Footnote 2: _Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker_, Sämtliche +_Werke_, Teil 7.] + +[Footnote 3: _Op. cit._, Teil 15.] + +[Footnote 4: _Zur Philosophie und Gesehichte,_ 2 Teil.] + +[Footnote 5: J.G. Sulzer's _Unterredungen über die Schönheit der +Nätur nebst desselben moralischen Betrachtungen über besondere +Gegenstände der Naturlehre_ is typical. Charites describes his +conversion to the love of Nature by his friend Eukrates. Eukrates +woke him at dawn and led him to a hill close by, as the sun rose. The +fresh air, the birds' songs, and the wide landscape move him, and +Eukrates points out that the love of Nature is the 'most natural of +pleasures,' making the labourer so happy that he forgets servitude +and misery, and sings at his work. 'This pleasure is always new to +us, and the heart, provided it be not possessed by vanity or stormy +passions, lies always open to it. Do you not know that they who are +in trouble, and, above all, they who are in love, find their chief +relief here? Is not a sick man better cheered by sunshine than by any +other refreshment?' Then he points out Nature's harmonies and changes +of colour, and warns Charites to avoid the storms of the passions. +'Yonder brook is a picture of our soul; so long as it runs quietly +between its banks, the water is clear and grass and flowers border +it; but when it swells and flows tumultuously, all this ornament is +torn away, and it becomes turbid. To delight in Nature the mind must +be free.... She is a sanctity only approached by pure souls.... As +only the quiet stream shews the sky and the objects around, so it is +only on quiet souls that Nature's pictures are painted; ruffled water +reflects nothing.' He waxes eloquent about birds' songs, flowers, and +brooks, and wanders by the hour in the woods, 'all his senses open to +Nature's impressions,' which are 'rays from that source of all +beauty, the sight of which will one day bless the soul.' His friend +is soon convinced that Nature cannot be overpraised, and that her art +is endlessly great.] + +[Footnote 6: _Vorn Gefühl des Schönen und Physiologie überhaupt._ +Winter.] + +[Footnote 7: Comp. _Das Fluchtigste_. 'Tadle nicht der Nachtigallen, +Bald verhallend süsses Lied,' oder 'Nichts verliert sich,' etc.] + +[Footnote 8: Herder's _Nachlass_, Düntzer und F.G. von Herder, 1857.] + +[Footnote 9: Bernay's _Der junge Goethe_.] + +[Footnote 10: _Die Sprödde, Die Bekehrte, März, Lust und Qual, Luna, +Gegenwart_.] + +[Footnote 11: Laprade is all admiration for the 'incomparable artiste +et poëte inspiré du sentiment de la Nature, c'est qu'il excelle à +peindre le monde extérieur et le coeur humain l'un par l'autre, qu'il +mêle les images de l'univers visible à l'expression des sentiments +intimes, de manière à n'en former qu'un seul tissu.... Tous les +éléments d'un objet d'une situation apparaissent à la fois, et dans +leur harmonie, essentielle à cet incomparable esprit.' He is +astonished at the symbolism in _Werthtr_: 'Chaque lettre répond à la +saison ou elle est écrite.... l'idee et l'image s'identifient dans un +fait suprême, dans un cri; il se fait entre l'émotion intime et +l'impression du dehors une sorte de fusion.' And despite Goethe's +Greek paganism and pantheism, he declares: 'Le nom de Goethe marque +une de ces grandes dates, une de ces grandes révolutions de la +poésie--la plus grande, nous le croyons, depuis Homer.' ... 'Goethe +est la plus haut expression poétique des tendances de notre siècle +vers le monde extérieur et la philosophie de la Nature.'] + +[Footnote 12: Comp. _Tagebucher und Briefe Goethe's aus Italien an +Frau von Stein und Herder_. E. Schmidt, Weimar, 1886.] + +[Footnote 13: Julian Schmidt.] + +[Footnote 14: _The Lady of the Lake_ breathes a delightful freshness, +the very spirit of mountain and wood, free alike from the moral +preaching of Wordsworth, and from the storms of passion.] + +[Footnote 15: Laprade.] + +[Footnote 16: 'Sa formule réligieuse, c'est une question; sa pensée, +c'est le doute ... l'artiste divinise chaque détail. Son panthéisme +ne s'applique pas seulement à l'ensemble des choses; Dieu tout entier +est réellement présent poor lui dans chaque fragment de matière dans +le plus immonde animal ... c'est une réligion aussi vieille que +l'humanité décline; cela s'appelle purement et simplement le +fétichisme.' (Laprade.)] + +[Footnote 17: _Vorschule der Æsthetik_. Compare 'With every genius a +new Nature is created for us in the further unveiling of the old.' 2 +Aufi. _Berlin Reimer_, 1827.] + +[Footnote 18: 'Like a lily softly swaying in the hushed air, so my +being moves in its elements, in the charming dream of her.' 'Our +souls rush forward in colossal plans, like exulting streams rushing +perpetually through mountain and forest.' 'If the old mute rock of +Fate did not stand opposing them, the waves of the heart would never +foam so beautifully and become mind.' 'There is a night in the soul +which no gleam of starlight, not even dry wood, illuminates,' etc.] + +[Footnote 19: Comp. Tieck's _Biographie von Koepke_. Brandes.] + +[Footnote 20: _Franz Sternbald_, I. Berlin, 1798.] + +[Footnote 21: Haym, _Die romantische Schule_. Berlin, 1870.] + +[Footnote 22: _Phantasus_, i. Berlin, 1812.] + +[Footnote 23: 'A young hunter was sitting in the heart of the +mountains in a thoughtful mood beside his fowling-piece, while the +noise of the water and the woods was sounding through the solitude +... it grew darker ... the birds of night began to shoot with fitful +wing along their mazy courses ... unthinkingly he pulled a straggling +root from the earth, and on the instant heard with affright a stifled +moan underground, which winded downwards in doleful tones, and died +plaintively away in the deep distance. The sound went through his +inmost heart; it seized him as if he had unwittingly touched the +wound, of which the dying frame of Nature was expiring in its agony.' +(Runenberg.)] + +[Footnote 24: _Hymnen an die Nacht_.] + +[Footnote 25: In _Die Lehrlinge von Sais_.] + +[Footnote 26: _Athenäum_, iii., 1800.] + + + + +INDEX + + +Addison +Æschylus +Agrippa v. Nettesheim +Alamanni +Alberti, Leon +Alcantara +Alcuin +Alexander +Ambrose +Angilbert +Anno v. Coeln +Apollonios Rhodios +Apollonius Sidonius +Apuleius +Aquinus, Thomas +Aribert v. Mailand +Aribo +Ariosto +Aristophanes +Aristotle +Augustine +Augustus +Ausonius +Aventinus +Avitus + +Baccioli, Lucca +Bakhuysen +Basil +Beauvais, V. v. +Beda +v. Bern +Bernhard v. Clairvaux +Bernhard v. Hildesheim +Bernhard v. Ventadour +Bertran de Born +Birgitta +Blair +de Bles +Boccaccio +Boecklin +Boehme +Boetius +Boie +Bojardo +Bonaventura +Boucher +Bouts +Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, A. v. +Brockes +Brueghel, Peter and Jan +Bruno +Buffon +Bürger +Burkhard v. Monte Sion +Byron, + +Calderon +Calpernius +Camoens +Campanella +Carew +Cassiodorus +Catullus +Celtes +Chambers +Charlemagne +Chateaubriand +Chaucer +Chlodwig +Chlotaire +Chrysostom +Cicero +Claudius +Clement of Rome +v. Clugny, Abbé M. +Colonna, Vittoria +Columbus +Columella +Corneille +Cornelia +Correggio +Cowley +Cramer +Cronegk +Crugot +Cuyp +Cyprian + +Dante +Darius +Defoe +Dionisius da B.S. Sepolchro +Domidius +Dracontius +Drayton +Drummond +du Bois-Reymond +Dürer + +v. Eichendorff +Eist, Deitmar v. +Ekkehart +Ennodius +Epiphanius, M.H. +Euripides +Everdingen, A. v. +v. Eyck + +Fabri +Fénélon +Fischart +Fleming +Forster +Fortunatus, +Francis of Assisi +Frank, Sebastian +Fredegar +Frederic the Great +Friedlander +Fürttenbach + +Gatterer +Gellert +Gerhard, Paul +Gervinus +Gessner, Conrad +Gessner, Salomon +Giorgione +Gleim +Goethe +Gogen +Gottfried v. Strassburg +Gozzoli +Grasser +Gregory Nazianzen +Gregory of Nyssa +Gregory of Tours +Grümbke +Gryphius +Guarini, G. +Günther, Christian +Günther d. Liguriner +Guotenberg, U. v. +Gussfeldt + +Hadrian +Haeckel +Hagedorn +Haller +Harsdörfer +Hartmann +Hebel +Hegel +Heine +Herder +Hermes +Hilary +Hillern, W. v. +Hobbema +Hoffmannswaldau +Hölderlin +Hölty +Homer +Horace +Hugo v. St. Victor +Hugo, Victor +Hulsen +Humboldt + +Ibykos +Isodore + +Jacob v. Bern +Jacobi, Joh. G. +Jerome +Jovius + +Kalidasa +Kallimachos +Kant +Kent +Keyssler +Kiechel +Klaj +Kleist, E. v. +Klipphausen +Klopstock +König, Eva +Kürenberg + +Lamartine +Lamprecht +Leman +Lenôtre +Leon, Luis de +Leonardo da Vinci +Lessing +Livy +Logau +Lohenstein +Longos +Lopez +Lorraine, Claude +Louis XIV. +Louis XV. +Lucretius +Ludwig zu Nassau +Luis de Leon +Lüneberg +Luther + +Maghas +Mantegna +Mareuil, A. v. +Maria Theresa +v. Martius +Medici, Lorenzo de +Meer, Aart v. d. +Meleager +Memling +Menander +Michael Angelo +Milton +Minucius Felix +Molanus +Montagu +Montemayor +Montreux +Moore +Morungen, H. v. + +Moscherosch +Möser +Mosto, A. da +Murdach + +Navarrete, F. de +Nemesianus +Nettesheim, C.A. v. +Nicolas +Nonnos +Novalis + +Opitz +Osorio +Ossian +Ouwater +Ovid + +Paracelsus +Patenir +Paul, Jean, +Paul, St +Paulinus of Nola +Perdiccas +Peter Martyr +Petrarch +Pfintzing +Phidias +Philip of Macedon +Phokas +Pico della Mirandola +Pierre, B. de St +Pindar +Pisanello +Pius II. (Enea Silvio), +Plato +Pliny +Polo, Marco +Pope +Potter, Paul +Poussin +Propertius +Prudentius +Ptolemaios + +Racine +Radegunde +Raphael +Regensburg +Reinmar +Reissner +Richardson +Rickel, D. v. +Roche, Sophie la +Ronsard +Rousseau, +Rubens +Rucellai +Rückert +Rugge +Ruysbroek +Ruysdael + +Sabiende, R. v. +Sachs, Hans +Sannazaro +Sappho +Saussure +v. Schachten +Schaller +Scherr +Scheuchzer +Schickhart +Schiller +Scipio Africanus +Scott +Seneca +Shaftesbury +Shakespeare, +Shelley, +Sidney +Simonides +Socrates +Sophocles +Southey +Southwell +Spalding +Spee +Spenser +Spielhagen +Spinoza +Spix +Stolberg +Storm, Th. +Sulzer +Summenhart +Suso + +Tasso +Tauler +Teresa v. Avila +Theocritus +Theodoric +Theodulf +Thomson +Tiberius +Tibullus +Tieck +Titian +Toscanelli, Paolo + +Uhland +d'Urfé +Uz, Joh. P. + +Vasco da Gama +Velde, Adrian v. d. +Veldegge, H. v. +Vespucci +Virgil +Vischer +Vives, Luis +Volkmar +Voltaire +Voss + +Wahlafried +Walther v. d. Vogelweide +Wandelbert +Watteau +Weyden, Roger v. d. +William of Tours +Winckelmann +Wolfram v. Eschenbach +Wordsworth +Wyatt +Wynant + +Young + +Zesen, P. v. +Ziegler, A. v. +Zimmermann +Zweibrücken, A. v. + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR +NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND MODERN TIMES*** + + +******* This file should be named 13814-8.txt or 13814-8.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/8/1/13814 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre> +<p>Title: The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times</p> +<p>Author: Alfred Biese</p> +<p>Release Date: October 20, 2004 [eBook #13814]</p> +<p>Language: English</p> +<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p> +<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND MODERN TIMES***</p> +<br /><br /><h4>E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Leonard Johnson,<br /> + and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team</h4><br /><br /> +<hr class="full" /> +<br /> + <h2 class="title">The Development</h2> + + <h5>of the</h5> + + <h1>Feeling for Nature</h1> + + <h2 class="title">In the Middle Ages and</h2> + + <h2 class="title">Modern Times</h2> + + <h5>BY</h5> + + <h3>ALFRED BIESE</h3> + + <h5>DIRECTOR OF THE K. K. GYMNASIUM AT NEUWIED</h5> + + <h5>1905</h5> + + <h5><i>Authorized translation from the German</i></h5><span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pgv" id="pgv">v</a></span> + + <h2>Table of Contents</h2> + + <ul> + <li><a href="#pref">AUTHORS PREFACE</a></li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#intro">INTRODUCTION</a></li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch1">CHAPTER I</a></li> + + <li>CHRISTIANITY AND GERMANISM</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch2">CHAPTER II</a></li> + + <li>THE THEOLOGICAL CHRISTIAN AND THE SYMPATHETIC HEATHEN FEELING + OF THE FIRST TEN CENTURIES A.D.</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch3">CHAPTER III</a></li> + + <li>THE NAIVE FEELING AT THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch4">CHAPTER IV</a></li> + + <li>INDIVIDUALISM AND SENTIMENTAL FEELING AT THE RENAISSANCE</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch5">CHAPTER V</a></li> + + <li>ENTHUSIASM FOR NATURE AMONG THE DISCOVERERS AND CATHOLIC + MYSTICS</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch6">CHAPTER VI</a></li> + + <li>SHAKESPEARE'S SYMPATHY FOR NATURE</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch7">CHAPTER VII</a></li> + + <li>THE DISCOVERY OF THE BEAUTY OF LANDSCAPE IN PAINTING</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch8">CHAPTER VIII</a></li> + + <li>HUMANISM, ROCOCO, AND PIGTAIL</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch9">CHAPTER IX</a></li> + + <li>SYMPTOMS OF A RETURN TO NATURE</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch10">CHAPTER X</a></li> + + <li>THE SENSITIVENESS AND EXAGGERATION OF THE ELEGIAC IDYLLIC + FEELING</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch11">CHAPTER XI</a></li> + + <li>THE AWAKENING OF FEELING FOR THE ROMANTIC</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#ch12">CHAPTER XII</a></li> + + <li>THE UNIVERSAL PANTHEISTIC FEELING OF MODERN TIMES</li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#notes">NOTES</a></li> + + <li style="list-style: none"><br /></li> + + <li><a href="#index">INDEX</a></li> + </ul> + + <h2><a name="pref" id="pref">AUTHOR'S PREFACE</a></h2> + + <p>The encouraging reception of my "Development of the Feeling for + Nature among the Greeks and Romans" gradually decided me, after some + years, to carry the subject on to modern tunes. Enticing as it was, I + did not shut my eyes to the great difficulties of a task whose + dimensions have daunted many a savant since the days of Humboldt's + clever, terse sketches of the feeling for Nature in different times + and peoples. But the subject, once approached, would not let me go. + Its solution seemed only possible from the side of historical + development, not from that of <i>a priori</i> synthesis. The almost + inexhaustible amount of material, especially towards modern times, + has often obliged me to limit myself to typical forerunners of the + various epochs, although, at the same time, I have tried not to lose + the thread of general development. By the addition of the chief + phases of landscape, painting, and garden craft, I have aimed at + giving completeness to the historical picture; but I hold that + literature, especially poetry, as the most intimate medium of a + nation's feelings, is the chief source of information in an enquiry + which may <span class="pagenum"><a name="pgvi" id= + "pgvi">vi</a></span>form a contribution, not only to the history of + taste, but also to the comparative history of literature. At a time + too when the natural sciences are so highly developed, and the cult + of Nature is so widespread, a book of this kind may perhaps claim the + interest of that wide circle of educated readers to whom the modern + delight in Nature on its many sides makes appeal. And this the more, + since books are rare which seek to embrace the whole mental + development of the Middle Ages and modern times, and are, at the same + time, intended for and intelligible to all people of cultivation.</p> + + <p>The book has been a work of love, and I hope it will be read with + pleasure, not only by those whose special domain it touches, but by + all who care for the eternal beauties of Nature. To those who know my + earlier papers in the <i>Preussische Jahrbücher</i>, the + <i>Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte</i>, and the + <i>Litteraturbeilage des Hamburgischen Correspondents</i>, I trust + this fuller and more connected treatment of the theme will prove + welcome.</p> + + <p>ALFRED BIESE. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pgvii" id= + "pgvii">vii</a></span></p> + + <p><i>Published Translations of the following Authors have been + used</i>.</p> + + <p>SANSCRIT.--Jones, Wilson, Arnold, anonymous translator in a + publication of the Society for Resuscitation of Ancient + Literature.</p> + + <p>LATIN AND GREEK.--Lightfoot, Jowett, Farrar, Lodge, Dalrymple, + Bigg, Pilkington, Hodgkin, De Montalembert, Gary, Lok, Murray, Gibb, + a translator in Bonn's Classics.</p> + + <p>ITALIAN.--Gary, Longfellow, Cayley, Robinson, Kelly, Bent, Hoole, + Roscoe, Leigh Hunt, Lofft, Astley, Oliphant.</p> + + <p>GERMAN.--Horton and Bell, Middlemore, Lytton, Swanwick, Dwight, + Boylau, Bowling, Bell, Aytoun, Martin, Oxenford, Morrison, M'Cullum, + Winkworth, Howorth, Taylor, Nind, Brooks, Lloyd, Frothingham, Ewing, + Noel, Austin, Carlyle, Storr, Weston, Phillips.</p> + + <p>SPANISH.--Markham, Major, Bowring, Hasell, M'Carthy, French.</p> + + <p>FRENCH.--Anonymous translator of Rousseau.</p> + + <p>PORTUGUESE.--Aubertin.</p> + + <p>The Translator's thanks are also due to the author for a few + alterations in and additions to the text, and to Miss Edgehill, Miss + Tomlinson, and Dr B. Scheifers for translations from Greek and Latin, + Italian, and Middle German respectively. <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pgviii" id="pgviii">viii</a></span></p> + <hr /> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg001" id="pg001">001</a></span> + + <h2><a name="intro" id="intro">INTRODUCTION</a></h2> + + <p>Nature in her ever-constant, ever-changing phases is indispensable + to man, his whole existence depends upon her, and she influences him + in manifold ways, in mind as well as body.</p> + + <p>The physical character of a country is reflected in its + inhabitants; the one factor of climate alone gives a very different + outlook to northerner and southerner. But whereas primitive man, to + whom the darkness of night meant anxiety, either feared Nature or + worshipped her with awe, civilised man tries to lift her veil, and + through science and art to understand her inner and outer beauty--the + scientist in her laws, the man of religion in her relation to his + Creator, the artist in reproducing the impressions she makes upon + him.</p> + + <p>Probably it has always been common to healthy minds to take some + pleasure in her; but it needs no slight culture of heart and mind to + grasp her meaning and make it clear to others. Her book lies open + before us, but the interpretations have been many and dissimilar. A + fine statue or a richly-coloured picture appeals to all, but only + knowledge can appreciate it at its true value and discover the full + meaning of the artist. And as with Art, so with Nature.</p> + + <p>For Nature is the greatest artist, though dumb until man, with his + inexplicable power of putting himself in her place, transferring to + her his bodily and mental self, gives her speech. <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg002" id="pg002">002</a></span> Goethe said 'man + never understands how anthropomorphic he is.' No study, however + comprehensive, enables him to overstep human limits, or conceive a + concrete being, even the highest, from a wholly impersonal point of + view. His own self always remains an encumbering factor. In a real + sense he only understands himself, and his measure for all things is + man. To understand the world outside him, he must needs ascribe his + own attributes to it, must lend his own being to find it again.</p> + + <p>This unexplained faculty, or rather inherent necessity, which + implies at once a power and a limit, extends to persons as well as + things. The significant word sympathy expresses it. To feel a + friend's grief is to put oneself in his place, think from his + standpoint and in his mood--that is, suffer with him. The fear and + sympathy which condition the action of tragedy depend upon the same + mental process; one's own point of view is shifted to that of + another, and when the two are in harmony, and only then, the claim of + beauty is satisfied, and æsthetic pleasure results.</p> + + <p>By the well-known expression of Greek philosophy, 'like is only + understood by like,' the Pythagoreans meant that the mathematically + trained mind is the organ by which the mathematically constructed + cosmos is understood. The expression may also serve as an æsthetic + aphorism. The charm of the simplest lyrical song depends upon the + hearer's power to put himself in the mood or situation described by + the poet, on an interplay between subject and object.</p> + + <p>Everything in mental life depends upon this faculty. We observe, + ponder, feel, because a kindred vibration in the object sets our own + fibres in motion.</p> + + <p>'You resemble the mind which you understand.'</p> + + <p>It is a magic bridge from our own mind, making <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg003" id="pg003">003</a></span>access possible to + a work of art, an electric current conveying the artist's ideas into + our souls.</p> + + <p>We know how a drama or a song can thrill us when our feeling + vibrates with it; and that thrill, Faust tells us, is the best part + of man.</p> + + <p>If inventive work in whatever art or science gives the purest kind + of pleasure, Nature herself seeming to work through the artist, + rousing those impulses which come to him as revelations, there is + pleasure also in the passive reception of beauty, especially when we + are not content to remain passive, but trace out and rethink the + artist's thoughts, remaking his work.</p> + + <p>'To invent for oneself is beautiful; but to recognise gladly and + treasure up the happy inventions of others is that less thine?' said + Goethe in his <i>Jahreszeiten</i>; and in the <i>Aphorisms</i>, + confirming what has just been said: 'We know of no world except in + relation to man, we desire no art but that which is the expression of + this relation.' And, further, 'Look into yourselves and you will find + everything, and rejoice if outside yourselves, as you may say, lies a + Nature which says yea and amen to all that you have found there.'</p> + + <p>Certainly Nature only bestows on man in proportion to his own + inner wealth. As Rückert says, 'the charm of a landscape lies in + this, that it seems to reflect back that part of one's inner life, of + mind, mood, and feeling, which we have given it.' And Ebers, 'Lay + down your best of heart and mind before eternal Nature; she will + repay you a thousandfold, with full hands.'</p> + + <p>And Vischer remarks, 'Nature at her greatest is not so great that + she can work without man's mind.' Every landscape can be beautiful + and stimulating if human feeling colours it, and it will be most so + to him who brings the richest endowment of heart and mind to bear: + Nature only discloses her whole self to a whole man.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg004" id="pg004">004</a></span> + But it is under the poet's wand above all, that, like the marble at + Pygmalion's breast, she grows warm and breathes and answers to his + charm; as in that symbolic saga, the listening woods and waters and + the creatures followed Orpheus with his lute. Scientific knowledge, + optical, acoustical, meteorological, geological, only widens and + deepens love for her and increases and refines the sense of her + beauty. In short, deep feeling for Nature always proves considerable + culture of heart and mind.</p> + + <p>There is a constant analogy between the growth of this feeling and + that of general culture.</p> + + <p>As each nation and time has its own mode of thought, which is + constantly changing, so each period has its 'landscape eye.' The same + rule applies to individuals. Nature, as Jean Paul said, is made + intelligible to man in being for ever made flesh. We cannot look at + her impersonally, we must needs give her form and soul, in order to + grasp and describe her.</p> + + <p>Vischer says<a href="#a1"><sup>[1]</sup></a> 'it is simply by an + act of comparison that we think we see our own life in inanimate + objects.' We say that Nature's clearness is like clearness of mind, + that her darkness and gloom are like a dark and gloomy mood; then, + omitting 'like,' we go on to ascribe our qualities directly to her, + and say, this neighbourhood, this air, this general tone of colour, + is cheerful, melancholy, and so forth. Here we are prompted by an + undeveloped dormant consciousness which really only compares, while + it seems to take one thing for another. In this way we come to say + that a rock projects boldly, that fire rages furiously over a + building, that a summer evening with flocks going home at sunset is + peaceful and idyllic; that autumn, dripping with rain, its willows + sighing in the wind, is elegiac and melancholy and so forth.</p> + + <p>Perhaps Nature would not prove to be this ready symbol of man's + inner life were there no secret <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg005" + id="pg005">005</a></span>rapport between the two. It is as if, in + some mysterious way, we meet in her another mind, which speaks a + language we know, wakening a foretaste of kinship; and whether the + soul she expresses is one we have lent her, or her own which we have + divined, the relationship is still one of give and take.</p> + + <p>Let us take a rapid survey of the course of this feeling in + antiquity. Pantheism has always been the home of a special tenderness + for Nature, and the poetry of India is full of intimate dealings + between man and plants and animals.</p> + + <p>They are found in the loftiest flights of religious enthusiasm in + the Vedas, where, be it only in reference to the splendour of dawn or + the 'golden-handed sun,' Nature is always assumed to be closely + connected with man's inner and outer life. Later on, as Brahminism + appeared, deepening the contemplative side of Hindoo character, and + the drama and historical plays came in, generalities gave way to + definite localizing, and in the Epics ornate descriptions of actual + landscape took independent place. Nature's sympathy with human joys + and griefs was taken for granted, and she played a part of her own in + drama.</p> + + <p>In the <i>Mahâbhârata</i>, when Damajanti is wandering in search + of her lost Nala and sees the great mountain top, she asks it for her + prince.</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i2">Oh mountain lord!</p> + + <p>Far seen and celebrated hill, that cleav'st</p> + + <p>The blue o' the sky, refuge of living things,</p> + + <p>Most noble eminence, I worship thee!...</p> + + <p>O Mount, whose double ridge stamps on the sky</p> + + <p>Yon line, by five-score splendid pinnacles</p> + + <p>Indented; tell me, in this gloomy wood</p> + + <p>Hast thou seen Nala? Nala, wise and bold!</p> + + <p>Ah mountain! why consolest thou me not,</p> + + <p>Answering one word to sorrowful, distressed,</p> + + <p>Lonely, lost Damajanti?</p> + </div> + + <p>And when she comes to the tree Asoka, she implores: <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg006" id="pg006">006</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Ah, lovely tree! that wavest here</p> + + <p>Thy crown of countless shining clustering blooms</p> + + <p>As thou wert woodland king! Asoka tree!</p> + + <p>Tree called the sorrow-ender, heart's-ease tree!</p> + + <p>Be what thy name saith; end my sorrow now,</p> + + <p>Saying, ah, bright Asoka, thou hast seen</p> + + <p>My Prince, my dauntless Nala--seen that lord</p> + + <p>Whom Damajanti loves and his foes fear.</p> + </div> + + <p>In Maghas' epic, <i>The Death of Sisupala</i>, plants and animals + lead the same voluptuous life as the 'deep-bosomed, wide-hipped' + girls with the ardent men.</p> + + <p>'The mountain Raivataka touches the ether with a thousand heads, + earth with a thousand feet, the sun and moon are his eyes. When the + birds are tired and tremble with delight from the caresses of their + mates, he grants them shade from lotos leaves. Who in the world is + not astonished when he has climbed, to see the prince of mountains + who overshadows the ether and far-reaching regions of earth, standing + there with his great projecting crags, while the moon's sickle + trembles on his summit?'</p> + + <p>In Kalidasa's <i>Urwasi</i>, the deserted King who is searching + for his wife asks the peacock:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i10">Oh tell,</p> + + <p>If, free on the wing as you soar,</p> + + <p>You have seen the loved nymph I deplore--</p> + + <p>You will know her, the fairest of damsels fair,</p> + + <p>By her large soft eye and her graceful air;</p> + + <p>Bird of the dark blue throat and eye of jet,</p> + + <p>Oh tell me, have you seen the lovely face</p> + + <p>Of my fair bride--lost in this dreary wilderness?</p> + </div> + + <p>and the mountain:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Say mountain, whose expansive slope confines</p> + + <p>The forest verge, oh, tell me hast thou seen</p> + + <p>A nymph as beauteous as the bride of love</p> + + <p>Mounting with slender frame thy steep ascent,</p> + + <p>Or wearied, resting in thy crowning woods?</p> + </div> + + <p>As he sits by the side of the stream, he asks whence comes its + charm: <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg007" id= + "pg007">007</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Whilst gazing on the stream, whose new swollen waters</p> + + <p>Yet turbid flow, what strange imaginings</p> + + <p>Possess my soul and fill it with delight.</p> + + <p>The rippling wave is like her aching brow;</p> + + <p>The fluttering line of storks, her timid tongue;</p> + + <p>The foaming spray, her white loose floating vest;</p> + + <p>And this meandering course the current tracks</p> + + <p>Her undulating gait.</p> + </div> + + <p>Then he sees a creeper without flowers, and a strange attraction + impels him to embrace it, for its likeness to his lost love:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Vine of the wilderness, behold</p> + + <p>A lone heartbroken wretch in me,</p> + + <p>Who dreams in his embrace to fold</p> + + <p>His love, as wild he clings to thee.</p> + </div> + + <p>Thereupon the creeper transforms itself into Urwasi.</p> + + <p>In Kalidasa's <i>Sakuntala</i>, too, when the pretty girls are + watering the flowers in the garden, Sakuntala says: 'It is not only + in obedience to our father that I thus employ myself. I really feel + the affection of a sister for these young plants.' Taking it for + granted that the mango tree has the same feeling for herself, she + cries: 'Yon Amra tree, my friends, points with the fingers of its + leaves, which the gale gently agitates, and seems inclined to whisper + some secret'; and with maiden shyness, attributing her own thoughts + about love to the plants, one of her comrades says: 'See, my + Sakuntala, how yon fresh Mallica which you have surnamed Vanadosini + or Delight of the Grove, has chosen the sweet Amra for her + bridegroom....'</p> + + <p>'How charming is the season, when the nuptials even of plants are + thus publicly celebrated!'--and elsewhere:</p> + + <p>'Here is a plant, Sakuntala, which you have forgotten.' Sakuntala: + 'Then I shall forget myself.'</p> + + <p>Birds, clouds,<a href="#a2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> and waves are + messengers of love; all Nature grieves at the separation of lovers. + When <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg008" id= + "pg008">008</a></span>Sakuntala is leaving her forest, one of her + friends says: 'Mark the affliction of the forest itself when the time + of your departure approaches!</p> + + <p>'The female antelope browses no more on the collected Cusa grass, + and the pea-hen ceases to dance on the lawn; the very plants of the + grove, whose pale leaves fall on the ground, lose their strength and + their beauty.'</p> + + <p>The poems of India, especially those devoted to descriptions of + Nature, abound in such bold, picturesque personifications, which are + touching, despite their extravagance, through their intense sympathy + with Nature. They shew the Hindoo attitude toward Nature in general, + as well as his boundless fancy. I select one example from 'The + Gathering of the Seasons' in Kalidasa's <i>Ritusanhare</i>: a + description of the Rains.</p> + + <p>'Pouring rain in torrents at the request of the thirst-stricken + Chatakas, and emitting slow mutterings pleasing to the ears, clouds, + bent down by the weight of their watery contents, are slowly moving + on....</p> + + <p>'The rivers being filled up with the muddy water of the rivers, + their force is increased. Therefore, felling down the trees on both + the banks, they, like unchaste women, are going quickly towards the + ocean....</p> + + <p>'The heat of the forest has been removed by the sprinkling of new + water, and the Ketaka flowers have blossomed. On the branches of + trees being shaken by the wind, it appears that the entire forest is + dancing in delight. On the blossoming of Ketaka flowers it appears + that the forest is smiling. Thinking, "he is our refuge when we are + bent down by the weight of water, the clouds are enlivening with + torrents the mount Vindhya assailed with fierce heat (of the + summer)."'</p> + + <p>Charming pictures and comparisons are numerous, though they have + the exaggeration common to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg009" id= + "pg009">009</a></span>oriental imagination, 'Love was the cause of my + distemper, and love has healed it; as a summer's day, grown black + with clouds, relieves all animals from the heat which itself had + caused.'</p> + + <p>'Should you be removed to the ends of the world, you will be fixed + in this heart, as the shade of a lofty tree remains with it even when + the day is departed.'</p> + + <p>'The tree of my hope which had risen so luxuriantly is broken + down.'</p> + + <p>'Removed from the bosom of my father, like a young sandal tree + rent from the hill of Malaja, how shall I exist in a strange + soil?'</p> + + <p>This familiar intercourse with Nature stood far as the poles + asunder from the monotheistic attitude of the Hebrew. The individual, + it is true, was nothing in comparison with Brahma, the All-One; but + the divine pervaded and sanctified all things, and so gave them a + certain value; whilst before Jehovah, throned above the world, the + whole universe was but dust and ashes. The Hindoo, wrapt in the + contemplation of Nature, described her at great length and for her + own sake, the Hebrew only for the sake of his Creator. She had no + independent significance for him; he looked at her only 'sub specie + eterni Dei,' in the mirror of the eternal God. Hence he took interest + in her phases only as revelations of his God, noting one after + another only to group them synthetically under the idea of Godhead. + Hence too, despite his profound inwardness--'The heart is deceitful + above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?' + (<i>Jeremiah</i>)--human individuality was only expressed in its + relation to Jehovah.</p> + + <p>'The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth + his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night + sheweth knowledge.'--<i>Psalm</i> 19.</p> + + <p>'Let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad; let the sea + roar, and the fulness thereof.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg010" id="pg010">010</a></span> + 'Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein; then shall all the + trees of the wood rejoice.'--<i>Psalm</i> 96.</p> + + <p>'Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful + together.'--<i>Psalm</i> 98.</p> + + <p>'The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up + their voice; the floods lift up their waves. The Lord on high is + mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of + the sea.'--<i>Psalm</i> 93.</p> + + <p>'The sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back. The mountains + skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs.'--<i>Psalm</i> + 114.</p> + + <p>'The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee; they were + afraid: the depths also were troubled.'--<i>Psalm</i> 77.</p> + + <p>All these lofty personifications of inanimate Nature only + characterise her in her relation to another, and that not man but + God. Nothing had significance by itself, Nature was but a book in + which to read of Jehovah; and for this reason the Hebrew could not be + wrapt in her, could not seek her for her own sake, she was only a + revelation of the Deity.</p> + + <p>'Lord, how great are thy works, in wisdom hast thou made them all: + the earth is full of thy goodness.'</p> + + <p>Yet there is a fiery glow of enthusiasm in the songs in praise of + Jehovah's wonders in creation.</p> + + <p>'0 Lord my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour + and majesty.</p> + + <p>'Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest + out the heavens like a curtain.</p> + + <p>'Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters; who maketh + the clouds his chariot; who walketh upon the wings of the wind.</p> + + <p>'Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire; who + laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for + ever.</p> + + <p>'Thou coveredst the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above + the mountains.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg011" id="pg011">011</a></span> + 'At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted + away.</p> + + <p>'They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the + place which thou hast founded for them.</p> + + <p>'Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn + not again to cover the earth.</p> + + <p>'He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the + hills.</p> + + <p>'They give drink to every beast of the field: the wild asses + quench their thirst.</p> + + <p>'By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, + which sing among the branches ...</p> + + <p>'He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the + service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth.</p> + + <p>'And wine that maketh glad the heart of man ...</p> + + <p>'The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, + which he hath planted.</p> + + <p>'Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees + are her house.</p> + + <p>'The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats, and the rocks for + the conies.</p> + + <p>'He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going + down.</p> + + <p>'Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of + the forest do creep forth.</p> + + <p>'The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from + God.</p> + + <p>'The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them + down in their dens.</p> + + <p>'Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the + evening....</p> + + <p>'This great and wide sea, wherein are creeping things innumerable, + both small and great beasts....</p> + + <p>'He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth; he toucheth the hills, + and they smoke.</p> + + <p>'I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live; I will <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg012" id="pg012">012</a></span>sing praise to my + God as long as I have my being.'--<i>Psalm</i> 104.</p> + + <p>And what a lofty point of view is shewn by the overpowering words + which Job puts into the mouth of Jehovah; 'Where wast thou when I + laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast + understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof if thou knowest, or + who hath stretched the line upon it?</p> + + <p>'Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the + corner stone thereof?</p> + + <p>'When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God + shouted for joy?...</p> + + <p>'Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the + dayspring to know his place?</p> + + <p>'That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked + might be shaken out of it?...</p> + + <p>'Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea, or hast thou + walked in the search of the deep?...</p> + + <p>'Declare, if thou knowest it all!...</p> + + <p>'Where is the way where light dwelleth, and as for darkness, where + is the place thereof?' etc.</p> + + <p>Compare with this <i>Isaiah</i> xl. verse 12, etc.</p> + + <p>Metaphors too, though poetic and fine, are not individualized.</p> + + <p>'Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy water-spouts: all thy + waves and thy billows are gone over me.'--<i>Psalm</i> 42.</p> + + <p>'Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink + in deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, + where the floods overflow me.'--<i>Psalm</i> 69.</p> + + <p>There are many pictures from the animal world; and these are more + elaborate in Job than elsewhere (see <i>Job</i> xl. and xli.). + Personifications, as we have seen, are many, but Nature is only + called upon to sympathise with man in isolated cases, as, for + instance, in 2 <i>Samuel</i> i.:</p> + + <p>'Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg013" id="pg013">013</a></span>neither let there + be rain upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of + the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as if he had not + been anointed with oil.'</p> + + <p>The Cosmos unfolded itself to the Hebrew<a href= + "#a3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> as one great whole, and the glance fixed + upon a distant horizon missed the nearer lying detail of phenomena. + His imagination ranged the universe with the wings of the wind, and + took vivid note of air, sky, sea, and land, but only, so to speak, in + passing; it never rested there, but hurried past the boundaries of + earth to Jehovah's throne, and from that height looked down upon + creation.</p> + + <p>The attitude of the Greek was very different. Standing firmly + rooted in the world of sense, his open mind and his marvellous eye + for beauty appreciated the glorious external world around him down to + its finest detail. His was the race of the beautiful, the first in + history to train all its powers into harmony to produce a culture of + beauty equal in form and contents, and his unique achievement in art + and science enriched all after times with lasting standards of the + great and beautiful.</p> + + <p>The influence of classic literature upon the Middle Ages and + modern times has not only endured, but has gone on increasing with + the centuries; so that we must know the position reached by Greece + and Rome as to feeling for Nature, in order to discover whether the + line of advance in the Middle Ages led directly forward or began by a + backward movement--a zigzag.</p> + + <p>The terms ancient and modern, naive and sentimental, classic and + romantic, have been shibboleths of culture from Jean Paul, Schiller, + and Hegel, to Vischer. Jean Paul, in his <i>Vorschule zur + Aesthetik</i>, compares the ideally simple Greek poetry, with its + objectivity, serenity, and moral grace, with the musical poetry of + the romantic period, and speaks of one as the sunlight that pervades + our waking <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg014" id= + "pg014">014</a></span>hours, the other as the moonlight that gleams + fitfully on our dreaming ones. Schiller's epoch-making essay <i>On + Naive and Sentimental Poetry</i>, with its rough division into the + classic-naive depending on a harmony between nature and mind, and the + modern-sentimental depending on a longing for a lost paradise, is + constantly quoted to shew that the Greeks took no pleasure in Nature. + This is misleading. Schiller's Greek was very limited; in the very + year (1795) in which the essay appeared in <i>The Hours</i>, he was + asking Humboldt's advice as to learning Greek, with special reference + to Homer and Xenophon.</p> + + <p>To him Homer was the Greek <i>par excellence</i>, and who would + not agree with him to-day?</p> + + <p>As in Greek mythology, that naive poem of Nature, the product of + the artistic impulse of the race to stamp its impressions in a + beautiful and harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in + Homer, the feeling for Nature is profound; but the Homeric hero had + no personal relations with her, no conscious leaning towards her; the + descriptions only served to frame human action, in time or space.</p> + + <p>But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive + Homeric time, was short in spite of Schiller, who, in the very essay + referred to, included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the + sentimental, and Shakespeare among the naive, poets--a fact often + overlooked.</p> + + <p>In line with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for + Nature passed through various stages. These can be clearly traced + from objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic + personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions, in which + scenery was brought into harmony or contrast with man's inner life; + until finally, in Hellenism, Nature was treated for her own sake, and + man reduced to the position of supernumerary <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg015" id="pg015">015</a></span>both in poetry and + also--so approaching the modern--in landscape-painting.</p> + + <p>Greece had her sentimental epoch; she did not, as we have said, + long remain naive. From Sophist days a steady process of + decomposition went on--in other words, a movement towards what we + call modern, a movement which to the classic mind led backward; but + from the wider standpoint of general development meant advance. For + the path of culture is always the same in the nations; it leads first + upward and then downward, and all ripening knowledge, while it + enriches the mind, brings with it some unforeseen loss. Mankind pays + heavily for each new gain; it paid for increased subjectivity and + inwardness by a loss in public spirit and patriotism which, once the + most valued of national possessions, fell away before the increasing + individuality, the germ of the modern spirit. For what is the modern + spirit but limitless individuality?</p> + + <p>The greater the knowledge of self, the richer the inner life. Man + becomes his own chief problem--he begins to watch the lightest + flutter of his own feelings, to grasp and reflect upon them, to look + upon himself in fact as in a mirror; and it is in this doubling of + the ego, so to speak, that sentimentality in the modern sense + consists. It leads to love of solitude, the fittest state for the + growth of a conscious love of Nature, for, as Rousseau said 'all + noble passions are formed in solitude,' 'tis there that one + recognizes one's own heart as 'the rarest and most valuable of all + possessions.' 'Oh, what a fatal gift of Heaven is a feeling heart!' + and elsewhere he said: 'Hearts that are warmed by a divine fire find + a pure delight in their own feelings which is independent of fate and + of the whole world.' Euripides, too, loved solitude, and avoided the + noise of town life by retiring to a grotto at Salamis which he had + arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his + biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg016" id="pg016">016</a></span>from the sea. He, + rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. + His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible + that I should see myself standing face to face, in which case I + should have wept for the sorrows that we suffer'; and in the chorus + of <i>The Suppliants</i> we have: 'This insatiate joy of mourning + leads me on like as the liquid drop flowing from the sun-trodden + rock, ever increasing of groans.' In Euripides we have the first + loosening of that ingenuous bond between Nature and the human spirit, + as the Sophists laid the axe to the root of the old Hellenic ideas + and beliefs. Subjectivity had already gained in strength from the + birth of the lyric, that most individual of all expressions of + feeling; and since the lyric cannot dispense with the external world, + classic song now shewed the tender subjective feeling for Nature + which we see in Sappho, Pindar, and Simonides. Yet Euripides (and + Aristophanes, whose painful mad laugh, as Doysen says, expresses the + same distraction and despair as the deep melancholy of Euripides) + only paved the way for that sentimental, idyllic feeling for Nature + which dwelt on her quiet charms for their own sake, as in Theocritus, + and, like the modern, rose to greater intensity in the presence of + the amorous passion, as we see in Kallimachos and the Anthology. It + was the outcome of Hellenism, of which sentimental introspection, the + freeing of the ego from the bonds of race and position, and the + discovery of the individual in all directions of human existence, + were marks. And this feeling developing from Homer to Longos, from + unreflecting to conscious and then to sentimental pleasure in Nature, + was expressed not only in poetry but in painting, although the latter + never fully mastered technique.</p> + + <p>The common thoughtless statement, so often supported by quotations + from Schiller, Gervinus, and others, that Greek antiquity was not + alive to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg017" id= + "pg017">017</a></span>the beauty of Nature and her responsiveness to + human moods, and neither painted scenery nor felt the melancholy + poetic charm of ruins and tombs, is therefore a perversion of the + truth; but it must be conceded that the feeling which existed then + was but the germ of our modern one. It was fettered by the specific + national beliefs concerning the world and deities, by the undeveloped + state of the natural sciences, which, except botany, still lay in + swaddling-clothes, by the new influence of Christendom, and by that + strict feeling for style which, very much to its advantage, imposed a + moderation that would have excluded much of our senseless modern + rhapsody.</p> + + <p>It was not unnatural that Schiller, in distaste for the weak riot + of feeling and the passion for describing Nature which obtained in + his day, was led to overpraise the Homeric naïvete and overblame the + sentimentality which he wrongly identified with it.</p> + + <p>In all that is called art, the Romans were pupils of the Greek, + and their achievements in the region of beauty cannot be compared + with his. But they advanced the course of general culture, and their + feeling--always more subjective, abstract, self-conscious, and + reflective--has a comparatively familiar, because modern, ring in the + great poets.</p> + + <p>The preference for the practical and social-economic is traceable + in their feeling for Nature. Their mythology also lay too much within + the bounds of the intelligible; shewed itself too much in forms and + ceremonies, in a cult; but it had not lost the sense of awe--it still + heard the voices of mysterious powers in the depths of the + forest.</p> + + <p>The dramatists wove effective metaphors and descriptions of Nature + into their plays.</p> + + <p>Lucretius laid the foundations of a knowledge of her which refined + both his enjoyment and his descriptions; and the elegiac sentimental + style, which we see developed in Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil, + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg018" id="pg018">018</a></span>and + Horace, first came to light in the great lyrist Catullus. In Imperial + times feeling for Nature grew with the growth of culture in general; + men turned to her in times of bad cheer, and found comfort in the + great sky spaces, the constant stars, and forests that trembled with + awe of the divine Numen.</p> + + <p>It was so with Seneca, a pantheist through and through. Pliny the + younger was quite modern in his choice of rural solitudes, and his + appreciation of the views from his villa. With Hadrian and Apuleius + the Roman rococo literature began; Apuleius was astonishingly modern, + and Ausonius was almost German in the depth and tenderness of his + feeling for Nature. Garden-culture and landscape-painting shewed the + same movement towards the sympathetic and elegiac-sentimental.</p> + + <p>Those who deny the Roman feeling for Nature might learn better + from a glance at the ruins of their villas. As H. Nissen says in his + <i>Italische Landeskunde</i>:</p> + + <p>'It was more than mere fashion which drew the Roman to the + sea-side, and attracted so strongly all those great figures, from the + elder Scipio Africanus and his noble daughter, Cornelia, down to + Augustus and Tiberius and their successors, whenever their powers + flagged in the Forum. There were soft breezes to cool the brow, + colour and outline to refresh the eye, and wide views that appealed + to a race born to extensive lordship.</p> + + <p>'In passing along the desolate, fever-stricken coasts of Latium + and Campania to-day, one comes upon many traces of former splendour, + and one is reminded that the pleasure which the old Romans took in + the sea-side was spoilt for those who came after them by the havoc of + the time.'</p> + + <p>In many points, Roman feeling for Nature was more developed than + Greek. For instance, the Romans appreciated landscape as a whole, and + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg019" id= + "pg019">019</a></span>distance, light and shade in wood and water, + reflections, the charms of hunting and rowing, day-dreams on a + mountain side, and so forth.</p> + + <p>That antiquity and the Middle Ages had any taste for romantic + scenery has been energetically denied; but we can find a trace of it. + The landscape which the Roman admired was level, graceful, and + gentle; he certainly did not see any beauty in the Alps. Livy's + 'Foeditas Alpinum' and the dreadful descriptions of Ammian, with + others, are the much-quoted vouchers for this. Nor is it surprising; + for modern appreciation, still in its youth, is really due to + increased knowledge about Nature, to a change of feeling, and to the + conveniences of modern travelling, unknown 2000 years ago.</p> + + <p>The dangers and hardships of those days must have put enjoyment + out of the question; and only served to heighten the unfavourable + contrast between the wildness of the mountain regions and the + cultivation of Italy.</p> + + <p>Lucretius looked at wild scenery with horror, but later on it + became a favourite subject for description; and Seneca notes, as + shewing a morbid state of mind, in his essay on tranquillity of mind, + that travelling not only attracts men to delightful places, but that + some even exclaim: 'Let us go now into Campania; now that delicate + soil delighteth us, let us visit the wood countries, let us visit the + forest of Calabria, and let us seek some pleasure amidst the deserts, + in such sort as these wandering eyes of ours may be relieved in + beholding, at our pleasure, the strange solitude of these savage + places.'</p> + + <p>We have thus briefly surveyed on the one hand, in theory, the + conditions under which a conscious feeling for Nature develops, and + the forms in which it expresses itself; and, on the other, the course + this feeling has followed in antiquity among the Hindoos, Hebrews, + Greeks, and Romans. The movement <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg020" id="pg020">020</a></span>toward the modern, toward the + subjective and individual, lies clear to view. We will now trace its + gradual development along lines which are always strictly analogous + to those of culture in general, through the Middle Ages. <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg021" id="pg021">021</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch1" id="ch1">CHAPTER I</a></h2> + + <h3>CHRISTIANITY AND GERMANISM</h3> + + <p>When the heathen world had outlived its faculties, and its + creative power had failed, it sank into the ocean of the past--a + sphinx, with her riddle guessed,--and mediæval civilization arose, + founded upon Christianity and Germanism. There are times in the + world's history when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept + away and all things made new at a stroke, as if by the + world-consuming fire of the old Saga. But, in reality, all change is + gradual; the old is for ever failing and passing out of sight, to be + taken up as a ferment into the ever emerging new, which changes and + remodels as it will. It was so with Christianity. It is easy to + imagine that it arose suddenly, like a phoenix, from the ashes of + heathendom; but, although dependent at heart upon the sublime + personality of its Founder, it was none the less a product of its + age, and a result of gradual development--a river with sources partly + in Judea, partly in Hellas. And mediæval Christianity never denied + the traces of its double origin.</p> + + <p>Upon this syncretic soil its literature sprang up, moulded as to + matter upon Old Testament and specifically Christian models, as to + form upon the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg022" id= + "pg022">022</a></span>great writers of antiquity; but matter and form + are only separable in the abstract, and the Middle Ages are woven + through and through with both Greco-Roman and Jewish elements.</p> + + <p>But these elements were unfavourable to the development of feeling + for Nature; Judaism admitted no delight in her for her own sake, and + Christianity intensified the Judaic opposition between God and the + world, Creator and created.</p> + + <p>'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; if + any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him': by + which John meant, raise your eyes to your Heavenly Father, throned + above the clouds.</p> + + <p>Christianity in its stringent form was transcendental, despising + the world and renouncing its pleasures. It held that Creation, + through the entrance of sin, had become a caricature, and that + earthly existence had only the very limited value of a thoroughfare + to the eternal Kingdom.</p> + + <p>While joy in existence characterized the Hellenic world until its + downfall, and the Greek took life serenely, delighting in its smooth + flow; with Christianity, as Jean Paul put it, 'all the present of + earth vanished into the future of Heaven, and the Kingdom of the + Infinite arose upon the ruins of the finite.'</p> + + <p>The beauty of earth was looked upon as an enchantment of the + devil; and sin, the worm in the fruit, lurked in its alluring + forms.</p> + + <p>Classic mythology created a world of its own, dimly veiled by the + visible one; every phase of Nature shewed the presence or action of + deities with whom man had intimate relations; every form of life, + animated by them, held something familiar to him, even sacred--his + landscape was absorbed by the gods.</p> + + <p>To Judaism and Christianity, Nature was a fallen angel, separated + as far as possible from her God. They only recognized one world--that + of spirit; and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg023" id= + "pg023">023</a></span>one sphere of the spiritual, religion--the + relation between God and man. Material things were a delusion of + Satan's; the heaven on which their eyes were fixed was a very distant + one.</p> + + <p>The Hellenic belief in deities was pandemonistic and cosmic; + Christianity, in its original tendency, anti-cosmic and hostile to + Nature. And Nature, like the world at large, only existed for it in + relation to its Creator, and was no longer 'the great mother of all + things,' but merely an instrument in the hands of Providence.</p> + + <p>The Greek looked at phenomena in detail, in their inexhaustible + variety, rarely at things as a whole; the Christian considered Nature + as a work of God, full of wonderful order, in which detail had only + the importance of a link in a chain.</p> + + <p>As Lotze says, 'The creative artistic impulse could be of no use + to a conception of life in which nothing retained independent + significance, but everything referred to or symbolized something + else.' But yet, the idea of individuality, of the importance of the + ego, gained ground as never before through this introspection and + merging of material in spiritual, this giving spirit the exclusive + sway; and Christianity, while it broke down the barriers of nation, + race, and position, and widened the cleft between Nature and spirit, + discovered at the same time the worth of the individual.</p> + + <p>And this individuality was one of the chief steps towards an + artistic, that is, individual point of view about Nature, for it was + not possible to consider her freely and for her own sake alone, until + the unlimited independence of mind had been recognized.</p> + + <p>But the full development of Christianity was only reached when it + blended with the Germanic spirit, with the German Gemüth (for which + no other language has a word), and intensified, by so doing, the + innately subjective temperament of the race.</p> + + <p>The northern climate gives pause for the development <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg024" id="pg024">024</a></span>of the inner life; + its long bleak winter, with the heavy atmosphere and slow coming of + spring, wake a craving for light and warmth, and throw man back on + himself. This inward inclination, which made itself felt very early + in the German race, by bringing out the contemplative and independent + sides of his character, and so disinclining him for combined action + with his fellows, forwarded the growth of the over-ripe seeds of + classic culture and vital Christianity.</p> + + <p>The Romanic nations, with their brilliant, sharply-defined + landscape and serene skies, always retained something of the + objective delight in life which belonged to antiquity; they never + felt that mysterious impulse towards dreams and enthusiastic longing + which the Northerner draws from his lowering skies and dark woods, + his mists on level and height, the grey in grey of his atmosphere, + and his ever varying landscape. A raw climate drives man indoors in + mind as well as body, and prompts that craving for spring and delight + in its coming which have been the chief notes in northern feeling for + Nature from earliest times.</p> + + <p>Vischer has shewn in his <i>Aesthetik</i>, that German feeling was + early influenced by the different forms of plant life around it. + Rigid pine, delicate birch, stalwart oak, each had its effect; and + the wildness and roughness of land, sea, and animal life in the North + combined with the cold of the climate to create the taste for + domestic comfort, for fireside dreams, and thought-weaving by the + hearth.</p> + + <p>Nature schooled the race to hard work and scanty pleasure, and yet + its relationship to her was deep and heartfelt from the first. + Devoutly religious, it gazed at her with mingled love and fear; and + the deposit of its ideas about her was its mythology.</p> + + <p>Its gods dwelt in mountain tops, holes in the rocks, and rivers, + and especially in dark forests and in the leafy boughs of sacred + trees; and the howling of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg025" id= + "pg025">025</a></span>wind, the rustle of leaves, the soughing in the + tree tops, were sounds of their presence. The worship of woods lasted + far into Christian times, especially among the Saxons and + Frisians.<a href="#b1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Wodan was the all-powerful father of gods and men--the highest + god, who, as among all the Aryan nations, represented Heaven. Light + was his shining helmet, clouds were the dark cap he put on when he + spread rain over the earth, or crashed through the air as a wild + hunter with his raging pack. His son Donar shewed himself in thunder + and lightning, as he rode with swinging axe on his goat-spanned car. + Mountains were sacred to both, as plants to Ziu. Freyr and Freya were + goddesses of fertility, love, and spring; a ram was sacred to them, + whose golden fleece illuminated night as well as day, and who drew + their car with a horse's speed.<a href="#b2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> As + with Freya, an image of the goddess Nerthus was drawn through the + land in spring, to announce peace and fertility to mortals.</p> + + <p>The suggestive myth of Baldur, god of light and spring, killed by + blind Hödur, was the expression of general grief at the passing of + beauty.</p> + + <p>The <i>Edda</i> has a touching picture of the sorrow of Nature, of + her trees and plants, when the one beloved of all living things fell, + pierced by an arrow. Holda was first the mild and gracious goddess, + then a divine being, encompassing the earth. She might be seen in + morning hours by her favourite haunts of lake and spring, a beautiful + white woman, who bathed and vanished. When snow fell, she was making + her bed, and the feathers flew. Agriculture and domestic order were + under her care.</p> + + <p>Ostara was goddess of bright dawn, of rising light, and awakening + spring, as Hel of subterranean night, the darkness of the underworld. + Frigg, wife of the highest god, knew the story of existence, and + protected marriage. She was the Northern Juno or Hera.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg026" id="pg026">026</a></span> + Ravines and hollows in the mountains were the dwelling-places of the + dwarfs (Erdmännlein), sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly to + man; now peaceful and helpful, now impish spirits of mischief in + cloud caps and grey coats, thievish and jolly.</p> + + <p>They were visible by moonlight, dancing in the fields; and when + their track was found in the dew,<a href="#b3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> a + good harvest was expected. Popular belief took the floating autumn + cobwebs for the work of elves and fairies. The spirits of mountain + and wood were related to the water-spirits, nixies who sat combing + their long hair in the sun, or stretched up lovely arms out of the + water. The elves belonged to the more spiritual side of Nature, the + giants to the grosser. Rocks and stones were the weapons of the + giants; they removed mountains and hills, and boulders were pebbles + shaken out of their shoes.</p> + + <p>Among animals the horse was sacred to many deities, and gods and + goddesses readily transformed themselves into birds. Two ravens, + Hugin and Munin, whose names signify thought and memory, were Odin's + constant companions. The gift of prophecy was ascribed to the cuckoo, + as its monotonous voice heralded the spring:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Kukuk vam haven, wo lange sail ik leven?</p> + </div> + + <p>There were many legends of men and snakes who exchanged shapes, + and whom it was unlucky to kill.<a href="#b4"><sup>[4]</sup></a></p> + + <p>The sun and moon, too, were familiar figures in legends.</p> + + <p>Their movement across the sky was a flight from two pursuing + wolves, of which one, the Fenris wolf, was fated one day to catch and + devour the moon. The German, like the Greek, dreaded nothing more + than the eclipse of sun or moon, and connected it with the + destruction of all things and the end of the world. In the moon spots + he saw a human form carrying a hare or a stick or an axe on his + shoulder.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg027" id="pg027">027</a></span> + The Solstices impressed him most of all, with their almost constant + day in summer, almost constant night in winter. Sun, moon, and stars + were the eyes of heaven; there was a pious custom to greet the stars + before going to bed. Still earlier, they were sparks of fire from + Muspilli, to light the gods home. Night, day, and the sun had their + cars--night and day with one horse, the sun with two: sunrise brought + sounds sweeter than the song of birds or strings; the rising sun, it + was said, rings for joy, murmuring daybreak laughs.<a href= + "#b5"><sup>[5]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Day brought joy, night sorrow; the first was good and friendly, + the second bad and hostile. The birds greeted daytime and summer with + songs of delight, but grieved in silence through night and winter: + the first swallow and stork were hailed as spring's messengers. May + with greening woods led in beloved summer, frost and snow the + winter.</p> + + <p>So myth, fable, and legend were interlaced in confusion; who can + separate the threads?</p> + + <p>At any rate, the point of view which they indicate remained the + common one even far into the Middle Ages, and shewed simple familiar + intercourse with Nature. Even legal formulæ were full of pictures + from Nature. In the customary oath to render a contract binding, the + promise is to hold, so it runs, 'so long as the sun shines and rivers + flow, so long as the wind blows and birds sing, so far off as earth + is green and fir trees grow, so far as the vault of heaven reaches.' + As Schnaase says,<a href="#b6"><sup>[6]</sup></a> though with some + exaggeration, such formulæ, in their summary survey of earth and sky, + often give a complete landscape poem in a few words. He points out + that in northern, as opposed to classic mythology, Nature was + considered, not in the cursory Hebrew way, that hurried over or + missed detail, but as a whole, and in her relation to man's inner + life.</p> + + <p>'The collective picture of heaven and earth, of cloud movement, of + the mute life of plants--that <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg028" + id="pg028">028</a></span>side of Nature which had almost escaped the + eye of antiquity--occupied the Northerner most of all.</p> + + <p>'The <i>Edda</i> even represents all Nature together in one + colossal form--the form of the giant Ymir, whom the sons of Boer + slew, in order to make the mountains from his bones, the earth from + his flesh, the skies from his skull.'</p> + + <p>A still grander mythical synthesis was the representation of the + whole world under the form of the sacred ash tree Yggdrasil. This was + the world tree which united heaven, earth, and hell. Its branches + stretched across the world and reached up to the skies, and its roots + spread in different directions--one toward the race of Asa in heaven, + another toward the Hrimthursen, the third toward the underworld; and + on both roots and branches creatures lived and played--eagle, + squirrel, stag, and snake; while by the murmuring Urdhar stream, + which rippled over one root, the Nones sat in judgment with the race + of Asa.</p> + + <p>Not less significant was the conception of the end of the world, + the twilight of the gods (Götterdämmerung), according to which all + the wicked powers broke loose and fought against the gods; the sun + and moon were devoured by wolves, the stars fell and earth quaked, + the monster world-serpent Joermungande, in giant rage, reared himself + out of the water and came to land: Loki led the Hrimthursen and the + retinue of hell, and Surt, with his shining hair, rode away from the + flaming earth across Bifröst, the rainbow, which broke beneath + him.</p> + + <p>After the world conflagration a new and better earth arose, with + rejuvenated gods.<a href="#b7"><sup>[7]</sup></a></p> + + <p>German mediæval poetry, as a whole, epic and lyric, was interwoven + with a hazy network of suggestive myth and legend; and moral + elements, which in mythology were hidden by the prominence of Nature, + stood out clear to view in the fate and <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg029" id="pg029">029</a></span>character of the + heroes. The germ of many of our fairy tales is a bit of purest poetry + of Nature--a genuine Nature myth transferred to human affairs, which + lay nearer to the child-like popular mind, and were therefore more + readily understood by it.</p> + + <p>So, for instance, from the Maiden of the Shield, Sigrdrifa, who + was pierced by Odin's sleep thorn, and who originally represented the + earth, frozen in winter, kissed awake by the sun-god, came Brunhild, + whose mail Siegfried's sword penetrated as the sun rays penetrate the + frost, and lastly the King's daughter, who pricked herself with the + fateful spindle, and sank into deep sleep. And as Sigrdrifa was + surrounded by walls of flame, so now we have a thorny hedge of wild + briar round the beautiful maiden (hence named Dornröschen) when the + lucky prince comes to waken her with a kiss.<a href= + "#b8"><sup>[8]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Not all fairy tales have preserved the myth into Christian times + in so poetic and transparent a form as this. Its poetic germ arose + from hidden depths of myth and legend, and, like heathen + superstitions in the first centuries of Christianity, found its most + fruitful soil among the people. It has often been disguised beyond + recognition by legends, and by the worship of the Madonna and saints, + but it has never been destroyed, and it keeps its magic to the + present day.</p> + + <p>We see then that the inborn German feeling for Nature, conditioned + by climate and landscape, and pronounced in his mythology, found both + an obstacle and a support in Christianity--an obstacle in its + transcendentalism, and a support in its inwardness. <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg030" id="pg030">030</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch2" id="ch2">CHAPTER II</a></h2> + + <h3>THE THEOLOGICAL CHRISTIAN AND THE SYMPATHETIC HEATHEN FEELING OF + THE FIRST TEN CENTURIES A.D.</h3> + + <p>The Middle Ages employed its best intellectual power in solving + the problems of man's relation to God and the Redeemer, his moral + vocation, and his claim to the Kingdom of the blessed. Mind and heart + were almost entirely engrossed by the dogmas of the new faith, such + as the incarnation, original sin, and free-will, and by doubts which + the Old Testament had raised and not solved. Life was looked upon as + a test-place, a thoroughfare to the heavenly Kingdom; earth, with its + beauty and its appeal to the senses, as a temptress.</p> + + <p>To flee the world and to lack artistic feeling were therefore + marks of the period. We have no trace of scientific knowledge applied + to Nature, and she was treated with increasing contempt, as the + influence of antiquity died out. In spite of this, the attitude of + the Apostolic Fathers was very far from hostile. Their fundamental + idea was the Psalmist's 'Lord, how great are Thy works; in wisdom + hast Thou made them all!' and yet they turned to Nature--at any rate, + the noblest Grecians among them--not only for proof of divine wisdom + and goodness, but with a degree of personal inclination, an + enthusiasm, to which antiquity was a stranger.</p> + + <p>Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians:</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg031" id="pg031">031</a></span> + 'Let us note how free from anger He is towards all His creatures. The + heavens are moved by His direction and obey Him in peace. Day and + night accomplish the course assigned to them by Him, without + hindrance one to another. The sun and the moon and the dancing stars, + according to His appointment, circle in harmony within the bounds + assigned to them, without any swerving aside. The earth, bearing + fruit in fulfilment of His will at her proper seasons, putteth forth + the food that supplieth abundantly both men and beasts and all living + things which are thereupon, making no dissension, neither altering + anything which He hath decreed. Moreover, the inscrutable depths of + the abysses and unutterable statutes of the nether regions are + constrained by the same ordinances. The basin of the boundless sea, + gathered together by His workmanship into its reservoirs, passeth not + the barriers wherewith it is surrounded; but even as He ordered it, + so it doeth. For He said, "so far shalt thou come, and thy waves + shall be broken within thee." The ocean which is impassable for men, + and the worlds beyond it, are directed by the same ordinances of the + Master. The seasons of spring and summer and autumn and winter give + way in succession one to another in peace. The winds in their several + quarters at their proper seasons fulfil their ministry without + disturbance, and the overflowing fountains, created for enjoyment and + health, without fail give their breasts which sustain the life for + men. Yea, the smallest of living things come together in concord and + peace.'<a href="#c1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p> + + <p>The three great Cappadocians, the most representative of the Greek + Fathers and leaders of the fourth century, wrote about the scenery + round them in a tone of sentimentality not less astonishing, in view + of the prejudice which denies all feeling for Nature to the Middle + Ages, than their broad humanity and free handling of dogma.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg032" id="pg032">032</a></span> It + was no ascetic renouncing the world and solitude<a href= + "#c2"><sup>[2]</sup></a>; but rather a sensitive man, thoughtful and + dreamy at once, who wrote as follows (Basil the Great to Gregory + Nazianzen):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It is a lofty mountain overshadowed with a deep wood, irrigated + on the north by cold and transparent streams. At its foot is spread + a low plain, enriched perpetually with the streams from the + mountains. The wood, a virgin forest of trees of various kinds and + foliage which grows around it, almost serves it as a rampart; so + that even the Isle of Calypso, which Homer evidently admired as a + paragon of loveliness, is nothing in comparison with this. For + indeed it is very nearly an island, from its being enclosed on all + sides with rocky boundaries. On two sides of it are deep and + precipitous ravines, and on another side the river flowing from the + steep is itself a continuous and almost impassable barrier. The + mountain range, with its moon-shaped windings, walls off the + accessible parts of the plain. There is but one entrance, of which + we are the masters. My hut is built on another point, which uplifts + a lofty pinnacle on the summit, so that this plain is outspread + before the gaze, and from the height I can catch a glimpse of the + river flowing round, which to my fancy affords no less delight than + the view of the Strymore as you look from Amphipolis. For the + Strymore broadens into lakes with its more tranquil stream, and is + so sluggish as almost to forfeit the character of a river. The + Iris, on the other hand, flowing with a swifter course than any + river I know, for a short space billows along the adjacent rock, + and then, plunging over it, rolls into a deep whirlpool, affording + a most delightful view to me and to every spectator, and abundantly + supplying the needs of the inhabitants, for it nurtures an + incredible number of fishes in its eddies.</p> + + <p>Why need I tell you of the sweet exhalations from the earth or + the breezes from the river? Other persons might admire the + multitude of the flowers, or of the lyric birds, but I have no time + to attend to them. But my highest eulogy of the spot is, that, + prolific as it is of all kinds of fruits from its happy situation, + it bears for me the sweetest of all fruits, tranquillity; not only + because it is free from the noises of cities, but because it is not + traversed by a single visitor except the hunters, who occasionally + join us. For, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg033" id= + "pg033">033</a></span>besides its other advantages, it also + produces animals--not bears and wolves, like yours--heaven forbid! + But it feeds herds of stags, and of wild goats and hares, and + creatures of that kind. Do you not then observe what a narrow risk + I ran, fool that I was, to change such a spot for Tiberine, the + depth of the habitable world? I am now hastening to it, pardon me. + For even Alcmæon, when he discovered the Echinades, no longer + endured his wanderings.<a href="#c3"><sup>[3]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This highly-cultured prince of the Church clearly valued the place + quite as much for its repose, its idyllic solitude, for what we + moderns would call its romantic surroundings, sylvan and rugged at + once, as for its fertility and practical uses. But it is too much to + say, with Humboldt<a href="#c4"><sup>[4]</sup></a>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>In this simple description of scenery and forest life, feelings + are expressed which are more intimately in unison with those of + modern tunes, than anything which has been transmitted to us from + Greek or Roman antiquity. From the lonely Alpine hut to which Basil + withdrew, the eye wanders over the humid and leafy roof of the + forest below.... The poetic and mythical allusion at the close of + the letter falls on the Christian ear like an echo from another and + earlier world.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The Hellenic poets of the Anthology, and the younger Pliny in + Imperial days, held the same tone, elegiac and idyllic<a href= + "#c5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>; as Villemain says, 'These pleasant + pictures, these poetic allusions, do not shew the austerity of the + cloister.'<a href="#c6"><sup>[6]</sup></a> The specifically Christian + and monastic was hidden by the purely human.</p> + + <p>Other writings of Basil's express still more strongly the mild + dejection which longs for solitude. For instance, when Gregory had + been dwelling upon the emptiness of all earthly things, he said in + reply, that peace of soul must be man's chief aim, and could only be + attained by separation from the world, by solitude; 'for the + contemplation of Nature abates the fever of the soul, and banishes + all insincerity and presumption.' Therefore he loved the quiet + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg034" id="pg034">034</a></span>corner + where he was undisturbed by human intercourse.</p> + + <p>He drew melancholy comparisons from Nature: men were compared to + wandering clouds that dissolve into nothing, to wavering shadows, and + shipwrecked beings, etc.</p> + + <p>His homilies on the Hexameron, too, shew thought of Nature. There + is a fine sense for the play of colour on the sea here: 'A pleasant + sight is the glistening sea when a settled calm doth hold it; but + pleasant too it is to behold its surface ruffled by gentle breezes, + and its colour now purple, now white, now dark; when it dasheth not + with violence against the neighbouring coast, but holdeth it in + tranquil embrace.'<a href="#c7"><sup>[7]</sup></a></p> + + <p>There is enthusiastic admiration for Nature mixed with his + profound religious feeling in the whole description of the stars, the + seasons, etc. The expression of Ptolymäos, that when he gazed at the + stars he felt himself raised to the table of Zeus, is weak in + comparison with Basil's words, 'If, on a clear night, you have fixed + your gaze upon the beauty of the stars, and then suddenly turned to + thoughts of the artist of the universe, whoever he be, who has + adorned the sky so wonderfully with these undying flowers, and has so + planned it that the beauty of the spectacle is not less than its + conformity to law....if the finite and perishable world is so + beautiful, what must the infinite and invisible be?'<a href= + "#c8"><sup>[8]</sup></a></p> + + <p>For him, as for modern minds, starlight brought thoughts of + eternity: 'If the greatness of the sky is beyond human comprehension, + what mind, what understanding could fathom eternal things?'</p> + + <p>Gregory Nazianzen's feeling for Nature was intensely melancholy. + His poem <i>On Human Nature</i> says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>For yesterday, worn out with my grief alone, I sat apart in a + shady grove, gnawing my heart out. For <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg035" id="pg035">035</a></span>somehow I love + this remedy in time of grief, to talk with mine own heart in + silence. And the breezes whispered to the note of the songster + birds, and from the branches brought to me sweet slumber, though my + heart was well-nigh broken. And the cicadas, friends of the sun, + chirped with the shrill note that issues from their breasts, and + filled the whole grove with sound. A cold spring hard by bedewed my + feet as it flowed gently through the glen; but I was held in the + strong grip of grief, nor did I seek aught of these things, for the + mind, when it is burdened with sorrow, is not fain to take part in + pleasure.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The classic writers had also contrasted Nature with mind, as, for + example, Ibykos in his famous <i>Spring Song</i><a href= + "#c9"><sup>[9]</sup></a>; but not with Gregory's brooding melancholy + and self-tormenting introspection. The poem goes on to compare him to + a cloud that wanders hither and thither in darkness, without even a + visible outline of that for which he longed; without peace:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I am a stream of troubled water: ever onward I move, nor hath + any part of me rest; thou wilt not a second time pass over that + stream thou didst before pass over, nor wilt thou see a second time + the man thou sawest before.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In his dreamy enthusiasm he likes nothing better than solitude: + 'Happy he who leads a lonely life, happy he who with the mighty force + of a pure mind seeth the glory of the lights of heaven.'</p> + + <p>The same tone constantly recurs in his writings. Human life is but + dust, blown by the wind; a stormy voyage, faded grass; kingdoms and + powers are waves of the sea, which suck under and drown; a charming + girl is a rose with thorns, etc.</p> + + <p>Gregory of Nyssa again praises the order and splendour of Nature + and her Creator in Old Testament style: 'Seeing the harmony of the + whole, of wonders in heaven and in earth, and how the elements of + things, though mutually opposed, are all by Nature welded together, + and make for one aim through a certain indefinable + intercommunion.'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg036" id="pg036">036</a></span> + With the pathos of Job he cries:</p> + + <blockquote> + <div class="poem"> + <p>Who has spread out the ground at my feet?</p> + + <p>Who has made the sky firm over me as a dome?</p> + + <p>Who carries the sun as a torch before me?</p> + + <p>Who sends springs into the ravines?</p> + + <p>Who prepares the path of the waters?</p> + </div> + + <p>And who gives my spirit the wing for that high flight in which I + leave earth behind and hasten through the wide ocean of air, know + the beauty of the ether, and lift myself to the stars and observe + all their splendour, and, not staying there, but passing beyond the + limits of mutable things, comprehend unchangeable Nature--the + immutable Power which is based upon itself, and leads and supports + all that exists?</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This, with its markedly poetic swing, is surprisingly like the + passage in Plato's <i>Phædo</i>, where Socrates says: 'If any man + could arrive at the exterior limit or take the wings of a bird and + come to the top, then, like a fish who puts his head out of the water + and sees this world, he would see a world beyond; and if the nature + of man could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this other + world was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the + true earth.' But even the thought, that the order and splendour of + Nature witnessed to the eternal powers which had created her, was not + strange to the Greek, as Aristotle proves in the remarks which Cicero + preserved to us in his treatise <i>On the Nature of the Gods</i>.</p> + + <p>Well then did Aristotle observe: 'If there were men whose + habitations had been always underground, in great and commodious + houses, adorned with statues and pictures, finished with everything + which they who are reputed happy abound with, and if, without + stirring from thence, they should be informed of a certain divine + power and majesty, and after some time the earth should open, and + they should quit their dark abode to come to us, where they should + immediately behold the earth, the seas, the heavens, should consider + the vast <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg037" id= + "pg037">037</a></span>extent of the clouds and force of the winds, + should see the sun, and observe his grandeur and beauty, and also his + generative power, inasmuch as day is occasioned by the diffusion of + his light through the sky, and when night has obscured the earth, + they should contemplate the heavens bespangled and adorned with + stars, the surprising variety of the moon in her increase and wane, + the rising and setting of all the stars and the inviolable regularity + of all their courses; when,' says he, 'they should see these things, + they would undoubtedly conclude that there are gods, and that these + are their mighty works.'</p> + + <p>Thus unconsciously the Greek Fathers of the Church took over the + thoughts of the great classic philosophers, only substituting a unity + for a plurality of godhead. To soar upon the wings of bird, wind, or + cloud, a <i>motif</i> which we find here in Gregory of Nyssa, and + which reached its finest expression in Ganymede and the evening scene + in Faust, had reached a very modern degree of development in + antiquity.<a href="#c10"><sup>[10]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Gregory of Nyssa was still more sentimental and plaintive than + Basil and Gregory Nazianzen:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>When I see every ledge of rock, every valley and plain, covered + with new-born verdure, the varied beauty of the trees, and the + lilies at my feet decked by Nature with the double charms of + perfume and of colour, when in the distance I see the ocean, + towards which the clouds are onward borne, my spirit is overpowered + by a sadness not wholly devoid of enjoyment. When in autumn the + fruits have passed away, the leaves have fallen, and the branches + of the trees, dried and shrivelled, are robbed of their leafy + adornments, we are instinctively led, amid the everlasting and + regular change in Nature, to feel the harmony of the wondrous + powers pervading all things. He who contemplates them with the eye + of the soul, feels the littleness of man amid the greatness of the + universe.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Are not these thoughts, which Humboldt rightly strings together, + highly significant and modern? Especially <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg038" id="pg038">038</a></span>in view of the + opinion which Du Bois Reymond, for example, expresses: 'In antiquity, + mediæval times, and in later literature up to the last century, one + seeks in vain for the expression of what we call a feeling for + Nature.'<a href="#c11"><sup>[11]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Might not Werther have written them? They have all his sentimental + melancholy, coupled with that 'delight of sorrow' which owes its name + (Wonne der Wehmuth) to Goethe, although its meaning was known to + Euripides.</p> + + <p>Yet it was only in rare cases, such as Seneca and Aristotle, that + classic writers combined such appreciation of Nature's individual + traits with that lofty view of the universe which elevates and + humbles at once.</p> + + <p>Gregory shewed the blending of Christian with classic feeling; and + the deepening of the inner life through the new faith is quite as + clear in patristic writings as their close relationship to the + classic.</p> + + <p>But the thinkers and poets of the Middle Ages did not always see + Nature under the brilliant light of Hellenic influence; there were + wide spaces of time in which monkish asceticism held sway, and she + was treated with most unscientific contempt. For the development of + feeling did not proceed in one unswerving line, but was subject to + backward movements. The rosy afterglow of the classic world was upon + these Greek Fathers; but at the same time they suffered from the + sorrowfulness of the new religion, which held so many sad and + pessimistic elements.</p> + + <p>The classic spirit seemed to shudder before the eternity of the + individual, before the unfathomable depths which opened up for + mankind with this religion of the soul, which can find no rest in + itself, no peace in the world, unless it be at one with God in + self-forgetting devotion and surrender.</p> + + <p>Solitude, to which all the deeper minds at this time paid homage, + became the mother of new and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg039" + id="pg039">039</a></span>great thoughts, and of a view of the world + little behind the modern in sentimentality.</p> + + <p>What Villemain says of the quotation from Gregory Nazianzen just + given, applies with equal force to the others:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>No doubt there is a singular charm in this mixture of abstract + thoughts and emotions, this contrast between the beauties of Nature + and the unrest of a heart tormented by the enigma of existence and + seeking to find rest in faith.... It was not the poetry of Homer, + it was another poetry.... It was in the new form of contemplative + poetry, in this sadness of man about himself, in these impulses + towards God and the future, in this idealism so little known by the + poets of antiquity, that the Christian imagination could compete + without disadvantage. It was there that that poetry arose which + modern satiety seeks for, the poetry of reverie and reflection, + which penetrates man's heart and deciphers his most intimate + thoughts and vaguest wishes.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Contempt for art was a characteristic of the Fathers of the + Church, and to that end they extolled Nature; man's handiwork, + however dazzling, was but vanity in their eyes, whereas Nature was + the handiwork of the Creator. Culture and Nature were purposely set + in opposition to each other.<a href="#c12"><sup>[12]</sup></a> St + Chrysostom wrote:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>If the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would + lead thy spirit astray, look upwards to the vault of heaven, and + around thee on the open fields, in which herds graze by the water's + side. Who does not despise all the creations of art, when in the + stillness of his soul he watches with admiration the rising of the + sun, as it pours its golden light over the face of the earth; when + resting on the thick grass beside the murmuring spring, or beneath + the sombre shade of a thick and leafy tree, the eye rests on the + far receding and hazy distance?</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The visible to them was but a mirror of the invisible; as Paul + says (13th of the 1st Corinthians): 'Here we see in a glass darkly,' + and Goethe: 'Everything transitory is but a similitude.' <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg040" id="pg040">040</a></span></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>God (says St Chrysostom again) has placed man in the world as in + a royal palace gleaming with gold and precious stones; but the + wonderful thing about this palace is, that it is not made of stone, + but of far costlier material; he has not lighted up a golden + candelabra, but given lights their fixed course in the roof of the + palace, where they are not only useful to us, but an object of + great delight.<a href="#c13"><sup>[13]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The Roman secular writers of the first Christian centuries had not + this depth of thought and sadness; but from them too we have notable + descriptions of Nature in which personal pleasure and sympathy are + evident motives as well as religious feeling.</p> + + <p>In the little <i>Octavius</i> of Minucius Felix, a writing full of + genuine human feeling of the time of Commodus, the mixture of the + heathen culture and opinions of antiquity with the Christian way of + thinking has a very modern ring. The scenery is finely sketched.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The heats of summer being over, autumn began to be temperate ... + we (two friends, a heathen and a Christian) agreed to go to the + delightful city of Ostia.... As, at break of day, we were + proceeding along the banks of the Tiber towards the sea, that the + soft breeze might invigorate our limbs, and that we might enjoy the + pleasure of feeling the beach gently subside under our footsteps, + Cæcilius observed an image of Serapis, and having raised his hands + to his lips, after the wont of the superstitious vulgar, he kissed + it.... Then Octavius said: 'It is not the part of a good man, + brother Marcus, thus to leave an intimate companion and friend + amidst blind popular ignorance, and to suffer him, in such open + daylight, to stumble against stones,' etc.... Discoursing after + this sort, we traversed the space between Ostia and the sea, and + arrived at the open coast. There the gentle surges had smoothed the + outermost sands like a pleasure walk, and as the sea, although the + winds blow not, is ever unquiet, it came forward to the shore, not + hoary and foaming, but with waves gently swelling and curled. On + this occasion we were agreeably amused by the varieties of its + appearance, for, as we stood on the margin and dipped the soles of + our feet in the water, the wave alternately struck at us, and then + receding, and sliding away, seemed to swallow <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg041" id="pg041">041</a></span>up itself. We + saw some boys eagerly engaged in the game of throwing shells in the + sea.... Cæcilius said: 'All things ebb into the fountain from which + they spring, and return back to their original without contriver, + author, or supreme arbiter ... showers fall, winds blow, thunder + bellows, and lightnings flash ... but they have no aim.' Octavius + answers: 'Behold the heaven itself, how wide it is stretched out, + and with what rapidity its revolutions are performed, whether in + the night when studded with stars, or in the daytime when the sun + ranges over it, and then you will learn with what a wonderful and + divine hand the balance is held by the Supreme Moderator of all + things; see how the circuit made by the sun produces the year, and + how the moon, in her increase, wanes and changes, drives the months + around.... Observe the sea, it is bound by a law that the shore + imposes; the variety of trees, how each of them is enlivened from + the bowels of the earth! Behold the ocean, it ebbs and flows + alternately. Look at the springs, they trickle with a perpetual + flow; at rivers, they hold on their course in quick and continued + motion. Why should I speak of the ridges of mountains, aptly + disposed? of the gentle slope of hills, or of plains widely + extended?... In this mansion of the world, when you fully consider + the heaven and the earth, and that providence, order, and + government visible in them, assure yourself that there is indeed a + Lord and Parent of the whole ... do not enquire for the name of + God--God is his name.... If I should call Him Father, you would + imagine Him earthly; if King, carnal; and if Lord, mortal. Remove + all epithets, and then you will be sensible of His glory....'</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>How like Faust's confession of faith to Gretchen:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Him who dare name</p> + + <p>And yet proclaim,</p> + + <p>Yes! I believe...</p> + + <p>The All-embracer,</p> + + <p>All-sustainer,</p> + + <p>Doth he not embrace, sustain,</p> + + <p>Thee, me, Himself?</p> + + <p>Lifts not the Heaven its dome above?</p> + + <p>Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us rise?...</p> + + <p>And beaming tenderly with looks of love</p> + + <p>Climb not the everlasting stars on high?...</p> + + <p>Fill thence thy heart, how large so e'er it be,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg042" id= + "pg042">042</a></span>And in the feeling when thou'rt wholly + blest,</p> + + <p>Then call it what thou wilt--Bliss! Heart! Love! God!</p> + + <p>I have no name for it--'tis feeling all</p> + + <p>Name is but sound and smoke</p> + + <p>Shrouding the glow of Heaven.</p> + </div> + + <p>Such statements of belief were not rare in the Apologists; but + Nature at this time was losing independent importance in men's minds, + like life itself, which after Cyprian was counted as nothing but a + fight with the devil.<a href="#c14"><sup>[14]</sup></a></p> + + <p>There is deep reverence for Nature in the lyrics, the hymns of the + first centuries A.D., as a work of God and an emblem of moral ideas. + Ebert observes<a href="#c15"><sup>[15]</sup></a></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>In comparison with the old Roman, one can easily see the + peculiarities and perfect originality of these Christian lyrics. I + do not mean merely in that dominance of the soul life in which man + appeared to be quite merged, and which makes them such profound + expressions of feeling; but in man's relationship to Nature, which, + one might say, supplies the colour to the painter's brush.<a href= + "#c16"><sup>[16]</sup></a> Nature appears here in the service of + ideal moral powers and robbed of her independence;<a href= + "#c17"><sup>[17]</sup></a> the servant of her Creator, whose direct + command she obeys. She is his instrument for man's welfare, and + also at times, under the temporary mastery of the devil, for his + destruction. Thus Nature easily symbolizes the moral world.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>'Bountiful Giver of light, through whose calm brightness, when the + time of night is past and gone, the daylight is suffused abroad, + Thou, the world's true morning star, clearer than the full glorious + sun, Thou very dayspring, very light in all its fulness, that dost + illumine the innermost recesses of the heart,' sings St Hilary in his + Morning Hymn; and in another hymn, declaring himself unworthy to lift + his sinful eyes to the clear stars, he urges all the creatures, and + heaven, earth, sea and river, hill and wood, rose, lily, and star to + weep with him and lament the sinfulness of man.</p> + + <p>In the Morning Hymn of St Ambrose dawn is <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg043" id="pg043">043</a></span>used symbolically; + dark night pales, the light of the world is born again, and the new + birth of the soul raises to new energy; Christ is called the true + sun, the source of light; 'let modesty be as the dawn, faith as the + noonday, let the mind know no twilight.'</p> + + <p>And Prudentius sings in a Morning Hymn <a href= + "#c18"><sup>[18]</sup></a>: 'Night and mist and darkness fade, light + dawns, the globe brightens, Christ is coming!' and again: 'The herald + bird of dawn announces day, Christ the awaker calls us to life.' And + in the ninth hymn: 'Let flowing rivers, waves, the seashore's + thundering, showers, heat, snow, frost, forest and breeze, night, + day, praise Thee throughout the ages.'<a href= + "#c19"><sup>[19]</sup></a></p> + + <p>He speaks of Christ as the sun that never sets, never is obscured + by clouds, the flower of David, of the root of Jesse; of the eternal + Fatherland where the whole ground is fragrant with beds of purple + roses, violets, and crocuses, and slender twigs drop balsam.</p> + + <p>St Jerome united Christian genius, as Ebert says, with classic + culture to such a degree that his writings, especially his letters, + often shew a distinctly modern tone,<a href= + "#c20"><sup>[20]</sup></a> and go to prove that asceticism so + deepened and intensified character that even literary style took + individual stamp.<a href="#c21"><sup>[21]</sup></a> But the most + perfect representative, the most modern man, of his day was + Augustine.</p> + + <p>As Rousseau's <i>Confessions</i> revealed the revolutionary genius + of the eighteenth century, Augustine's opened out a powerful + character, fully conscious of its own importance, striving with the + problems of the time, and throwing search-lights into every corner of + its own passionate heart. He had attained, after much struggling, to + a glowing faith, and he described the process in characteristic and + drastic similes from Nature, which are scarcely suitable for + translation. He said on one occasion:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>For I burned at times in my youth to satiate myself with deeds + of hell, and dared to run wild in many <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg044" id="pg044">044</a></span>a dark love + passage.... In the time of my youth I took my fill passionately + among the wild beasts, and I dared to roam the woods and pursue my + vagrant loves beneath the shade; and my beauty consumed away and I + was loathsome in Thy sight, pleasing myself and desiring to please + the eyes of men.... The seething waves of my youth flowed up to the + shores of matrimony....</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Comfortless at the death of his friend:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I burned, I sighed, I wept, I was distraught, for I bore within + me a soul rent and bloodstained, that would no longer brook my + carrying; yet I found no place where I could lay it down, neither + in pleasant groves nor in sport was it at rest. All things, even + the light itself, were filled with shuddering.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Augustine, like Rousseau, understood 'que c'est un fatal présent + du ciel qu'une ame sensible.'</p> + + <p>He looked upon his own heart as a sick child, and sought healing + for it in Nature and solitude, though in vain.</p> + + <p>The pantheistic belief of the Manicheans that all things, fire, + air, water, etc., were alive, that figs wept when they were picked + and the mother tree shed milky tears for the loss of them, that + everything in heaven and earth was a part of godhead, gave him no + comfort; it was rather the personal God of the Psalms whom he saw in + the ordering of Nature.</p> + + <p>The cosmological element in theism has never been more beautifully + expressed than in his words:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I asked the earth, and she said: 'I am not He,' and all things + that are in her did confess the same. I asked the sea and the + depths and creeping things, and they answered: 'We are not thy God, + seek higher.' I asked the blowing breezes, and the whole expanse of + air with its inhabitants made answer: 'Anaxagoras was at fault, I + am not God.' I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and + with a loud voice did they exclaim: 'He made us.' My question was + the enquiry of my spirit, their answer was the beauty of their + form.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In another place:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Not with uncertain but with sure consciousness, Lord, I love + Thee. But behold, sea and sky and all <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg045" id="pg045">045</a></span>things in them + from all sides tell me that I must love Thee, nor do they cease to + give all men this message, so that they are without excuse. Sky and + earth speak to the deaf Thy praises: when I love Thee, I love not + beauty of form, nor radiancy of light; but when I love my God, I + love the light, the voice, the sweetness, the food, the embrace of + my innermost soul. That is what I love when I love my God.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Augustine's interest in Nature was thus religious. At the same + time, the soothing influence of quiet woods was not unknown to + him.</p> + + <p>The likeness and unlikeness between the Christian and heathen + points of view are very clear in the correspondence between Ausonius, + the poet of the Moselle, and Paulinus, Bishop of Nola; and the deep + friendship expressed in it raises their dilettante verses to the + level of true poetry.</p> + + <p>Ausonius, thoroughly heathen as he was, carries us far forward + into Christian-Germanic times by his sentimentality and his artistic + descriptions of the scenery of the Moselle.<a href= + "#c22"><sup>[22]</sup></a></p> + + <p>It is characteristic of the decline of heathendom, that the lack + of original national material to serve as inspiration, as the Æneas + Saga had once served, led the best men of the time to muse on Nature, + and describe scenery and travels. Nothing in classic Roman poetry + attests such an acute grasp of Nature's little secret charms as the + small poem about the sunny banks of the Moselle, vine-clad and + crowned by villas, and reflected in the crystal water below. It + seemed as if the Roman, with the German climate, had imbibed the + German love of Nature; as if its scenery had bewitched him like the + German maiden whom he compared to roses and lilies in his song.</p> + + <p>Many parts of his poetical epistles are in the same tone, and we + learn incidentally from them that a lengthy preamble about weather + and place belonged to letter-writing even then.<a href= + "#c23"><sup>[23]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Feeling for Nature and love of his friend are interwoven into a + truly poetic appeal in No. 64, in which <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg046" id="pg046">046</a></span>Ausonius complains + that Paulinus does not answer his letters:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Rocks give answer to the speech of man, and his words striking + against the caves resound, and from the groves cometh the echo of + his voice. The cliffs of the coast cry out, the rivers murmur, the + hedge hums with the bees that feed upon it, the reedy banks have + their own harmonious notes, the foliage of the pine talks in + trembling whispers to the winds: what time the light south-east + falls on the pointed leaves, songs of Dindymus give answer in the + Gargaric grove. Nature has made nothing dumb; the birds of the air + and the beasts of the earth are not silent, the snake has its hiss, + the fishes of the sea as they breathe give forth their note.... + Have the Basque mountains and the snowy haunts of the Pyrenees + taken away thy urbanity?... May he, who advises thee to keep + silence, never enjoy the singing of sweet songs nor the voices of + Nature ... sad and in need may he live in desolate regions, and + wander silent in the rounded heights of the Alpine range.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The sounds of Nature are detailed with great delicacy in this + appeal, and we see that the Alps are referred to as desolate + regions.</p> + + <p>In another letter (25) he reminded his friend of their mutual + love, their home at Burdigala, his country-house with its + vine-slopes, fields, woods, etc., and went on:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Yet without thee no year advanceth with grateful change of + season; the rainy spring passeth without flower, the dog-star burns + with blazing heat, Pomona bringeth not the changing scents of + autumn, Aquarius pours forth his waters and saddens winter. + Pontius, dear heart, seest thou what thou hast done?</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Closing in the same tender strain with a picture of his hope + fulfilled:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Now he leaves the snowy towns of the Iberians, now he holds the + fields of the Tarbellians, now passeth he beneath the halls of + Ebromagus, now he is gliding down the stream, and now he knocketh + at thy door! Can we believe it? Or do they who love, fashion + themselves dreams?</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg047" id="pg047">047</a></span> + The greater inwardness of feeling here, as contrasted with classic + times, is undeniable; the tone verges on the sentimentality of the + correspondences between 'beautiful souls' in the eighteenth + century.</p> + + <p>Paulinus was touchingly devoted to his former teacher Ausonius, + and in every way a man of fine and tender feeling. He gave himself + with zeal to Christianity, and became an ascetic and bishop.</p> + + <p>It was a bitter grief to him that his Ausonius remained a heathen + when he himself had sworn allegiance to Christ and said adieu to + Apollo. There is a fine urbanity and humanity in his writings, but he + did not, like Ausonius, love Nature for her own sake. The one took + the Christian ascetic point of view, the other the classic heathen, + with sympathy and sentiment in addition.</p> + + <p>Paulinus recognized the difference, and contrasted their ideas of + solitude. 'They are not crazed, nor is it their savage fierceness + that makes men choose to live in lonely spots; rather, turning their + eyes to the lofty stars, they contemplate God, and set the leisure + that is free from empty cares, to fathom the depths of truth they + love.'</p> + + <p>In answer to his friend's praise of home, he praised Spain, in + which he was living, and many copious descriptions of time and place + run through his other writings<a href="#c24"><sup>[24]</sup></a>; but + while he yielded nothing to Ausonius in the matter of friendship, + 'sooner shall life disappear from my body than thy image from my + heart,' he was without his quiet musing delight in Nature. For her + the heathen had the clearer eye and warmer heart; the Christian + bishop only acknowledged her existence in relation to his Creator, + declaring with pride that no power had been given to us over the + elements, nor to them over us, and that not from the stars but from + our own hearts come the hindrances to virtue.</p> + + <p>Lives of the saints and paraphrases of the story of creation were + the principal themes of the Christian <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg048" id="pg048">048</a></span>poets of the fourth and fifth + centuries. In some of these the hermit was extolled with a dash of + Robinson Crusoe romance, and the descriptions of natural phenomena in + connection with Genesis often showed a feeling for the beauty of + Nature in poetic language. Dracontius drew a detailed picture of + Paradise with much self-satisfaction.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Then in flight the joyous feathered throng passed through the + heavens, beating the air with sounding wings, various notes do they + pour forth in soothing harmony, and, methinks, together praise for + that they were accounted worthy to be created.<a href= + "#c26"><sup>[26]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>For the charming legend of Paradise was to many Christian minds of + this time what the long-lost bliss of Elysium and the Golden Age had + been to the Hellenic poets and the Roman elegist--the theme of much + vivid imagery and highly-coloured word-painting.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Eternal spring softens the air, a healing flame floods the world + with light, all the elements glow in healing warmth; as the shades + of night fade, day rises.... Then the feathered flocks fly joyfully + through the air, beating it with their wings in the rush of their + passage, and with flattering satisfaction their voices are heard, + and I think they praise God that they were found worthy to be + created; some shine in snowy white, some in purple, some in + saffron, some in yellow gold; others have white feathers round the + eyes, while neck and breast are of the bright tint of the hyacinth + ... and upon the branches, the birds are moved to and fro with them + by the wind.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This shews careful observation of detail; but, for the most part, + such idyllic feeling was checked by lofty religious thoughts.</p> + + <p>'Man,' he cries, 'should rule over Nature, over all that it + contains, over all earth offers in fruit, flowers, and verdure that + tree and vine, sea and spring, can give.' He summons all creation to + praise the Creator--stars and seasons, hail-storm and <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg049" id="pg049">049</a></span>lightning, earth, + sea, river and spring, cloud and night, plants, animals, and light; + and he describes the flood in bold flights of fancy.</p> + + <p>In the three books of Avitus<a href="#c27"><sup>[27]</sup></a> we + have 'a complete poem of the lost Paradise, far removed from a mere + paraphrase or versification of the Bible,'<a href= + "#c28"><sup>[28]</sup></a> which shews artistic leanings and + sympathetic feeling here and there. As Catullus<a href= + "#c29"><sup>[29]</sup></a> pictures the stars looking down upon the + quiet love of mortals by night, and Theocritus<a href= + "#c30"><sup>[30]</sup></a> makes the cypresses their only witnesses, + the Christian poet surrounds the marriage of our first parents with + the sympathy of Nature:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>And angel voices joined in harmony and sang to the chaste and + pure; Paradise was their wedding-chamber, earth their dowry, and + the stars of heaven rejoiced with gladsome radiance.... The + kindness of heaven maintains eternal spring there; the tumultuous + south wind does not penetrate, the clouds forsake an air which is + always pure.... The soil has no need of rains to refresh it, and + the plants prosper by virtue of their own dew. The earth is always + verdant, and its surface animated by a sweet warmth resplendent + with beauty. Herbs never abandon the hills, the trees never lose + their leaves, etc.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And when Adam and Eve leave it, they find all the rest of the + beautiful world ugly and narrow in comparison. 'Day is dark to their + eyes, and under the clear sun they complain that the light has + disappeared.'</p> + + <p>It was the reflection of their own condition in Nature. Among + heathen writers who were influenced, without being entirely swayed, + by Christian teaching, and imitated the rhetorical Roman style in + describing Nature, Apollonius Sidonius takes a prominent place. In + spite of many empty phrases and a stilted style, difficult to + understand as well as to translate, his poems, and still more his + letters, give many interesting pictures of the culture of his part of + the fifth century. In Carm. 2 he draws a <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg050" id="pg050">050</a></span>highly--coloured + picture of the home of Pontius Leontas,<a href= + "#c31"><sup>[31]</sup></a> a fine country property, and paints the + charms of the villa with all the art of his rhetoric and some real + appreciation. The meeting of the two rivers, the Garonne and the + Dordogne, in the introduction is poetically rendered, and he goes on + to describe the cool hall and grottos, state-rooms, pillars--above + all, the splendid view: 'There on the top of the fortress I sit down + and lean back and gaze at the mountains covered by olives, so dear to + the Muse and the goats. I shall wander in their shade, and believe + that coward Daphne grants me her love.' He delighted in unspoilt + Nature, and describes:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>My fountain, which, as it flows from the mountain-side, is + overshadowed by a many-covered grotto with its wide circle. It + needs not Art; Nature has given it grace. That no artist's hand has + touched it is its charm; it is no masterpiece of skill, no hammer + with resounding blow will adorn the rocks, nor marble fill up the + place where the tufa is worn away.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He lays stress upon the contrast between culture and Nature, town + luxury and country solitude, in his second letter to Domidius, and + describes the beauties of his own modest estate with sentimental + delight:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>You reproach me for loitering in the country; I might complain + with more reason that you stay in the town when the earth shines in + the light of spring, the ice is melting from the Alps, and the soil + is marked by the dry fissures of tortuous furrows ... the stones in + the stream, and the mud on the banks are dried up ... here neither + nude statues, comic actors, nor Hippodrome are to be found ... the + noise of the waters is so great that it drowns conversation. From + the dining-room, if you have time to spare at meals, you can occupy + it with the delight of looking at the scenery, and watch the + fishing ... here you can find a hidden recess, cool even in summer + heat, a place to sleep in. Here what joy it is to listen to the + cicadas chirping at noonday, and to the frogs croaking when the + twilight is coming on, and to the swans and geese giving note at + the early hours of the night, and at midnight to the cocks crowing + together, and to the boding crows with three-fold <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg051" id="pg051">051</a></span>note greeting + the ruddy torch of the rising dawn; and in the half light of the + morning to hear the nightingale warbling in the bushes, and the + swallow twittering among the beams.... Between whiles, the + shepherds play in their rustic fashion. Not far off is a wood where + the branches of two huge limes interlace, though their trunks are + apart (in their shade we play ball), and a lake that rises to such + fury in a storm that the trees that border it are wetted by the + spray.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In another letter to Domidius he described a visit to the + country-seat of two of his friends:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>We were torn from one pleasure to another--games, feastings, + chatting, rowing, bathing, fishing.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>As a true adherent even as a bishop of classic culture and + humanity, Sidonius is thus an interesting figure in these wild times, + with his Pliny-like enthusiasm for country rather than city, and his + susceptibility to woodland and pastoral life.</p> + + <p>The limit of extravagance in the bombastic rhetoric of the period + was reached in the travels of Ennodius,<a href= + "#c32"><sup>[32]</sup></a> who was scarcely more than a fantastic + prattler. The purest, noblest, and most important figure of the sixth + century was undoubtedly Boetius; but it is Cassiodorus, a statesman + of the first rank under Theodoric, who in his <i>Variorium libris</i> + gives the most interesting view of the attitude of his day towards + Nature. He revelled in her and in describing her. After praising Baja + for its beauty<a href="#c33"><sup>[33]</sup></a> and Lactarius for + its healthiness, he said of Scyllacium:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The city of Scyllacium hangs upon the hills like a cluster of + grapes, not that it may pride itself upon their difficult ascent, + but that it may voluptuously gaze on verdant plains and the blue + back of the sea. The city beholds the rising sun from its very + cradle, when the day that is about to be born sends forward no + heralding Aurora; but as soon as it begins to rise, the quivering + brightness displays its torch. It beholds Phoebus in his joy; it is + bathed in the brightness of that luminary so that it might be + thought to be itself the native land of the sun, the claims of + Rhodes to that honour being outdone.... It enjoys a translucent + air, but withal so temperate, that its winters are sunny and its + summers cool, and life passes there without sorrow, since + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg052" id= + "pg052">052</a></span>hostile seasons are feared by none. Hence, + too, man himself is here freer of soul than elsewhere, for this + temperateness of the climate prevails in all things.... Assuredly + for the body to imbibe muddy waters is a different thing from + sucking in the transparency of a sweet fountain. Even so the vigour + of the mind is repressed when it is clogged by a heavy atmosphere. + Nature itself hath made us subject to these influences.... clouds + make us feel sad, and again a bright day fills us with joy.... At + the foot of the Moscian Mount we hollowed out the bowels of the + rock, and tastefully introduced therein the eddying waves of + Nereus. Here a troop of fishes sporting in free captivity refreshes + all minds with delight, and charms all eyes with admiration. They + run greedily to the hand of man, and, before they become his food, + seek dainties from him.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He described the town as rich in vineyards and olive woods, + cornfields and villas.</p> + + <p>He awarded the palm of beauty to Como and its lake, and although + he wrote in the clumsy language of a decaying literature, this + sixth-century sketch still strikes us as surprisingly complete and + artistic in feeling:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Como, with its precipitous mountains and its vast expanse of + lake, seems placed there for the defence of the Province of + Liguria; and yet again, it is so beautiful, that one would think it + was created for pleasure only.</p> + + <p>To the south lies a fertile plain with easy roads for the + transport of provisions; on the north, a lake sixty miles long + abounding in fish, soothing the mind with delicious recreation.... + Rightly is it called Como, because it is adorned with such gifts. + The lake lies in a shell-like valley with white margins. Above + rises a diadem of lofty mountains, their slopes studded with bright + villas; a girdle of olives below, vineyards above, while a crest of + thick chestnut woods adorns the very summit of the hills. Streams + of snowy clearness dash from the hill-sides into the lake. On the + eastern side these unite to form the river Addua, so called because + it contains the added volume of two streams.... So delightful a + region makes men delicate and averse to labour.... Therefore the + inhabitants deserve special consideration, and for this reason we + wish them to enjoy perpetually the royal bounty.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg053" id="pg053">053</a></span> + This shews, beyond dispute, that the taste for the beauty of Nature, + even at that wild time, was not dead, and that the writer's attitude + was not mainly utilitarian. He noted the fertility of the land in + wine and grain, and of the sea in fish, but he laid far greater + stress upon its charms and their influence upon the inhabitants.</p> + + <p>On <i>a priori</i> grounds (so misleading in questions of this + kind) one would scarcely expect the most disturbed period in the + history of the European people to have produced a Venantius + Fortunatus, the greatest and most celebrated poet of the sixth + century. His whole personality, as well as his poetry, shewed the + blending of heathenism and Christianity, of Germanism and Romanism, + and it is only now and then among the Roman elegists and later epic + poets that we meet a feeling for Nature which can be compared to his. + Like all the poets of this late period, his verse lacks form, is + rugged and pompous, moving upon the stilts of classic reminiscences, + and coining monstrous new expressions for itself; but its feeling is + always sincere. It was the last gleam of a setting sun of literature + that fell upon this one beneficent figure. He was born in the + district of Treviso near Venice, and crossed the Alps a little before + the great Lombard invasion, while the Merovingians, following in the + steps of Chlodwig, were outdoing each other in bloodshed and cruelty. + In the midst of this hard time Fortunatus stood out alone among the + poets by virtue of his talent and purity of character. His poems are + often disfigured by bombast, prolixity, and misplaced learning; but + his keen eye for men and things is undeniable, and his feeling for + Nature shews not only in dealing with scenery, but in linking it with + the inner life.</p> + + <p>The lover's wish in <i>On Virginity</i>,<a href= + "#c34"><sup>[34]</sup></a> one of his longer poems, suggests the + Volkslieder:</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg054" id= + "pg054">054</a></span></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>O that I too might go, if my hurrying foot could poise amid the + lights of heaven and hold on its starry course. But now, without + thee, night comes drearily with its dark wings, and the day itself + and the glittering sunshine is darkness to me. Lily, narcissus, + violet, rose, nard, amomum, bring me no joy--nay, no flower + delights my heart. That I may see thee, I pass hovering through + each cloud, and my love teaches my wandering eyes to pierce the + mist, and lo! in dread fear I ask the stormy winds what they have + to tell me of my lord. Before thy feet I long to wash the pavement, + and with my hair to sweep thy temples. Whatever it be, I will bear + it; all hard things are sweet; if only I see thee, this penalty is + my joy. But be thou mindful, for thy vows do I yearn; I have thee + in my heart, have me in thy heart too.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This is more tender in feeling than any poem by Catullus or + Tibullus. We can only explain it by two facts--the deepening of the + inner life through Christianity (we almost hear Christ's words about + the 'great sinner'), and the intimate friendship which Fortunatus + enjoyed with a German lady, who may justly be called the noblest and + purest figure of her time in Franconia.</p> + + <p>This was Radegunde, the unhappy daughter of a Thuringian king, who + first saw her father's kingdom lost, and then, fleeing from the + cruelty of her husband, the bloodstained Chlotaire, took the veil in + Poitiers and founded a convent, of which she made Agnes, a noble + Franconian lady, the abbess. When Fortunatus visited the place, these + ladies became his devoted friends, and he remained there as a priest + until the death of Radegunde. His poems to them, which were often + letters and notes written off-hand, are full of affection and + gratitude (he was, by the way, a gourmet, and the ladies made + allowance for this weakness in dainty gifts), and form an enduring + witness of a pure and most touching friendship. They contain many + pretty sketches of Nature and delicate offerings of flowers. In one + he said: 'If the season brought white lilies or blossomed in red + roses, I <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg055" id= + "pg055">055</a></span>would send them to you, but now you must be + content with purple violets for a greeting'; and in another, because + gold and purple are not allowable, he sends her flowers, that she may + have 'her gold in crocuses, her purple in violets, and they may adorn + her hair with even greater delight than she draws from their + fragrance.' Once, when following pious custom, she had withdrawn into + her cell, his 'straying thoughts go in search of her':</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>How quickly dost thou hide the light from mine eyes! for without + thee I am o'erweighted by the clouds that bear me down, and though + thou flee and hide thyself here but for a few short days, that + month is longer than the whole hurrying year. Prithee, let the joys + of Easter bring thee back in safety, and so may a two-fold light + return to us at once.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And when she comes out, he cries:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Thou hadst robbed me of my happiness; now it returns to me with + thee, thou makest me doubly celebrate this solemn festival.... + Though the seedlings are only just beginning to shoot up from the + furrows, yet I to-day will reap my harvest in seeing thee once + more. To-day do I gather in the fruit and lay the peaceful sheaves + together. Though the field is bare, nor decked with ears of corn, + yet all, through thy return, is radiant fulness.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The comparison is tedious and spun out; but the idea is poetic. We + find it in the classics: for instance, in Theocritus, when he praises + Nais, whose beauty draws even Nature under her sway, and whose coming + makes spring everywhere:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Where has my light hidden herself from my straying eyes? When I + see not thee, I am ne'er satisfied. Though the heavens be bright, + though the clouds have fled, yet for me is the day sunless, if it + hide thee from me.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The most touching evidence of this friendship is the poem <i>On + the Downfall of Thuringia</i>.</p> + + <p>'One must,' says Leo,<a href="#c35"><sup>[35]</sup></a> 'refer the + chief excellence <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg056" id= + "pg056">056</a></span>of the poem to the lady who tells the tale, + must grant that the irresistible power of the description, the + spectacle of the freshly open wounds, the sympathy in the consuming + sorrow of a friend, gave unwonted power of the wing to this + low-flying pen.' Radegunde is thinking of her only remaining + relative, Amalafried:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>When the wind murmurs, I listen if it bring me some news, but of + all my kindred not even a shadow presents itself to me.... And + thou, Amalafried, gentle son of my father's brother, does no + anxiety for me consume thy heart? Hast thou forgotten what + Radegunde was to thee in thy earliest years, and how much thou + lovedst me, and how thou heldst the place of the father, mother, + brother, and sister whom I had lost? An hour absent from thee + seemed to me eternal; now ages pass, and I never hear a word from + thee. A whole world now lies betwixt those who loved each other and + who of old were never separate. If others, for pity alone, cross + the Alps to seek their lost slaves, wherefore am I forgotten?--I + who am bound to thee by blood? Where art thou? I ask the wind as it + sighs, the clouds as they pass--at least some bird might bring me + news of thee. If the holy enclosure of this monastery did not + restrain me, thou shouldst see me suddenly appear beside thee. I + could cross the stormy seas in winter if it were necessary. The + tempest that alarms the sailors should cause no fear to me who love + thee. If my vessel were dashed to pieces by the tempest, I should + cling to a plank to reach thee, and if I could find nothing to + cling to, I should go to thee swimming, exhausted. If I could but + see thee once more, I should deny all the perils of the + journey....</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>There is little about Nature in this beautiful avowal of love and + longing, but the whole colouring of the mood forms a background of + feeling for his longer descriptions. His very long and tedious poem + about the bridal journey of Gelesiuntha, the Spanish princess, who + married King Chilperic, shews deep and touching feeling in parts. She + left her Toledo home with a heavy heart, crossing the Pyrenees, where + 'the mountains shining with snow <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg057" id="pg057">057</a></span>reach to the stars, and their sharp + peaks project over the rain clouds.' In the same vein as Ausonius, + when he urged Paulinus to write to him, she begs her sister for + news:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>By thy name full oft I call thee, Gelesiuntha, sister mine: with + this name fountains, woods, rivers, and fields resound. Art thou + silent, Gelesiuntha? Answer as to thy sister stones and mountains, + groves and waters and sky, answer in language mute.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In troubled thought and care she asked the very breezes, but of + her sister's safety all were silent.</p> + + <p>Fortunatus, like Ausonius, not only looked at Nature with + sympathy, but was a master in description of scenery. His lengthy + descriptions of spring are mostly only decorative work, but here and + there we find a really poetic idea. For example:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>At the first spring, when earth has doffed her frost, the field + is clothed with variegated grass; the mountains stretch their leafy + heads towards the sky, the shady tree renews its verdant foliage, + the lovely vine is swelling with budding branches, giving promise + that a weight of grapes shall hang from its prolific stems. While + all joys return, the earth is dead and dull.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The soft violets paint the field with their own purple, the + meadows are green with grass, the grass is bright with its fresh + shoots. Little by little, like stars, the bright flowers spring up, + and the sward is joyous and gay with flecks of colour, and the + birds that through the winter cold have been numb and silent, with + imprisoned song, are now recalled to their song.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He describes the cold winter, and a hot summer's day, when</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Even in the forests no shade was to be found, and the traveller + almost fainted on the burning roads, longing for shade and cool + drinks. At last the rustle of a crystal stream is heard, he hurries + to it with delight, he lies down and lays his limbs in the soft + kisses of the grass.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg058" id="pg058">058</a></span> + His poems about beautiful and noteworthy places include some on the + Garonne and Gers (Egircius):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>So dried up by heat that it is neither river nor land, and the + grumbling croak of the frog, sole ruler of the realm from which the + fish are banished, is heard in the lonely swamp; but when the rain + pours down, the flood swells, and what was a lake suddenly becomes + a sea.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He has many verses of this sort, written with little wit but great + satisfaction.</p> + + <p>More attractive are descriptions of the Rhine and Moselle, + recalling Ausonius, and due to love partly of Nature, partly of + verbal scene-painting. The best and most famous of these is on his + journey by the Moselle from Metz to Andernach on the Rhine. Here he + shews a keen eye and fine taste for wide views and high mountains, as + well as for the minutiæ of scenery, with artistic treatment. He also + blends his own thoughts and feelings with his impressions of Nature, + making it clear that he values her not merely for decoration, but for + her own sake.</p> + + <p>He has been called the last Roman poet; in reality, he belonged + not only to the period which directly succeeded his own, when the + Roman world already lay in ruins, but to the fully-developed Middle + Ages--the time when Christianity and Germanism had mated with Roman + minds.</p> + + <p>In his best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the + classic tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the + great of bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really + modern and under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with + all its depth and intensity. His touching friendship with Radegunde + is, as it were, a symbol of the blending of the two elements out of + which the modern sprang. It was the stimulating influence of the + noble Germanic princess, herself <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg059" id="pg059">059</a></span>Christian in soul, which fanned the + dying sparks of classic poetry into a flame.</p> + + <p>Fortunatus stood upon a borderland. Literature was retreating + further and further from the classic models, and culture was + declining to its fall. In Gaul, as in Spain and Italy, the shadows of + coming night were broadening over literary activity, thought, and + feeling.</p> + + <p>It is a characteristic fact in Roman literature, that not only its + great lights, but the lesser ones who followed them, were + enthusiastically imitated. Latin poetry of the Middle Ages lived upon + recollections of the past, or tried to raise itself again by its + help; even so late a comer as Fortunatus became in his turn an object + of marvel, and was copied by poets who never reached his level.</p> + + <p>It is not surprising that feeling for Nature shewed a + corresponding shallowness and lassitude.</p> + + <p>Not only bucolic but didactic writing was modelled upon the + classic. Isodorus and Beda, in their works with identical titles + 'concerning the existence of things,' relied on Roman models no less + than Alcuin, who had formed himself on the pattern of Augustine's + time in his <i>Conflict between Winter and Spring</i>, as well as in + many single verses, directly inspired by Virgil.<a href= + "#c36"><sup>[36]</sup></a></p> + + <p>His <i>Farewell to his Cell</i> caught the idyllic tone very + neatly:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Beloved cell, retirement's sweet abode!</p> + + <p>Farewell, a last farewell, thy poet bids thee!</p> + + <p>Beloved cell, by smiling woods embraced,</p> + + <p>Whose branches, shaken by the genial breeze,</p> + + <p>To meditation oft my mind disposed.</p> + + <p>Around thee too, their health-reviving herbs</p> + + <p>In verdure gay the fertile meadows spread;</p> + + <p>And murmuring near, by flowery banks confined,</p> + + <p>Through fragrant meads the crystal streamlets glide,</p> + + <p>Wherein his nets the joyful fisher casts,</p> + + <p>And fragrant with the apple bending bough,</p> + + <p>With rose and lily joined, the gardens smile;</p> + + <p>While jubilant, along thy verdant glades <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg060" id="pg060">060</a></span>At dawn his + melody each songster pours,</p> + + <p>And to his God attunes the notes of praise.</p> + </div> + + <p>These heartfelt effusions express a feeling which certainly + inspired many monks when they turned from their gloomy cells to the + gardens and woods beyond--a feeling compounded of renunciation of the + world with idyllic comfort in their surroundings. If their + fundamental feeling was worship and praise of the Creator, their + constant outdoor work, which, during the first centuries, was + strenuous cultivation of the soil, must have roused a deep + appreciation of Nature in the nobler minds among them. Their choice + of sites for monasteries and hermitages fully bears out this + view.<a href="#c37"><sup>[37]</sup></a></p> + + <p><i>The Conflict between Spring and Winter</i>, with its classic + suggestions, is penetrated by a truly German love of spring.<a href= + "#c38"><sup>[38]</sup></a> It described the time when the cuckoo + sings high in the branches, grass clothes earth with many tints, and + the nightingale sings untiringly in the red-gold butcher's broom, + captivating us with her changing melodies.</p> + + <p>Among the savants whom Charlemagne gathered round him was + Angilbert. Virgil was his model, but the influence of the lighter + fluency of Fortunatus was visible, as in so many of his + contemporaries. With a vivid and artistic pen he described the wood + and park of Aachen and the Kaiser's brilliant hunt<a href= + "#c39"><sup>[39]</sup></a>; the great forest grove, the grassy + meadows with brooks and all sorts of birds flitting about, the + thicket stocked with many kinds of game.</p> + + <p>At the same time, his writing betrayed the conventional tone of + courts in its praise of his great secular lord, and a 'thoughtful + romantic inclination' for the eternal feminine, for the beautiful + women with splendid ornaments, and necks shining like milk or snow or + glowing like a rose, who, as Ebert puts it, 'lay far from the + asceticism of the poetry of the saints.'</p> + + <p>Naso Muadorinus in his pastorals took Calpurnius <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg061" id="pg061">061</a></span>and Nemesianus for + his models, just as they had taken Virgil, and Virgil Theocritus. + Muadorinus imitated the latter in his pastorals.</p> + + <p>In an alternate song of his between an old man and a boy, the old + man draws an artistic contrast between the shady coolness of the wood + and the mid-day glow of the sun, while the boy praises Him whose + songs the creatures follow as once they followed Orpheus with his + lute; and at the end, Charlemagne, who was extolled at the beginning + as a second Cæsar, is exalted to heaven as the founder of a new + Golden Age.</p> + + <p>In the Carolingian Renaissance of the Augustine epoch of + literature, Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, takes first place. At any + rate, he described in a very superior way, and, like Fortunatus, with + some humour, the draining of the Larte at Le Mans, Feb. 820; also, in + a light and lively strain, the Battle of the Birds, and, with the + same strong colouring, Paradise.</p> + + <p>The idyll of the cloister garden, so often treated, became famous + in the much-read <i>Hortulus</i> of Wahlafried.<a href= + "#c40"><sup>[40]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Despite classical flourishes from Virgil and Columella, and + pharmaceutical handling of plants, there is a good deal of thoughtful + observation of Nature in these 444 hexameters.</p> + + <p>They contain descriptions of seasons, of recipes, flowers and + vegetables, of the gardener's pleasure in digging his fields in + spring, clearing them of nettles, and levelling the ground thrown up + by the moles, in protecting his seedlings from rain and sun, and, + later on, in his gay beds of deciduous plants.</p> + + <p>There is a touch here and there which is not unpoetic--for + instance:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>A bright green patch of dark blue rue paints this shady grove; + it has short leaves and throws out short umbels, and passes the + breath of the wind and the rays of the sun right down to the end of + the stalk, and at a gentle touch gives forth a heavy scent.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg062" id="pg062">062</a></span> + and:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>With what verse, with what song, can the dry thinness of my + meagre muse rightly extol the shining lily, whose whiteness is as + the whiteness of gleaming snow, whose sweet scent is as the scent + of Sabian woods?</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He closes pleasantly too, adjuring Grimald to read the book under + the shade of the peach tree, while his school-fellows play round and + pick the great delicate fruit which they can barely grasp with one + hand. In the poem to the layman Ruodbern (100 hexameters) he + described the dangers of Alpine travelling, both from weather and + other foes. In those days the difficulties of the road excluded all + interest in mountain beauty. There is a tender and expressive poem in + Sapphic metre, in which, homesick and cold in winter, he sang his + longing for beautiful Reichenau. But even he, like most of his + predecessors and all his followers, wielded his pen with labour, + expression often failing to keep pace with thought.</p> + + <p>It only remains to mention Wandalbert, a monk of the monastery at + Prün, who, in a postscript to the <i>Conclusio des Martyrologium</i>, + gives a charming account of a landowner's life in field, garden, and + hunt.</p> + + <p>In the cloister, then, idyllic comfort, delighting in Nature and a + quiet country life, was quite as much at home as scholarship and + classical study. But we shall look there in vain for any trace of the + sentimental, the profoundly melancholy attitude of the Fathers of the + Church, Basil and Gregory, or for Augustine's deep faith and devout + admiration of the works of creation: even the tone of Ausonius and + Fortunatus, in their charming descriptions of scenery, was now a + thing of the past. Feeling for Nature--sentimental, sympathetic, + cosmic, and dogmatic--had dwindled down to mere pleasure in + cultivating flowers in the garden, to the level Aachen <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg063" id="pg063">063</a></span>landscape and such + like; and the power to describe the impression made by scenery was, + like the impression itself, lame and weary.</p> + + <p>It was the night of the decline breaking over Latin + literature.</p> + + <p>And how did it stand with German literature up to the eleventh + century? A German Kingdom had existed from the treaties of Verdun and + Mersen (842), but during this period traces of German poetry are few, + outweighed by Latin.</p> + + <p>The two great Messianic poems, <i>Heliand</i> and <i>Krist</i>, + stand out alone. In the <i>Heliand</i> the storm on the lake of + Gennesaret is vividly painted:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Then began the power of the storm; in the whirlwind the waves + rose, night descended, the sea broke with uproar, wind and water + battled together; yet, obedient to the command and to the + controlling word, the water stilled itself and flowed serenely.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In <i>Krist</i> there is a certain distinction in the description + of the Ascension, as the rising figures soar past the constellations + of stars, which disappear beneath their feet; for the rest, the + symbolic so supplants the direct meaning, that in place of an epic we + have a moralizing sermon. But there are traces of delight in the + beauty of the outer world, in the sunshine, and sympathy is + attributed to Nature:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>She grew very angry at such deeds.</p> + </div> + + <p>The poem <i>Muspilli</i> (the world fire) shews the old northern + feeling for Nature; still more the few existing words of the + <i>Wessobrunner Prayer</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>This I heard as the greatest marvel among men,</p> + + <p>That once there was no earth nor heaven above,</p> + + <p>The bright stars gave no light, the sun shone not,</p> + + <p>Nor the moon, nor the glorious sea.</p> + </div> + + <p>How plainly 'the bright stars' and the 'glorious sea' shew joy in + the beauty of the world!</p> + + <p>In the oldest Scandinavian poems the inflexible <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg064" id="pg064">064</a></span>character of the + Northerner and the northern landscape is reflected; the descriptions + are short and scanty; it is not mountain, rock, and sea which count + as beautiful, but pleasant, and, above all, fruitful scenery. The + imagery is bold: (Kenninger) the wind is the wolf of wood or sail, + the sea the pathway of the whale, the bath of the diving bird, + etc.</p> + + <p>The Anglo-Saxon was especially distinguished by his forcible + images and epithets. In Rynerwulf we have 'night falls like a helmet, + dark brown covers the mountains.' 'The sky is the fortress of the + storm, the sun the torch of the world, the jewel of splendour.' 'Fire + is eager, wild, blind, and raging; the sea is the gray sea, and the + sparkling splendid sea; waves are graves of the dead,' etc.</p> + + <p>Vivid feeling for Nature is not among the characteristic features + of either Scandinavian or old German poetry.</p> + + <p>It is naive and objective throughout, and seldom weighty or + forcible.</p> + + <p>The Waltharius shews the influence of Virgil's language, in + highly-coloured and sympathetic descriptions like those of the Latin + poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance.</p> + + <p>Animal saga probably first arose just before the twelfth century, + and their home was probably Franconia.</p> + + <p>Like the genial notices of plant life in the Latin poems of the + Carlovingian period, the animal poems shewed interest in the animal + world--the interest of a child who ponders individual differences and + peculiarities, the virtues and failings so closely allied to its own. + It was a naive 'hand-and-glove' footing between man and the + creatures, which attributed all his wishes and weaknesses to them, + wiped out all differences between them with perfect impartiality, and + gave the characteristics of each animal with exactness and + poetry.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg065" id="pg065">065</a></span> + The soil for the cultivation of poetry about animals was prepared by + the symbolic and allegorical way of looking at Nature which held sway + all through the Middle Ages.</p> + + <p>The material was used as a symbolic language for the immaterial, + the world of sense conceived of as a great picture-book of the truths + of salvation, in whose pages God, the devil, and, between them man, + figured: thus plant life suggested the flower of the root of Jesse, + foretold by Isaiah, red flowers the Saviour's wounds, and so forth. + In the earliest Christian times, a remarkable letter existed in + Alexandria, the so-called 'Physiologus,' which has affected the + proverbial turns of speech in the world's literature up to the + present day to an almost unequalled degree.</p> + + <p>It gave the symbolic meanings of the different animals. The lamb + and unicorn were symbols of Christ; sheep, fish, and deer, of his + followers; dragons, serpents, and bears, of the devil; swine, hares, + hyenas, of gluttony; the disorderly luxuriance of snow meant death, + the phoenix the resurrection, and so forth, indeed, whole categories + of animals were turned into allegories of the truths of + salvation.<a href="#c41"><sup>[41]</sup></a> The cleverest fables of + animals were in <i>Isengrimen</i>, published in Ghent about 1140 in + Latin verse--the story of the sick lion and his cure by the fox, and + the outwitting of the wolf. Such fables did not remain special to + German national literature, but became popular subjects in the + literature of the whole world; and it is a significant fact that they + afterwards took root especially in Flanders, where the taste for + still life and delight in Nature has always found a home, and which + became the nursery, in later times, of landscape, animal, and genre + painting. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg066" id= + "pg066">066</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch3" id="ch3">CHAPTER III</a></h2> + + <h3>THE NAIVE FEELING AT THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES</h3> + + <p>In the development and maturing of the race, as of the individual, + nothing is more helpful than contact with foreign elements, people of + other manners, thoughts, and feelings. Intimate intercourse between + different nationalities rouses what is best in the soul of a nation, + inviting, as it does, to discussion and opposition, as well as to the + acquisition of new ideas. The conquests of Alexander the Great opened + up a new world to the Greek, and a new culture arose--Hellenism. It + was a new world that rose before the astonished eyes of the + Crusader--in his case too, the East; but the resulting culture did + not last. The most diverse motives fused to bring about this great + migration to a land at once unknown and yet, through religion, + familiar; and a great variety of characters and nations met under the + banner of the Cross.</p> + + <p>Naturally this shaking up together, not only of Europeans among + themselves, but of the eastern with the western world, brought about + a complete revolution in manners, speech, art, science, trade, + manufacture, thought, and feeling, and so became an important factor + in general progress.</p> + + <p>The narrow boundaries of nationality, race, and education were + broken through; all felt equal before the leading idea; men, places, + plants, and animals were alike new and wonderful. Little <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg067" id="pg067">067</a></span>wonder if German + knights returning home from the East wove fiction with their fact, + and produced the most fantastic and adventurous heroic songs.</p> + + <p>Many of the noblest of the nations joined the Crusades in pious + ardour for the cause, and it is easy to imagine the effect of the + complete novelty of scene upon them. With such tremendous new + impressions to cope with, it is not surprising that even the best + minds, untrained as they were, were unequal to the task, and that the + descriptions of real experiences or events in poetic form failed to + express what they meant. Besides this, there is no doubt that in many + ways the facts fell below their ideals; also that the Crusader's + mantle covered at the same time a rabble, which joined from the + lowest motives, the scum of Europe. It must also be remembered that + it is far easier to experience or feel than to pass on that + experience and feeling to others; that those who wrote did not always + belong to the most educated; and that they wrote, for the most part, + with difficulty in Greek or Latin. When all this has been weighed and + admitted, the fact remains that in existing accounts of the Crusades + there is great poverty of description of scenery, and lack of much + feeling for Nature. The historian, as such, was bound to give first + place to matters of fact and practical importance, and so to judge a + place by its value to an army passing through or occupying it; by its + fertility, water-supply, its swamps or stony ground, and so forth; + but still the modern reader is astonished to see how little + impression the scenery of the Holy Land made, judged by the accounts + we possess, upon the Crusaders. Even when it is conceded that other + important concerns came first, and that danger, want, and hunger must + often have made everything disagreeable, still, references to Nature + are very scanty, and one may look in vain for any interest in + beautiful scenery for its own sake.</p> + + <p>There is only matter-of-fact geographical and <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg068" id="pg068">068</a></span>mythological + information in William of Tours' <i>History of the Crusades</i>; for + instance, in his description of the Bosphorus he does not waste a + word over its beauty. But, as 'fruitful' and 'pleasant' are + ever-recurring adjectives with him, one cannot say that he absolutely + ignored it.</p> + + <p>He said of Durazzo: 'They weather the bad seasons of the year in + fruitful districts rich in woods and fields, and all acceptable + conditions'; of Tyre, 'The town has a most excellent position on a + plain, almost entirely surrounded by mountains. The soil is + productive, the wood of value in many ways.' Of Antioch, 'Its + position is very convenient and pleasant, it lies in valleys which + have excellent and fertile soil, and are most pleasantly watered by + springs and streams. The mountains which enclose the town on both + sides are really very high; but send down very clear water, and their + sides and slopes are covered by buildings up to the very summits.' + There is nothing about beautiful views, unless one takes this, which + really only records a meteorological curiosity: 'From the top of one + mountain one can see the ball of the sun at the fourth watch of the + night, and if one turns round at the time when the first rays light + up the darkness, one has night on one side and day on the other.'</p> + + <p>Tyre is described again as 'conspicuous for the fertility of its + soil and the charm of its position.' Its great waterworks are + especially admired, since by their means 'not only the gardens and + most fruitful orchards flourish, but the cane from which sugar is + made, which is so useful to man for health and other purposes, and is + sent by merchants to the most distant parts of the world.' Other + reporters were charmed by the fertility and wealth of the East. 'On + those who came from the poorer and colder western countries, the rich + resources of the sunny land in comparison with the poverty of home + made an impression of overflowing plenty, and at <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg069" id="pg069">069</a></span>times almost of + inexhaustibleness. The descriptions of certain districts, extolled + for their special richness, sound almost enthusiastic.<a href= + "#d1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Burkhard von Monte Sion was enthusiastic about Lebanon's wealth of + meadows and gardens, and the plain round Tripolis, and considered the + Plain of Esdraelon the most desirable place in the world; but, on + exact and unprejudiced examination, there is nothing in his words + beyond homely admiration and matter-of-fact discussion of its great + practical utility.</p> + + <p>He says of La Boneia, 'That plain has many homesteads, and + beautiful groves of olive and fig and other trees of various kinds, + and much timber. Moreover, it abounds in no common measure in rivers + and pasture land'; closes a geographical account of Lebanon thus, + 'There are in Libanus and Antilibanus themselves fertile and + well-tilled valleys, rich in pasture land, vineyards, gardens, + plantations--in a word, in all the good things of the world'; and + says of the Plain of Galilee, 'I never saw a lovelier country, if our + sins and wrong-doing did not prevent Christians from living + there.'</p> + + <p>He had some feeling too for a distant view. He wrote of Samaria: + 'The site was very beautiful; the view stretched right to the Sea of + Joppa and to Antipatris and Cæsarea of Palestine, and over the whole + mountain of Ephraim down to Ramathaym and Sophim and to Carmel near + Accon by the sea. And it is rich in fountains and gardens and olive + groves, and all the good things this world desires.' But it would be + going too far to conclude from the following words that he + appreciated the contrast between simple and sublime scenery: 'It must + be noticed too, that the river, from the source of Jordan at the foot + of Lebanon as far as the Desert of Pharan, has broad and pleasant + plains on both sides, and beyond these the fields are surrounded by + very high mountains as far as the Red Sea.'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg070" id="pg070">070</a></span> In + dealing with Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, religious enthusiasm + suppresses any reference to scenery.</p> + + <p>These descriptions shew that the wealth and fertility of the + country were praised before its beauty, and that this was only + referred to in short, meagre phrases, which tell less about it than + any raptures without special knowledge.</p> + + <p>It was much the same with Phokas, who visited the Holy Land in + 1135.<a href="#d2"><sup>[2]</sup></a></p> + + <p>He was greatly impressed by the position of Antioch, 'with its + meadows and fruitful gardens, and the murmur of waters as the river, + fed by the torrents of the Castalian spring, flows quietly round the + town and besprinkles its towers with its gentle waves ... but most to + be admired of all is the mountain between town and sea, a noble and + remarkable sight--indeed, a delight to the beholder's eye ... the + Orontes flows with countless windings at the foot of it, and + discharges itself into the sea.'</p> + + <p>He thought Lebanon very beautiful and worthy its praise in Holy + Scripture: 'The sun lies like white hair upon its head; its valleys + are crowned with pines, cedars, and cypresses; streams, beautiful to + look at and quite cold, flow from the ravines and valleys down to the + sea, and the freshly melted snow gives the flowing water its crystal + clearness.'</p> + + <p>Tyre, too, was praised for its beauty: 'Strangers were + particularly delighted with one spring, which ran through meadows; + and if one stands on the tower, one can see the dense growth of + plants, the movement of the leaves in the glow of noon.'</p> + + <p>The plain of Nazareth, too, was 'a heaven on earth, the delight of + the soul.'</p> + + <p>But recollections of the sacred story were dearer to Phokas than + the scenery, and elsewhere he limited himself to noting the rich + fruit gardens, shady groups of trees, and streams and rivers with + pleasant banks.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg071" id="pg071">071</a></span> + Epiphanius Monachus Hagiopolitæ, in his <i>Enarratio Syriæ</i>, was a + very dry pioneer; so, too, the <i>Anonymus de locis + Hierosolymitanis</i>; Perdiccas, in his <i>Hierosolyma</i>, describes + Sion thus: 'It stands on an eminence so as to strike the eye, and is + beautiful to behold, owing to a number of vines and flower gardens + and pleasant spots.'</p> + + <p>It must be admitted then, that, beside utilitarian admiration of a + Paradise of fruitfulness, there is some record of simple, even + enthusiastic delight in its beauty; but only as to its general + features, and in the most meagre terms. The country was more + interesting to the Crusaders as the scene of the Christian story than + as a place in which to rest and dream and admire Nature for her own + sake.</p> + + <p>The accounts of German pilgrimages<a href="#d3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> + of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries only contain dry notices, + such as those of Jacob von Bern (1346-47), Pfintzing (1436-40), and + Ulrich Leman (1472-80). The last-mentioned praises Damascus in this + clumsy fashion: 'The town is very gay, quite surrounded by orchards, + with many brooks and springs flowing inside and out, and an + inexpressible number of people in it,' etc. Dietrich von Schachten + describes Venice in this way: 'Venice lies in the sea, and is built + neither on land nor on mountain, but on wooden piles, which is + unbelievable to one who has not seen it'; and Candia: 'Candia is a + beautiful town in the sea, well built; also a very fruitful island, + with all sorts of things that men need for living.' He describes a + ride through Southern Italy: 'Saturday we rode from Trepalda, but the + same day through chestnut and hazel woods; were told that these woods + paid the king 16,000 gulden every year. After that we rode a German + mile through a wood, where each tree had its vine--many trees carried + 3 ohms of wine, which is pleasant to see--and came to Nola.'</p> + + <p>He called Naples 'very pretty and big,' and <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg072" id="pg072">072</a></span>on: 'Then the king + took us to the sea and shewed us the ports, which are pretty and + strong with bulwarks and gates; we saw many beautiful ships too,' + etc. One does not know which is the more wonderful here, the poverty + of the description or the utter lack of personal observation: what + the wood produced, and how one was protected from the sea, was more + important to the writer than wood and sea themselves, and this, even + in speaking of the Bay of Naples, perhaps the most beautiful spot in + Europe. But instances like these are typical of German descriptions + at the time, and their Alpine travels fared no better.<a href= + "#d4"><sup>[4]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Geographical knowledge of the Alps advanced very slowly; there was + as yet no æsthetic enjoyment of their beauty. The Frankish historians + (Gregory of Tours, Fredegar) chronicled special events in the Alps, + but very briefly. Fredegar, for instance, knew of the sudden + appearance of a hot spring in the Lake of Thun, and Gregory of Tours + notes that the land-slip in 563 at the foot of the Dent du Midi, + above the point where the Rhine enters the Lake of Geneva, was a + dreadful event. Not only was the Castle of Tauretunum overwhelmed, + but the blocking of the Rhine caused a deluge felt as far as Geneva. + The pious prince of the Church explained this as a portent of another + catastrophe, the pest, which ravaged Gaul soon after.</p> + + <p>There was much fabling at that time in the legends of saints, + about great mines of iron, gold, and silver, and about chamois and + buck, cattle-breeding and Alpine husbandry in the 'regio montana'; + for example, in von Aribo's <i>Vita S. Emmerani</i>. When the Alps + became more frequented, especially when, through Charlemagne, a + political bridge came to unite Italy and Germany, new roads were made + and the whole region was better known--in fact, early in mediæval + times, not only political, but ecclesiastical and mercantile life + spread its threads over a great <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg073" + id="pg073">073</a></span>part of the known world, and began to bind + the lives of nations together, so that the Alps no longer remained + <i>terra incognita</i> to dwellers far and near.</p> + + <p>We have accounts of Alpine journeys by the Abbé Majolus v. Clugny + (970), Bernard v. Hildesheim (1101), Aribert v. Mailand, Anno v. + Coeln<a href="#d5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>, but without a trace of + orography. They scarcely refer to the snow and glacier regions from + the side of physical geography, or even of æsthetic feeling; and do + not mention the mountain monarchs so familiar to-day--Mt. Blanc, the + Jungfrau, Ortner, Glockner, etc.--which were of no value to their + life, practical or scientific. These writers record nothing but names + of places and their own troubles and dangers in travelling, + especially in winter. And even at the end of the fifteenth century, + German travels across the Alps were written in the same strain--for + example, the account of the voyage of the Elector-Palatine Alexander + v. Zweibrücken and Count Joh. Ludwig zu Nassau (1495-96) from Zurich + Rapperschwyl and Wesen to Wallensee: 'This is the real Switzerland; + has few villages, just a house here and a house there, but beautiful + meadows, much cattle, and very high mountains, on which snow lies, + which falls before Christmas, and is as hard as any rock.' As an + exception to this we have a vivid and poetic description of the + famous Verona Pass in Latin verse by Guntherus Ligurinus.</p> + + <p>Günther's description of this notorious ravine, between sky-high + Alps, with the torrent rushing at the bottom and a passage so narrow + that men could only move forward one by one, sounds like a personal + experience. This twelfth-century poem comes to us, in fact, like a + belated echo of Fortunatus.</p> + + <p>We must now enquire whether the chief representatives of German + literature at this time shewed any of the national love of Nature, + whether the influence of the Crusades was visible in them, how far + scenery <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg074" id= + "pg074">074</a></span>took a place in epic and song, and whether, as + moderns have so often stated, mediæval Germany stood high above + antiquity in this respect. Gervinus, a classic example on the last + point, in the section of his history of German poetry which treats of + the difference between the German fables about animals on the one + hand, and Esop's and the Oriental on the other, said:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The way in which animals are handled in the fables demanded a + far slighter familiarity between them and men; so exact a knowledge + as we see in the German fables, often involving knowledge of their + natural history, such insight into the 'privacy of the animal + world,' belonged to quite another kind of men. Antiquity did not + delight in Nature, and delight in Nature is the very foundation of + these poems. Remote antiquity neither knew nor sought to know any + natural history; but only wondered at Nature. The art of hunting + and the passion for it, often carried to excess in the Middle Ages, + was unknown to it. It is a bold remark of Grimm's that he could + smell the old smell of the woods in the German animal poems, but it + is one whose truth every one will feel, who turns to this simple + poetry with an open mind, who cares for Nature and life in the + open.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This is a very tangle of empty phrases and misstatements. No + people stood in more heartfelt and naive relation to Nature, + especially to the animal world, than the Hindoos and Persians. In + earlier enquiries<a href="#d6"><sup>[6]</sup></a> we have reviewed + the naive feeling displayed in Homer and the sentimental in + Hellenism, and have seen that the taste for hunting increased + knowledge of Nature in the open in Hellenic days far more than in the + Middle Ages. We shall see now that the level of feeling reached in + those and imperial Roman days was not regained in European literature + until long after the fall of Latin poetry, and that it was the + fertilizing influence of that classic spirit, and that alone, which + enabled the inborn German taste for Nature, and for hunting, and + plant and animal life, to find artistic expression. It was a too + superficial <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg075" id= + "pg075">075</a></span>knowledge of classic literature, and an + inclination to synthesis, and clever <i>a priori</i> argument (a + style impressed upon his day by Hegel's method, and fortunately fast + disappearing), which led Gervinus to exalt the Middle Ages at the + expense of antiquity. It sounds like a weak concession when he says + elsewhere:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Joy in Nature, which is peculiar to modern times, in contrast to + antiquity, which is seen in the earliest mediæval poems, and in + which, moreover, expiring antiquity came to meet the German--this + joy in Nature, in dwelling on plant and animal life, is the very + soul of this (animal) poetry. As in its plastic art, so in all its + poetry, antiquity only concerned itself with gods and heroes; its + glance was always turned upwards.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>But, as a fact, no one has ever stood with feet more firmly + planted on this earth than the Greek, enjoying life and undeterred by + much scruple or concern as to the powers above; and centuries of + development passed before German literature equalled Greek in love of + Nature and expressive representation of her beauty.</p> + + <p>To rank the two national epics of Germany, the + <i>Nibelungenlied</i> and <i>Gudrun</i>, side by side with the + <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey</i> is to exaggerate their value. And + here, as ever, overstraining the comparison is mischievous.</p> + + <p>The <i>Nibelungenlied</i> is undeniably charming with its laconic + and yet plastic descriptions, its vigorous heroes, and the tragic + course of their fate; so is <i>Gudrun</i>, that melodious poem of the + North Sea. But they never, either in composition, method of + representation, or descriptive epithets, reach the perfect art of the + Greek epics. What moral beauty and plastic force there is in Homer's + comparisons and in his descriptions of times and seasons! what a + clear eye and warm heart he has for Nature in all her moods! and what + raw and scanty beginnings of such things we have in the + <i>Nibelungenlied</i>! It <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg076" id= + "pg076">076</a></span>is true Homer had not attained to the degree of + sympathy which finds in Nature a friend, a sharer of one's joys and + sorrows; she is pictured objectively in the form of epic comparisons; + but how faithfully, and with what range and variety!</p> + + <p>There can scarcely be another epic in the world so poor in + descriptions of time and place as the <i>Nibelungenlied</i>; it + cannot be used to prove German feeling for Nature!</p> + + <p>India, Persia, and Greece made natural phenomena the counterparts + of human life, weaving into the tale, by way of comparison or + environment, charming genre pictures of plant and animal life, each + complete in itself; in the <i>Nibelungenlied</i> Nature plays no part + at all, not even as framework.</p> + + <p>Time is indicated as sparsely as possible:</p> + + <p>'Upon the 7th day at Worms on the Rhine shore, the gallant + horsemen arrived.'</p> + + <p>'On a Whitsun morning we saw them all go by'; or 'When it grew + towards even, and near the sun's last ray, seeing the air was + cooler'; or 'He must hang, till light morning threw its glow through + the window.' The last is the most poetic; elsewhere it is 'Day was + over, night fell.'</p> + + <p>Terseness can be both a beauty and a force; but, in comparison + with Greece, how very little feeling for Nature these expressions + contain!</p> + + <p>It is no better with descriptions of place:</p> + + <p>'From the Rhine they rode through Hesse, their warriors as well, + towards the Saxon country, where they to fighting fell.'</p> + + <p>'He found a fortress placed upon a mountain.'</p> + + <p>'Into a wide-roomed palace of fashion excellent, for there, + beneath it rushing, one saw the Danube's flood.'</p> + + <p>Even the story of the hunt and the murder of Siegfried is quite + matter-of-fact and sparse as to scenery: 'By a cold spring he soon + lost his life ... then <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg077" id= + "pg077">077</a></span>they rode from there into a deep wood ... there + they encamped by the green wood, where they would hunt on the broad + mead ... one heard mountain and tree echo.'</p> + + <p>'The spring of water was pure and cool and good.' ...</p> + + <p>'There fell Chriemhild's husband among the flowers ... all round + about the flowers were wetted with his blood.'</p> + + <p>One thinks instinctively of Indian and Greek poetry, of Adonis and + the death of Baldur in the Northern Saga. But even here, where the + subject almost suggests it, there is no trace of Nature's sympathy + with man.</p> + + <p>References to the animal world too--Chriemhild's dreams of the + falcons seized by two eagles, and the two wild boars which attacked + Siegfried, the game hunted in the forests by the heroes who run like + panthers--all show it to be of no importance.</p> + + <p>Even such phrases as rosy-red, snow-white, etc., are rare--'Her + lovely face became all rosy-red with pleasure'; but there is a + certain tenderness in the comparisons of Chriemhild:</p> + + <p>'Then came the lovely maiden, even as morning red from sombre + clouds outbreaking,' and, 'just as the moon in brightness excels the + brightest stars, and suddenly outshining, athwart the clouds + appears,' so she excelled all other women.</p> + + <p>It has been said that one can hear the sighing of the north wind + and the roar of the North Sea in <i>Gudrun</i>, but this is scarcely + more than a pretty phrase. The 'dark tempestuous' sea, 'wild + unfathomable' waves, the shore 'wet from the blood of the slain,' are + indeed mentioned, but that is all.</p> + + <p>Wat of Sturmland says to the young warriors: 'The air is still and + the moon shines clear ... when the red star yonder in the south dips + his head in the brine, I shall blow on my great horn that all + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg078" id="pg078">078</a></span>the + hosts shall hear'; but it is hope of morning, not delight in the + starry sky, that he is expressing.</p> + + <p>Indications of place too are of the briefest, just 'It was a broad + neck of land, called the Wülpensand,' or, 'In a few hours they saw + the shores where they would land, a little harbour lay in sight + enfolded by low hills clothed with dark fir trees.'</p> + + <p>The first trace of sympathy with Nature occurs in the account of + the effect of Horand's song.</p> + + <p>Like Orpheus, he charms the little birds and other creatures: 'He + sang with such a splendid voice, that the little birds ceased their + song.'</p> + + <p>'And as he began to sing again, all the birds in the copse round + ceased their sweet songs.'</p> + + <p>'The very cattle left their green pastures to hearken, the little + gold beetles stopped running among the grass, the fishes ceased to + shoot about in the brooks. He sang long hours, and it seemed but a + brief moment. The very church bells sounded sweet no longer; the folk + left the choir songs of the priests and ran to hear him. All who + heard his voice were heart-sick after the singer, so grand and sweet + was the strain.'</p> + + <p>Indications of time are rarely found more short and concise than + here:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When night ended and day began.</p> + + <p>On the 12th day they quitted the country.</p> + + <p>In Maytime. On a cool morning.</p> + </div> + + <p>This is a little richer:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It was the time when leaves spring up delightfully and birds of + all sorts sing their best in the woods.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Much more definite and distinct is:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It was about that time of the year when departing winter sheds + his last terrors upon the earth; a sharp breeze was blowing and the + sea was covered with broken up ice; but there were gleams of + sunshine upon the hills, and the little birds began to tune their + throats tremulously, that they might be ready to sing their lay + when the March weather was past.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg079" id= + "pg079">079</a></span></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Gudrun trembled with cold; her wet garment clung close to her + white limbs; the wind dashed her golden hair about her face.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And later, when the morning of Gudrun's deliverance breaks, the + indications of time, though short, are plastic enough:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>After the space of an hour the red star went down upon the edge + of the sea, and Wat of Sturmland, standing upon the hill, blew a + great blast on his horn, which was heard in the land for miles + round.... The sound of Wat's horn ... wakened a young maid, who, + stealing on tiptoe to the window, looked over the bay and beheld + the glimmering of spears and helms upon the sands.... 'Awake, + mistress,' she cried, 'the host of the Hegelings is at hand.'</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Companions are few;</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>He sprang like a wild lion.</p> + </div> + + <p>The shower of stones flung down upon Wat 'is but an April + shower.'</p> + + <p>Images are few too:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>This flower of hope, to find repose here on the shore, Hartmouth + and his friends did not bring to blossom.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Wilhelm Grimm rightly observes:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>At this epoch the poetry of the Fatherland gave no separate + descriptions of Nature--descriptions, that is, whose only object + was to paint the impression of the landscape in glowing colours + upon the mind. The old German masters certainly did not lack + feeling for Nature, but they have left us no other expression of it + than such as its connection with historical events demanded.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And further:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The question, whether contact with Southern Italy, or, through + the Crusades, with Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, did not enrich + German poetry with new pictures of Nature, can only, as a general + rule, be answered in the negative.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In the courtly epics of chivalry, the place of real Nature was + taken by a fabulous wonderworld, full <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg080" id="pg080">080</a></span>of the most fantastic and romantic + scenery, in which wood, field, plants, and animals were all + distorted. For instance, in the Alexander saga (of Pfaffen Lamprecht) + Alexander the Great describes to his teacher Aristotle the wonders he + has seen, and how one day he came with his army to a dark forest, + where the interlacing boughs of tall trees completely shut out the + sunlight. Clear, cool streams ran through it down to the valley, and + birds' songs echoed in the shade. The ground was covered by an + enormous quantity of flower buds of wondrous size, which looked like + great balls, snow-white and rose-coloured, closely folded up. + Presently, the fragrant goblets opened, and out of all these + wonder-flowers stepped lovely maidens, rosy as dawn and white as day, + and about twelve years old. All these thousands of charming beings + raised their voices together and competed with the birds in song, + swaying up and down in charming lines, singing and laughing in the + cool shade. They were dressed in red and white, like the flowers from + which they were born; but if sun rays fell on them, they would fade + and die. They were only children of the woodland shade and the + summer, and lived no longer than the flowers, which May brings to + life and Autumn kills. In this wood Alexander and his host pitched + their tents, and lived through the summer with the little maids. But + their happiness only lasted three months and twelve days:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>When the time came to an end, our joy passed away too; the + flowers faded, and the pretty girls died; trees lost their leaves, + springs their flow, and the birds their song; all pleasure passed + away. Discomfort began to touch my heart with many sorrows, as day + by day I saw the beautiful maidens die, the flowers fade: with a + heavy heart, I departed with my men.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This fairy-like tale, with its blending of human and plant life, + is very poetically conceived; but it is <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg081" id="pg081">081</a></span>only a play of + fancy, one of the early steps towards the modern feeling.</p> + + <p>The battle scenes, as well as other scenes in this poem, are bold + and exaggerated. Armies meet like roaring seas; missiles fly from + both sides as thick as snow; after the dreadful bath of blood, sun + and moon veil their light and turn away from the murder committed + there.</p> + + <p>Hartmann von der Aue, too, did not draw real Nature, but only one + of his own invention.</p> + + <p>For example, the wild forest with the magic spring in + <i>Iwein</i>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I turned to the wilds next morning, and found an extensive + clearing, hidden in the forest, solitary and without husbandmen. + There, to my distress, I descried a sad delight of the eyes--beasts + of every kind that I know the names of, attacking each other.... + this spring is cold and very pure; neither rain, sun, or wind reach + it; it is screened by a most beautiful lime tree. The tree is + excessively tall and thick, so that neither sun nor rain can + penetrate its foliage, winter does not injure it, nor lessen its + beauty by one hair; 'tis green and blossoming the whole year + round.... Over the spring there is a wonderfully fine stone ... the + tree was so covered with birds that I could scarcely see the + branches, and even the foliage almost disappeared. The sweet songs + were pleasant and resounded through the forest, which re-echoed + them....</p> + + <p>As I poured water upon the ruby, the sun, which had just come + out, disappeared, the birds' song round about ceased, a black storm + approached, dark heavy storm-clouds came from all four quarters of + the vault of heaven. It seemed no longer bright day ... soon a + thousand flashes of lightning played round me in the forest ... + there came storm, rain, and hail ... the storm became so great that + the forest broke down.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He never shews a real love for Nature even in his lyrics, for the + wish for flowers in <i>Winter Complaint</i> can hardly be said to + imply that:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>He who cares for flowers must lament much at this heavy, dismal + time; a wife helps to shorten the long nights. In this way I will + shorten long winter without the birds' song.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg082" id="pg082">082</a></span> + Wolfram von Eschenbach, too, is very sparing of references to Nature: + time is given by such phrases as 'when twilight began,' or 'as the + day broke,' 'at the bright glow of morning' ... 'as day already + turned to evening.'</p> + + <p>His interest in real things was driven into the background by + love-making and adventures--<i>Arthur's Round Table</i> and the + <i>Holy Grail</i>; all the romance of knighthood. When he described a + forest or a garden, he always decked it out lavishly.</p> + + <p>For instance, the garden in Orgeluse:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>A garden surrounding a mountain, planted with noble trees where + pomegranates, figs, olives, vines, and other fruits grew richly ... + a spring poured from the rock, and (for all this would have been + nothing to him without a fair lady) there he found what did not + displease him--a lady so beautiful and fair that he was charmed at + the sight, the flower of womanly beauty.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Comparisons are few and not very poetic. In <i>Songs of the + Heart</i>--</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The lady of the land watered herself with her heart's tears.</p> + + <p>Her eyes rained upon the child.</p> + + <p>Her joy was drowned in lamentation.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Gawan and Orgeluse,</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Spite their outer sweetness, as disagreeable as a shower of rain + in sunshine.</p> + + <p>There were many fair flowers, but their colours could not + compare with that of Orgeluse.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>His heroes are specially fond of birds. Young Parzival</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Felt little care while the little birds sang round him; it made + his heart swell, he ran weeping into the house.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and Gawan</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Found a door open into a garden; he stept in to look round and + enjoy the air and the singing of the birds.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg083" id="pg083">083</a></span> So + we see that in the <i>Nibelungenlied</i> scarcely a plant grew, and + Hartmann and Wolfram's gardens belonged almost entirely to an unreal + region; there are no traces of a very deep feeling for Nature in all + this.</p> + + <p>But Gottfried von Strassburg, with his vivid, sensuous imagination + and keen eye for beauty, shewed a distinct advance both in taste and + achievement. He, too, notes time briefly: 'And as it drew towards + evening,' 'Now day had broke.' He repeats his comparisons: fair + ladies are 'the wonder rose of May,' 'the longing white rose.' The + two Isolts are sun and dawn. Brangäne is the full moon. The terrified + girl is thus described:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Her rosy mouth paled; the fair colour, which was her ornament, + died out of her skin; her bright eyes grew dim like night after + day.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Another comparison is:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Like the siren's song, drawing a bark to the reef as by a + magnet, so the sweet young queen attracted many hearts.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Love is a usurious plant, whose sun never goes down; a romance + sweetens the mood as May dew sweetens the blood.</p> + + <p>Constant friendship is one which takes the pleasure with the pain, + the thorn with the rose. The last comparisons shew more thought, and + still more is seen in the beginning of the poem, <i>Riwalin and + Blancheflur</i>, which has a charming description of Spring.</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Now the festival was agreed upon and arranged</p> + + <p>For the four flowering weeks</p> + + <p>When sweet May attracts, till he flies off again.</p> + + <p>At Tinkapol upon a green plain</p> + + <p>High up on a wonderful meadow with spring colour</p> + + <p>Such as no eye has seen before or since. Soft sweet May</p> + + <p>Had dressed it with his own charming extravagance.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg084" id= + "pg084">084</a></span>There were little wood birds, a joy to the + ear,</p> + + <p>Flowers and grass and green plants and summer meads</p> + + <p>That were a delight to eye and heart.</p> + + <p>One found there whatever one would, whatever May should + bring--</p> + + <p>Shade from the sun, limes by the brook,</p> + + <p>A gentle breeze which brought the prattle</p> + + <p>Of Mark's court people. May's friend, the green turf,</p> + + <p>Had made herself a charming costume of flowers,</p> + + <p>In which she shone back at the guests with a festival of her + own;</p> + + <p>The blossoming trees smiled so sweetly at every one,</p> + + <p>That heart and mind smiled back again.</p> + + <p>The pure notes of the birds, blessed and beautiful,</p> + + <p>Touched heart and senses, filling hill and dale with joy.</p> + + <p>The dear nightingale,</p> + + <p>Sweet bird, may it ever be blessed!</p> + + <p>Sang so lustily upon the bough</p> + + <p>That many a heart was filled with joy and good humour.</p> + + <p>There the company pitched itself</p> + + <p>With great delight on the green grass.</p> + + <p>The limes gave enough shade,</p> + + <p>And many covered their tent roofs with green boughs.</p> + </div> + + <p>There is a heartfelt ring in this. We see that even this early + period of German mediæval poetry was not entirely lacking in clear + voices to sing of Nature with real sympathy.</p> + + <p>The description of the Minne grotto is famous, with its magical + accessories, its limes and other trees, birds, songs, and flowers, so + that 'eye and ear alike found solace'; but the romantic love episode, + interwoven as it is by the poet with the life of Nature, is more + interesting for our purpose.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>They had a court, they had a council which brought them nought + but joy. Their courtiers were the green trees, the shade and the + sunlight, the streamlet and the spring; flowers, grass, leaf, and + blossom, which <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg085" id= + "pg085">085</a></span>refreshed their eyes. Their service was the + song of the birds, the little brown nightingales, the throstlets + and the merles and other wood birds. The siskin and the ringdove + vied with each other to do them pleasure, all day long their music + rejoiced ear and soul. Their love was their high feast.... The man + was with the woman, and the woman with the man; they had the + fellowship they most desired, and were where they fain would + be....</p> + + <p>In the dewy morning they gat them forth to the meadow where + grass and flowers alike had been refreshed. The glade was their + pleasure-ground; they wandered hither and thither hearkening each + other's speech, and waking the song of the birds by their + footsteps. Then they turned them to where the cool clear spring + rippled forth, and sat beside its stream and watched its flow till + the sun grew high in the heaven, and they felt its shade. Then they + betook them to the linden, its branches offered them a welcome + shelter, the breezes were sweet and soft beneath its shade, and the + couch at its feet was decked with the fairest grass and + flowers.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>With these lovers, love of Nature is only second to love of each + other. So in the following:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>That same morning had Tristan and his lady-love stolen forth + hand in hand and come full early, through the morning dew, to the + flowery meadow and the lovely vale. Dove and nightingale saluted + them sweetly, greeting their friends Tristan and Iseult. The wild + wood birds bade them welcome in their own tongue ... it was as if + they had conspired among themselves to give the lovers a morning + greeting. They sang from the leafy branches in changeful wise, + answering each other in song and refrain. The spring that charmed + their eye and ear whispered a welcome, even as did the linden with + its rustling leaves. The blossoming trees, the fair meadow, the + flowers, and the green grass--all that bloomed laughed at their + coming; the dew which cooled their feet and refreshed their heart + offered a silent greeting.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The amorous passion was the soil in which, in its early narrow + stages, sympathy for Nature grew up. Was it the thirteenth-century + lyrics, the love-songs of the Minnesingers, which unfolded the germ? + For the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg086" id= + "pg086">086</a></span>lyric is the form in which the deepest + expression can be given to feeling for Nature, and in which she + either appears as background, frame, or ornament, or, by borrowing a + soul or symbolizing thought and feeling, blends with the inner + life.</p> + + <p>As the German court epics took their material from France, so the + German love-songs were inspired by the Provençal troubadours. The + national differences stand out clear to view: the vivid glowing + Provençal is fresher, more vehement, and mettlesome; the dreamy + German more monotonous, tame, and melancholy. The one is given to + proud daring, wooing, battle, and the triumph of victory; the other + to musing, loving, and brooding enthusiasm. The stamp of the + occasional, of improvisation, is upon all Provençal work; while with + the German Minnesingers, everything--Nature as well as love--tends to + be stereotyped, monotonous.</p> + + <p>The scanty remains of Troubadour songs<a href= + "#d7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> often shew mind and Nature very strikingly + brought together, either in harmony or contrast. For example, Bernard + von Ventadour (1195):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It may annoy others to see the foliage fall from the trees, but + it pleases me greatly; one cannot fancy I should long for leaves + and flowers when she, my dear one, is haughty to me.</p> + + <p>Cold and snow become flowers and greenery under her charming + glance.</p> + + <p>As I slumber at night, I am waked by the sweet song of the + nightingale; nothing but love in my mind quite thrilled by shudders + of delight.</p> + + <p>God! could I be a swallow and sweep through the air, I would go + at midnight to her little chamber.</p> + </blockquote> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When I behold the lark up spring</p> + + <p>To meet the bright sun joyfully,</p> + + <p>How he forgets to poise his wing</p> + + <p>In his gay spirit's revelry.</p> + + <p>Alas! that mournful thoughts should spring</p> + + <p>E'en from that happy songster's glee!</p> + + <p>Strange that such gladdening sight should bring</p> + + <p>Not joy but pining care to me.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg087" id="pg087">087</a></span> A + very modern thought which calls to mind Theodore Storm's touching + lines after the death of his wife:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>But this I cannot endure, that the sun smiles as before, clocks + strike and bells ring as in thy lifetime, and day and night still + follow each other.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He connects spring with love:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When grass grows green and fresh leaves spring</p> + + <p>And flowers are budding on the plain,</p> + + <p>When nightingales so sweetly sing</p> + + <p>And through the greenwood swells the strain,</p> + + <p>Then joy I in the song and in the flower,</p> + + <p>Joy in myself but in my lady more;</p> + + <p>All objects round my spirit turns to joy,</p> + + <p>But most from her my rapture rises high.</p> + </div> + + <p>Arnold von Mareuil (about 1200) sings in the same way:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>O! how sweet the breeze of April</p> + + <p>Breathing soft, as May draws near,</p> + + <p>While through nights serene and gentle</p> + + <p>Songs of gladness meet the ear.</p> + + <p>Every bird his well-known language</p> + + <p>Warbling in the morning's pride,</p> + + <p>Revelling on in joy and gladness</p> + + <p>By his happy partner's side....</p> + + <p>With such sounds of bliss around me,</p> + + <p>Who could wear a saddened heart?</p> + </div> + + <p>He calls his lady-love</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The fairest creature which Nature has produced here below, + fairer than I can express and faker than a beautiful May day, than + sunshine in March, shade in summer, than May roses, April rain, the + flower of beauty, mirror of love, the key of Fame.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Bertran de Born too sings:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The beautiful spring delights me well</p> + + <p>When flowers and leaves are growing,</p> + + <p>And it pleases my heart to hear the swell</p> + + <p>Of the bird's sweet chorus flowing</p> + + <p>In the echoing wood, etc.</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg088" id="pg088">088</a></span> + + <p>The Greek lyrists up to Alexandrian times contented themselves + with implying indirectly that nothing delighted them so much as May + and its delights; but these singers implicitly state it. The German + Minnesingers too<a href="#d8"><sup>[8]</sup></a> are loud in praise + of spring, as in that anonymous song:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>I think nothing so good nor worthy of praise</p> + + <p>As a fair rose and my good man's love;</p> + + <p>The song of the little birds in the woods is clear to many a + heart.</p> + </div> + + <p>and summer is greeted with:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The good are glad that summer comes. See what a benefit it is to + many hearts.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The Troubadour motive is here too:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Winter and snow seem as beautiful flowers and clover to me, when + I have embraced her.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and Kürenberg makes a lady sing:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>When I stand there alone in my shift and think of thee, noble + knight, I blush like a rose on its thorn.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Delight in summer, complaint of winter--this is the fundamental + chord struck again and again; there is scarcely any trace of blending + the feelings of the lover with those of Nature. It is a monotonous + repetition of a few themes, of flowers and little birds as messengers + of love, and lady-loves who are brighter than the sun, whose presence + brings spring in winter or cheers a grey and snowy day.</p> + + <p>Deitmar von Eist greets spring with:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Ah! now the time of the little birds' singing is coming for us, + the great lime is greening, the long winter is past, one sees + well-shaped flowers spread their glory over the heath. 'Tis a joy + to many hearts, and a comfort too to mine.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In another song the birds and roses remind him of a happy past and + of the lady of his heart. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg089" id= + "pg089">089</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>A little bird sang on the lime o'erhead,</p> + + <p>Its song resounded through the wood</p> + + <p>And turned my heart back to another place;</p> + + <p>And once again I saw the roses blow,</p> + + <p>And they brought back the many thoughts</p> + + <p>I cherish of a lady.</p> + </div> + + <p>A lady says to a falcon:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>You happy falcon you! You fly whither you will!</p> + + <p>And choose the tree you like in the wood.</p> + + <p>I have done the same. I chose a husband</p> + + <p>For myself, whom my eyes chose.</p> + + <p>So 'tis fitting for beautiful women.</p> + </div> + + <p>In winter he complains:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Alas for summer delight! The birds' song has disappeared with + the leaves of the lime. Time has changed, the nightingales are + dumb. They have given up their sweet song and the wood has faded + from above.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Uhland's beautiful motive in <i>Spring Faith</i>, that light and + hope will come back to the oppressed heart with the flowers and the + green, is given, though stiffly and dimly, by Heinrich von + Veldegge:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I have some delightful news; the flowers are sprouting on the + heath, the birds singing in the wood. Where snow lay before, there + is now green clover, bedewed in the morning. Who will may enjoy it. + No one forces me to, I am not free from cares.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and elsewhere:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>At the time when flowers and grass come to us, all that made my + heart sad will be made good again.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The loss of the beauty of summer makes him sad:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Since the bright sunlight has changed to cold, and the little + birds have left off singing their song, and cold nights have faded + the foliage of the lime, my heart is sad.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Ulrich von Guotenberg makes a pretty comparison: <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg090" id="pg090">090</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>She is my summer joy, she sows flowers and clover</p> + + <p>In my heart's meadow, whence I, whate'er befall,</p> + + <p>Must teem with richer bliss: the light of her eyes</p> + + <p>Makes me bloom, as the hot sun the dripping trees....</p> + + <p>Her fair salute, her mild command</p> + + <p>Softly inclining, make May rain drop down into my heart.</p> + </div> + + <p>Heinrich von Rugge laments winter:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The dear nightingale too has forgotten how beautifully she sang + ... the birds are mourning everywhere.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and longs for summer:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I always craved blissful days.... I liked to hear the little + birds' delightful songs. Winter cannot but be hard and immeasurably + long. I should be glad if it would pass away.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Heinrich von Morungen:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>How did you get into my heart?</p> + + <p>It must ever be the same with me.</p> + + <p>As the noon receives her light from the sun,</p> + + <p>So the glance of your bright eyes, when you leave me,</p> + + <p>Sinks into my heart.</p> + </div> + + <p>He calls his love his light of May, his Easter Day:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>She is my sweetheart, a sweet May</p> + + <p>Bringing delights, a sunshine without cloud.</p> + </div> + + <p>and says, in promising fidelity: 'My steady mind is not like the + wind.'</p> + + <p>Reinmar says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When winter is over</p> + + <p>I saw the heath with the red flowers, delightful there....</p> + + <p>The long winter is past away; when I saw the green leaves</p> + + <p>I gave up much of my sorrow.</p> + </div> + + <p>In a time of trouble he cried:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>To me it must always be winter.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg091" id="pg091">091</a></span> So + we see that Troubadour references to Nature were drawn from a very + limited area. Individual grasp of scenery was entirely lacking, it + did not occur to them to seek Nature for her own sake. Their + comparisons were monotonous, and their scenes bare, stereotyped + arabesques, not woven into the tissue of lyric feeling. Their ruling + motives were joy in spring and complaint of winter. Wood, flowers, + clover, the bright sun, the moon (once), roses, lilies, and woodland + birds, especially the nightingale, served them as elementary or + landscape figures.</p> + + <p>Wilhelm Grimm says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The Minnesingers talk often enough of mild May, the + nightingale's song, the dew shining on the flowers of the heath, + but always in relation only to their own feelings reflected in + them. To indicate sad moods they used faded leaves, silent birds, + seed buried in snow.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and Humboldt:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The question, whether contact with Southern Italy, or the + Crusades in Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, have enriched the art + of poetry in Germany with new natural pictures, can only generally + be answered by the negative. It is not remarked that the + acquaintance with the East gave any new direction to the songs of + the minstrels. The Crusaders came little into actual contact with + the Saracens; they even lived in a state of great restraint with + other nations who fought in the same cause. One of the oldest lyric + poets was Friedrich of Hausen. He perished in the army of + Barbarossa. His songs contain many views of the Crusades; but they + chiefly express religious sentiments on the pain of being separated + from his dear friends. He found no occasion to say anything + concerning the country or any of those who took part in the wars, + as Reinmar the Elder, Rubin, Neidhart, and Ulrich of Lichtenstein. + Reinmar came a pilgrim to Syria, as it appears, in the train of + Leopold the 6th, Duke of Austria. He complains that the + recollections of his country always haunted him, and drew away his + thoughts from God. The date tree has here been mentioned sometimes, + when they speak of the palm branches which pious <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg092" id="pg092">092</a></span>pilgrims bore + upon their shoulders. I do not remember that the splendid scenery + in Italy has excited the fancy of the minstrels who crossed the + Alps. Walther, who had wandered about, had only seen the river Po; + but Friedank was at Rome. He merely remarked that grass grew in the + palaces of those who formerly bore sway there.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>As a fact, even the greatest Minnesinger, Walther, the master + lyrist of the thirteenth century, was not ahead of his contemporaries + in this matter. His <i>Spring Longing</i> begins:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Winter has wrought us harm everywhere,</p> + + <p>Forest and field are dreary and bare</p> + + <p>Where the sweet voices of summer once were,</p> + + <p>Yet by the road where I see maiden fair</p> + + <p>Tossing the ball, the birds' song is there.</p> + </div> + + <p>and <i>Spring and Women</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When flowers through the grass begin to spring</p> + + <p>As though to greet with smiles the sun's bright rays,</p> + + <p>On some May morning, and in joyous measure,</p> + + <p>Small songbirds make the dewy forest ring</p> + + <p>With a sweet chorus of sweet roundelays,</p> + + <p>Hath life in all its store a purer pleasure?</p> + + <p>'Tis half a Paradise on earth.</p> + + <p>Yet ask me what I hold of equal worth,</p> + + <p>And I will tell what better still</p> + + <p>Ofttimes before hath pleased mine eyes,</p> + + <p>And, while I see it, ever will.</p> + + <p>When a noble maiden, fair and pure,</p> + + <p>With raiment rich and tresses deftly braided,</p> + + <p>Mingles, for pleasure's sake, in company,</p> + + <p>High bred, with eyes that, laughingly demure,</p> + + <p>Glance round at times and make all else seem faded,</p> + + <p>As, when the sun shines, all the stars must die.</p> + + <p>Let May bud forth in all its splendour;</p> + + <p>What sight so sweet can he engender</p> + + <p>As with this picture to compare?</p> + + <p>Unheeded leave we buds and blooms,</p> + + <p>And gaze upon the lovely fair!</p> + </div> + + <p>The grace in this rendering of a familiar motive, and the + individuality in the following <i>Complaint of Winter</i>, were both + unusual at the time: <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg093" id= + "pg093">093</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Erewhile the world shone red and blue</p> + + <p>And green in wood and upland too,</p> + + <p>And birdlets sang on the bough.</p> + + <p>But now it's grown grey and lost its glow,</p> + + <p>And there's only the croak of the winter crow,</p> + + <p>Whence--many a ruffled brow!</p> + </div> + + <p>Elsewhere he says that his lady's favour turns his winter to + spring, and adds:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Cold winter 'twas no more for me,</p> + + <p>Though others felt it bitterly;</p> + + <p>To me it was mid May.</p> + </div> + + <p>He has many pictures of Nature and pretty comparisons, but the + stereotyped style predominates--heath, flowers, grass, and + nightingales. The pearl of the collection is the naive song which + touches sensuous feeling, like the <i>Song of Solomon</i>, with the + magic light of innocence:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Under the lime on the heath where I sat with my love,</p> + + <p>There you would find</p> + + <p>The grass and the flowers all crushed--</p> + + <p>Sweetly the nightingale sang in the vale by the wood.</p> + + <p>Tandaradei!</p> + + <p>When I came up to the meadow my lover was waiting me there.</p> + + <p>Ah! what a greeting I had! Gracious Mary, 'tis bliss to me + still!</p> + + <p>Tandaradei! Did he kiss me, you ask? Look at the red of my + lips!</p> + + <p>Of sweet flowers of all sorts he made us a bed,</p> + + <p>I wager who passes now smiles at the sight,</p> + + <p>The roses would still show just where my head lay.</p> + + <p>Tandaradei!</p> + + <p>But how he caressed me, that any but one</p> + + <p>Should know that, God forbid! I were shamed if they did;</p> + + <p>Only he and I know it,</p> + + <p>And one little birdie who never will tell.</p> + </div> + + <p>So we see that interest in Nature in the literature of the + Crusaders very seldom went beyond the utilitarian bounds of pleasure + and admiration in fertility and pleasantness; and the German + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg094" id= + "pg094">094</a></span>national epics rarely alluded to her traits + even by way of comparison. The court epics shewed some advance, and + sympathy was distinctly traceable in Gottfried, and even attained to + artistic expression in his lyrics, where his own feelings chimed with + Nature.</p> + + <p>For the rest, the Minnesingers' descriptions were all alike. The + charm of Nature apart from other considerations, delight in her for + her own sake alone, was unknown to the time.</p> + + <p>Hitherto we have only spoken of literature.</p> + + <p>Feeling for Nature reveals itself in plastic art also, especially + in painting; and since the mind of a people is one united organism, + the relation between poetry and painting is not one of opposition and + mutual exclusion--they rather enlarge and explain, or condition each + other.</p> + + <p>As concerns feeling for Nature, it may be taken as a universal + rule that landscape-painting only develops when Nature is sought for + her own sake, and that so long as scenery merely serves the purpose + of ornament in literature, so long it merely serves as accessory and + background in painting; whereas, when Nature takes a wider space in + prose and poetry, and becomes an end of representation in herself, + the moment for the birth of landscape-painting has come. We will + follow the stages of the development of painting very briefly, from + Woltmann and Woermann's excellent book,<a href= + "#d9"><sup>[9]</sup></a> which, if it throws no fresh light upon our + subject, illustrates what has just been said in a striking + manner.</p> + + <p>In the first centuries <i>Anno Domini</i>, painting was wholly + proscribed by Christendom. Its technique did not differ from that of + antiquity; but Christendom took up an attitude of antagonism. The + picture worship of the old religions was opposed to its very origin + and essence, and was only gradually introduced into the Christian + cult through heathen influences. It is a fact too, easy to explain, + especially <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg095" id= + "pg095">095</a></span>through its Jewish origin, that Christianity at + first felt no need of art, and that this one-sidedness only ceased + when the specifically Jewish element in it had died out, and + Christendom passed to cultivated Greeks and Romans. In the cemeteries + and catacombs of the first three centuries, we find purely decorative + work, light vines with Cupids, but also remains of landscapes; for + instance, in the oldest part of the cemetery of Domitilla at Rome, + where the ceiling decoration consists of shepherds, fishers, and + biblical scenes. The ceiling picture in St Lucina (second century) + has apparently the Good Shepherd in the middle, and round it + alternate pictures of Him and of the praying Madonna; whilst in the + middle it has also charming divisions with fields, branches with + leaves and flowers, birds, masks, and floating genii.</p> + + <p>In Byzantine painting too, the influence of antiquity was still + visible, especially in a Psaltery with a Commentary and fourteen + large pictures. David appears here as a shepherd; a beautiful woman's + form, exhibiting the melody, is leaning with her left arm upon his + shoulder; a nymph's head peeps out of the foliage; and in front we + have Bethlehem, and the mountain god resting in a bold position under + a rock; sheep, goats, and water are close by, and a landscape with + classic buildings, streams, and mountains forms the background; it is + very poetically conceived. Elsewhere, too, personifications recur, in + which classic beauty is still visible, mixed with severe Christian + forms.</p> + + <p>At the end of the tenth century began the Romantic period, which + closed in the thirteenth.</p> + + <p>The brilliant progress made by architecture paved the way for the + other arts; minds trained in its laws began to look for law in + organic Nature too, and were no longer content with the old uncertain + and arbitrary shapes. But as no independent feeling for Nature, in + the widest sense of the term, existed, <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg096" id="pg096">096</a></span>mediæval art treated her, not + according to her own laws, but to those of architecture. With the + development of the Gothic style, from the thirteenth century on, art + became a citizen's craft, a branch of industry. Heretofore it had + possessed but one means of expression--religious festival or + ceremony, severely ecclesiastical. This limit was now removed. The + artist lived a wide life, open to impressions from Nature, his + imagination fed by poetry with new ideas and feelings, and constantly + stimulated by the love of pleasure, which was so vehement among all + classes that it turned every civil and ecclesiastical event to + histrionic purposes, and even made its influence felt upon the + clergy. The strong religious feeling which pervaded the Middle Ages + still ruled, and even rose to greater enthusiasm, in accordance with + the spirit of the day; but it was no longer a matter of blind + submission of the will, but of conscious acceptance.</p> + + <p>It is true that knowledge of the external world was as yet very + limited; the painter had not explored and mastered it, but only used + it as a means to represent a certain realm of feeling, studying it + just so far as this demanded. We have seen the same in the case of + poetry. The beginnings of realistic painting were visible, although, + as, for example, in representing animals, no individuality was + reached.</p> + + <p>From the middle of the fourteenth century a new French school + sprang up. The external world was more keenly and accurately studied, + especially on its graceful side. It was only at the end of that + period that painting felt the need to develop the background, and + indicate actual surroundings by blue sky, hills, Gothic buildings, + and conventional trees. These were given in linear perspective; of + aerial perspective there was none. The earlier taste still ruled in + initialling and border decorations; but little flowers were added by + degrees to the thorn-leaf pattern, and birds, sometimes angels, + introduced.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg097" id="pg097">097</a></span> + The altar-piece at Cologne, at the end of the fourteenth century, is + more subjective in conception, and full of lyric feeling. Poetic + feeling came into favour, especially in Madonna pictures of purely + idyllic character, which were painted with most charming + surroundings. Instead of a throne and worshipping figures, Mary was + placed sitting comfortably with the Child on flowery turf, and saints + around her; and although the background might be golden instead of + landscape, yet all the stems and blossoms in the grass were naturally + and accurately treated. In a little picture in the town museum at + Frankfort, the Madonna is seated in a rose garden under fruit trees + gay with birds, and reading a book; a table with food and drinks + stands close by, and a battlemented wall surrounds the garden. She is + absorbed in contemplation; three female saints are attending to + mundane business close by, one drawing water from a brook, another + picking cherries, the third teaching the child Christ to play the + zither. There is real feeling in the whole picture, and the landscape + is worked in with distinct reference to the chief idea.</p> + + <p>Hence, although there were many isolated attempts to shew that + realistic and individual study of Nature had begun, + landscape-painting had not advanced beyond the position of a + background, treated in a way more or less suited to the main subject + of the picture; and trees, rocks, meadows, flowers, were still only + framework, ornament, as in the poetry of the Minnesingers.<a href= + "#d10"><sup>[10]</sup></a> <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg098" id= + "pg098">098</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch4" id="ch4">CHAPTER IV</a></h2> + + <h3>INDIVIDUALISM AND SENTIMENTAL FEELING AT THE RENAISSANCE</h3> + + <p>In a certain sense all times are transitional to those who live in + them, since what is old is always in process of being destroyed and + giving way to the new. But there are landmarks in the general + development of culture, which mark off definite periods and divide + what has been from what is beginning. Hellenism was such a landmark + in antiquity, the Renaissance in the Middle Ages.</p> + + <p>Without overlooking the differences between Greek and Italian, + classic and modern, which are relative and not absolute, it is + instructive to note the great likeness between these two epochs. The + limits of their culture will stand out more clearly, if, by the aid + of Helbig's researches and Burckhardt's masterly account of the + Renaissance, we range the chief points of that likeness side by + side.</p> + + <p>They were epochs in which an icy crust, which had been lying over + human thought and feeling, melted as if before a spring breeze. It is + true that the theory of life which now began to prevail was not + absolutely new; the stages of growth in a nation's culture are never + isolated; it was the result of the enlargement of various factors + already present, and their fusion with a flood of incoming ones.</p> + + <p>The Ionic-Doric Greek kingdom widened out in Alexander's time to a + Hellenic-Asiatic one, and the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg099" + id="pg099">099</a></span>barriers of the Romano-Germanic Middle Ages + fell with the Crusades and the great voyages of discovery. Hellenism + and the Renaissance brought about the transition from antiquity and + the mediæval to the specifically modern; the Roman Empire inherited + Hellenism, the Reformation the Renaissance. Both had their roots in + the past, both made new growth which blossomed at a later time. In + Hellenism, Oriental elements were mixed with the Greek; in the + Renaissance, it was a mixture of Germanic with the native Italian + which caused the revival of classic antiquity and new culture. + Burckhardt says<a href="#e1"><sup>[1]</sup></a>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Elsewhere in Europe men deliberately and with reflection + borrowed this or the other element of classical civilization; in + Italy, the sympathies both of the learned and of the people were + naturally engaged on the side of antiquity as a whole, which stood + to them as a symbol of past greatness. The Latin language too was + easy to an Italian, and the numerous monuments and documents in + which the country abounded facilitated a return to the past. With + this tendency, other elements--the popular character which time had + now greatly modified, the political institutions imported by the + Lombards from Germany, chivalry and northern forms of civilization, + and the influence of religion and the Church--combined to produce + the modern Italian spirit, which was destined to serve as the model + and ideal for the whole western world.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The distance between the works of the Greek artists and + poets--between Homer, Sophocles, and Phidias on the one hand, and the + Alexandrian Theocritus and Kallimachos and the Pergamos sculptures on + the other--is greater than lies between the <i>Nibelungenlied</i> and + the Minnesingers, and Dante and Petrarch. In both cases one finds + oneself in a new world of thought and feeling, where each and all + bears the stamp of change, in matters political and social as well as + artistic. If, for example, by the aid of Von Helbig's + researches,<a href="#e2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> we conjure up a + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg100" id= + "pg100">100</a></span>picture of the chief points in the history of + Greek culture, we are astonished to see how almost every point + recurred at the Renaissance, as described by Burckhardt.</p> + + <p>The chief mark of both epochs was individualism, the discovery of + the individual. In Hellenism it was the barriers of race and position + which fell; in the Renaissance, the veil, woven of mysticism and + delusion, which had obscured mediæval faith, thought, and feeling. + Every man recognized himself to be an independent unit of church, + state, people, corporation--of all those bodies in which in the + Middle Ages he had been entirely merged.</p> + + <p>Monarchical institutions arose in Hellenism; but the individual + was no longer content to serve them only as one among many; he must + needs develop his own powers. Private affairs began to preponderate + over public; the very physiognomy of the race shewed an individual + stamp.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>After the time of Alexander the Great, portrait shewed most + marked individuality. Those of the previous period had a certain + uniform expression; one would have looked in vain among them for + the diversities in contemporary types shewn by comparing + Alexander's vivid face full of stormy energy, Menander's with its + peculiar look of irony, and the elaborate savant-physiognomy of + Aristotle. (HELBIG.)</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And Burckhardt says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>At the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with + individuality; the charm laid upon human personality was dissolved, + and a thousand figures meet us each in its own special shape and + dress.... Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered in the + highest degree the individuality, not only of the tyrant or + Condottiere himself, but also of the men whom he protected or used + as his tools--the secretary, minister, poet, or companion.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Political indifference brought about a high degree of + cosmopolitanism, especially among those who <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg101" id="pg101">101</a></span>were banished. 'My + country is the whole world,' said Dante; and Ghiberti: 'Only he who + has learned everything is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune + and without friends, he is yet a citizen of every country, and can + fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.'</p> + + <p>In both Hellenism and the Renaissance, an effort was made in art + and science to see things as they really were. In art, detail was + industriously cultivated; but its naturalism, especially as to + undraped figures, was due to a sensuous refinement of gallantry and + erotic feeling. The sensuous flourished no less in Greek times than + in those of Boccaccio; but the most characteristic peculiarity of + Hellenism was its intentional revelling in feeling--its + sentimentality. There was a trace of melancholy upon many faces of + the time, and unhappy love in endless variations was the poet's main + theme. Petrarch's lyre was tuned to the same key; a melancholy + delight in grief was the constant burden of his song.</p> + + <p>In Greece the sight of foreign lands had furthered the natural + sciences, especially geography, astronomy, zoology, and botany; and + the striving for universality at the Renaissance, which was as much a + part of its individualism as its passion for fame, was aided by the + widening of the physical and mental horizons through the Crusades and + voyages of discovery. Dante was not only the greatest poet of his + time, but an astronomer; Petrarch was geographer and cartographer, + and, at the end of the fifteenth century, with Paolo Toscanelli, + Lucca Baccioli, and Leonardo da Vinci, Italy was beyond all + comparison the first nation in Europe in mathematics and natural + science.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>A significant proof of the wide-spread interest in natural + history is found in the zeal which shewed itself at an early period + for the collection and comparative study of plants and animals. + Italy claims <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg102" id= + "pg102">102</a></span>to be the first creator of botanical + gardens.... princes and wealthy men, in laying out their pleasure + gardens, instinctively made a point of collecting the greatest + possible number of different plants in all their species and + varieties. (BURCKHARDT.)</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Leon Battista Alberti, a man of wide theoretical knowledge as well + as technical and artistic facility of all sorts, entered into the + whole life around him with a sympathetic intensity that might almost + be called nervous.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears + ... more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful + landscape cured him. (BURCKHARDT.)</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He defined a beautiful landscape as one in which one could see in + its different parts, sea, mountain, lake or spring, dry rocks or + plains, wood and valley. Therefore he cared for variety; and, what is + more striking, in contrast to level country, he admired mountains and + rocks!</p> + + <p>In Hellenism, hunting, to which only the Macedonians had been + addicted before, became a fashion, and was enjoyed with Oriental pomp + in the <i>paradeisoi</i>. Writers drew most of their comparisons from + it. In the Renaissance, Petrarch did the same, and animals often + served as emblems of state--their condition ominous of good or + evil--and were fostered with superstitious veneration, as, for + example, the lions at Florence.</p> + + <p>Thus the growth of the natural sciences increased interest in the + external world, and sensitiveness brought about a sentimental + attitude towards Nature in Hellenism and in the Renaissance.</p> + + <p>Both discovered in Nature a source of purest pleasure; the + Renaissance feeling was, in fact, the extension and enhancement of + the Hellenic. Burckhardt overlooked the fact that beautiful scenery + was appreciated and described for its own sake in Hellenism, but he + says very justly;</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg103" id= + "pg103">103</a></span></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the + outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful.... By the + year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine hearty + enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found + lively expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which + gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena + of Nature--spring with its flowers, the green fields and the woods. + But these pictures are all foreground without perspective.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Among the Minnesingers there were traces of feeling for Nature; + but only for certain stereotyped phases. Of the individuality of a + landscape, its characteristic colour, form, and light, not a word was + said.</p> + + <p>Even the Carmina Burana were not much ahead of the Minnesingers in + this respect, although they deserve a closer examination.</p> + + <p>These Latin poems of wandering clerks probably belong to the + twelfth century, and though no doubt a product in which the whole of + Europe had a share, their best pieces must be ascribed to a French + hand. Latin poetry lives again in them, with a freshness the + Carlovingian Renaissance never reached; they are mediæval in form, + but full of a frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, which hardly + any northerner of that day possessed. Often enough this degenerated + into frivolity; but the stir of national awakening after the long + sleep of the Middle Ages is felt like a spring breeze through them + all.</p> + + <p>It is a far cry from the view of Nature we saw in the Carlovingian + monks, to these highly-coloured verses. The dim light of churches and + bare cell walls may have doubled the monks' appreciation of blue + skies and open-air life; but they were fettered by the constant fight + with the senses; Nature to them must needs be less a work of God for + man's delight, than a dangerous means of seduction. 'They wandered + through Nature with timid misgiving, and their anxious fantasy + depicted <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg104" id= + "pg104">104</a></span>forms of terror or marvellous rescues.<a href= + "#e3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> The idyllic pleasure in the simple charms of + Nature, especially in the monastery garden of the Carlovingian time, + contrasts strikingly with the tone of these very mundane <i>vagantes + clerici</i>, for whom Nature had not only long been absorbed and + freed from all demoniac influence, but peopled by the charming forms + of the old mythic poems, and made for the joy and profit of men, in + the widest and naivest sense of the words.</p> + + <p>Spring songs, as with the Minnesingers, take up most of the space; + but the theme is treated with greater variety. Enjoyment of life and + Nature breathes through them all.</p> + + <p>One runs thus:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Spring cometh, and the earth is decked and studded with vernal + flowers. The harmony of the birds' returning song rouses the heart + to be glad. It is the time of joy.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Songs 98 to 118 rejoice that winter is gone; for instance:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Now in the mild springtime Flora opens the lap which the cold + frost had locked in cruel time of winter; the zephyr with gentle + murmur cometh with the spring; the grove is clad in leaves. The + nightingale is singing, the fields are gay with divers hues. It is + sweet to walk in the wooded glens, it is sweeter to pluck the lily + with the rose, it is sweetest of all to sport with a lovely + maiden.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Another makes a similar confession, for Nature and amorous passion + are the two strings of these lyres:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Beneath the pleasant foliage of a tree 'tis sweet to rest, while + the nightingale sings her plaintive song; sweeter still, to sport + in the grass with a fair maiden.... O, to what changeful moods is + the heart of the lover prone! As the vessel that wanders o'er the + waves without an anchor, so doth Love's uncertain warfare toss + 'twixt fear and hope.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg105" id="pg105">105</a></span> + The beauties of Nature are drawn upon to describe the fair maiden; + her eyes are compared to stars, her colour to lilies and snow, her + mouth to a rose, her kiss 'doth rend in sunder all the clouds of + care.'</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>In the flowery season I sat beneath a shady tree while the birds + sang in the groves ... and listened to my Thisbe's talk, the talk I + love and long for; and we spoke of the sweet interchange of love, + and in the doubtful balance of the mind wanton love and chastity + were wavering.</p> + + <p>I have seen the bright green of flowers, I have seen the flower + of flowers, I have seen the rose of May; I have seen the star that + is brighter than all other, that is glorious and fair above all + other, through whom may I ever spend my life in love.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>On such a theme the poet rings endless changes. The most charming + is the poem <i>Phyllis and Flora</i>. Actual landscape is not given, + but details are treated with freshness and care:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>In the flowery season of the year, under a sky serene, while the + earth's lap was painted with many colours, when the messenger of + Aurora had put to flight the stars, sleep left the eyes of Phyllis + and of Flora, two maidens whose beauty answered to the morning + light. The breeze of spring was gently whispering, the place was + green and gay with grass, and in the grass itself there flowed a + living brook that played and babbled as it went. And that the sun's + heat might not harm the maidens, near the stream there was a + spreading pine, decked with leaves and spreading far its + interweaving branches, nor could the heat penetrate from without. + The maidens sat, the grass supplied the seat.... They intend to go + to Love's Paradise: at the entrance of the grove a rivulet murmurs; + the breeze is fragrant with myrrh and balsam; they hear the music + of a hundred timbrels and lutes. All the notes of the birds resound + in all their fulness; they hear the sweet and pleasant song of the + blackbird, the garrulous lark, the turtle and the nightingale, + etc.... He who stayed there would become immortal; every tree there + rejoices in its own fruit; the ways are scented with myrrh and + cinnamon and amomum; the master could be forced out of his + house.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg106" id="pg106">106</a></span> + The first to shew proof of a deepening effect of Nature on the human + spirit was Dante.</p> + + <p>Dante and Petrarch elaborated the Hellenistic feeling for Nature; + hence the further course of the Renaissance displayed all its + elements, but with increased subjectivity and individuality.</p> + + <p>No one, since the days of Hellenism, had climbed mountains for the + sake of the view--Dante was the first to do it. And although, in + ranging heaven, earth, hell, and paradise in the <i>Divina + Commedia</i>, he rarely described real Nature, and then mostly in + comparisons; yet, as Humboldt pointed out, how incomparably in a few + vigorous lines he wakens the sense of the morning airs and the light + on the distant sea in the first canto of Purgatorio:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The dawn was vanquishing the matin hour,</p> + + <p>Which fled before it,-so that from afar</p> + + <p>I recognized the trembling of the sea.</p> + </div> + + <p>And how vivid this is:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="i12">The air</p> + + <p>Impregnate changed to water. Fell the rain:</p> + + <p>And to the fosses came all that the land</p> + + <p>Contain'd not, and, as mightiest streams are wont,</p> + + <p>To the great river with such headlong sweep</p> + + <p>Rush'd, that naught stayed its course.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Through that celestial forest, whose thick shade</p> + + <p>With lively greenness the new-springing day</p> + + <p>Attempered, eager now to roam and search</p> + + <p>Its limits round, forthwith I left the bank;</p> + + <p>Along the champaign leisurely my way</p> + + <p>Pursuing, o'er the ground that on all sides</p> + + <p>Delicious odour breathed. A pleasant air,</p> + + <p>That intermitted never, never veered,</p> + + <p>Smote on my temples gently, as a wind</p> + + <p>Of softest influence, at which the sprays,</p> + + <p>Obedient all, lean'd trembling to that part</p> + + <p>Where first the holy mountain casts his shade;</p> + + <p>Yet were not so disordered; but that still</p> + + <p>Upon their top the feather'd quiristers</p> + + <p>Applied their wonted art, and with full joy</p> + + <p>Welcomed those hours of prime, and warbled shrill</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg107" id= + "pg107">107</a></span>Amid the leaves, that to their jocund + lays</p> + + <p>Kept tenour; even as from branch to branch</p> + + <p>Along the piny forests on the shore</p> + + <p>Of Chiassi rolls the gathering melody,</p> + + <p>When Eolus hath from his cavern loosed</p> + + <p>The dripping south. Already had my steps,</p> + + <p>Tho' slow, so far into that ancient wood</p> + + <p>Transported me, I could not ken the place</p> + + <p>Where I had enter'd; when behold! my path</p> + + <p>Was bounded by a rill, which to the left</p> + + <p>With little rippling waters bent the grass</p> + + <p>That issued from its brink.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>and this of the heavenly Paradise:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i10">I looked,</p> + + <p>And, in the likeness of a river, saw</p> + + <p>Light flowing, from whose amber-seeming waves</p> + + <p>Flash'd up effulgence, as they glided on</p> + + <p>'Twixt banks, on either side, painted with spring,</p> + + <p>Incredible how fair; and, from the tide,</p> + + <p>There, ever and anon outstarting, flew</p> + + <p>Sparkles instinct with life; and in the flowers</p> + + <p>Did set them, like to rubies chased in gold;</p> + + <p>Then, as if drunk with odours, plunged again</p> + + <p>Into the wondrous flood, from which, as one</p> + + <p>Re-entered, still another rose.</p> + </div> + + <p>His numerous comparisons conjure up whole scenes, perfect in truth + to Nature, and shewing a keen and widely ranging eye. For + example:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i6">Bellowing, there groaned</p> + + <p>A noise, as of a sea in tempest torn</p> + + <p>By warring winds.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Inferno.)</p> + + <p>O'er better waves to steer her rapid course</p> + + <p>The light bark of my genius lifts the sail,</p> + + <p>Well pleased to leave so cruel sea behind.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Purgatorio.)</p> + + <p>All ye, who in small bark have following sail'd,</p> + + <p>Eager to listen on the adventurous track</p> + + <p>Of my proud keel, that singing cuts her way.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Paradiso.)</p> + + <p>As sails full spread and bellying with the wind</p> + + <p>Drop suddenly collapsed, if the mast split,</p> + + <p>So to the ground down dropp'd the cruel fiend.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Inferno.)</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg108" id= + "pg108">108</a></span></p> + + <p class="i8">As, near upon the hour of dawn,</p> + + <p>Through the thick vapours Mars with fiery beam</p> + + <p>Glares down in west, over the ocean floor.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Purgatorio.)</p> + + <p class="i8">As 'fore the sun</p> + + <p>That weighs our vision down, and veils his form</p> + + <p>In light transcendent, thus my virtue fail'd</p> + + <p>Unequal.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Purgatorio.)</p> + + <p class="i6">As sunshine cheers</p> + + <p>Limbs numb'd by nightly cold, e'en thus my look</p> + + <p>Unloosed her tongue.</p> + + <p>And now there came o'er the perturbed waves,</p> + + <p>Loud crashing, terrible, a sound that made</p> + + <p>Either shore tremble, as if of a wind</p> + + <p>Impetuous, from conflicting vapours sprung,</p> + + <p>That, 'gainst some forest driving all his might,</p> + + <p>Plucks off the branches, beats them down, and hurls</p> + + <p>Afar; then, onward pressing, proudly sweeps</p> + + <p>His whirlwind rage, while beasts and shepherds fly.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Inferno.)</p> + + <p>As florets, by the frosty air of night</p> + + <p>Bent down and closed, when day has blanch'd their leaves</p> + + <p>Rise all unfolded on their spiry stems,</p> + + <p>So was my fainting vigour new restored.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Inferno.)</p> + + <p class="i4">As fall off the light autumnal leaves,</p> + + <p>One still another following, till the bough</p> + + <p>Strews all its honours on the earth beneath.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Inferno.)</p> + </div> + + <p>Bees, dolphins, rays of sunlight, snow, starlings, doves, frogs, a + bull, falcons, fishes, larks, and rooks are all used, generally with + characteristic touches of detail.</p> + + <p>Specially tender is this:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>E'en as the bird, who 'mid the leafy bower</p> + + <p>Has, in her nest, sat darkling through the night</p> + + <p>With her sweet brood; impatient to descry</p> + + <p>Their wished looks, and to bring home their food,</p> + + <p>In the fond quest, unconscious of her toil; <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg109" id="pg109">109</a></span></p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>She, of the time prevenient, on the spray</p> + + <p>That overhangs their couch, with wakeful gaze</p> + + <p>Expects the sun, nor, ever, till the dawn</p> + + <p>Removeth from the east her eager ken,</p> + + <p>So stood the dame erect.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>The most important forward step was made by Petrarch, and it is + strange that this escaped Humboldt in his famous sketch in the second + volume of <i>Cosmos</i>, as well as his commentator Schaller, and + Friedlander.</p> + + <p>For when we turn from Hellenism to Petrarch, it does not seem as + if many centuries lay between; but rather as if notes first struck in + the one had just blended into distinct harmony in the other.</p> + + <p>The modern spirit arose from a union of the genius of the Italian + people of the thirteenth century with antiquity, and the feeling for + Nature had a share in the wider culture, both as to sentimentality + and grasp of scenery. Classic and modern joined hands in Petrarch. + Many Hellenic motives handed on by Roman poets reappear in his + poetry, but always with that something in addition of which antiquity + shewed but a trace--the modern subjectivity and individuality. It was + the change from early bud to full blossom. He was one of the first to + deserve the name of modern--modern, that is, in his whole feeling and + mode of thought, in his sentimentality and his melancholy, and in the + fact that 'more than most before and after him, he tried to know + himself and to hand on to others what he knew.' (Geiger.) It is an + appropriate remark of Hettner's, that the phrase, 'he has discovered + his heart,' might serve as a motto for Petrarch's songs and sonnets. + He knew that he had that sentimental disorder which he called + 'acedia,' and wished to be rid of it. This word has a history of its + own. To the Greeks, to Apollonius, for instance,<a href= + "#e4"><sup>[4]</sup></a> it meant carelessness, indifference; and, + joined with the genitive [Greek: nooio]--that is, of the mind--it + meant, according to the scholiasts, <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg110" id="pg110">110</a></span>as much as [Greek: lypê] + (Betrübnis)--that is, distress or grief. In the Middle Ages it became + 'dislike of intellect so far as that is a divine gift'--that disease + of the cloister which a monkish chronicler defined as 'a sadness or + loathing and an immoderate distress of mind, caused by mental + confusion, through which happiness of mind was destroyed, and the + mind thrown back upon itself as from an abyss of despair.'</p> + + <p>To Dante it meant the state--</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i14">Sad</p> + + <p>In the sweet air, made gladsome by the sun,</p> + </div> + + <p>distaste for the good and beautiful.</p> + + <p>The modern meaning which it took with Petrarch is well defined by + Geiger as being neither ecclesiastic nor secular sin,<a href= + "#e5"><sup>[5]</sup></a> but</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Entirely human and peculiar to the cleverest--the battle between + reality and seeming, the attempt to people the arid wastes of the + commonplace with philosophic thought--the unhappiness and despair + that arise from comparing the unconcern of the majority with one's + own painful unrest, from the knowledge that the results of striving + do not express the effort made--that human life is but a ceaseless + and unworthy rotation, in which the bad are always to the fore, and + the good fall behind ... as pessimism, melancholy, world pain + (Weltschmerz)--that tormenting feeling which mocks all attempt at + definition, and is too vitally connected with erring and striving + human nature to be curable--that longing at once for human + fellowship and solitude, for active work and a life of + contemplation.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Petrarch knew too the pleasure of sadness, what Goethe called + 'Wonne der Wehmuth,' the <i>dolendi voluptas.</i></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Lo, what new pleasure human wits devise!</p> + + <p>For oftentimes one loves</p> + + <p>Whatever new thing moves</p> + + <p>The sighs, that will in closest order go;</p> + + <p>And I'm of those whom sorrowing behoves;</p> + + <p>And that with some success</p> + + <p>I labour, you may guess,</p> + + <p>When eyes with tears, and heart is brimmed with woe.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg111" id="pg111">111</a></span> In + Sonnet 190:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>My chiefest pleasure now is making moan.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Oh world, oh fruitless thought,</p> + + <p>Oh luck, my luck, who'st led me thus for spite!...</p> + + <p>For loving well, with pain I'm rent....</p> + + <p>Nor can I yet repent,</p> + + <p>My heart o'erflowed with deadly pleasantness.</p> + + <p>Now wait I from no less</p> + + <p>A foe than dealt me my first blow, my last.</p> + + <p>And were I slain full fast,</p> + + <p>'Twould seem a sort of mercy to my mind....</p> + + <p>My ode, I shall i' the field</p> + + <p>Stand firm; to perish flinching were a shame,</p> + + <p>In fact, myself I blame</p> + + <p>For such laments; my portion is so sweet.</p> + + <p>Tears, sighs, and death I greet.</p> + + <p>O reader that of death the servant art,</p> + + <p>Earth can no weal, to match my woes, impart.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>His poems are full of scenes and comparisons from Nature; for the + sympathy for her which goes with this modern and sentimental tone is + a deep one:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>In that sweet season of my age's prime</p> + + <p>Which saw the sprout and, as it were, green blade</p> + + <p>Of the wild passion....</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="i10">Changed me</p> + + <p>From living man into green laurel whose</p> + + <p>Array by winter's cold no leaf can lose.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Ode 1.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Love is that by which</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>My darknesses were made as bright</p> + + <p>As clearest noonday light. (Ode 4.)</p> + </div> + + <p>Elsewhere it is the light of heaven breaking in his heart, and + springtime which brings the flowers.</p> + + <p>In Sonnet 44 he plays with impossibilities, like the Greek and + Roman poets:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Ah me! the sea will have no waves, the snow</p> + + <p>Will warm and darken, fish on Alps will dwell,</p> + + <p>And suns droop yonder, where from common cell</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg112" id= + "pg112">112</a></span></p> + + <p>The springs of Tigris and Euphrates flow,</p> + + <p>Or ever I shall here have truce or peace</p> + + <p>Or love....</p> + </div> + + <p>and uses the same comparisons, Sestina 7:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>So many creatures throng not ocean's wave,</p> + + <p>So many, above the circle of the moon,</p> + + <p>Of stars were never yet beheld by night;</p> + + <p>So many birds reside not in the groves;</p> + + <p>So many herbs hath neither field nor shore,</p> + + <p>But my heart's thoughts outnumber them each eve.</p> + </div> + + <p>Many of his poems witness to the truth that the love-passion is + the best interpreter of Nature, especially in its woes. The woes of + love are his constant theme, and far more eloquently expressed than + its bliss:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>So fair I have not seen the sun arise,</p> + + <p>When heaven was clearest of all cloudy stain--</p> + + <p>The welkin-bow I have not after rain</p> + + <p>Seen varied with so many shifting dyes,</p> + + <p>But that her aspect in more splendid guise</p> + + <p>Upon the day when I took up Love's chain</p> + + <p>Diversely glowed, for nothing mortal vies</p> + + <p>Therewith.... (Sonnet 112.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>From each fair eyelid's tranquil firmament</p> + + <p>So brightly shine my stars untreacherous,</p> + + <p>That none, whose love thoughts are magnanimous,</p> + + <p>Would from aught else choose warmth or guidance lent.</p> + + <p>Oh, 'tis miraculous, when on the grass</p> + + <p>She sits, a very flower, or when she lays</p> + + <p>Upon its greenness down her bosom white.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 127.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Oh blithe and happy flowers, oh favoured sod,</p> + + <p>That by my lady in passive mood are pressed,</p> + + <p>Lawn, which her sweet words hear'st and treasurest,</p> + + <p>Faint traces, where her shapely foot hath trod,</p> + + <p>Smooth boughs, green leaves, which now raw juices load,</p> + + <p>Pale darling violets, and woods which rest</p> + + <p>In shadow, till that sun's beam you attest,</p> + + <p>From which hath all your pride and grandeur flowed;</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg113" id= + "pg113">113</a></span>Oh land delightsome, oh thou river pure</p> + + <p>Which bathest her fair face and brilliant eyes</p> + + <p>And winn'st a virtue from their living light,</p> + + <p>I envy you each clear and comely guise</p> + + <p>In which she moves. (Sonnet 129.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>These recall Nais in Theocritus:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>When she crept or trembling footsteps laid,</p> + + <p>Green bright and soft she made</p> + + <p>Wood, water, earth, and stone; yea, with conceit</p> + + <p>The grasses freshened 'neath her palms and feet.</p> + + <p>And her fair eyes the fields around her dressed</p> + + <p>With flowers, and the winds and storms she stilled</p> + + <p>With utterance unskilled</p> + + <p>As from a tongue that seeketh yet the breast,</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 25.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>As oft as yon white foot on fresh green sod</p> + + <p>Comelily sets the gentle step, a dower</p> + + <p>Of grace, that opens and revives each flower,</p> + + <p>Seems by the delicate palm to be bestowed.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 132.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>I seem to hear her, hearing airs and sprays,</p> + + <p>And leaves, and plaintive bird notes, and the brook</p> + + <p>That steals and murmurs through the sedges green.</p> + + <p>Such pleasure in lone silence and the maze</p> + + <p>Of eerie shadowy woods I never took,</p> + + <p>Though too much tow'r'd my sun they intervene.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 143.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>and like Goethe's:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>I think of thee when the bright sunlight shimmers</p> + + <p>Across the sea;</p> + + <p>When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers</p> + + <p>I think of thee....</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>I hear thee, when the tossing waves' low rumbling</p> + + <p>Creeps up the hill;</p> + + <p>I go to the lone wood and listen trembling</p> + + <p>When all is still....</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>So Petrarch sings in Ode 15:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Now therefore, when in youthful guise I see</p> + + <p>The world attire itself in soft green hue,</p> + + <p>I think that in this age unripe I view</p> + + <p>That lovely girl, who's now a lady's mien.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg114" id= + "pg114">114</a></span>Then, when the sun ariseth all aglow,</p> + + <p>I trace the wonted show</p> + + <p>Of amorous fire, in some fine heart made queen...</p> + + <p>When leaves or boughs or violets on earth</p> + + <p>I see, what time the winter's cold decays,</p> + + <p>And when the kindly stars are gathering might,</p> + + <p>Mine eye that violet and green portrays</p> + + <p>(And nothing else) which, at my warfare's birth,</p> + + <p>Armed Love so well that yet he worsts me quite.</p> + + <p>I see the delicate fine tissue light</p> + + <p>In which our little damsel's limbs are dressed....</p> + + <p>Oft on the hills a feeble snow-streak lies,</p> + + <p>Which the sun smiteth in sequestered place.</p> + + <p>Let sun rule snow! Thou, Love, my ruler art,</p> + + <p>When on that fair and more than human face</p> + + <p>I muse, which from afar makes soft my eyes....</p> + + <p>I never yet saw after mighty rain</p> + + <p>The roving stars in the calm welkin glide</p> + + <p>And glitter back between the frost and dew,</p> + + <p>But straight those lovely eyes are at my side....</p> + + <p>If ever yet, on roses white and red,</p> + + <p>My eyes have fallen, where in bowl of gold</p> + + <p>They were set down, fresh culled by virgin hands,</p> + + <p>There have I seemed her aspect to behold....</p> + + <p>But when the year has flecked</p> + + <p>Some deal with white and yellow flowers the braes,</p> + + <p>I forthwith recollect</p> + + <p>That day and place in which I first admired</p> + + <p>Laura's gold hair outspread, and straight was fired....</p> + + <p>That I could number all the stars anon</p> + + <p>And shut the waters in a tiny glass</p> + + <p>Belike I thought, when in this narrow sheet</p> + + <p>I got a fancy to record, alas,</p> + + <p>How many ways this Beauty's paragon</p> + + <p>Hath spread her light, while standing self-complete,</p> + + <p>So that from her I never could retreat....</p> + + <p>She's closed for me all paths in earth and sky.</p> + </div> + + <p>The reflective modern mind is clear in this, despite its + loquacity. He was yet more eloquent and intense, more fertile in + comparisons, when his happiest days were over.</p> + + <p>In Ode 24, standing at a window he watches the strange forms his + imagination conjures up--a wild creature torn in pieces by two dogs, + a ship wrecked by a storm, a laurel shattered by lightning: + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg115" id="pg115">115</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Within this wood, out of a rock did rise</p> + + <p>A spring of water, mildly rumbling down,</p> + + <p>Whereto approached not in any wise</p> + + <p>The homely shepherd nor the ruder clown,</p> + + <p>But many muses and the nymphs withal....</p> + + <p>But while herein I took my chief delight,</p> + + <p>I saw (alas!) the gaping earth devour</p> + + <p>The spring, the place, and all clean out of sight--</p> + + <p>Which yet aggrieves my heart unto this hour....</p> + + <p>At last, so fair a lady did I spy,</p> + + <p>That thinking yet on her I burn and quake,</p> + + <p>On herbs and flowers she walked pensively....</p> + + <p>A stinging serpent by the heel her caught,</p> + + <p>Wherewith she languished as the gathered flower.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Now Zephyrus the blither days brings on,</p> + + <p>With flowers and leaves, his gallant retinue,</p> + + <p>And Progne's chiding, Philomela's moan,</p> + + <p>And maiden spring all white and pink of hue;</p> + + <p>Now laugh the meadows, heaven is radiant grown,</p> + + <p>And blithely now doth Love his daughter view;</p> + + <p>Air, water, earth, now breathe of love alone,</p> + + <p>And every creature plans again to woo.</p> + + <p>Ah me! but now return the heaviest sighs,</p> + + <p>Which my heart from its last resources yields</p> + + <p>To her that bore its keys to heaven away.</p> + + <p>And songs of little birds and blooming fields</p> + + <p>And gracious acts of ladies, fair and wise,</p> + + <p>Are desert land and uncouth beasts of prey.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 269.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The nightingale, who maketh moan so sweet</p> + + <p>Over his brood belike or nest-mate dear,</p> + + <p>So deft and tender are his notes to hear,</p> + + <p>That fields and skies are with delight replete;</p> + + <p>And all night long he seems with me to treat,</p> + + <p>And my hard lot recall unto my ear.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 270.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>In every dell</p> + + <p>The sands of my deep sighs are circumfused.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Ode 1.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Oh banks, oh dales, oh woods, oh streams, oh fields</p> + + <p>Ye vouchers of my life's o'erburdened cause,</p> + + <p>How often Death you've heard me supplicate.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Ode 8.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Whereso my foot may pass,</p> + + <p>A balmy rapture wakes</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg116" id= + "pg116">116</a></span>When I think, here that darling light hath + played.</p> + + <p>If flower I cull or grass,</p> + + <p>I ponder that it takes</p> + + <p>Root in that soil, where wontedly she strayed</p> + + <p>Betwixt the stream and glade,</p> + + <p>And found at times a seat</p> + + <p>Green, fresh, and flower-embossed. (Ode 13.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Whenever plaintive warblings, or the note</p> + + <p>Of leaves by summer breezes gently stirred,</p> + + <p>Or baffled murmur of bright waves I've heard</p> + + <p>Along the green and flowery shore to float,</p> + + <p>Where meditating love I sat and wrote,</p> + + <p>Then her whom earth conceals, whom heaven conferred,</p> + + <p>I hear and see, and know with living word</p> + + <p>She answereth my sighs, though so remote.</p> + + <p>'Ah, why art thou,' she pityingly says,</p> + + <p>'Pining away before thy hour?'</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 238.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The waters and the branches and the shore,</p> + + <p>Birds, fishes, flowers, grasses, talk of love,</p> + + <p>And me to love for ever all invite.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 239.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Thou'st left the world, oh Death, without a sun....</p> + + <p>Her mourners should be earth and sea and air.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 294.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Here we have happiness and misery felt in the modern way, and + Nature in the modern way drawn into the circle of thought and + feeling, and personified.</p> + + <p>Petrarch was the first, since the days of Hellenism, to enjoy the + pleasures of solitude quite consciously.</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>How often to my darling place of rest,</p> + + <p>Fleeing from all, could I myself but flee,</p> + + <p>I walk and wet with tears my path and breast.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 240.)</p> + </div> + + <p>He shared Schiller's thought:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Oh Nature is perfect, wherever we stray,</p> + + <p>'Tis man that deforms it with care.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>As love from thought to thought, from hill to hill,</p> + + <p>Directs me, when all ways that people tread</p> + + <p>Seem to the quiet of my being, foes,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg117" id= + "pg117">117</a></span>If some lone shore, or fountain-head, or + rill</p> + + <p>Or shady glen, between two slopes outspread,</p> + + <p>I find--my daunted soul doth there repose....</p> + + <p>On mountain heights, in briary woods, I find</p> + + <p>Some rest; but every dwelling place on earth</p> + + <p>Appeareth to my eyes a deadly bane....</p> + + <p>Where some tall pine or hillock spreads a shade,</p> + + <p>I sometimes halt, and on the nearest brink</p> + + <p>Her lovely face I picture from my mind....</p> + + <p>Oft hath her living likeness met my sight, (Oh who'll believe + the word?) in waters clear,</p> + + <p>On beechen stems, on some green lawny space,</p> + + <p>Or in white cloud....</p> + + <p>Her loveliest portrait there my fancy draws,</p> + + <p>And when Truth overawes</p> + + <p>That sweet delusion, frozen to the core,</p> + + <p>I then sit down, on living rock, dead stone,</p> + + <p>And seem to muse, and weep and write thereon....</p> + + <p>Then touch my thoughts and sense</p> + + <p>Those widths of air which hence her beauty part,</p> + + <p>Which always is so near, yet far away....</p> + + <p>Beyond that Alp, my Ode,</p> + + <p>Where heaven above is gladdest and most clear,</p> + + <p>Again thou'lt meet me where the streamlet flows</p> + + <p>And thrilling airs disclose</p> + + <p>The fresh and scented laurel thicket near,</p> + + <p>There is my heart and she that stealeth it.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Ode 17.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>It is the same idea as Goethe's in <i>Knowest thou the Land</i>? + Again:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Alone, engrossed, the least frequented strands</p> + + <p>I traverse with my footsteps faint and slow,</p> + + <p>And often wary glances round me throw,</p> + + <p>To flee, should human trace imprint the sands.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 28.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>A life of solitude I've ever sought,</p> + + <p>This many a field and forest knows, and will.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 221.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Love of solitude and feeling for Nature limit or increase each + other; and Petrarch; like Dante, took scientific interest in her, and + found her a stimulant to mental work.</p> + + <p>Burckhardt says: 'The enjoyment of Nature is for him the favourite + accompaniment of intellectual <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg118" + id="pg118">118</a></span>pursuits; it was to combine the two that he + lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that he from + time to time fled from the world and from his age.'</p> + + <p>He wrote a book <i>On a Life of Solitude (De Vita Solitaria)</i> + by the little river Sorgue, and said in a letter from Vaucluse: 'O if + you could imagine the delight with which I breathe here, free and far + from the world, with forests and mountains, rivers and springs, and + the books of clever men.'</p> + + <p>Purely objective descriptions, such as his picture of the Gulf of + Spezzia and Porto Venere at the end of the sixth book of the + <i>Africa</i>, were rare with him; but, as we have already seen, he + admired mountain scenery. He refers to the hills on the Riviera di + Levante as 'hills distinguished by most pleasant wildness and + wonderful fertility.'<a href="#e6"><sup>[6]</sup></a></p> + + <p>The scenery of Reggio moved him, as he said,<a href= + "#e7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> to compose a poem. He described the storm at + Naples in 1343, and the earthquake at Basle. As we have seen from one + of his odes, he delighted in the wide view from mountain heights, and + the freedom from the oppression of the air lower down. In this + respect he was one of Rousseau's forerunners, though his 'romantic' + feeling was restrained within characteristic limits. In a letter of + April 26, 1335, interesting both as to the period and the personality + of the writer, he described to Dionisius da Borgo San Sepolchro the + ascent of Mt. Ventoux near Avignon which he made when he was + thirty-two, and greatly enjoyed, though those who were with him did + not understand his enjoyment. When they had laboured through the + difficulties of the climb, and saw the clouds below them, he was + immensely impressed. It was in accordance with his love of solitude + that lonely mountain tops should attract him, and the letter shows + that he fully appreciated both climb and view.</p> + + <p>'It was a long day, the air fine. We enjoyed the <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg119" id="pg119">119</a></span>advantages of + vigour of mind, and strength and agility of body, and everything else + essential to those engaged in such an undertaking, and so had no + other difficulties to face than those of the region itself.' ... 'At + first, owing to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of + the great sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like one dazed. + I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and + Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things + from a mountain of less fame. I turned my eyes towards Italy, whither + my heart most inclined. The Alps, rugged and snow-capped, seemed to + rise close by, although they were really at a great distance.... The + Bay of Marseilles, the Rhone itself, lay in sight.'</p> + + <p>It was a very modern effect of the wide view that 'his whole past + life with all its follies rose before his mind; he remembered that + ten years ago, that day, he had quitted Bologna a young man, and + turned a longing gaze towards his native country: he opened a book + which was then his constant companion, <i>The Confessions of St + Augustine</i>, and his eye fell on the passage in the tenth + chapter:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>And men go about and admire lofty mountains and broad seas, and + roaring torrents and the ocean, and the course of the stars, and + forget their own selves while doing so.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>His brother, to whom he read these words, could not understand why + he closed the book and said no more. His feeling had suddenly + changed.</p> + + <p>He knew, when he began the climb, that he was doing something very + unusual, even unheard of among his contemporaries, and justified + himself by the example of Philip V. of Macedon, arguing that a young + man of private station might surely be excused for what was not + thought blamable in a grey-haired king. Then on the mountain top, + lost in the view, the passage in St Augustine suddenly occurred to + him, and he started blaming himself <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg120" id="pg120">120</a></span>for admiring earthly things so much. + 'I was amazed ... angry with myself for marvelling but now at earthly + things, when I ought to have learnt long ago that nothing save the + soul was marvellous, and that to the greatness of the soul nought + else was great'; and he closed with an explanation flavoured with + theology to the taste of his confessor, to whom he was writing. The + mixture of thoroughly modern delight in Nature<a href= + "#e8"><sup>[8]</sup></a> with ascetic dogma in this letter, gives us + a glimpse into the divided feelings of one who stood upon the + threshold between two eras, mediæval and modern, into the reaction of + the mediæval mind against the budding modern feeling.</p> + + <p>This is, at any rate, the first mountain ascent for pleasure since + Hellenic days, of which we have detailed information. From Greece + before Alexander we have nothing; but the Persian King Darius, in his + expedition against the Scythians in the region of Chalcedon, ascended + the mountain on which stood the Urios temple to Zeus, and there + 'sitting in the temple, he took a view of the Euxine Sea, which is + worthy of admiration.' (Herodotus.)</p> + + <p>Philip V. of Macedon ascended the Hæmus B.C. 181, and Apollonios + Rhodios describes the panorama spread out before the Argonauts as + they ascended the Dindymon, and elsewhere recalls the view from Mt. + Olympus. These are the oldest descriptions of distant views conceived + as landscape in the classic literature preserved to us. Petrarch's + ascent comes next in order.</p> + + <p>This sentimental and subjective feeling for Nature, half-idyllic, + half-romantic, which seemed to arise suddenly and spontaneously in + Petrarch, is not to be wholly explained by a marked individuality, + nourished by the tendencies of the period; the influence of Roman + literature, the re-birth of the classic, must also be taken into + account. For the Renaissance attitude towards Nature was closely + allied to <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg121" id= + "pg121">121</a></span>the Roman, and therefore to the Hellenic; and + the fact that the first modern man arose on Italian soil was due to + the revival of antiquity plus its union with the genius of the + Italian people. Many direct analogies can be traced between Petrarch + and the Roman poets; it was in their school that his eyes opened to + the wonders of Nature, and he learnt to blend the inner with the + outer life.</p> + + <p>Boccaccio does not lead us much further. There is idyllic quality + in his description of a wood in the <i>Ameto</i>,<a href= + "#e9"><sup>[9]</sup></a> and especially in <i>Fiammetta</i>, in which + he praises country life and describes the spring games of the + Florentine youth.</p> + + <p>This is the description of a valley in the <i>Decameron</i>: + 'After a walk of nearly a mile, they came to the Ladies' Valley, + which they entered by a straight path, whence there issued forth a + fine crystal current, and they found it so extremely beautiful and + pleasant, especially at that sultry season, that nothing could exceed + it, and, as some of them told me afterwards, the plain in the valley + was so exact a circle, as if it had been described by a pair of + compasses, though it seemed rather the work of Nature than of art, + and was about half a mile in circumference, surrounded by six hills + of moderate height, on each of which was a palace built in the form + of a little castle.... The part that looks toward the south was + planted as thick as they could stand together with vines, olives, + almonds, cherries, figs, and most other kinds of fruit trees, and on + the northern side were fine plantations of oak, ash, etc., so tall + and regular that nothing could be more beautiful. The vale, which had + only that one entrance, was full of firs, cypress trees, laurels, and + pines, all placed in such order as if it had been done by the + direction of some exquisite artist, and through which little or no + sun could penetrate to the ground, which was covered with a thousand + different flowers.... But what gave no less delight than any of the + rest was a <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg122" id= + "pg122">122</a></span>rivulet that came through a valley which + divided two of the mountains, and running through the vein of a rock, + made a most agreeable murmur with its fall, appealing, as it was + dashed and sprinkled into drops, like so much quicksilver.'</p> + + <p>Description of scenery for its own sake is scarcely more than + attempted here, nor do Petrarch's lyrics, with their free thought of + passion and overpowering consciousness of the joys and sorrows of + love, reach the level of Hellenism in this respect. Yet it advanced + with the Renaissance. Pope Pius II. (Æneas Sylvius) was the first to + describe actual landscape (Italian), not merely in a few subjective + lines, but with genuine modern enjoyment. He was one of those figures + in the world's history in whom all the intellectual life and feeling + of a time come to a focus.</p> + + <p>He had a heart for everything, and an all-round enthusiasm for + Nature unique in his day. Antiquity and Nature were his two passions, + and the most beautiful descriptions of Nature before Rousseau and + Goethe are contained in his <i>Commentaries</i>.</p> + + <p>Writing of the country round his home, he says:</p> + + <p>'The sweet spring time had begun, and round about Siena the + smiling hills were clothed with leaves and flowers, and the crops + were rising in plenty in the fields. Even the pasture land quite + close to the town affords an unspeakably lovely view; gently sloping + hills, either planted with homely trees or vines, or ploughed for + corn, look down on pleasant valleys in which grow crops, or green + fields are to be seen, and brooks are even flowing. There are, too, + many plantations, either natural or artificial, in which the birds + sing with wondrous sweetness. Nor is there a mound on which the + citizens have not built a magnificent estate; they are thus a little + way out of the town. Through this district the Pope walked with + joyous head.'</p> + + <p>Again and again love of Nature drew him away <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg123" id="pg123">123</a></span>even in old age + from town life and the circle of courtiers and flatterers; he was for + ever finding new reasons to prolong his <i>villeggiatura</i>, despite + the grumbling of his court, which had to put up with wretched inns or + monasteries overrun by mice, where the rain came through the roofs + and the necessaries of life were scanty.<a href= + "#e10"><sup>[10]</sup></a></p> + + <p>His taste for these beautifully-situated monastic solitudes was a + riddle to those around him. He wrote of his summer residence in + Tibur:</p> + + <p>'On all sides round the town in summer there are most lovely + plantations, to which the Pope with his cardinals often retired for + relaxation, sitting sometimes on some green sward beneath the olives, + sometimes in a green meadow on the bank of the river Aino, whence he + could see the clear waters. There are some meadows in a retired glen, + watered by many streams; Pius often rested in these meadows near the + luxuriant streams and the shady trees. He lived at Tibur with the + Minorites on an elevation whence he could see the town and the course + of the Aino as it flowed into the plain beneath him and through the + quiet gardens, nor did anything else give him pleasure.</p> + + <p>'When the summer was over, he had his bedroom in the house + overlooking the Aino; from there the most beautiful view was to be + seen, and also from a neighbouring mountain on the other side of the + river, still covered with a green and leafy grove ... he completed a + great part of his journey with the greatest enjoyment.'</p> + + <p>In May 1462 he went to the baths at Viterbo, and, old man as he + was, gives this appreciative description of spring beauties by the + way:</p> + + <p>'The road by which he made for Sorianum was at that time of the + year delightful; there was a tremendous quantity of genista, so that + a great part of the field seemed a mass of flowering yellow, while + the rest, covered as it was by shrubs and various <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg124" id="pg124">124</a></span>grasses, brought + purple and white and a thousand different colours before the eyes. It + was the month of May, and everything was green. On one side were the + smiling fields, on the other the smiling woods, in which the birds + made sweet harmony. At early dawn he used to walk into the fields to + catch the exquisite breeze before the day should grow hot, and gaze + at the green crops and the flowering flax, which then, emulating + heaven's own blue, gave the greatest joy to all beholders.... Now the + crows are holding vigil, and the ringdoves; and the owl at times + utters lament with funeral note. The place is most lovely; the view + in the direction of Siena stretches as far as Amiata, and in the west + reaches Mt. Argentarius.'</p> + + <p>In the plains the plague was raging; the sight of the people + appealing to him as to a god, moved him to tears as he thought how + few of the children would survive in the heat. He travelled to a + castle charmingly placed on the lake of Bolsena, where 'there is a + shady circular walk in the vineyard under the big grapes; stone steps + shaded by the vine leaves lead down to the bank, where ilex oaks, + alive with the songs of blackbirds, stand among the crags.' Halfway + up the mountain, in the monastery of San Salvatore, he and his court + took up their quarters.</p> + + <p>'The most lovely scenery met the eye. As you look to the west from + the higher houses, the view reaches beyond Ilcinum and Siena as far + as the Pistorian Alps. To the north a variety of hills and the + pleasant green of woods presents itself, stretching a distance of + five miles; if your sight is good, your eye will travel as far as the + Apennine range and can see Cortona.'</p> + + <p>There he passed the time, shooting birds, fishing, and rowing.</p> + + <p>'In the cool air of the hills, among the old oaks and chestnuts, + on the green meadows where there were no thorns to wound the feet, + and no snakes <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg125" id= + "pg125">125</a></span>or insects to hurt or annoy, the Pope passed + days of unclouded happiness.'</p> + + <p>This is thoroughly modern: 'Silvarum amator,' as he calls himself, + he includes both the details of the near and the general effect of + the far-distant landscape.</p> + + <p>And with age his appreciation of it only seemed to increase; for + instance, he says of Todi:</p> + + <p>'A most lovely view meets the eye wherever you turn; you can see + Perusia and all the valley that lies between, full of wide--spreading + forts and fertile fields, and honoured by the river Tiber, which, + drawing its coils along like a snake, divides Tuscia from Umbria, + and, close to the city itself, enters many a mountain, passing + through which it descends to the plain, murmuring as it goes, as + though constrained against its will.'</p> + + <p>This is his description of a lake storm, during an excursion to + the Albanian Mountains:</p> + + <p>As far as Ostia 'he had a delightful voyage; at night the sea + began to be most unwontedly troubled, and a severe storm arose. The + east wind rolled up the waters from their lowest depths, huge waves + beat the shore; you could have heard the sea, as it were, groaning + and wailing. So great was the force of the winds, that nothing seemed + able to resist it; they raged and alternately fled and put one + another to rout, they overturned woods and anything that withstood + them. The air glittered with frequent lightning, the sky thundered, + and terrific thunder-bolts fell from the clouds.... The night was + pitch dark, though the flashes of lightning were continuous.'</p> + + <p>And of a lake at rest he says:</p> + + <p>'The beauty of that lake is remarkable; everywhere it is + surrounded by high rocks, the water is transparently clear. Nature, + so far superior to art, provided a most pleasant journey. The + Nemorian lake, with its crystal-clear waters, reflects the faces + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg126" id="pg126">126</a></span>of + those that look into it, and fills a deep basin. The descent from the + top to the bottom is wooded. The poetic genius would never be + awakened if it slept here; you would say it was the dwelling-place of + the Muses, the home of the Nymphs, and, if there is any truth in + legends, the hiding-place of Diana.'</p> + + <p>He visited the lakes among the mountains, climbing and resting + under the trees; the view from Monte Cavo was his favourite, from + which he could see Terracina, the lakes of Nemi and Albano, etc. He + noted their extent and formation, and added:</p> + + <p>'The genista, however, was especially delightful, covering, as it + did with its flowers, the greater part of the plains. Then, moreover, + Rome presented itself fully to the eyes, together with Soracte and + the Sabine Land, and the Apennine range white with snow, and Tibur + and Præneste.'</p> + + <p>It is clear that it was a thoroughly modern enthusiasm which + attracted Æneas Sylvius to the country and gave him this ready pen + for everything in Nature--everything, that is, except bare mountain + summits.</p> + + <p>It is difficult to attribute this faculty for enjoying and + describing scenery to the influence of antiquity alone, for, save the + younger Pliny, I know of no Roman under the Empire who possessed it, + and, besides, we do not know how far Pius II. was acquainted with + Roman literature. We know that the re-awakening of classic literature + exerted an influence upon the direction of the feeling for Nature in + general, and, for the rest, very various elements coalesced. Like + times produce like streams of tendency, and Hellenism, the Roman + Empire, and the Renaissance were alike to some extent in the + conditions of their existence and the results that flowed from them; + the causal nexus between them is undeniable, and makes them the chief + stepping-stones on the way to the modern.</p> + + <p>Theocritus, Meleager, Petrarch, and Æneas Sylvius <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg127" id="pg127">127</a></span>may serve as + representatives of the development of the feeling for Nature from + classic to modern; they are the ancestors of our enthusiasm, the + links in the chain which leads up to Rousseau, Goethe, Byron, and + Shelley.</p> + + <p>From the autobiography of Æneas Sylvius and the lyrics of Petrarch + we gain a far truer picture of the feeling of the period up to the + sixteenth century than from any poetry in other countries. Even the + epic had a more modern tone in Italy; Ariosto's descriptions were far + ahead of any German epic.</p> + + <p>Humboldt pointed out very clearly the difference between the epic + of the people and the epic of art--between Homer and Ariosto. Both, + he said, are true painters of the world and Nature; but Ariosto + pleases more by his brilliance and wealth of colour, Homer by purity + of form and beauty of composition. Ariosto achieves through general + effect, Homer through perfection of form. Nature is more naive in + Homer, the subject is paramount, and the singer disappears; in + Ariosto, Nature is sentimental, and the poet always remains in view + upon the stage. In Homer all is closely knit, while Ariosto's threads + are loosely spun, and he breaks them himself in play. Homer almost + never describes, Ariosto always does.</p> + + <p>Ariosto's scenes and comparisons from Nature, being calculated for + effect, are more subjective, and far more highly-coloured than + Homer's. But they shew a sympathetic grasp.</p> + + <p>The modern bloom, so difficult to define, lies over + them--something at once sensuous, sentimental, and chivalrous. He is + given to describing lonely woodland scenery, fit places for trysts + and lovers' rendezvous.</p> + + <p>In the 1st Canto of <i>Mad Orlando</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>With flowery thorns, vermilion roses near</p> + + <p>Her, she upon a lovely bush doth meet,</p> + + <p>That mirrored doth in the bright waves appear,</p> + + <p>Shut out by lofty oaks from the sun's heat.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg128" id= + "pg128">128</a></span></p> + + <p>Amidst the thickest shades there is a clear</p> + + <p>Space in the middle for a cool retreat;</p> + + <p>So mixed the leaves and boughs are, through them none</p> + + <p>Can see; they are impervious to the sun.</p> + </div> + + <p>In the 6th Canto the Hippogriff carries Roger into a country:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Nor could he, had he searched the whole world through,</p> + + <p>Than this a more delightful country see....</p> + + <p>Soft meads, clear streams, and banks affording shade,</p> + + <p>Hillocks and plains, by culture fertile made.</p> + + <p>Fair thickets of the cedar, palm and no</p> + + <p>Less pleasant myrtle, of the laurel sweet,</p> + + <p>Of orange trees, where fruit and flow'rs did grow,</p> + + <p>And which in various forms, all lovely, meet</p> + + <p>With their thick shades against the fervid glow</p> + + <p>Of summer days, afforded a retreat;</p> + + <p>And nightingales, devoid of fear, among</p> + + <p>Those branches fluttered, pouring forth their song.</p> + + <p>Amid the lilies white and roses red,</p> + + <p>Ever more freshened by the tepid air,</p> + + <p>The stag was seen, with his proud lofty head,</p> + + <p>And feeling safe, the rabbit and the hare....</p> + + <p>Sapphires and rubies, topazes, pearls, gold,</p> + + <p>Hyacinths, chrysolites, and diamonds were</p> + + <p>Like the night flow'rs, which did their leaves unfold</p> + + <p>There on those glad plains, painted by the air</p> + + <p>So green the grass, that if we did behold</p> + + <p>It here, no emeralds could therewith compare;</p> + + <p>As fair the foliage of the trees was, which</p> + + <p>With fruit and flow'r eternally were rich.</p> + + <p>Amid the boughs, sing yellow, white, and blue,</p> + + <p>And red and green small feathered creatures gay;</p> + + <p>The crystals less limpidity of hue</p> + + <p>Than the still lakes or murmuring brooks display.</p> + + <p>A gentle breeze, that seemeth still to woo</p> + + <p>And never change from its accustomed way,</p> + + <p>Made all around so tremulous the air</p> + + <p>That no annoyance was the day's hot glare.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 34.)</p> + </div> + + <p>Descriptions of time are short:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>From the hard face of earth the sun's bright hue</p> + + <p>Not yet its veil obscure and dark did rend;</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg129" id= + "pg129">129</a></span>The Lycaonian offspring scarcely through</p> + + <p>The furrows of the sky his plough did send.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 80.)</p> + </div> + + <p>Comparisons, especially about the beauty of women, are very + artistic, recalling Sappho and Catullus:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The tender maid is like unto the rose</p> + + <p>In the fair garden on its native thorn;</p> + + <p>Whilst it alone and safely doth repose,</p> + + <p>Nor flock nor shepherd crops it; dewy morn,</p> + + <p>Water and earth, the breeze that sweetly blows,</p> + + <p>Are gracious to it; lovely dames adorn</p> + + <p>With it their bosoms and their beautiful</p> + + <p>Brows; it enamoured youths delight to cull.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 1.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Only, Alcina fairest was by far</p> + + <p>As is the sun more fair than every star....</p> + + <p>Milk is the bosom, of luxuriant size,</p> + + <p>And the fair neck is round and snowy white;</p> + + <p>Two unripe ivory apples fall and rise</p> + + <p>Like waves upon the sea-beach when a slight</p> + + <p>Breeze stirs the ocean.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 7.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Now in a gulf of bliss up to the eyes</p> + + <p>And of fair things, to swim he doth begin.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 7.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>So closely doth the ivy not enlace</p> + + <p>The tree where firmly rooted it doth stand,</p> + + <p>As clasp each other in their warm embrace</p> + + <p>These lovers, by each other's sweet breath fanned.</p> + + <p>Sweet flower, of which on India's shore no trace</p> + + <p>Is, or on the Sabæan odorous sand.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 7.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Her fair face the appearance did maintain</p> + + <p>That sometimes shewn is by the sky in spring,</p> + + <p>When at the very time that falls the rain,</p> + + <p>The sun aside his cloudy veil doth fling.</p> + + <p>And as the nightingale its pleasant strain</p> + + <p>Then on the boughs of the green trees doth sing,</p> + + <p>Thus Love doth bathe his pinions at those bright</p> + + <p>But tearful eyes, enjoying the clear light.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 11.)</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg130" id= + "pg130">130</a></span></p> + + <p>But as more fickle than the leaf was she,</p> + + <p>When it in autumn doth more sapless grow,</p> + + <p>And the old wind doth strip it from the tree,</p> + + <p>And doth before it in its fury grow.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 21.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>He uses the sea:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>As when a bark doth the deep ocean plough,</p> + + <p>That two winds strike with an alternate blast,</p> + + <p>'Tis now sent forward by the one, and now</p> + + <p>Back by the other in its first place cast,</p> + + <p>And whirled from prow to poop, from poop to prow,</p> + + <p>But urged by the most potent wind at last</p> + + <p>Philander thus irresolute between</p> + + <p>The two thoughts, did to the least wicked lean.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 21.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>As comes the wave upon the salt sea shore</p> + + <p>Which the smooth wind at first in thought hath fanned;</p> + + <p>Greater the second is than that before</p> + + <p>It, and the third more fiercely follows, and</p> + + <p>Each time the humour more abounds, and more</p> + + <p>Doth it extend its scourge upon the land:</p> + + <p>Against Orlando thus from vales below</p> + + <p>And hills above, doth the vile rabble grow.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Canto 24.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>These comparisons not only shew faithful and personal observation, + but are far more subjective and subtle than, for instance, Dante's. + The same holds good of Tasso. How beautiful in detail, and how + sentimental too, is this from <i>Jerusalem Delivered</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Behold how lovely blooms the vernal rose</p> + + <p>When scarce the leaves her early bud disclose,</p> + + <p>When, half unwrapt, and half to view revealed,</p> + + <p>She gives new pleasure from her charms concealed.</p> + + <p>But when she shews her bosom wide displayed,</p> + + <p>How soon her sweets exhale, her beauties fade!</p> + + <p>No more she seems the flower so lately loved,</p> + + <p>By virgins cherished and by youths approved.</p> + + <p>So swiftly fleeting with the transient day</p> + + <p>Passes the flower of mortal life away.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg131" id="pg131">131</a></span> + Not less subjective is:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i6">Like a ray of light on water</p> + + <p>A smile of soft desire played in her liquid eyes.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 18.)</p> + </div> + + <p>The most famous lines in this poem are those which describe a + romantic garden so vividly that Humboldt says 'it reminds one of the + charming scenery of Sorrento.' It certainly proves that even epic + poetry tried to describe Nature for her own sake:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The garden then unfolds a beauteous scene,</p> + + <p>With flowers adorned and ever living green;</p> + + <p>There silver lakes reflect the beaming day,</p> + + <p>Here crystal streams in gurgling fountains play.</p> + + <p>Cool vales descend and sunny hills arise,</p> + + <p>And groves and caves and grottos strike the eyes.</p> + + <p>Art showed her utmost power; but art concealed</p> + + <p>With greater charm the pleased attention held.</p> + + <p>It seemed as Nature played a sportive part</p> + + <p>And strove to mock the mimic works of art:</p> + + <p>By powerful magic breathes the vernal air,</p> + + <p>And fragrant trees eternal blossoms bear:</p> + + <p>Eternal fruits on every branch endure,</p> + + <p>Those swelling from their buds, and these mature:</p> + + <p>The joyous birds, concealed in every grove,</p> + + <p>With gentle strife prolong the notes of love.</p> + + <p>Soft zephyrs breathe on woods and waters round,</p> + + <p>The woods and waters yield a murmuring sound;</p> + + <p>When cease the tuneful choir, the wind replies,</p> + + <p>But, when they sing, in gentle whisper dies;</p> + + <p>By turns they sink, by turns their music raise</p> + + <p>And blend, with equal skill, harmonious lays.</p> + </div> + + <p>But even here the scene is surrounded by an imaginary atmosphere; + flowers, fruit, creatures, and atmosphere all lie under a magic + charm. Tasso's importance for our subject lies far more in his + much-imitated pastorals.</p> + + <p>The <i>Arcadia</i> of Jacopo Sannazaro, which appeared in 1504, a + work of poetic beauty and still greater literary importance,<a href= + "#e11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> paved the way for pastoral poetry, which, + like the sonnet, was interwoven with <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg132" id="pg132">132</a></span>prose. The shepherd's occupations + are described with care, though many of the songs and terms of + expression rather fit the man of culture than the child of Nature, + and he had that genuine enthusiasm for the rural which begets a + convincing eloquence. 'Tis you,' he says at the end, addressing the + Muse, 'who first woke the sleeping woods, and taught the shepherds + how to strike up their lost songs.'</p> + + <p>Bembo wrote this inscription for his grave:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Strew flowers o'er the sacred ashes, here lies Sannazaro;</p> + + <p>With thee, gentle Virgil, he shares Muse and grave.</p> + </div> + + <p>Virgil too was industriously imitated in the didactic poetry of + his country.</p> + + <p>Giovanni Rucellai (born 1475) wrote a didactic poem, <i>The + Bees</i>, which begins:</p> + + <p>'O chaste virgins, winged visitants of flowery banks, whilst I + prepared to sing your praise in lofty verse, at peep of day I was + o'ercome by sleep, and then appeared a chorus of your tiny folk, and + from their rich mellifluous haunts, in a clear voice these words + flowed forth.... And I will sing how liquid and serene the air + distils sweet honey, heavenly gilt, on flowerets and on grass, and + how the bees, chaste and industrious, gather it, and thereof with + care and skill make perfumed wax to grace the altars of our God.'</p> + + <p>And a didactic poem by Luigi Alamanni (born 1495), called + <i>Husbandry</i>, has: 'O blessed is he who dwells in peace, the + actual tiller of his joyous fields, to whom, in his remoteness, the + most righteous earth brings food, and secure in well-being, he + rejoices in his heart. If thou art not surrounded by society rich + with purple and gems, nor with houses adorned with costly woods, + statues, and gold;... at least, secure in the humble dwelling of wood + from the copse hard by, and common stones collected close at hand, + which thine own hand has founded and built, whenever thou awakenest + at the approach <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg133" id= + "pg133">133</a></span>of dawn, thou dost not find outside those who + bring news of a thousand events contrary to thy desires.... Thou + wanderest at will, now quickly, now slowly, across the green meadow, + through the wood, over the grassy hill, or by the stream. Now here, + now there ... thou handlest the hatchet, axe, scythe, or hoe.... To + enjoy in sober comfort at almost all seasons, with thy dear children, + the fruits of thine own tree, the tree planted by thyself, this + brings a sweetness sweet beyond all others.'</p> + + <p>These didactic writings, inspired by Virgilian Georgics, show a + distinct preference for the idyllic.</p> + + <p>Sannazaro's <i>Arcadia</i> went through sixty editions in the + sixteenth century alone. Tasso reckoned with the prevalent taste of + his day in <i>Aminta</i>, which improved the then method of + dramatizing a romantic idyll. The whole poem bears the stamp of an + idealizing and romantic imagination, and embodies in lyric form his + sentimental idea of the Golden Age and an ideal world of Nature. Even + down to its details <i>Aminta</i> recalls the pastorals of Longos; + and Daphne's words (Act I. Scene 1) suggest the most feeling + outpourings of Kallimachos and Nonnos:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>And callest thou sweet spring-time</p> + + <p>The time of rage and enmity,</p> + + <p>Which breathing now and smiling,</p> + + <p>Reminds the whole creation,</p> + + <p>The animal, the human,</p> + + <p>Of loving! Dost thou see not</p> + + <p>How all things are enamoured</p> + + <p>Of this enamourer, rich with joy and health?</p> + + <p>Observe that turtle-dove,</p> + + <p>How, toying with his dulcet murmuring,</p> + + <p>He kisses his companion. Hear that nightingale</p> + + <p>Who goes from bough to bough</p> + + <p>Singing with his loud heart, 'I love!' 'I love!'...</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="i10">The very trees</p> + + <p>Are loving. See with what affection there,</p> + + <p>And in how many a clinging turn and twine,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg134" id= + "pg134">134</a></span>The vine holds fast its husband. Fir loves + fir,</p> + + <p>The pine the pine, and ash and willow and beech</p> + + <p>Each towards the other yearns, and sighs and trembles.</p> + + <p>That oak tree which appears</p> + + <p>So rustic and so rough,</p> + + <p>Even that has something warm in its sound heart;</p> + + <p>And hadst thou but a spirit and sense of love,</p> + + <p>Thou hadst found out a meaning for its whispers.</p> + + <p>Now tell me, would thou be</p> + + <p>Less than the very plants and have no love?</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>One seems to hear Sakuntala and her friends talking, or Akontios + complaining. So, too, when the unhappy lover laments (Aminta):</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>In my lamentings I have found</p> + + <p>A very pity in the pebbly waters,</p> + + <p>And I have found the trees</p> + + <p>Return them a kind voice:</p> + + <p>But never have I found,</p> + + <p>Nor ever hope to find,</p> + + <p>Compassion in this hard and beautiful</p> + + <p>What shall I call her?</p> + </div> + + <p>Aminta describes to Tirsis how his love grew from boyhood up:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>There grew by little and little in my heart,</p> + + <p>I knew not from what root,</p> + + <p>But just as the grass grows that sows itself,</p> + + <p>An unknown something which continually</p> + + <p>Made me feel anxious to be with her.</p> + </div> + + <p>Sylvia kisses him:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Never did bee from flower</p> + + <p>Suck sugar so divine</p> + + <p>As was the honey that I gathered then</p> + + <p>From those twin roses fresh.</p> + </div> + + <p>In Act II. Scene 1, the rejected Satyr, like the rejected + Polyphemus or Amaryllis in Theocritus, complains in antitheses which + recall Longos:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The woods hide serpents, lions, and bears under their green + shade, and in your bosom hatred, disdain, and cruelty dwell.... + Alas, when I bring the earliest flowers, you refuse them + obstinately, perhaps because <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg135" + id="pg135">135</a></span>lovelier ones bloom on your own face; if I + offer beautiful apples, you reject them angrily, perhaps because + your beautiful bosom swells with lovelier ones.... and yet I am not + to be despised, for I saw myself lately in the clear water, when + winds were still and there were no waves.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This is the sentimental pastoral poetry of Hellenism reborn and + intensified.</p> + + <p>So with the elegiac motive so loved by Alexandrian and Roman + poets, praise of a happy past time; the chorus sings in + <i>Aminta</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>O lovely age of gold,</p> + + <p>Not that the rivers rolled</p> + + <p>With milk, or that the woods wept honeydew;</p> + + <p>Not that the ready ground</p> + + <p>Produced without a wound,</p> + + <p>Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew....</p> + + <p>But solely that.... the law of gold,</p> + + <p>That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted,</p> + + <p>Which Nature's own hand wrote--What pleases is permitted!...</p> + + <p>Go! let us love, the daylight dies, is born;</p> + + <p>But unto us the light</p> + + <p>Dies once for all, and sleep brings on eternal night.</p> + </div> + + <p>Over thirty pastoral plays can be ascribed to Italy in the last + third of the sixteenth century. The most successful imitator of Tasso + was Giovanni Battista Guarini (born 1537) in <i>The True Shepherd (II + Pastor Fido)</i>. One quotation will shew how he outvied + <i>Aminta</i>. In Act I, Scene 1, Linko says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Look round thee, Sylvia; behold</p> + + <p>All in the world that's amiable and fair</p> + + <p>Is love's sweet work: heaven loves, the earth, the sea,</p> + + <p>Are full of love and own his mighty sway.</p> + + <p>Love through the woods</p> + + <p>The fiercest beasts; love through the waves attends</p> + + <p>Swift gliding dolphins and the sluggish whales.</p> + + <p>That little bird which sings....</p> + + <p>Oh, had he human sense,</p> + + <p>'I burn with love,' he'd cry, 'I burn with love,'</p> + + <p>And in his heart he truly burns,</p> + + <p>And in his warble speaks</p> + + <p>A language, well by his dear mate conceived,</p> + + <p>Who answering cries, 'And I too burn with love.'</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg136" id="pg136">136</a></span> + + <p>He praises woodland solitude:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Dear happy groves!</p> + + <p>And them all silent, solitary gloom,</p> + + <p>True residence of peace and of repose!</p> + + <p>How willingly, how willingly my steps</p> + + <p>To you return, and oh! if but my stars</p> + + <p>Benightly had decreed</p> + + <p>My life for solitude, and as my wish</p> + + <p>Would naturally prompt to pass my days--</p> + + <p>No, not the Elysian fields,</p> + + <p>Those happy gardens of the demi-gods,</p> + + <p>Would I exchange for yon enchanting shades.</p> + </div> + + <p>The love lyrics of the later Renaissance are remarkably rich in + vivid pictures of Nature combined with much personal sentiment. + Petrarch's are the model; he inspired Vittoria Colonna, and she too + revelled in sad feelings and memories, especially about the death of + her husband:<a href="#e12"><sup>[12]</sup></a></p> + + <p>'When I see the earth adorned and beautiful with a thousand lovely + and sweet flowers, and how in the heavens every star is resplendent + with varied colours; when I see that every solitary and lively + creature is moved by natural instinct to come out of the forests and + ancient caverns to seek its fellow by day and by night; and when I + see the plains adorned again with glorious flowers and new leaves, + and hear every babbling brook with grateful murmurs bathing its + flowery banks, so that Nature, in love with herself, delights to gaze + on the beauty of her works, I say to myself, reflecting: "How brief + is this our miserable mortal life!" Yesterday this plain was covered + with snow, to-day it is green and flowery. And again in a moment the + beauty of the heavens is overclouded by a fierce wind, and the happy + loving creatures remain hidden amidst the mountains and the woods; + nor can the sweet songs of the tender plants and happy birds be + heard, for these cruel storms have dried up the flowers on the + ground; the birds are mute, the most rapid <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg137" id="pg137">137</a></span>streams and + smallest rivulets are checked by frost, and what was one hour so + beautiful and joyous, is, for a season, miserable and dead.'</p> + + <p>Here the two pictures in the inner and outer life are equally + vivid to the poetess; it is the real 'pleasure of sorrow,' and she + lingers over them with delight.</p> + + <p>Bojardo, too, reminds us of Petrarch; for example, in Sonnet + 89:<a href="#e13"><sup>[13]</sup></a></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Thou shady wood, inured my griefs to hear,</p> + + <p>So oft expressed in quick and broken sighs;</p> + + <p>Thou glorious sun, unused to set or rise</p> + + <p>But as the witness of my daily fear;</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Ye wandering birds, ye flocks and ranging deer,</p> + + <p>Exempt from my consuming agonies;</p> + + <p>Thou sunny stream to whom my sorrow flies</p> + + <p>'Mid savage rocks and wilds, no human traces near.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>O witnesses eternal, how I live!</p> + + <p>My sufferings hear, and win to their relief</p> + + <p>That scornful beauty--tell her how I grieve!</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>But little 'tis to her to hear my grief.</p> + + <p>To her, who sees the pangs which I receive,</p> + + <p>And seeing, deigns them not the least relief.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Lorenzo de Medici's idylls were particularly rich in descriptions + of Nature and full of feeling. 'Here too that delight in pain, in + telling of their unhappiness and renunciation; here too those + wonderful tones which distinguish the sonnets of the fourteenth and + fifteenth centuries so favourably from those of a later time.' + (Geiger.)</p> + + <p>There is a delicate compliment in this sonnet:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>O violets, sweet and fresh and pure indeed,</p> + + <p>Culled by that hand beyond all others fair!</p> + + <p>What rain or what pure air has striven to bear</p> + + <p>Flowers far excelling those 'tis wont to yield?</p> + + <p>What pearly dew, what sun, or sooth what earth</p> + + <p>Did you with all these subtle charms adorn;</p> + + <p>And whence is this sweet scent by Nature drawn,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg138" id= + "pg138">138</a></span>Or heaven who deigns to grant it to such + worth?</p> + + <p>O, my dear violets, the hand which chose</p> + + <p>You from all others, that has made you fair,</p> + + <p>'Twas that adorned you with such charm and worth;</p> + + <p>Sweet hand! which took my heart altho' it knows</p> + + <p>Its lowliness, with that you may compare.</p> + + <p>To that give thanks, and to none else on earth.</p> + </div> + + <p>Thus we see that the Italians of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and + fifteenth centuries were penetrated through and through by the modern + spirit--were, indeed, its pioneers. They recognized their own + individuality, pondered their own inner life, delighted in the charms + of Nature, and described them in prose and poetry, both as + counterparts to feeling and for her own sake.</p> + + <p>Over all the literature we have been considering--whether poetic + comparison and personification, or sentimental descriptions of + pastoral life and a golden age, of blended inner and outer life, or + of the finest details of scenery--there lies that bloom of the + modern, that breath of subjective personality, so hard to define. The + rest of contemporary Europe had no such culture of heart and mind, no + such marked individuality, to shew.</p> + + <p>The further growth of the Renaissance feeling, itself a rebirth of + Hellenic and Roman feeling, was long delayed.</p> + + <p>Let us turn next to Spain and Portugal--the countries chiefly + affected by the great voyages of discovery, not only socially and + economically, but artistically--and see the effect of the new scenery + upon their imagination. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg139" id= + "pg139">139</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch5" id="ch5">CHAPTER V</a></h2> + + <h3>ENTHUSIASM FOR NATURE AMONG THE DISCOVERERS AND CATHOLIC + MYSTICS</h3> + + <p>The great achievement of the Italian Renaissance was the discovery + of the world within, of the whole deep contents of the human spirit. + Burckhart, praising this achievement, says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>If we were to collect the pearls from the courtly and knightly + poetry of all the countries of the West during the two preceding + centuries, we should have a mass of wonderful divinations and + single pictures of the inward life, which at first sight would seem + to rival the poetry of the Italians. Leaving lyrical poetry out of + account, Godfrey of Strassburg gives us, in his <i>Tristram and + Isolt</i>, a representation of human passion, some features of + which are immortal. But these pearls lie scattered in the ocean of + artificial convention, and they are altogether something very + different from a complete objective picture of the inward man and + his spiritual wealth.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The discovery of the beauty of scenery followed as a necessary + corollary of this awakening of individualism, this fathoming of the + depths of human personality. For only to fully-developed man does + Nature fully disclose herself.</p> + + <p>This had already been stated by one of the most philosophic minds + of the time, Pico della Mirandola, in his speech on the dignity of + man. God, he tells us, made man at the close of creation to know the + laws of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire its <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg140" id="pg140">140</a></span>greatness. He + bound him to no fixed place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no + iron necessity; but gave him freedom to will and to move.</p> + + <p>'I have set thee,' said the Creator to Adam, 'in the midst of the + world, that thou mayest the more easily behold and see all that is + therein. I created thee a being neither heavenly nor earthly, neither + mortal nor immortal, only that thou mightest be free to shape and to + overcome thyself. Thou mayest sink into a beast, and be born again to + the Divine likeness. The brutes bring with them from their mothers' + body what they will carry with them as long as they live; the higher + spirits are from the beginning, or soon after, what they will be for + ever. To thee alone is given a growth and a development depending on + thine own free will. Thou bearest in thee the germs of a universal + life.'</p> + + <p>The best men of the Renaissance realized this ideal of an + all-round development, and it was the glory of Italy in the + fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that she found a new realm in the + inner man at the very time that her discoveries across the seas were + enlarging the boundaries of the external world, and her science was + studying it. Mixed as the motives of the discoverers must have been, + like those of the crusaders before them, and probably, for the most + part, self-interested, it is easy to imagine the surprise they must + have felt at seeing ignorant people, who, to quote Peter Martyr (de + rebus oceanicis):<a href="#f1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Naked, without weights or measures or death-dealing money, live + in a Golden Age without laws, without slanderous judges, without + the scales of the balance. Contented with Nature, they spend their + lives utterly untroubled for the future.... Theirs is a Golden Age; + they do not enclose their farms with trench or wall or hurdle; + their gardens are open. Without laws, without the scales of the + balance, without judges, they guard the right by Nature's + light.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg141" id="pg141">141</a></span> + And their wonder at the novelties in climate and vegetation, the + strange forests, brilliant birds, and splendid stars of the tropics, + must have been no less.</p> + + <p>Yet it is one thing to feel, and another to find words to convey + the feeling to others; and the explorers often expressed regret for + their lack of skill in this respect.</p> + + <p>Also, and this is more important in criticizing what they wrote, + these seamen were mostly simple, unlettered folk, to whom a country's + wealth in natural products and their practical value made the + strongest appeal, and whose admiration of bays, harbours, trees, + fields of grain, etc., was measured by the same standard of utility. + Even such unskilled reporters did not entirely fail to refer to the + beauty of Nature; but had it not been for the original and powerful + mind of Christopher Columbus, we should have had little more in the + way of description than 'pleasant,' 'pretty,' and such words.</p> + + <p>Marco Polo described his journey to the coast of Cormos<a href= + "#f2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> in very matter-of-fact fashion, but not + without a touch of satisfaction at the peculiarities of the + place:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>You then approach the very beautiful plain of Formosa, watered + by fine rivers, with plantations of the date palms, and having the + air filled with francolins, parrots, and other birds unknown to our + climate. You ride two days to it, and then arrive at the ocean, on + which there is a city and a fort named Cormos. The ships of India + bring thither all kinds of spiceries, precious stones, and pearls, + cloths of silk and gold, elephants' teeth, and many other + articles.... They sow wheat, barley, and other kinds of grain in + the month of November, and reap them in March, when they become + ripe and perfect; but none except the date will endure till May, + being dried up by the extreme heat.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Elsewhere he wrote of scenery in the same strain: of the Persian + deserts, and the green table-lands and wild gorges of Badachshan, + Japan with its golden <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg142" id= + "pg142">142</a></span>roofed palaces, paradisaical Sunda Islands with + their 'abundance of treasure and costly spices,' Java the less with + its eight kingdoms, etc.; but naturally his chief interest was given + to the manners and customs of the various races, and the fertility + and uses of their countries.</p> + + <p>In Bishop Osorio's <i>History of Emmanuel, King of Portugal</i>, + we see some pleasure in the beauties of Nature peeping through the + matter-of-fact tone of the day.</p> + + <p>Thus, speaking of the companions of Vasco da Gama, he says that + they admired the far coast of Africa:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>They descried some little islands, which appeared extremely + pleasant; the trees were lofty, the meadows of a beautiful verdure, + and great numbers of cattle frisked about everywhere; they could + see the inhabitants walking upon the shore in vast numbers....</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Of Mozambique he says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The palm trees are of a great height, covered with long prickly + leaves; broad-spreading boughs afford an agreeable shade, and bear + nuts of a great size, called cocoes.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Of Melinda:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The city stands in a beautiful plain, surrounded with a variety + of fine gardens; these are stocked with all sorts of trees, + especially the orange, the flowers of which yield a most graceful + diffusive smell. The country is rich and plentiful, abounding not + only with tame and domestic cattle, but with game of all kinds, + which the natives hunt down or take with nets.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Of Zanzibar:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The soil of this place is rich and fertile, and it abounds with + springs of the most excellent water; the whole island is covered + with beautiful woods, which are extremely fragrant from the many + wild citrons growing there, which diffuse the most grateful + scent.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Of Brazil, which is 'extremely pleasant and the soil + fruitful':</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg143" id= + "pg143">143</a></span></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Clothed with a beautiful verdure, covered with tall trees, + abounding with plenty of excellent water ... and so healthy that + the inhabitants make no use of medicines, for almost all who die + here are not cut off by any distemper, but worn out by age. Here + are many large rivers, besides a vast number of delightful springs. + The plains are large and spacious, and afford excellent pasture.... + In short, the whole country affords a most beautiful prospect, + being diversified with hills and valleys, and these covered with + thick shady woods stocked with great variety of trees, many of + which our people were quite strangers to: of these there was one of + a particular nature, the leaves of which, when cut, sent forth a + kind of balsam. The trees used in dyeing scarlet grow here in great + plenty and to a great height. The soil likewise produces the most + useful plants.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Of Ormuz, near Arabia:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The name of the island seems to be taken from the ancient city + of Armuza in Caramania ... the place is sandy and barren, and the + soil so very poor that it produces nothing fit for human + sustenance, neither by nature nor by the most laborious cultivation + ... yet here you might see greater plenty of these, as well as all + luxurious superfluities, than in most other countries of a richer + and more fertile soil, for the place, poor in itself, having become + the great mart for the commodities of India, Persia, and Arabia, + was thus abundantly stocked with the produce of all these + countries.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Peter Martyr's<a href="#f3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> point of view was + much the same. He was full of surprise at the splendour round him, + and the advantages such fertility offered to husbandry:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Thus after a few days with cheerful hearts they espied the land + long looked for....</p> + + <p>As they coasted along by the shore of certain of these islands, + they heard nightingales sing in the thick woods in the month of + November.</p> + + <p>They found also great rivers of fresh water and natural havens + of capacity to harbour great navies of ships.... They found there + wild geese, turtle-doves, and ducks, much greater than ours, and as + white <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg144" id= + "pg144">144</a></span>as swans, with heads of purple colour. Also + popinjays, of the which some are green, some yellow, and having + their feathers intermingled with green, yellow, and purple, which + varieties delighted the sense not a little.... They entered into a + main large sea, having in it innumerable islands, marvellously + differing one from another; for some of them were very fruitful, + full of herbs and trees, other some very dry, barren, and rough, + with high rocky mountains of stone, whereof some were of bright + blue, or azurine colour, and other glistening white.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He filled a whole page with descriptions of the wonderful wealth + of flowers, fruit, and vegetables of all kinds, which the ground + yields even in February. The richness of the prairie grass, the charm + of the rivers, the wealth of fruit, the enormous size of the trees + (with a view to native houses), the various kinds of pines, palms, + and chestnuts, and their uses, the immense downfall of water carried + to the sea by the rivers--all this he noted with admiration; but + industrial interest outweighed the æsthetic, even when he called + Spain happier than Italy. There is no trace of any real feeling for + scenery, any grasp of landscape as a whole; he did not advance beyond + scattered details, which attracted his eye chiefly for their material + uses.</p> + + <p>But there is real delight in Nature in the account of a journey to + the Cape Verde Islands, undertaken on the suggestion of Henry the + Navigator by Aloise da Mosto,<a href="#f4"><sup>[4]</sup></a> an + intelligent Venetian nobleman:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Cape de Verde is so called because the Portuguese, who had + discovered it about a year before, found it covered with trees, + which continue green all the year round. This is a high and + beautiful Cape, which runs a good length into the sea, and has two + hills or little mountains at the point thereof. There are several + villages of negroes from Senega, on and about the promontory, who + dwell in thatched houses close to the shore, and in sight of those + who sail by.... The coast is all low and full of fine large trees, + which are constantly green; that is, they never wither as those in + Europe do, for the new leaves grow before the <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg145" id="pg145">145</a></span>old ones fall + off. These trees are so near the shore that they seem to drink out + of the sea. It is a most beautiful coast to behold, and the author, + who had sailed both in the East and West, never saw any comparable + with it.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>As Ruge says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The delight of this solid and prudent citizen of Strasburg in + the beauty of the tropics is lost in translation, but very evident + in the original account.<a href="#f5"><sup>[5]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>After reading it, we cannot quite say with Humboldt that Columbus + was the very first to give fluent expression to Nature's beauty on + the shores of the New World; none the less, and apart from his + importance in other respects, he remains the chief representative of + his time in the matter. Humboldt noted this in his critical + examination of the history of geography in the fifteenth and + sixteenth centuries, in which he pointed out his deep feeling for + Nature, and also, what only those who know the difficulties of + language at the time can appreciate, the beauty and simplicity of his + expression of it.<a href="#f6"><sup>[6]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Columbus is a striking example of the fact that a man's openness + to Nature increases with his general inner growth. No one doubts that + uneducated sailors, like other unlettered people, are vividly + impressed by fine scenery, especially when it is new to them, if they + possess a spark of mental refinement. They have the feeling, but are + unable to express it in words. But, as Humboldt says, feeling + improves speech; with increased culture, the power of expression + increases.</p> + + <p>We owe a debt of gratitude to Fernandez de Navarrete<a href= + "#f7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> for the Diary in which we can trace + Columbus' love for Nature increasing to 'a deep and poetic feeling + for the majesty of creation.'</p> + + <p>He wrote, October 8th, 1492, in his diary:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>'Thanks be to God,' says the Admiral, 'the air is very soft like + the April at Seville, and it is a pleasure to be there, so balmy + are the breezes.'</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg146" id="pg146">146</a></span> + And Humboldt says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The physiognomy and forms of the vegetation, the impenetrable + thickets of the forests, in which one can scarcely distinguish the + stems to which the several blossoms and leaves belong, the wild + luxuriance of the flowering soil along the humid shores, and the + rose-coloured flamingoes which, fishing at early morning at the + mouth of the rivers, impart animation to the scenery,--all in turn + arrested the attention of the old mariner as he sailed along the + shores of Cuba, between the small Lucayan Islands and the + Jardinillos.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Each new country seemed to him more beautiful than the last; he + complained that he could not find new words in which to give the + Queen an impression of the beauty of the Cuban coast.</p> + + <p>It will repay us to examine the Diary more closely, since Humboldt + only treated it shortly and in scattered extracts, and it has been + partly falsified, unintentionally, by attempts to modernize the + language instead of adhering to literal translation. What Peschel + says, for instance, is pretty but distinctly exaggerated:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Columbus was never weary of listening to the nightingales, + comparing the genial Indian climate with the Andalusian spring, and + admiring the luxuriant wilderness on these humid shores, with their + dense vegetation and forests so rich in all kinds of plants, and + alive with swarms of parrots ... with an open eye for all the + beauties of Nature and all the wonders of creation, he looked at + the splendour of the tropics very much as a tender father looks + into the bright eyes of his child.<a href= + "#f8"><sup>[8]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The Diary of November 3rd says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>He could see nothing, owing to the dense foliage of the trees, + which were very fresh and odoriferous; so that he felt no doubt + that there were aromatic herbs among them. He said that all he saw + was so beautiful that his eyes could never tire of gazing upon such + loveliness, nor his ears of listening to the songs of birds.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>November 14th:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>He saw so many islands that he could not count them all, with + very high land covered with trees of many kinds and an infinite + number of palms. He was much <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg147" + id="pg147">147</a></span>astonished to see so many lofty islands, + and assured the Sovereigns that the mountains and islands he had + seen since yesterday seemed to him to be second to none in the + world, so high and clear of clouds and snow, with the sea at their + bases so deep.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>November 25th:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>He saw a large stream of beautiful water falling from the + mountains above, with a loud noise.... Just then the sailor boys + called out that they had found large pines. The Admiral looked up + the hill and saw that they were so wonderfully large, that he could + not exaggerate their height and straightness, like stout yet fine + spindles. He perceived that here there was material for great store + of planks and masts for the largest ships in Spain ... the + mountains are very high, whence descend many limpid streams, and + all the hills are covered with pines, and an infinity of diverse + and beautiful trees.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>November 27th:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The freshness and beauty of the trees, the clearness of the + water and the birds, made it all so delightful that he wished never + to leave them. He said to the men who were with him that to give a + true relation to the Sovereigns of the things they had seen, a + thousand tongues would not suffice, nor his hand to write it, for + that it was like a scene of enchantment.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>December 13th:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The nine men well armed, whom he sent to explore a certain + place, said, with regard to the beauty of the land they saw, that + the best land in Castille could not be compared with it. The + Admiral also said that there was no comparison between them, nor + did the Plain of Cordova come near them, the difference being as + great as between night and day. They said that all these lands were + cultivated, and that a very wide and large river passed through the + centre of the valley and could irrigate all the fields. All the + trees were green and full of fruit, and the plants tall and covered + with flowers. The roads were broad and good. The climate was like + April in Castille; the nightingale and other birds sang as they do + in Spain during that month, and it was the most pleasant place in + the world. Some birds sing sweetly at night, the crickets and frogs + are heard a good deal.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg148" id="pg148">148</a></span> + All this shews a naive and spontaneous delight in Nature, as free + from sentimentality as from any grasp of landscape as a distinct + entity.</p> + + <p>In a letter about Cuba, which Humboldt gives, he says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The lands are high, and there are many very lofty mountains ... + all most beautiful, of a thousand different shapes, accessible and + covered with trees of a thousand kinds of such great height that + they seemed to reach the skies. I am told that the trees never lose + their foliage, and I can well believe it, for I observed that they + were as green and luxuriant as in Spain in the month of May. Some + were in bloom, others bearing fruit, and others otherwise according + to their nature. There were palm trees of six or eight kinds, + wonderful in their beautiful variety; but this is the case with all + the other trees; fruits and grasses, trees, plants and fruits + filled us with admiration. It contains extraordinary pine groves + and very extensive plains.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Humboldt here comments that these often-repeated expressions of + admiration prove a strong feeling for the beauty of Nature, since + they are concerned with foliage and shade, not with precious metals. + The next letter shews the growing power of description:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Reaching the harbour of Bastimentos, I put in.... The storm and + a rapid current kept me in for fourteen days, when I again set + sail, but not with favourable weather.... I had already made four + leagues when the storm recommenced and wearied me to such a degree + that I absolutely knew not what to do; my wound re-opened, and for + nine days my life was despaired of. Never was the sea seen so high, + so terrific, and so covered with foam; not only did the wind oppose + our proceeding onward, but it also rendered it highly dangerous to + run in for any headland, and kept me in that sea, which seemed to + me a sea of blood, seething like a cauldron on a mighty fire. Never + did the sky look more fearful; during one day and one night it + burned like a furnace, and emitted flashes in such fashion that + each time I looked to see if my masts and my sails were not + destroyed; these flashes came with such alarming fury that we all + thought the ship must have been consumed. All this time the waters + from heaven never ceased, not to say that it <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg149" id="pg149">149</a></span>rained, for it + was like a repetition of the Deluge. The men were at this time so + crushed in spirit, that they longed for death as a deliverance from + so many martyrdoms. Twice already had the ships suffered loss in + boats, anchors, and rigging, and were now lying bare without + sails.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>These extracts shew how feeling for Nature in unlettered minds + could develop into an enthusiasm which begot to some extent its own + power of expression. Columbus was entirely deficient in all previous + knowledge of natural history; but he was gifted with deep feeling + (the account of the nocturnal visions in the <i>Lettera Rarissima</i> + is proof of this)<a href="#f9"><sup>[9]</sup></a>, mental energy, and + a capacity for exact observation which many of the other explorers + did not possess, and these faculties made up for what he lacked in + education.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>In Cuba alone, he distinguishes seven or eight different species + of palm more beautiful and taller than the date tree; he informs + his learned friend Anghiera that he has seen pines and palms + wonderfully associated together in one and the same plain, and he + even so acutely observed the vegetation around him, that he was the + first to notice that there were pines in the mountains of Cibao, + whose fruits are not fir cones but berries like the olives of the + Axarafe de Sevilla.</p> + + <p>(<i>Cosmos.</i>)</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Most of Vespucci's narratives of travel, especially his letters to + the Medici, only contain adventures and descriptions of manners and + customs. He lacked the originality and enthusiasm which gave the + power of the wing to Columbus.</p> + + <p>That imposing Portuguese poem, the <i>Lusiad</i> of Camoens, is + full of jubilation over the discovery of the New World. Camoens made + his notes of foreign places at first hand; he had served as a + soldier, fought at the foot of Atlas in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, + had doubled the Cape twice, and, inspired by a deep love for Nature, + had spent sixteen years in examining the phenomena of the ocean on + the Indian and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg150" id= + "pg150">150</a></span>Chinese shores. He was a great sea painter. His + poetic and inventive power remind one at times of Dante--for + instance, in the description of the Dream Face; and he pictures + foreign lands with the clearness and detail of the discoverers and + later travellers. Here and there his poetry is like the Diary of + Columbus translated into verse--epic verse.</p> + + <p>He had the same fiery spirit, nerve, and fresh insight, with the + poet's gift added.</p> + + <p>(None the less, the classic apparatus of deities in Thetys' + <i>Apology</i> is no adornment.)</p> + + <p>Comparisons from Nature and animals are few but detailed:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>E'en as the prudent ants which towards their nest</p> + + <p>Bearing the apportioned heavy burden go,</p> + + <p>Exercise all their forces at their best,</p> + + <p>Hostile to hostile winter's frost and snow;</p> + + <p>There, all their toils and labours stand confessed,</p> + + <p>There, never looked-for energy they show;</p> + + <p>So, from the Lusitanians to avert</p> + + <p>Their horrid Fate, the nymphs their power exert.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Thus, as in some sequestered sylvan mere</p> + + <p>The frogs (the Lycian people formerly),</p> + + <p>If that by chance some person should appear</p> + + <p>While out of water they incautious be,</p> + + <p>Awake the pool by hopping here and there,</p> + + <p>To fly the danger which they deem they see,</p> + + <p>And gathering to some safe retreat they know,</p> + + <p>Only their heads above the water show--So fly the Moors.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>E'en as when o'er the parching flame there glows</p> + + <p>A flame, which may from some chance cause ignite,</p> + + <p>(All while the whistling, puffing Boreas blows),</p> + + <p>Fanned by the wind sets all the growth alight,</p> + + <p>The shepherd's group, lying in their repose</p> + + <p>Of quiet sleep, aroused in wild afright</p> + + <p>At crackling flames that spread both wide and high,</p> + + <p>Gather their goods and to the village fly;</p> + + <p>So doth the Moor.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>E'en as the daisy which once brightly smiled,</p> + + <p>Plucked by unruly hands before its hour,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg151" id= + "pg151">151</a></span>And harshly treated by the careless + child,</p> + + <p>All in her chaplet tied with artless power.</p> + + <p>Droops, of its colour and its scent despoiled,</p> + + <p>So seems this pale and lifeless damsel flower;</p> + + <p>The roses of her lips are dry and dead,</p> + + <p>With her sweet life the mingled white and red.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>The following simile reminds us of the far-fetched comparison of + Apollonios Rhodios<a href="#f11"><sup>[11]</sup></a>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>As the reflected lustre from the bright</p> + + <p>Steel mirror, or of beauteous crystal fine,</p> + + <p>Which, being stricken by the solar light,</p> + + <p>Strikes back and on some other part doth shine;</p> + + <p>And when, to please the child's vain curious sight,</p> + + <p>Moved o'er the house, as may his hand incline,</p> + + <p>Dances on walls and roof and everywhere,</p> + + <p>Restless and tremulous, now here now there,</p> + + <p>So did the wandering judgment fluctuate.</p> + </div> + + <p>He says of Diana:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>And, as confronted on her way she pressed,</p> + + <p>So beautiful her form and bearing were,</p> + + <p>That everything that saw her love confessed,</p> + + <p>The stars, the heaven, and the surrounding air.</p> + </div> + + <p>The Indus and Ganges are personified in stanza xiv. 74, the Cape + in v. 50.</p> + + <p>His time references are mostly mixed up with ancient + mythology:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>As soon, however, as the enamelled morn</p> + + <p>O'er the calm heaven her lovely looks outspread,</p> + + <p>Opening to bright Hyperion, new-born,</p> + + <p>Her purple portals as he raised his head,</p> + + <p>Then the whole fleet their ships with flags adorn.</p> + </div> + + <p>and:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>So soon, however, as great Sol has spread</p> + + <p>His rays o'er earth, whom instantly to meet,</p> + + <p>Her purple brow Aurora rising shews,</p> + + <p>And rudely life around the horizon throws.</p> + </div> + + <p>He is at his best in writing of the sea.</p> + + <p>He says of the explorers on first setting sail: <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg152" id="pg152">152</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Now were they sailing o'er wide ocean bright,</p> + + <p>The restless waves dividing as they flew;</p> + + <p>The winds were breathing prosperous and light,</p> + + <p>The vessels' hollow sails were filled to view;</p> + + <p>The seas were covered o'er with foaming white</p> + + <p>Where the advancing prows were cutting through</p> + + <p>The consecrated waters of the deep....</p> + + <p>Thus went we forth these unknown seas to explore,</p> + + <p>Which by no people yet explored had been;</p> + + <p>Seeing new isles and climes which long before</p> + + <p>Great Henry, first discoverer, had seen.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Now did the moon in purest lustre rise</p> + + <p>On Neptune's silvery waves her beams to pour,</p> + + <p>With stars attendant glittered all the skies,</p> + + <p>E'en like a meadow daisy-spangled o'er;</p> + + <p>The fury of the winds all peaceful lies</p> + + <p>In the dark caverns close along the shore,</p> + + <p>But still the night-watch constant vigils keep,</p> + + <p>As long had been their custom on the deep.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>To tell thee of the dangers of the sea</p> + + <p>At length, which human understanding scare,</p> + + <p>Thunder-storms, sudden, dreadful in degree,</p> + + <p>Lightnings, which seem to set on fire the air,</p> + + <p>Dark floods of rain, nights of obscurity,</p> + + <p>Rollings of thunder which the world would tear,</p> + + <p>Were not less labour than a great mistake,</p> + + <p>E'en if I had an iron voice to speak.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>He describes the electric fires of St Elmo and the gradual + development of the waterspout:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>I saw, and clearly saw, the living light</p> + + <p>Which sailors everywhere as sacred hold</p> + + <p>In time of storm and crossing winds that fight,</p> + + <p>Of tempest dark and desperation cold;</p> + + <p>Nor less it was to all a marvel quite,</p> + + <p>And matter surely to alarm the bold,</p> + + <p>To observe the sea-clouds, with a tube immense,</p> + + <p>Suck water up from Ocean's deep expanse....</p> + + <p>A fume or vapour thin and subtle rose,</p> + + <p>And by the wind begin revolving there;</p> + + <p>Thence to the topmost clouds a tube it throws,</p> + + <p>But of a substance so exceeding rare....</p> + + <p>But when it was quite gorged it then withdrew</p> + + <p>The foot that on the sea beneath had grown,</p> + + <p>And o'er the heavens in fine it raining flew,</p> + + <p>The jacent waters watering with its own.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg153" id="pg153">153</a></span> + The storm at sea reminds us of Æschylus in splendour:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The winds were such, that scarcely could they shew</p> + + <p>With greater force or greater rage around,</p> + + <p>Than if it were this purpose then to blow</p> + + <p>The mighty tower of Babel to the ground....</p> + + <p>Now rising to the clouds they seem to go</p> + + <p>O'er the wild waves of Neptune borne on end;</p> + + <p>Now to the bowels of the deep below;</p> + + <p>It seems to all their senses, they descend;</p> + + <p>Notus and Auster, Boreas, Aquila,</p> + + <p>The very world's machinery would rend;</p> + + <p>While flashings fire the black and ugly night</p> + + <p>And shed from pole to pole a dazzling light....</p> + + <p>But now the star of love beamed forth its ray,</p> + + <p>Before the sun, upon the horizon clear,</p> + + <p>And visited, as messenger of day,</p> + + <p>The earth and spreading sea, with brow to cheer....</p> + </div> + + <p>And, as it subsides:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The mountains that we saw at first appeared,</p> + + <p>In the far view, like clouds and nothing more.</p> + </div> + + <p>Off the coast of India:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Now o'er the hills broke forth the morning light</p> + + <p>Where Ganges' stream is murmuring heard to flow,</p> + + <p>Free from the storm and from the first sea's fight,</p> + + <p>Vain terror from their hearts is banished now.</p> + </div> + + <p>His magic island, the Ilha of Venus, could only have been imagined + by a poet who had travelled widely. All the delights of the New World + are there, with the vegetation of Southern Europe added. It is a + poet's triumphant rendering of impressions which the discoverers so + often felt their inability to convey:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>From far they saw the island fresh and fair,</p> + + <p>Which Venus o'er the waters guiding drove</p> + + <p>(E'en as the wind the canvas white doth bear)....</p> + + <p>Where the coast forms a bay for resting-place,</p> + + <p>Curved and all quiet, and whose shining sand</p> + + <p>Is painted with red shells by Venus' hand....</p> + + <p>Three beauteous mounts rise nobly to the view,</p> + + <p>Lifting with graceful pride their sweeling head,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg154" id= + "pg154">154</a></span>O'er which enamelled grass adorning grew.</p> + + <p>In this delightful lovely island glad,</p> + + <p>Bright limpid streams their rushing waters threw</p> + + <p>From heights with rich luxuriant verdure clad,</p> + + <p>'Midst the white rocks above, their source derive,</p> + + <p>The streams sonorous, sweet, and fugitive....</p> + + <p>A thousand trees toward heaven their summits raise,</p> + + <p>With fruits odoriferous and fair;</p> + + <p>The orange in its produce bright displays</p> + + <p>The tint that Daphne carried in her hair;</p> + + <p>The citron on the ground its branches lays,</p> + + <p>Laden with yellow weights it cannot bear;</p> + + <p>The beauteous melons, which the whole perfume</p> + + <p>The virgin bosom in their form assume.</p> + + <p>The forest trees, which on the hills combine</p> + + <p>To ennoble them with leafy hair o'ergrown,</p> + + <p>Are poplars of Alcides; laurels shine,</p> + + <p>The which the shining God loved as his own;</p> + + <p>Myrtles of Cytherea with the pine</p> + + <p>Of Cybele, by other love o'erthrown;</p> + + <p>The spreading cypress tree points out where lies</p> + + <p>The seat of the ethereal paradise....</p> + + <p>Pomegranates rubicund break forth and shine,</p> + + <p>A tint whereby thou, ruby, losest sheen.</p> + + <p>'Twixt the elm branches hangs the jocund vine,</p> + + <p>With branches some of red and some of green....</p> + + <p>Then the refined and splendid tapestry,</p> + + <p>Covering the rustic ground beneath the feet,</p> + + <p>Makes that of Achemeina dull to be,</p> + + <p>But makes the shady valley far more sweet.</p> + + <p>Cephisian flowers with head inclined we see</p> + + <p>About the calm and lucid lake's retreat....</p> + + <p>'Twas difficult to fancy which was true,</p> + + <p>Seeing on heaven and earth all tints the same,</p> + + <p>If fair Aurora gave the flowers their time,</p> + + <p>Or from the lovely flowers to her it came;</p> + + <p>Flora and Zephyr there in painting drew</p> + + <p>The violets tinted, as of lovers' flame,</p> + + <p>The iris, and the rose all fair and fresh</p> + + <p>E'en as it doth on cheek of maiden blush....</p> + + <p>Along the water sings the snow-white swan,</p> + + <p>While from the branch respondeth Philomel....</p> + + <p>Here, in its bill, to the dear nest, with care,</p> + + <p>The rapid little bird the food doth bear.</p> + </div> + + <p>Subjective feeling for Nature is better displayed in the lyric + than the epic.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg155" id="pg155">155</a></span> + The Spaniard, Fray Luis de Leon, was a typical example of a + sixteenth-century lyrist; full of mild enthusiasm for Nature, the + theosophico-mystical attitude of the Catholic.</p> + + <p>A most fervid feeling for Nature from the religious side breathed + in St Francis of Assisi--the feeling which inspired his hymn to + Brother Sun (<i>Cantico del Sole</i>), and led his brother Egidio, + intoxicated with love to his Creator, to kiss trees and rocks and + weep over them<a href="#f12"><sup>[12]</sup></a>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Praised by His creatures all,</p> + + <p>Praised be the Lord my God</p> + + <p>By Messer Sun, my brother above all,</p> + + <p>Who by his rays lights us and lights the day--</p> + + <p>Radiant is she, with his great splendour stored,</p> + + <p>Thy glory, Lord, confessing.</p> + + <p>By Sister Moon and Stars my Lord is praised,</p> + + <p>Where clear and fair they in the heavens are raised</p> + + <p>By Brother Wind, etc....</p> + </div> + + <p>His follower, Bonaventura, too, in his verses counted--</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The smallest creatures his brothers and sisters, and called upon + crops, vineyards, trees, flowers, and stars to praise God.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Bernard von Clairvaux made it a principle 'to learn from the + earth, trees, corn, flowers, and grass'; and he wrote in his letter + to Heinrich Murdach (Letter 106):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Believe me, I have proved it; you will find more in the woods + than in books; trees and stones will teach you what no other + teacher can.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He looked upon all natural objects as 'rays of the Godhead,' + copies of a great original.</p> + + <p>His contemporary, Hugo von St Victor, wrote:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The whole visible world is like a book written by the finger of + God. It is created by divine power, and all human beings are + figures placed in it, not to shew the free-will of man, but as a + revelation and visible sign, by divine will, of God's invisible + wisdom. But <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg156" id= + "pg156">156</a></span>as one who only glances at an open book sees + marks on it, but does not read the letters, so the wicked and + sensual man, in whom the spirit of God is not, sees only the outer + surface of visible beings and not their deeper parts.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>German mystics wrote in the same strain; for instance, the popular + Franciscan preacher, Berthold von Regensburg (1272),</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Whose sermons on fields and meadows drew many thousands of + hearers, and moved them partly by the unusual freshness and + vitality of his pious feeling for Nature,</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>in spite of many florid symbolical accessories, such as we find + again in Ekkehart and other fifteenth-century mystics, and especially + in Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek.</p> + + <p>The northern prophetess and foundress of an Order Birgitta (1373) + held that the breath of the Creator was in all visible things: 'We + feel it pervading us in her visions,' says Hammerich,<a href= + "#f13"><sup>[13]</sup></a></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Whether by gurgling brook or snow-covered firs. It is with us + when the prophetess leads us along the ridges of the Swedish coast + with their surging waves or down the shaft of a mine, or to wander + in the quiet of evening through vineyards between roses and lilies, + while the dew is falling and the bells ring out the Ave Maria.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Vincentius von Beauvais (1264) in his <i>Speculum Naturæ</i> + demonstrates the value of studying Nature from a religious and moral + point of view; and the Carthusian general, Dionysius von Rickel + (1471), in his paper <i>On the beauty of the world and the glory of + God (De venustate mundi et de pulchritudine Dei)</i> says in Chapter + xxii.: 'All the beauty of the animal world is nothing but the + reflection and out-flow of the original beauty of God,' and gives as + special examples:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Roses, lilies, and other beautiful and fragrant flowers, shady + woods, pine trees, pleasant meadows, <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg157" id="pg157">157</a></span>high, mountains, springs, streams + and rivers, and the broad arm of the immeasurable sea ... and above + all shine the stars, completing their course in the clear sky in + wonderful splendour and majestic order.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Raymundus von Sabieude, a Spaniard, who studied medicine and + philosophy at Toulouse, and wrote his <i>Theologia Naturalis</i> in + 1436, considered Nature, like Thomas Aquinas, from a mystical and + scholastic point of view, as made up of living beings in a graduated + scale from the lowest to the highest; and he lauded her in terms + which even Pope Clement VII. thought exaggerated. Piety in him went + hand in hand with a natural philosophy like Bacon's, and his interest + in Nature was rather a matter of intellect than feeling.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>God has given us two books--the book of all living beings, or + Nature, and the Holy Scriptures. The first was given to man from + the beginning when all things were created, for each living being + is but a letter of the alphabet written by the finger of God, and + the book is composed of them all together as a book is of letters + ... man is the capital letter of this book. This book is not like + the other, falsified and spoilt, but familiar and intelligible; it + makes man joyous and humble and obedient, a hater of evil and a + lover of virtue.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Among the savants of the Renaissance who applied the inductive + method to Nature before Bacon,<a href="#f14"><sup>[14]</sup></a> we + must include the thoughtful and pious Spaniard Luis Vives (1540), who + wrote concerning the useless speculations of alchemists and + astrologers about occult things: 'It is not arguing that is needed + here, but silent observation of Nature.' Knowledge of Nature, he + said, would serve both body and soul.</p> + + <p>The tender religious lyrics of the mystic, Luis de Leon, followed + next.<a href="#f16"><sup>[16]</sup></a> His life (1521-1591) brings + us up to the days of the Inquisition. He himself, an excellent + teacher and man of science, was imprisoned for years for opinions too + openly expressed in his writings; but with all his varied fortunes he + never <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg158" id= + "pg158">158</a></span>lost his innate manliness and tenderness. His + biographer tells us, that as soon as the holidays began, he would + hurry away from the gloomy lecture rooms and the noisy students at + Salamanca, to the country, where he had taken an estate belonging to + a monastery at the foot of a hill by a river, with a little island + close by.</p> + + <p>It had a large uncultivated garden, made beautiful by fine old + trees, with paths among the vines and a stream running through it to + the river, and a long avenue of poplars whose rustle blended with the + noise of the mill-wheel. Beyond was a view of fields. Leon would sit + for hours here undisturbed, dipping his feet in the brook under a + poplar--the tree which was reputed to flourish on sand alone and give + shelter to all the birds under heaven--while the rustle of the leaves + sang his melancholy to sleep. His biographer goes on to say that he + had the Spaniard's special delight in Nature, and understood her + language and her secrets; and the veiled splendour of her tones, + colours, and forms could move him to tears. As he sat there gazing at + the clouds, he felt lifted up in heart by the insignificance of all + things in comparison with the spirit of man.</p> + + <p>In the pitching and tossing of his 'ships of thought' he never + lost the consciousness of Nature's beauty, and would pray the clouds + to carry his sighs with them in their tranquil course through heaven. + He loved the sunrise, birds, flowers, bees, fishes; nothing was + meaningless to him; all things were letters in a divine alphabet, + which might bring him a message from above. Nature was symbolic; the + glow of dawn meant the glow of divine love; a wide view, true + freedom; rays of sunshine, rays of divine glory; the setting sun, + eternal light; stars, flowers of light in an everlasting spring.</p> + + <p>His love for the country, especially for its peacefulness, was + free from the folly and excess of the pastoral poetry of his day. He + did not paint Nature <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg159" id= + "pg159">159</a></span>entirely for her own sake; man was always her + master<a href="#f15"><sup>[15]</sup></a> in his poems, and he + sometimes, very finely, introduced himself and his affairs at the + close, and represented Nature as addressing himself.</p> + + <p>His descriptions are short, and he often tries to represent sounds + onomato-poetically.</p> + + <p>This is from his ode, <i>Quiet Life</i><a href= + "#f17"><sup>[17]</sup></a>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>O happy he who flies</p> + + <p>Far from the noisy world away--</p> + + <p>Who with the worthy and the wise</p> + + <p>Hath chosen the narrow way.</p> + + <p>The silence of the secret road</p> + + <p>That leads the soul to virtue and to God!...</p> + + <p>O streams, and shades, and hills on high,</p> + + <p>Unto the stillness of your breast</p> + + <p>My wounded spirit longs to fly--</p> + + <p>To fly and be at rest.</p> + + <p>Thus from the world's tempestuous sea,</p> + + <p>O gentle Nature, do I turn to thee....</p> + + <p>A garden by the mountain side</p> + + <p>Is mine, whose flowery blossoming</p> + + <p>Shews, even in spring's luxuriant pride,</p> + + <p>What Autumn's suns shall bring:</p> + + <p>And from mountain's lofty crown</p> + + <p>A clear and sparkling rill comes tumbling down;</p> + + <p>Then, pausing in its downward force</p> + + <p>The venerable trees among,</p> + + <p>It gurgles on its winding course;</p> + + <p>And, as it glides along,</p> + + <p>Gives freshness to the day and pranks</p> + + <p>With ever changing flowers its mossy banks.</p> + + <p>The whisper of the balmy breeze</p> + + <p>Scatters a thousand sweets around,</p> + + <p>And sweeps in music through the trees</p> + + <p>With an enchanting sound</p> + + <p>That laps the soul in calm delight</p> + + <p>Where crowns and kingdoms are forgotten quite.</p> + </div> + + <p>The poem, <i>The Starry Sky</i>,<a href="#f18"><sup>[18]</sup></a> + is full of lofty enthusiasm for Nature and piety:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When yonder glorious sky</p> + + <p>Lighted with million lamps I contemplate,</p> + + <p>And turn my dazzled eye</p> + + <p>To this vain mortal state</p> + + <p>All mean and visionary, mean and desolate,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg160" id="pg160">160</a></span>A + mingled joy and grief</p> + + <p>Fills all my soul with dark solicitude....</p> + + <p>List to the concert pure</p> + + <p>Of yon harmonious countless worlds of light.</p> + + <p>See, in his orbit sure</p> + + <p>Each takes his journey bright,</p> + + <p>Led by an unseen hand through the vast maze of night.</p> + + <p>See how the pale moon rolls</p> + + <p>Her silver wheel....</p> + + <p>See Saturn, father of the golden hours,</p> + + <p>While round him, bright and blest,</p> + + <p>The whole empyrean showers</p> + + <p>Its glorious streams of light on this low world of ours.</p> + + <p>But who to these can turn</p> + + <p>And weigh them 'gainst a weeping world like this,</p> + + <p>Nor feel his spirit burn</p> + + <p>To grasp so sweet a bliss</p> + + <p>And mourn that exile hard which here his portion is?</p> + + <p>For there, and there alone,</p> + + <p>Are peace and joy and never dying love:</p> + + <p>Day that shall never cease,</p> + + <p>No night there threatening,</p> + + <p>No winter there to chill joy's ever-during spring.</p> + + <p>Ye fields of changeless green</p> + + <p>Covered with living streams and fadeless flowers;</p> + + <p>Thou paradise serene,</p> + + <p>Eternal joyful hours</p> + + <p>Thy disembodied soul shall welcome in thy towers!</p> + </div> + + <p>It was chiefly in Spanish literature at this time that Nature was + used allegorically. Tieck<a href="#f19"><sup>[19]</sup></a> says: 'In + Calderon's poetry, and that of his contemporaries, we often find, in + romances and song-like metres, most charming descriptions of the sea, + mountains, gardens, and woody valleys, but almost always used + allegorically, and with an artistic polish which ends by giving us, + not so much a real impression of Nature, as one of clever description + in musical verse, repeated again and again with slight variations.' + This is true of Leon, but far more of Calderon, since it belongs to + the very essence of drama. But, despite his passion for description + and his Catholic and conventional tone, there is inexhaustible fancy, + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg161" id= + "pg161">161</a></span>splendid colour, and a modern element of + individuality in his poems. His heroes are conscious of their own + ego, feel themselves to be 'a miniature world,' and search out their + own feelings 'in the wild waves of emotion' (as Aurelian, for + example, in <i>Zenobia</i>).</p> + + <p>Fernando says in <i>The Constant Prince</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>These flowers awoke in beauty and delight</p> + + <p>At early dawn, when stars began to set;</p> + + <p>At eve they leave us but a fond regret,</p> + + <p>Locked in the cold embraces of the night.</p> + + <p>These shades that shame the rainbow's arch of light.</p> + + <p>Where gold and snow in purple pomp are met,</p> + + <p>All give a warning man should not forget,</p> + + <p>When one brief day can darken things so bright.</p> + + <p>'Tis but to wither that the roses bloom--</p> + + <p>'Tis to grow old they bear their beauteous flowers,</p> + + <p>One crimson bud their cradle and their tomb.</p> + + <p>Such are man's fortunes in this world of ours;</p> + + <p>They live, they die; one day doth end their doom,</p> + + <p>For ages past but seem to us like hours.</p> + </div> + + <p>The warning which Zenobia gives her captor in his hour of triumph + to beware of sudden reverses of fortune is finely conceived:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Morn comes forth with rays to crown her,</p> + + <p>While the sun afar is spreading</p> + + <p>Golden cloths most finely woven</p> + + <p>All to dry her tear-drops purely.</p> + + <p>Up to noon he climbs, then straightway</p> + + <p>Sinks, and then dark night makes ready</p> + + <p>For the burial of the sea</p> + + <p>Canopies of black outstretching--</p> + + <p>Tall ships fly on linen pinions,</p> + + <p>On with speed the breezes send it,</p> + + <p>Small the wide seas seem and straitened,</p> + + <p>To its quick flight onward tending.</p> + + <p>Yet one moment, yet one instant,</p> + + <p>And the tempest roars, uprearing</p> + + <p>Waves that might the stars extinguish,</p> + + <p>Lifted for that ship's o'erwhelming.</p> + + <p>Day, with fear, looks ever nightwards,</p> + + <p>Calms must storm await with trembling;</p> + + <p>Close behind the back of pleasure</p> + + <p>Evermore stalks sadness dreary.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg162" id= + "pg162">162</a></span></p> + + <p>In <i>Life's a Dream</i> Prince Sigismund, chained in a dark + prison, says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>What sinned I more herein</p> + + <p>Than others, who were also born?</p> + + <p>Born the bird was, yet with gay</p> + + <p>Gala vesture, beauty's dower,</p> + + <p>Scarcely 'tis a winged flower</p> + + <p>Or a richly plumaged spray,</p> + + <p>Ere the aerial halls of day</p> + + <p>It divideth rapidly,</p> + + <p>And no more will debtor be</p> + + <p>To the nest it hates to quit;</p> + + <p>But, with more of soul than it,</p> + + <p>I am grudged its liberty.</p> + + <p>And the beast was born, whose skin</p> + + <p>Scarce those beauteous spots and bars,</p> + + <p>Like to constellated stars,</p> + + <p>Doth from its greater painter win</p> + + <p>Ere the instinct doth begin:</p> + + <p>Of its fierceness and its pride,</p> + + <p>And its lair on every side,</p> + + <p>It has measured far and nigh;</p> + + <p>While, with better instinct, I</p> + + <p>Am its liberty denied.</p> + + <p>Born the mute fish was also,</p> + + <p>Child of ooze and ocean weed;</p> + + <p>Scarce a finny bark of speed</p> + + <p>To the surface brought, and lo!</p> + + <p>In vast circuits to and fro</p> + + <p>Measures it on every side</p> + + <p>Its illimitable home;</p> + + <p>While, with greater will to roam,</p> + + <p>I that freedom am denied.</p> + + <p>Born the streamlet was, a snake</p> + + <p>Which unwinds the flowers among,</p> + + <p>Silver serpent, that not long</p> + + <p>May to them sweet music make,</p> + + <p>Ere it quits the flowery brake,</p> + + <p>Onward hastening to the sea</p> + + <p>With majestic course and free,</p> + + <p>Which the open plains supply;</p> + + <p>While, with more life gifted, I</p> + + <p>Am denied its liberty.</p> + </div> + + <p>In Act II. Clotardo tells how he has talked to the young prince, + brought up in solitude and confinement: <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg163" id="pg163">163</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>There I spoke with him awhile</p> + + <p>Of the human arts and letters,</p> + + <p>Which the still and silent aspect</p> + + <p>Of the mountains and the heavens</p> + + <p>Him have taught--that school divine</p> + + <p>Where he has been long a learner,</p> + + <p>And the voices of the birds</p> + + <p>And the beasts has apprehended.</p> + </div> + + <p>Descriptions of time and place are very rich in colour.</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>One morning on the ocean,</p> + + <p>When the half-awakened sun,</p> + + <p>Trampling down the lingering shadows</p> + + <p>Of the western vapours dun,</p> + + <p>Spread its ruby-tinted tresses</p> + + <p>Over jessamine and rose,</p> + + <p>Dried with cloths of gold Aurora's</p> + + <p>Tears of mingled fire and snows</p> + + <p>Which to pearl his glance converted.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Since these gardens cannot steal</p> + + <p>Away your oft returning woes,</p> + + <p>Though to beauteous spring they build</p> + + <p>Snow-white jasmine temples filled</p> + + <p>With radiant statues of the rose;</p> + + <p>Come into the sea and make</p> + + <p>Thy bark the chariot of the sun,</p> + + <p>And when the golden splendours run</p> + + <p>Athwart the waves, along thy wake</p> + + <p>The garden to the sea will say</p> + + <p>(By melancholy fears deprest)--</p> + + <p>'The sun already gilds the west,</p> + + <p>How very short has been this day.'</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>There is a striking remark about a garden; Menon says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>A beautiful garden surrounded by wild forest</p> + + <p>Is the more beautiful the nearer it approaches its opposite.</p> + </div> + + <p>Splendour of colour was everything with Calderon, but it was + splendour of so stiff and formal a kind, that, like the whole of his + intensely severe, even inquisitorial outlook, it leaves us cold.</p> + + <p>We must turn to Shakespeare to learn how strongly <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg164" id="pg164">164</a></span>the pulse of + sympathy for Nature could beat in contemporary drama. Goethe said: + 'In Calderon you have the wine as the last artificial result of the + grape, but expressed into the goblet, highly spiced and sweetened, + and so given you to drink; but in Shakespeare you have the whole + natural process of its ripening besides, and the grapes themselves + one by one, for your enjoyment, if you will.'</p> + + <p>In <i>Worship at the Cross</i> there is pious feeling for Nature + and mystical feeling side by side with an obnoxious fanaticism, + superstition, and other objectionable traits<a href= + "#f20"><sup>[20]</sup></a>; and mystical confessions of the same sort + may be gathered in numbers from the works of contemporary monks and + nuns. Even of such a fanatic and self-tormentor as the Spanish + Franciscan Petrus von Alcantara (1562), his biographer says that + despite his strict renunciation of the world, he retained a most warm + and deep feeling for Nature.</p> + + <p>'Whatever he saw of the outer world increased his devotion and + gave it wings. The starry sky seen through his little monastery + window, often kept him rapt in deep meditation for hours; often he + was as if beside himself, so strong was his pious feeling when he saw + the power and glory of God reflected in charming flowers and + plants.'</p> + + <p>When Gregorio Lopez (1596), a man who had studied many sides of + Nature, was asked if so much knowledge confused him, he answered: 'I + find God in all things, great and small.' Similar remarks are + attributed to many others.</p> + + <p>Next to Leon, as a poet in enthusiasm and mysticism, came St + Teresa von Avila. She was especially notable for the ravishingly + pretty pictures and comparisons she drew from Nature to explain the + soul life of the Christian.<a href="#f20"><sup>[21]</sup></a></p> + + <p>In all these outpourings of mystic feeling for Nature, there was + no interest in her entirely for her own sake; they were all more or + less dictated by <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg165" id= + "pg165">165</a></span>religious feeling. It was in the later German + and Italian mystics--for example, Bruno, Campanella, and Jacob + Boehme--that a more subjective and individual point of view was + attained through Pantheism and Protestantism.</p> + + <p>The Protestant free-speaking Shakespeare shewed a far more intense + feeling for Nature than the Catholic Calderon. <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg166" id="pg166">166</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch6" id="ch6">CHAPTER VI</a></h2> + + <h3>SHAKESPEARE'S SYMPATHY FOR NATURE</h3> + + <p>The poetry of India may serve as a measure of the part which + Nature can play in drama; it is full of comparisons and + personifications, and eloquent expressions of intimate sympathy with + plants and animals. In Greek tragedy, Nature stepped into the + background; metaphors, comparisons, and personifications are rarer; + it was only by degrees, especially in Sophocles and Euripides, in the + choruses and monologues, that man's interest in her appeared, and he + began to greet the light or the sky, land or sea, to attribute love, + pity, or hate to her, or find comfort in her lonely places. During + the Middle Ages, drama lay fallow, and the blossoming period of + French tragedy, educated to the pathos of Seneca, only produced cold + declamation, frosty rhetoric; of any real sympathy between man and + Nature there was no question.</p> + + <p>Over this mediæval void Calderon was the bridge to + Shakespeare.</p> + + <p>Shakespeare reached the Greek standpoint and advanced far beyond + it. He was not only the greatest dramatist of modern times as to + human action, suffering, and character, but also a genius in the + interpretation of Nature.<a href="#g1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p> + + <p>In place of the narrow limits of the old dramatists, he had the + wider and maturer modern vision, and, despite his mastery of + language, he was free both <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg167" id= + "pg167">167</a></span>from the exaggeration and redundance of + Oriental drama, and from the mere passion for describing, which so + often carried Calderon away.</p> + + <p>In him too, the subjectivity, which the Renaissance brought into + modern art, was still more fully developed. His metaphors and + comparisons shew this, and, most of all, the very perfect art with + which he assigns Nature a part in the play, and makes her not only + form the appropriate background, dark or bright as required, but + exert a distinct influence upon human fate.</p> + + <p>As Carrière points out:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>At a period which had painting for its leading art, and was + turning its attention to music, his mental accord produced effects + in his works to which antiquity was a stranger.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Herder had already noted that Shakespeare gives colour and + atmosphere where the Greek only gave outline. And although + Shakespeare's outlines are drawn with more regard to fidelity than to + actual beauty, yet, like a great painter, he brings all Nature into + sympathy with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night + in <i>Hamlet</i>, breathe the bracing Highland air in <i>Macbeth</i>, + the air of the woods in <i>As You Like It</i>; the storm on the heath + roars through Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the + pomegranate outside Julia's window.</p> + + <p>'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,' when Love solves + all differences in the <i>Merchant of Venice</i>! On the other hand, + when Macbeth is meditating the murder of Duncan, the wolf howls, the + owl hoots, and the cricket cries. And since Shakespeare's characters + often act out of part, so that intelligible motive fails, while it is + important to the poet that each scene be raised to dramatic level and + viewed in a special light, Goethe's words apply:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Here everything which in a great world event passes secretly + through the air, everything which at the very <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg168" id="pg168">168</a></span>moment of a + terrible occurrence men hide away in their hearts, is expressed; + that which they carefully shut up and lock away in their minds is + here freely and eloquently brought to light; we recognize the truth + to life, but know not how it is achieved.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Amorous passion in his hands is an interpreter of Nature; in one + of his sonnets he compares it to an ocean which cannot quench + thirst.</p> + + <p>In Sonnet 130 he says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;</p> + + <p>Coral is far more red than her lips' red;</p> + + <p>If snow be white, why then her breasts are dim;</p> + + <p>If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.</p> + + <p>I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,</p> + + <p>But no such roses see I in her cheeks;</p> + + <p>And in some perfumes is there more delight</p> + + <p>Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks....</p> + + <p>And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare</p> + + <p>As any she belied by false compare.</p> + </div> + + <p>His lady-love is a mirror in which the whole world is + reflected:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind....</p> + + <p>For if it see the rudest or gentlest sight,</p> + + <p>The most sweet favour or deformed'st creature,</p> + + <p>The mountain or the sea, the day or night,</p> + + <p>The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 113.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>When she leaves him it seems winter even in spring:</p> + + <p>'For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,</p> + + <p>And thou away, the very birds are mute.'</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 97.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Here, as in the dramas,<a href="#g2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> contrasts + in Nature are often used to point contrasts in life:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame</p> + + <p>Which like a canker in the fragrant rose</p> + + <p>Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!</p> + + <p>O in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 95.)</p> + </div> + + <p>and</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>No more be grieved at that which thou hast done;</p> + + <p>Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud;</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg169" id= + "pg169">169</a></span>Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and + sun,</p> + + <p>And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 35.)</p> + </div> + + <p>In an opposite sense is Sonnet 70:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The ornament of beauty is suspect</p> + + <p>A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air,</p> + + <p>For canker vice the sweetest buds did love,</p> + + <p>And thou presentest a pure unstained prime.</p> + </div> + + <p>Sonnet 7 has:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Lo! in the orient when the gracious light</p> + + <p>Lifts up his burning head, each under eye</p> + + <p>Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,</p> + + <p>Serving with looks his sacred majesty.</p> + </div> + + <p>Sonnet 18:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?</p> + + <p>Thou art more lovely and more temperate,</p> + + <p>Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,</p> + + <p>And summer's lease hath all too short a date--</p> + + <p>But thy eternal summer shall not fade,</p> + + <p>Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;</p> + + <p>Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,</p> + + <p>When in eternal lines to time thou growest:</p> + + <p>So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,</p> + + <p>So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.</p> + </div> + + <p>Sonnet 60:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore,</p> + + <p>So do our minutes hasten to their end;</p> + + <p>Each changing place with that which goes before,</p> + + <p>In sequent toil all forwards do contend.</p> + </div> + + <p>Sonnet 73:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>That time of life thou mayst in me behold,</p> + + <p>When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang</p> + + <p>Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,</p> + + <p>Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang</p> + + <p>In me thou see'st the twilight of such day</p> + + <p>As after sunset fadeth in the west,</p> + + <p>Which by-and-by black night doth take away,</p> + + <p>Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.</p> + + <p>In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire</p> + + <p>That on the ashes of his youth doth lie</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg170" id= + "pg170">170</a></span>As the death-bed whereon it must expire,</p> + + <p>Consumed with that which it was nourished by.</p> + + <p>This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong</p> + + <p>To love that well which thou must leave ere long.</p> + </div> + + <p>There are no better similes for the oncoming of age and death, + than the sere leaf trembling in the wind, the twilight of the setting + sun, the expiring flame.</p> + + <p>Almost all the comparisons from Nature in his plays are original, + and rather keen and lightning-like than elaborate, often with the + terseness of proverbs;</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The strawberry grows underneath the nettle.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Henry V.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Henry VI.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The waters swell before a boisterous storm.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard III.</i>)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Sometimes they are heaped up, like Calderon's, 'making it' (true + love)</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,</p> + + <p>Brief as the lightning in the collied night</p> + + <p>That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth,</p> + + <p>And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'</p> + + <p>The jaws of darkness do devour it up.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Midsummer Night's Dream.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <p>Compared with Homer's they are very bold, and shew an astonishing + play of imagination; in place of the naive simplicity and naturalness + of antiquity, this modern genius gives us a dazzling display of wit + and thought. To quote only short examples<a href= + "#g3"><sup>[3]</sup></a>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>'Open as day,' 'deaf as the sea,' 'poor as winter,'</p> + + <p>'chaste as unsunn'd snow.'</p> + </div> + + <p>He ranges all Nature. These are characteristic examples:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>King Richard doth himself appear</p> + + <p>As doth the blushing discontented sun</p> + + <p>From out the fiery portal of the east,</p> + + <p>When he perceives the envious clouds are bent</p> + + <p>To dim his glory and to stain the track</p> + + <p>Of his bright passage to the occident.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard II.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg171" id="pg171">171</a></span> + + <p>Since the more fair crystal is the sky,</p> + + <p>The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.</p> + + <p>As when the golden sun salutes the morn,</p> + + <p>And, having gilt the ocean with his beams,</p> + + <p>Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach</p> + + <p>And overlooks the highest peering hills,</p> + + <p>So Tamora.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Titus Andronicus.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>As all the world is cheered by the sun,</p> + + <p>So I by that; it is my day, my life.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard III.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not</p> + + <p>To those fresh morning drops upon the rose,</p> + + <p>As thy eye-beams, when their fresh rays have smote</p> + + <p>The night of dew that on my cheek down flows;</p> + + <p>Nor shines the silver moon one half so bright</p> + + <p>Through the transparent bosom of the deep.</p> + + <p>As doth thy face through tears of mine give light;</p> + + <p>Thou shinest on every tear that I do weep.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Love's Labour's Lost.</i>)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>This is modern down to its finest detail, and much richer in + individuality than the most famous comparisons of the same kind in + antiquity.</p> + + <p>Sea and stream are used:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Like an unseasonable stormy day</p> + + <p>Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores</p> + + <p>As if the world were all dissolved to tears,</p> + + <p>So high above his limits swells the rage</p> + + <p>Of Bolingbroke. (<i>Richard II.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The current that with gentle murmur glides,</p> + + <p>Thou know'st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage;</p> + + <p>But when his fair course is not hindered,</p> + + <p>He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones,</p> + + <p>Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge</p> + + <p>He overtaketh on his pilgrimage;</p> + + <p>And so by many winding nooks he strays</p> + + <p>With willing sport to the wild ocean.</p> + + <p>Then let me go, and hinder not my course. (<i>Two Gentlemen of + Verona.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought.</p> + + <p>You are the fount that makes small brooks to flow.</p> + + <p>And what is Edward but a ruthless sea?</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Henry VI.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg172" id="pg172">172</a></span> + + <p>If there were reason for these miseries,</p> + + <p>Then into limits could I bind my woes;</p> + + <p>When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'er-flow?</p> + + <p>If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad,</p> + + <p>Threatening the welkin with his big-swoln face?</p> + + <p>And wilt thou have a reason for this coil?</p> + + <p>I am the sea: hark, how her sighs do blow!</p> + + <p>She is the weeping welkin, I the earth;</p> + + <p>Then must my sea be moved with her sighs;</p> + + <p>Then must my earth with her continual tears</p> + + <p>Become a deluge, overflow'd and drowned.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Titus Andronicus.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>This battle fares like to the morning's war</p> + + <p>When dying clouds contend with growing light,</p> + + <p>What time the shepherd blowing of his nails</p> + + <p>Can neither call it perfect day nor night.</p> + + <p>Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea</p> + + <p>Forced by the tide to combat with the wind;</p> + + <p>Now sways it that way, like the self-same sea</p> + + <p>Forced to retire by fury of the wind.</p> + + <p>Sometime the flood prevails and then the wind:</p> + + <p>Now one the better, then another best;</p> + + <p>Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,</p> + + <p>Yet neither conqueror nor conquered.</p> + + <p>So is the equal poise of this fell war.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Henry VI.</i>)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>In the last five examples the epic treatment and the + personifications are noteworthy.</p> + + <p>Comparisons from animal life are forcible and striking:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>How like a deer, stricken by many princes,</p> + + <p>Dost thou lie here! (<i>Julius Cæsar.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <p>Richard III. is called:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The wretched bloody and usurping boar</p> + + <p>That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines,</p> + + <p>Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his trough</p> + + <p>In your embowell'd bosoms; this foul swine</p> + + <p>Lies now even in the centre of this isle.</p> + + <p>The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard III.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <p>The smallest objects are noted:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;</p> + + <p>They kill us for their sport. (<i>King + Lear.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg173" id= + "pg173">173</a></span></p> + + <p><i>Marcus</i>: Alas! my lord, I have but kill'd a fly.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p><i>Titus</i>: But how if that fly had a father and a + mother?</p> + + <p>How would he hang his slender gilded wings,</p> + + <p>And buzz lamenting doings in the air!</p> + + <p>Poor harmless fly!</p> + + <p>That, with his pretty buzzing melody,</p> + + <p>Came here to make us merry! and thou</p> + + <p>Hast kill'd him!</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Titus Andronicus.</i>)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Shakespeare has abundance of this idyllic miniature painting, for + which all the literature of the day shewed a marked taste.</p> + + <p>Tamora says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>My lovely Aaron, wherefore look'st thou sad,</p> + + <p>When everything doth make a gleeful boast?</p> + + <p>The birds chant melody on every bush,</p> + + <p>The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun,</p> + + <p>The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind</p> + + <p>And make a chequer'd shadow on the ground.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Titus Andronicus.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <p>And Valentine in <i>Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,</p> + + <p>I better brook than flourishing peopled towns;</p> + + <p>Here can I sit alone, unseen of any,</p> + + <p>And to the nightingale's complaining notes</p> + + <p>Tune my distresses and record my woes.</p> + </div> + + <p>Like this, in elegiac sentimentality, is Romeo:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i4">Before the worshipp'd sun</p> + + <p>Peer'd forth the golden window of the east....</p> + + <p>Many a morning hath he there been seen</p> + + <p>With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew.</p> + </div> + + <p><i>Cymbeline, Winter's Tale</i>, and <i>As You Like It</i> are + particularly rich in idyllic traits; the artificiality of court life + is contrasted with life in the open; there are songs, too, in praise + of woodland joys:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Under the greenwood tree</p> + + <p>Who loves to lie with me,</p> + + <p>And tune his merry note</p> + + <p>Unto the sweet bird's throat,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg174" id= + "pg174">174</a></span>Come hither, come hither, come hither!</p> + + <p>Here shall he see</p> + + <p>No enemy</p> + + <p>But winter and rough weather.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>As You Like It.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Blow, blow, thou winter wind,</p> + + <p>Thou art not so unkind</p> + + <p>As man's ingratitude.</p> + + <p>Thy tooth is not so keen,</p> + + <p>Because thou art not seen</p> + + <p>Altho' thy breath be rude.</p> + + <p>Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho unto the green holly!</p> + + <p>Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly!<a href= + "#g4"><sup>[4]</sup></a></p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>As You Like It.</i>)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Turning again to comparisons, we find birds used abundantly:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>More pity that the eagle should be mewed</p> + + <p>While kites and buzzards prey at liberty.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard III.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard III.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,</p> + + <p>Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort</p> + + <p>Rising and cawing at the gun's report</p> + + <p>Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,</p> + + <p>So at his sight away his fellows fly.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Midsummer Night's Dream.</i>)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>And plant life is touched with special tenderness:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>All the bystanders had wet their cheeks</p> + + <p>Like trees bedashed with rain.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard III.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Why grow the branches when the root is gone?</p> + + <p>Why wither not the leaves that want their sap?</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard III.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,</p> + + <p>Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard III.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Ah! my tender babes!</p> + + <p>My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Richard III.</i>)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg175" id="pg175">175</a></span> + Romeo is</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>To himself so secret and so close ...</p> + + <p>As is the bud bit with an envious worm,</p> + + <p>Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air</p> + + <p>Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.</p> + </div> + + <p>It is astonishing to see how Shakespeare noted the smallest and + most fragile things, and found the most poetic expression for them + without any sacrifice of truth to Nature.</p> + + <p>Juliet is 'the sweetest flower of all the field.' Laertes says to + Ophelia:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour</p> + + <p>Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,</p> + + <p>A violet in the youth of primy nature,</p> + + <p>Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting,</p> + + <p>The perfume and suppliance of a moment.</p> + + <p>The canker galls the infants of the spring</p> + + <p>Too oft before their buttons be disclosed;</p> + + <p>And in the morn and liquid dew of youth</p> + + <p>Contagious blastments are most imminent.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Hamlet.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <p>Hamlet soliloquizes:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable</p> + + <p>Seems to me all the uses of this world.</p> + + <p>Fie on't, O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden</p> + + <p>That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature</p> + + <p>Possess it merely.</p> + </div> + + <blockquote> + <p>Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly + frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most + excellent canopy the air, look you--this brave o'erhanging + firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it + appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation + of vapours.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>But the great advance which he made is seen far more in the + sympathetic way in which he drew Nature into the action of the + play.</p> + + <p>He established perfect harmony between human fate and the natural + phenomena around it.</p> + + <p>There are moonlight nights for Romeo and Juliet's <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg176" id="pg176">176</a></span>brief dream, when + all Nature, moon, stars, garden, seemed steeped in love together.</p> + + <p>He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day + is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned + like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.)</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature in <i>Macbeth</i>! And in + <i>Lear</i>, as Jacobi says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and + unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither + and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and there + a lightning flash from God--a flash of Providence, rending the + clouds.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to + justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies + at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms + one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry, + especially in Shakespeare.</p> + + <p>With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained + before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical + to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the + Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by + dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and + illuminated all and everything.</p> + + <p>Hense says<a href="#g5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>;</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The personification is plastic when Æschylus calls the heights + the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks of + hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are foes + who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive army; it + is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who enter into a + momentary armistice. Other personifications of Shakespeare's, as + when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls laughter a fool, and + describes time as having a wallet on his back wherein he puts alms + for oblivion, are of a kind which did not, and could not, exist in + antiquity.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg177" id="pg177">177</a></span> + The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his + feelings, the more he can see in Nature.</p> + + <p>Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors, + new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were + for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination.</p> + + <p>The motive of amorous passion, for instance, was a very + divining-rod in his hands, revealing the most delicate relations + between Nature and the soul. Ibykos had pointed the contrast between + the gay spring time and his own unhappy heart in which Eros raged + like 'the Thracian blast.' Theocritus had painted the pretty + shepherdess drawing all Nature under the spell of her charms; + Akontios (Kallimachos) had declared that if trees felt the pangs and + longings of love, they would lose their leaves; all such ideas, + modern in their way, had been expressed in antiquity.</p> + + <p>This is Shakespeare's treatment of them:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>How like a winter hath my absence been</p> + + <p>From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!</p> + + <p>What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!</p> + + <p>What old December's bareness everywhere!</p> + + <p>And yet this time removed was summer time,</p> + + <p>The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ...</p> + + <p>For summer and his pleasures wait on thee.</p> + + <p>And thou away the very birds are mute,</p> + + <p>Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer</p> + + <p>That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near,</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 97.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>From you have I been absent in the spring,</p> + + <p>When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim</p> + + <p>Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,</p> + + <p>That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.</p> + + <p>Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell</p> + + <p>Of different flowers in odour and in hue</p> + + <p>Could make me any summer's story tell....</p> + + <p>Yet seem'd it winter still....</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 98.)</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Or compare again the cypresses in Theocritus sole witnesses of + secret love; or Walther's <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg178" id= + "pg178">178</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>One little birdie who never will tell,</p> + </div> + + <p>with</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>These blue-veined violets whereon we lean</p> + + <p>Never can blab, nor know not what we mean.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Venus and Adonis.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <p>Comparisons of ladies' lips to roses, and hands to lilies, are + common with the old poets. How much more modern is:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The forward violet thus did I chide;</p> + + <p>Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells</p> + + <p>If not from my love's breath?...</p> + + <p>The lily I condemned for thy hand,</p> + + <p>And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair;</p> + + <p>The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,</p> + + <p>One blushing shame, another white despair....</p> + + <p>More flowers I noted, yet I none could see</p> + + <p>But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee.</p> + + <p class="i14">(Sonnet 99.)</p> + </div> + + <p>And how fine the personification in Sonnet 33:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Full many a glorious morning have I seen</p> + + <p>Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,</p> + + <p>Kissing with golden face the meadows green,</p> + + <p>Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;</p> + + <p>Anon permit the basest clouds to ride</p> + + <p>With ugly rack on his celestial face,</p> + + <p>And from the forlorn world his visage hide,</p> + + <p>Stealing unseen to West with this disgrace:</p> + + <p>Even so my sun one early morn did shine</p> + + <p>With all triumphant splendour on my brow;</p> + + <p>But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;</p> + + <p>The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.</p> + + <p>Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;</p> + + <p>Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.</p> + </div> + + <p>This is night in <i>Venus and Adonis</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Look! the world's comforter with weary gait</p> + + <p>His day's hot task hath ended in the West;</p> + + <p>The owl, night's herald, shrieks 'tis very late;</p> + + <p>The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest</p> + + <p>And coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light,</p> + + <p>Do summon us to part and bid good-night.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg179" id="pg179">179</a></span> + And this morning, in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night,</p> + + <p>Checkering the Eastern clouds with streaks of light.</p> + + <p>And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels</p> + + <p>From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels;</p> + + <p>Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,</p> + + <p>The day to cheer, and night's dank dew to dry ...</p> + </div> + + <p>Such wealth and brilliance of personification was not found again + until Goethe, Byron, and Shelley.</p> + + <p>He is unusually rich in descriptive phrases:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The weary sun hath made a golden set,</p> + + <p>And by the bright track of his golden car</p> + + <p>Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="i4">The worshipp'd Sun</p> + + <p>Peered forth the golden window of the East.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="i4">The all-cheering sun</p> + + <p>Should in the farthest East begin to draw</p> + + <p>The shady curtains from Aurora's bed.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>The moon:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Like to a silver bow</p> + + <p>New bent in heaven.</p> + </div> + + <p>Titania says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>I will wind thee in my arms....</p> + + <p>So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle</p> + + <p>Gently entwist; the female ivy so</p> + + <p>Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.</p> + + <p>O how I love thee!</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>That same dew, which sometime on the buds</p> + + <p>Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,</p> + + <p>Stood now within the pretty flow'rets' eyes</p> + + <p>Like tears.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Midsummer Night's Dream.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="i14">Daffodils</p> + + <p>That come before the swallow dares, and take</p> + + <p>The winds of March with beauty.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Winter's Tale.</i>)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="i14">Pale primroses</p> + + <p>That die unmarried, ere they can behold</p> + + <p>Bright Phoebus in his strength.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Winter's Tale.</i>)</p> + </div> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg180" id="pg180">180</a></span> + + <p>Goethe calls winds and waves lovers. In <i>Troilus and + Cressida</i> we have:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The sea being smooth,</p> + + <p>How many shallow bauble boats dare sail</p> + + <p>Upon her patient breast, making their way</p> + + <p>With those of nobler bulk!</p> + + <p>But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage</p> + + <p>The gentle Thetis, and anon behold</p> + + <p>The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut,</p> + + <p>Bounding between two moist elements</p> + + <p>Like Perseus' horse.</p> + </div> + + <p>And further on in the same scene:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!</p> + + <p>Commotion in the winds!</p> + + <p>... the bounded waters</p> + + <p>Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores.</p> + </div> + + <p>The personification of the river in <i>Henry IV.</i> is half + mythical:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank</p> + + <p>In single opposition, hand to hand,</p> + + <p>He did confound the best part of an hour</p> + + <p>In changing hardiment with great Glendower;</p> + + <p>Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink,</p> + + <p>Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood;</p> + + <p>Who, then affrighted with their bloody looks,</p> + + <p>Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,</p> + + <p>And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,</p> + + <p>Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.</p> + </div> + + <p>Striking instances of personification from <i>Antony and + Cleopatra</i> are:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne</p> + + <p>Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold;</p> + + <p>Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that</p> + + <p>The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,</p> + + <p>Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made</p> + + <p>The water which they beat to follow faster</p> + + <p>As amorous of their strokes.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg181" id="pg181">181</a></span> + And Antony, enthron'd in the market-place, sat alone</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy</p> + + <p>Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too</p> + + <p>And made a gap in nature.</p> + </div> + + <p>Instead of accumulating further instances of these very modern and + individual (and sometimes far-fetched) personifications, it is of + more interest to see how Shakespeare used Nature, not only as + background and colouring, but to act a part of her own in the play, + so producing the grandest of all personifications.</p> + + <p>At the beginning of Act III. in <i>King Lear</i>, Kent asks:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Who's there beside foul weather?</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p><i>Gentleman</i>: One minded like the weather, most + unquietly.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p><i>Kent</i>: Where's the King?</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p><i>Gent</i>: Contending with the fretful elements.</p> + + <p>Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,</p> + + <p>Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main,</p> + + <p>That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,</p> + + <p>Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage</p> + + <p>Catch in their fury and make nothing of;</p> + + <p>Strives in his little world of men to outscorn</p> + + <p>The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>In the stormy night on the wild heath the poor old man hears the + echo of his own feelings in the elements; his daughters' ingratitude, + hardness, and cruelty produce a moral disturbance like the + disturbance in Nature; he breaks out:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow!</p> + + <p>You cataracts and hurricanes, spout</p> + + <p>Till you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks!</p> + + <p>You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,</p> + + <p>Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts,</p> + + <p>Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,</p> + + <p>Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!</p> + + <p>Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once</p> + + <p>That make ungrateful man....</p> + + <p>Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain!</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg182" id= + "pg182">182</a></span></p> + + <p>Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters,</p> + + <p>I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness;</p> + + <p>I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,</p> + + <p>You owe me no subscription; then, let fall</p> + + <p>Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,</p> + + <p>A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man:</p> + + <p>But yet I call you servile ministers,</p> + + <p>That will with two pernicious daughters join</p> + + <p>Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head</p> + + <p>So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!</p> + </div> + + <p>How closely here animate and inanimate Nature are woven together, + the reasoning with the unreasoning. The poet makes the storm, rain, + thunder, and lightning live, and at the same time endues his human + figures with a strength of feeling and passion which gives them + kinship to the elements. In <i>Othello</i>, too, there <i>is</i> + uproar in Nature:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Do but stand upon the foaming shore,</p> + + <p>The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds....</p> + + <p>I never did like molestation view</p> + + <p>On the enchafed flood.</p> + </div> + + <p>but even the unruly elements spare Desdemona:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,</p> + + <p>The gather'd rocks and congregated sands.</p> + + <p>Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel--</p> + + <p>As having sense of beauty, do omit</p> + + <p>Their mortal natures, letting go safely by</p> + + <p>The divine Desdemona.</p> + </div> + + <p>Cassio lays stress upon 'the great contention of the sea and + skies'; but when Othello meets Desdemona, he cries:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i8">O my soul's joy!</p> + + <p>If after every tempest come such calms,</p> + + <p>May the winds blow till they have wakened death!</p> + + <p>And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas</p> + + <p>Olympus-high, and duck again as low</p> + + <p>As hell's from heaven. If it were now to die,</p> + + <p>'Twere now to be most happy.</p> + </div> + + <p>Iago calls the elements to witness his truthfulness:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Witness, you ever-burning lights above,</p> + + <p>You elements that clip us round about,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg183" id= + "pg183">183</a></span></p> + + <p>Witness, that here Iago doth give up</p> + + <p>The execution of his wit, hands, heart,</p> + + <p>To wrong'd Othello's service.</p> + </div> + + <p>Nature is disgusted at Othello's jealousy:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;</p> + + <p>The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,</p> + + <p>Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth</p> + + <p>And will not hear it.</p> + </div> + + <p>In terrible mental confusion he cries:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>O insupportable, O heavy hour!</p> + + <p>Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse</p> + + <p>Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe</p> + + <p>Should yawn at alteration.</p> + </div> + + <p>Unhappy Desdemona sings:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,</p> + + <p>Sing all a green willow;</p> + + <p>Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,</p> + + <p>Sing willow, willow, willow;</p> + + <p>The fresh streams ran by her and murmur'd her moans,</p> + + <p>Sing willow, willow, willow.</p> + </div> + + <p>A song in <i>Cymbeline</i> contains a beautiful personification of + flowers:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,</p> + + <p>And Phoebus 'gins arise,</p> + + <p>His steeds to water at those springs</p> + + <p>On chalic'd flowers that lies;</p> + + <p>And winking Mary-buds begin</p> + + <p>To ope their golden eyes;</p> + + <p>With everything that pretty is,</p> + + <p>My lady sweet, arise;</p> + + <p>Arise! Arise!</p> + </div> + + <p>The clearest expression of sympathy for Nature is in + <i>Macbeth</i>.</p> + + <p>Repeatedly we meet the idea that Nature shudders before the crime, + and gives signs of coming disaster.</p> + + <p>Macbeth himself says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i6">Stars, hide your fires!</p> + + <p>Let not light see my black and deep desires;</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg184" id= + "pg184">184</a></span>The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be</p> + + <p>Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.</p> + </div> + + <p>and Lady Macbeth:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i4">... The raven himself is hoarse</p> + + <p>That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan</p> + + <p>Under my battlements.... Come, thick night,</p> + + <p>And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,</p> + + <p>That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,</p> + + <p>Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark</p> + + <p>To cry 'Hold! hold!'...</p> + </div> + + <p>The peaceful castle to which Duncan comes all unsuspectingly, is + in most striking contrast to the fateful tone which pervades the + tragedy. Duncan says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air</p> + + <p>Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself</p> + + <p>Unto our gentle senses.</p> + </div> + + <p>and Banquo:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i8">This guest of summer,</p> + + <p>The temple-haunting martlet, does approve</p> + + <p>By his loved masonry, that the heaven's breath</p> + + <p>Smells wooingly here; no jetty, frieze,</p> + + <p>Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this bird</p> + + <p>Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;</p> + + <p>Where they most breed and haunt I have observ'd</p> + + <p>The air is delicate.</p> + </div> + + <p>Perhaps the familiar swallow has never been treated with more + discrimination; and at this point of the tale of horror it has the + effect of a ray of sunshine in a sky dark with storm clouds.</p> + + <p>In Act II. Macbeth describes his own horror and Nature's:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i8">Now o'er the one half world</p> + + <p>Nature seems dead.... Thou sure and firm-set earth,</p> + + <p>Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear</p> + + <p>Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts.</p> + </div> + + <p>Lady Macbeth says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman</p> + + <p>Which gives the stern'st good-night.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg185" id="pg185">185</a></span> + Lenox describes this night:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The night has been unruly: where we lay</p> + + <p>Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,</p> + + <p>Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death</p> + + <p>And prophesying, with accents terrible,</p> + + <p>Of dire combustion and confus'd events,</p> + + <p>New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird</p> + + <p>Clamour'd the live-long night: some say, the earth</p> + + <p>Was feverish and did shake.</p> + </div> + + <p>and later on, an old man says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Three score and ten I can remember well;</p> + + <p>Within the volume of which time I have seen</p> + + <p>Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night</p> + + <p>Hath trifled former knowings.</p> + </div> + + <p>Rosse answers him:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i8">Ah, good father,</p> + + <p>Thou see'st the heavens, as troubled with man's act,</p> + + <p>Threaten his bloody stage; by the clock 'tis day,</p> + + <p>And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.</p> + + <p>Is't night's predominance or the day's shame</p> + + <p>That darkness does the-face of earth entomb</p> + + <p>When living light should kiss it?</p> + </div> + + <p>The whole play is a thrilling expression of the sympathy for + Nature which attributes its own feelings to her--a human shudder in + presence of the wicked--a human horror of crime, most thrilling of + all in Macbeth's words:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i8">Come, seeling night,</p> + + <p>Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,</p> + + <p>And with thy bloody and invisible hand</p> + + <p>Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond</p> + + <p>Which keeps me pale.</p> + </div> + + <p>In <i>Hamlet</i>, too, Nature is shocked at man's mis-deeds:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i4">... Such an act (the queen's)</p> + + <p>That blurs the grace and blush of modesty</p> + + <p class="i4">... Heaven's face doth glow,</p> + + <p>Yea, this solidity and compound mass</p> + + <p>With tristful visage, as against the doom,</p> + + <p>Is thought-sick at the act.</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg186" id="pg186">186</a></span> + + <p>But there are other personifications in this most wonderful of all + tragedies, such as the magnificent one:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad.</p> + + <p>Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.</p> + </div> + + <p>The first player declaims:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>But, as we often see, against some storm</p> + + <p>A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,</p> + + <p>The bold winds speechless, and the orb below</p> + + <p>As hush as death....</p> + </div> + + <p>Ophelia dies:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When down her weedy trophies and herself</p> + + <p>Fell in the weeping brook.</p> + </div> + + <p>and Laertes commands:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Lay her i' the earth,</p> + + <p>And from her fair and unpolluted flesh</p> + + <p>May violets spring.</p> + </div> + + <p>Thus Shakespeare's great imagination gave life and soul to every + detail of Nature, and he obtained the right background for his + dramas, not only through choice of scenery, but by making Nature a + sharer of human impulse, happy with the happy, shuddering in the + presence of wickedness.</p> + + <p>He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which + stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy + with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so + closely allied to mythology. And this holds good not only in dealing + with the great elementary forces--storms, thunder, lightning, + etc.--but with flowers, streams, the glow of sunlight. Always and + everywhere the grasp of Nature was intenser, more individual, and + subjective, than any we have met hitherto.</p> + + <p>Idyllic feeling for Nature became sympathetic in his hands. + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg187" id="pg187">187</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch7" id="ch7">CHAPTER VII</a></h2> + + <h3>THE DISCOVERY OF THE BEAUTY OF LANDSCAPE IN PAINTING</h3> + + <p>The indispensable condition of landscape-painting--painting, that + is, which raises the representation of Nature to the level of its + main subject and paints her entirely for her own sake--is the power + to compose separate studies into a whole and imbue that with an + artistic idea. It was therefore impossible among people like the + Hebrews,<a href="#h1"><sup>[1]</sup></a> whose eyes were always fixed + on distance and only noted what lay between in a cursory way, and + among those who considered detail without relation to a whole, as we + have seen in mediæval poetry until the Renaissance. But just as study + of the laws of aerial and linear perspective demands a trained and + keen eye, and therefore implies interest in Nature, so the artistic + idea, the soul of the picture, depends directly upon the degree of + the artist's feeling for her Literature and painting are equal + witnesses to the feeling for Nature, and so long as scenery was only + background in poetry, it had no greater importance in painting. + Landscape painting could only arise in the period which produced + complete pictures of scenery in poetry--the sentimental idyllic + period.</p> + + <p>We have seen how in the Italian Renaissance the fetters of dogma, + tradition, and mediæval custom were removed, and servility and + visionariness gave place to healthy individuality and realism; how + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg188" id="pg188">188</a></span>man + and the world were discovered anew; and further, how among the other + Romanic nations a lively feeling for Nature grew up, partly idyllic, + partly mystic; and finally, how this feeling found dramatic + expression in Shakespeare.</p> + + <p>Natural philosophy also, in the course of its search for truth, as + it threw off both one-sided Christian ideas and ancient traditions, + came gradually to feel an interest in Nature; not only her laws, but + her beauty, became an object of enthusiastic study. By a very long + process of development the Hellenic feeling for Nature was reached + again in the Renaissance; but it always remained, despite its + sentimental and pantheistic elements, sensual, superficial, and + naive, in comparison with Christian feeling, which a warmer heart and + a mind trained in scholastic wisdom had rendered more profound and + abstract. Hence Nature was sometimes an object of attention in + detail, sometimes in mass.<a href="#h2"><sup>[2]</sup></a></p> + + <p>As we come to the first landscape painters and their birthplace in + the Netherlands, we see how steady and orderly is the development of + the human mind, and how factors that seem isolated are really links + in one chain.</p> + + <p>In the Middle Ages, landscape was only background with more or + less fitness to the subject. By the fifteenth century it was richer + in detail, as we see in Pisanello and the Florentines Gozzoli and + Mantegna. The poetry of earth had been discovered; the gold grounds + gave way to field, wood, hill, and dale, and the blue behind the + heads became a dome of sky. In the sixteenth century, Giorgione + shewed the value of effects of light, and Correggio's backgrounds + were in harmony with his tender, cheerful scenes. Titian loved to + paint autumn; the sunny days of October with blue grapes, golden + oranges, and melons; and evening with deep harmonies of colour over + the sleeping earth. He was a great pioneer in the realm of + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg189" id= + "pg189">189</a></span>landscape. With Michael Angelo not a blade of + grass grew; his problem was man alone. Raphael's backgrounds, on the + other hand, are life-like in detail: his little birds could fly out + of the picture, the stems of his plants seem to curve and bend + towards us, and we look deep into the flower they hold out.<a href= + "#h3"><sup>[3]</sup></a></p> + + <p>In the German Renaissance too, the great masters limited + themselves to charming framework and ingenious arabesques for their + Madonnas and Holy Families. But, as Lübke says,<a href= + "#h4"><sup>[4]</sup></a> one soon sees that Dürer depended on + architecture for borders and backgrounds far less than Holbein; he + preferred landscape.</p> + + <p>'The charm of this background is so great, the inwardness of + German feeling for Nature so strongly expressed in it, that it has a + special value of its own, and the master through it has become the + father of landscape painting.'<a href="#h5"><sup>[5]</sup></a></p> + + <p>This must be taken with a grain of salt; but, at all events, it is + true that Dürer combined 'keen and devoted study of Nature (in the + widest sense of the word) with a penetration which aimed at tracing + her facts up to their source.'<a href="#h6"><sup>[6]</sup></a> It is + interesting to see how these qualities overcame his theoretical views + on Nature and art.<a href="#h7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> Dürer's deep + respect for Nature proved him a child of the new era. Melanchthon + relates that he often regretted that he had been too much attracted + in his younger days by variety and the fantastic, and had only + understood Nature's simple truth and beauty later in life.</p> + + <p>His riper judgment preferred her to all other models. Nature, in + his remarks on the theory of art, includes the animate and the + inanimate, living creatures as well as scenery, and it is interesting + to observe that his admiration of her as a divine thing was due to + deep religious feeling. In his work on Proportion<a href= + "#h8"><sup>[8]</sup></a> he says:</p> + + <p>'Certainly art is hidden in Nature, and he who is able to separate + it by force from Nature, he <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg190" id= + "pg190">190</a></span>possesses it. Never imagine that you can or + will surpass Nature's achievements; human effort cannot compare with + the ability which her Creator has given her. Therefore no man can + ever make a picture which excels Nature's; and when, through much + copying, he has seized her spirit, it cannot be called original work, + it is rather something received and learnt, whose seeds grow and bear + fruit of their own kind. Thereby the gathered treasure of the heart, + and the new creature which takes shape and form there, comes to light + in the artist's work.'</p> + + <p>Elsewhere Dürer says 'a good painter's mind is full of figures,' + and he repeatedly remarks upon the superabundant beauty of all living + things which human intelligence rarely succeeds in reproducing.</p> + + <p>The first modern landscapes in which man was only accessory were + produced in the Netherlands. Quiet, absorbed musing on the external + world was characteristic of the nation; they studied the smallest and + most trifling objects with care, and set a high value on minutiæ.</p> + + <p>The still-life work of their prime was only possible to such an + easy-going, life-loving people; the delightful animal pictures of + Paul Potter and Adrian van de Velde could only have been painted in + the land of Reineke Fuchs. Carrière says about these masters of genre + painting<a href="#h9"><sup>[9]</sup></a>: 'Through the emphasis laid + upon single objects, they not only revealed the national + characteristics, but penetrated far into the soul of Nature and + mirrored their own feelings there, so producing works of art of a + kind unknown to antiquity. That divine element, which the Greek saw + in the human form, the Germanic race divined in all the visible forms + of Nature, and so felt at one with them and able to reveal itself + through them.</p> + + <p>'Nature was studied more for her own sake than in her relation to + man, and scenery became no longer mere background, but the actual + object of the picture. Animals, and even men, whether bathing + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg191" id="pg191">191</a></span>in the + river, lying under trees, or hunting in the forest, were nothing but + accessories; inorganic Nature was the essential element. The greatest + Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and + stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible + crevasses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or + tropical luxuriance, but to common objects of everyday life. But + these they grasped with a precision and depth of feeling which gave + charm to the most trifling--it was the life of the universe divined + in its minutiæ. In its treatment of landscape their genre painting + displayed the very characteristics which had brought it into + being.'<a href="#h10"><sup>[10]</sup></a></p> + + <p>The physical characters of the country favoured landscape painting + too. No doubt the moist atmosphere and its silvery sheen, which add + such freshness and brilliance to the colouring, influenced the + development of the colour sense, as much as the absence of sharp + contrasts in contour, the suggestive skies, and abundance of streams, + woods, meadows, and dales.</p> + + <p>But it was in devotional pictures that the Netherlanders first + tried their wings; landscape and scenes from human life did not free + themselves permanently from religion and take independent place for + more than a century later. The fourteenth-century miniatures shew the + first signs of the northern feeling for Nature in illustrations of + the seasons in the calendar pictures of religious manuscripts. + Beginnings of landscape can be clearly seen in that threshold picture + of Netherland art, the altar-piece at Ghent by the brothers Van Eyck, + which was finished in 1432. It shews the most accurate observation: + all the plants, grasses, flowers, rose bushes, vines, and palms, are + correctly drawn; and the luxuriant valley in which the Christian + soldiers and the knights are riding, with its rocky walls covered by + undergrowth jutting stiffly forward, is very like the valley of the + Maas.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg192" id="pg192">192</a></span> + One sees that the charm of landscape has dawned upon the + painters.</p> + + <p>Their skies are no longer golden, but blue, and flecked with + cloudlets and alive with birds; wood and meadow shine in sappy green; + fantastic rocks lie about, and the plains are bounded by low hills. + They are drinking deep draughts from a newly-opened spring, and they + can scarcely have enough of it. They would like to paint all the + leaves and fruit on the trees, all the flowers on the grass, even all + the dewdrops. The effect of distance too has been discovered, for + there are blue hill-tops beyond the nearer green ones, and a + foreground scene opens back on a distant plain (in the Ghent + altar-piece, the scene with the pilgrims); but they still possess + very few tones, and their overcrowded detail is almost all, from + foreground to furthest distance, painted in the same luminous strong + dark-green, as if in insatiable delight at the beauty of their own + colour. The progress made by Jan van Eyck in landscape was + immense.</p> + + <p>To the old masters Nature had been an unintelligible chaos of + detail, but beauty, through ecclesiastical tradition, an abstract + attribute of the Holy Family and the Saints, and they had used their + best powers of imagination in accordance with this view. Hence they + placed the Madonna upon a background of one colour, generally gilded. + But now the great discovery was made that Nature was a distinct + entity, a revelation and reflection of the divine in herself. And Jan + van Eyck introduced a great variety of landscapes behind his + Madonnas. One looks, for instance, through an open window to a wide + stretch of country with fields and fortresses, and towns with streets + full of people, all backed by mountains. And whether the scene + itself, or only its background, lies in the open, the landscape is of + the widest, enlivened by countless forms and adorned by splendid + buildings.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg193" id="pg193">193</a></span> + Molanus, the savant of Löwen, proclaimed Dierick Bouts, born like his + predecessor Ouwater at Haarlem, to be the inventor of landscape + painting (claruit inventor in describendo rare); but the van Eycks + were certainly before him, though he increased the significance of + landscape painting and shewed knowledge of aerial perspective and + gradations of tone. Landscape was a distinct entity to him, and could + excite the mood that suited his subject, as, for instance, in the + side picture of the Last Supper, where the foreground is drawn with + such exactness that every plant and even the tiny creatures crawling + on the grass can be identified.</p> + + <p>The scenery of Roger van der Weyden of Brabant--river valleys + surrounded by jagged rocks and mountains, isolated trees, and meadows + bright with sappy green--is clearly the result of direct Nature + study; it has a uniform transparent atmosphere, and a clear green + shimmer lies over the foreground and gradually passes into blue haze + further back.</p> + + <p>His pupil, Memling, shews the same fine gradations of tone. The + composition of his richest picture, 'The Marriage of St Catherine,' + did not allow space for an unbroken landscape, but the lines of wood + and field converge to a vista in such a way that the general effect + is one of unity.</p> + + <p>Joachim de Patenir, who appeared in 1515, was called a landscape + painter by his contemporaries, because he reduced his sacred figures + to a modest size, enlarged his landscape, and handled it with extreme + care. He was very far from grasping it as a whole, but his method was + synthetical; his river valleys, with masses of tree and bush and + romantic rocks, fantastic and picturesque, with fortresses on the + river banks, all shew this.</p> + + <p>Kerry de Bles was like him, but less accurate; with all the rest + of the sixteenth-century painters of Brabant and Flanders, he did not + rise to the idea of landscape as a whole.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg194" id="pg194">194</a></span> + The most minute attention was given to the accurate painting of + single objects, especially plants; the Flemings caring more for + perfect truth to life, the Dutch for beauty. The Flemings generally + sought to improve their landscape by embellishing its lines, while + the Dutch gave its spirit, but adhered simply and strictly to Nature. + The landscapes of Peter Brueghel the elder, with their dancing + peasants surrounded by rocks, mills, groups of trees, are painful in + their thoroughness; and Jan Brueghel carried imitation of Nature so + far that his minutise required a magnifying-glass--it was veritable + miniature work. He introduced fruit and flower painting as a new + feature of art.</p> + + <p>Rubens and Brueghel often painted on each other's canvas, Brueghel + supplying landscape backgrounds for Rubens' pictures, and Rubens the + figures for Brueghel's landscapes. Yet Rubens himself was the best + landscapist of the Flemish school. He was more than that. For + Brueghel and his followers, with all their patience and industry, + their blue-green landscape with imaginary trees, boundless distance + and endless detail, were very far from a true grasp of Nature. It was + Rubens and his school who really made landscape a legitimate + independent branch of art. They studied it in all its aspects, quiet + and homely, wild and romantic, some taking one and some the other: + Rubens himself, in his large way, grasping the whole without losing + sight of its parts. They all lifted the veil from Nature and saw her + as she was (Falke).</p> + + <p>Brueghel put off the execution of a picture for which he had a + commission from winter to spring, that he might study the flowers for + it from Nature when they came out, and did not grudge a journey to + Brussels now and then to paint flowers not to be had at Antwerp. + There is a characteristic letter which he sent to the Archbishop of + Milan with a picture:</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg195" id="pg195">195</a></span> 'I + send your Reverence the picture with the flowers, which are all + painted from Nature. I have painted in as many as possible. I believe + so many rare and different flowers have never been painted before nor + so industriously. It will give a beautiful effect in winter; some of + the colours almost equal Nature. I have painted an ornament under the + flowers with artistic medallions and curiosities from the sea. I + leave it to your reverence to judge whether the flowers do not far + exceed gold and jewels in colour.'</p> + + <p>He also painted landscapes in which people were only accessory, + sunny valleys with leafage, golden cornfields, meadows with rows of + dancing country folk or reapers in the wheat.</p> + + <p>Rubens, though he felt the influence of southern light and + sunshine as much as his fellows who had been in Italy, took his + backgrounds from his native land, from parts round Antwerp, Mechlin, + and Brussels. Foliage, water, and undulating ground were + indispensable to him--were, to a certain extent, the actual bearers + of the impression he wished to convey.</p> + + <p>Brueghel always kept a childlike attitude, delighting in details, + and proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the + point of deception. Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold + subjective way. He opened the book of Nature, so to speak, not to + spell out the words syllable by syllable, but to master her secret, + to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he + found there--in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape + painter. The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the + whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic + excitement and tension. Take, for instance, the evening scene with + the rainbow in the Louvre, marvellous in its delicate gradations of + atmospheric tone, and the equally marvellous thunderstorm in the + Belvedere <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg196" id= + "pg196">196</a></span>at Vienna, where a rain-cloud bursts under + sulphur lightning, and a mountain stream, swollen to a torrent and + lashed by the hurricane, carries all before it--trees, rocks, + animals, and men.</p> + + <p>In France, scarcely a flower had been seen in literature since the + Troubadour days, not even in the classical poetry of Corneille and + Racine. There were idyllic features in Fénelon's <i>Telemachus</i>, + and Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral + poetry which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain.</p> + + <p>Honoré d'Urfé's famous <i>Astrée</i> was much translated; but both + his shepherds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of + courts and carpet knights was over the whole, with a certain trace of + sadness.</p> + + <p>The case was different with French painting. After the + Netherlands, it was France, by her mediæval illustrated manuscripts, + who chiefly aided in opening the world's eyes to landscape. Both the + Poussins penetrated below the surface of Nature. Nicolas Poussin + (1594-1665) painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of + trees in the foreground, a hill with a classic building in the + middle, and a chain of mountains in the distance, and laid more + stress on drawing than colour. There was greater life in the pictures + of his brother-in-law, Caspar Doughet, also called Poussin; his grass + is more succulent, his winds sigh in the trees, his storm bends the + boughs and scatters the clouds.</p> + + <p>It was Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) who brought the ideal style to + its perfection. He inspired the very elements with mind and feeling; + his valleys, woods, and seas were just a veil through which divinity + was visible. All that was ugly, painful, and confused was purified + and transfigured in his hands. There is no sadness or dejection in + his pictures, but a spirit of serene beauty, free from ostentation, + far-fetched contrast, or artificial glitter. Light <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg197" id="pg197">197</a></span>breezes blow in + his splendid trees, golden light quivers through them, drawing the + eye to a bright misty horizon; we say with Uhland, 'The sky is + solemn, as if it would say "this is the day of the Lord."'</p> + + <p>Artistic feeling for Nature became a worship with Claude + Lorraine.</p> + + <p>The Netherlands recorded all Nature's phases in noble emulation + with ever-increasing delight.</p> + + <p>The poetry of air, cloudland, light, the cool freshness of + morning, the hazy sultriness of noon, the warm light of evening, it + all lives and moves in Cuyp's pictures and Wynant's, while Aart van + der Meer painted moonlight and winter snow, and Jan van Goyen the + melancholy of mist shot by sunlight. He, too--Jan van Goyen--was very + clever in producing effect with very small means, with a few trees + reflected in water, or a sand-heap--the art in which Ruysdael + excelled all others. The whole poetry of Nature--that secret magic + which lies like a spell over quiet wood, murmuring sea, still pool, + and lonely pasture--took form and colour under his hands; so little + sufficed to enchant, to rouse thought and feeling, and lead them + whither he would. Northern seriousness and sadness brood over most of + his work; the dark trees are overhung by heavy clouds and rain, mist + and dusky shadows move among his ruins. He had painted, says + Carrière, the peace of woodland solitude long before Tieck found the + word for it.</p> + + <p>Beechwoods reflected in a stream, misty cloud masses lighted by + the rising sun; he moves us with such things as with a morning hymn, + and his picture of a swollen torrent forcing its way between graves + which catch the last rays of the sun, while a cloud of rain shrouds + the ruins of a church in the background, is an elegy which has taken + shape and colour.</p> + + <p>Ruysdael marks the culminating point of this period of + development, which had led from mere <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg198" id="pg198">198</a></span>backgrounds and single traits of + Nature--even a flower stem or a blade of grass, up to elaborate + compositions imbued by a single motive, a single idea.</p> + + <p>To conjure up with slight material a complete little world of its + own, and waken responsive feeling, is not this the secret of the + charm in the pictures of his school--in the wooded hill or peasant's + courtyard by Hobbema, the Norwegian mountain scene of Albert van + Everdingen, the dusky fig-trees, rugged crags, and foaming cataract, + or the half-sullen, half-smiling sea-pieces of Bakhuysen and Van der + Velde?</p> + + <p>All these great Netherlander far outstripped the poetry of their + time; it was a hundred years later before mountain and sea found + their painter in words, and a complete landscape picture was not born + in German poetry until the end of the eighteenth century. + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg199" id="pg199">199</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch8" id="ch8">CHAPTER VIII</a></h2> + + <h3>HUMANISM, ROCOCO, AND PIGTAIL</h3> + + <p>Many decades passed before German feeling for Nature reached the + heights attained by the Italian Renaissance and the Netherland + landscapists. In the Middle Ages, Germany was engrossed with + ecclesiastical dogma--man's relation, not only to God, but to the one + saving Church--and had little interest for Science and Art; and the + great achievement of the fifteenth century, the Reformation, called + for word and deed to reckon with a thousand years of old traditions + and the slavery of intellectual despotism. The new time was born amid + bitter throes. The questions at issue--religious and ecclesiastical + questions concerned with the liberty of the Christian--were of the + most absorbing kind, and though Germany produced minds of individual + stamp such as she had never known before, characters of original and + marked physiognomy, it was no time for the quiet contemplation of + Nature. Mental life was stimulated by the new current of ideas and + new delight in life awakened: yet there is scarcely a trace of the + intense feeling for Nature which we have seen in Petrarch and Æneas + Sylvius.</p> + + <p>Largely as it was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, it is + certainly a mistake to reckon the Humanist movement in Germany, as + Geiger does,<a href="#i1"><sup>[1]</sup></a> as a 'merely imported + culture, entirely lacking independence.' The germ of this great + movement <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg200" id= + "pg200">200</a></span>towards mental freedom was contained in the + general trend of the time, which was striving to free itself from the + fetters of the Middle Ages in customs and education as well as dogma. + It was chiefly a polemical movement, a fight between contentious + savants. The writings of the Humanists at this naively sensuous + period were full of the joy of life and love of pleasure; but + scarcely any simple feeling for Nature can be found in them, and + there was neither poet nor poem fit to be compared with Petrarch and + his sonnets.</p> + + <p>Natural philosophy, too, was proscribed by scholastic wisdom; the + real Aristotle was only gradually shelled out from under mediæval + accretions. The natural philosopher, Conrad Summenhart<a href= + "#i2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> (1450-1501) was quite unable to disbelieve + the foolish legend, that the appearance of a comet foretold four + certain events--heat, wind, war, and the death of princes. At the + same time, not being superstitious, he held aloof from the crazy + science of astrology and all the fraud connected with it. Indeed, as + an observer of Nature, and still more as a follower and furtherer of + the scholastic Aristotelian natural philosophy, he shewed a leaning + towards the theory of development, for, according to him, the more + highly organized structures proceed from those of lower organization, + and these again form the inorganic under the influence of meteors and + stars. The poet laureate Conrad Celtes (<i>b</i>. 1459), a singer of + love and composer of four books about it, was a true poet. His + incessant wandering, for he was always moving from place to place, + was due in part to love of Nature and of novelty, but still more to a + desire to spread his own fame. He lacked the naivete and openness to + impressions of the true child of Nature; his songs in praise of + spring, etc., scatter a colourless general praise, which is evidently + the result of arduous thought rather than of direct impressions from + without; and his many references <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg201" id="pg201">201</a></span>to ancient deities shew that he + borrowed more than his phrases.</p> + + <p>Though geography was then closely bound up with the writing of + history, as represented by Beatus Rhenanus (1485-1547) and Johann + Aventinus, and patriotism and the accounts of new lands led men to + wish to describe the beauties and advantages of their own, the + imposing discoveries across the seas did not make so forcible an + impression upon the German humanist as upon savants elsewhere, + especially in Italy and Spain. A mystico-theosophical feeling for + Nature, or rather a magical knowledge of her, flourished in Germany + at this time among the learned, both among Protestants and those who + were partially true to Catholicism. One of the strangest exponents of + such ideas was Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Cologne<a href= + "#i3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> (1535). His system of the world abounded in + such fantastic caprices as these: everything depends on harmony and + sympathy; when one of Nature's strings is struck, the others sound + with it: the analogical correspondences are at the same time magical: + symbolic relations between natural objects are sympathetic also: a + true love-bond exists between the elm and vine: the sun bestows life + on man; the moon, growth; Mercury, imagination; Venus, love, etc. God + is reflected in the macrocosm, gives light in all directions through + all creatures, is adumbrated in man microcosmically, and so + forth.</p> + + <p>Among others, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus + von Hohenheim (1541), ranked Nature and the Bible, like Agrippa, as + the best books about God and the only ones without falsehood.</p> + + <p>'One must study the elements, follow Nature from land to land, + since each single country is only one leaf in the book of creation. + The eyes that find pleasure in this true experience are the true + professors, and more reliable than all learned writings.'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg202" id="pg202">202</a></span> He + held man to be less God's very image than a microcosmic copy of + Nature--the quintessence of the whole world. Other enthusiasts made + similar statements. Sebastian Frank of Donauwörth (1543) looked upon + the whole world as an open book and living Bible, in which to study + the power and art of God and learn His will: everything was His + image, all creatures are 'a reflection, imprint, and expression of + God, through knowledge of which man may come to know the true Mover + and Cause of all things.'</p> + + <p>He shewed warm feeling for Nature in many similes and + descriptions<a href="#i4"><sup>[4]</sup></a>--in fact, much of his + pithy drastic writing sounds pantheistic. But he was very far from + the standpoint of the great Italian philosophers, Giordano Bruno and + Campanella. Bruno, a poet as well as thinker, distinguished Nature in + her self-development--matter, soul, and mind--as being stages and + phases of the One.</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The material of all things issues from the original womb,</p> + + <p>For Nature works with a master hand in her own inner depths;</p> + + <p>She is art, alive and gifted with a splendid mind.</p> + + <p>Which fashions its own material, not that of others,</p> + + <p>And does not falter or doubt, but all by itself</p> + + <p>Lightly and surely, as fire burns and sparkles.</p> + + <p>Easily and widely, as light spreads everywhere,</p> + + <p>Never scattering its forces, but stable, quiet, and at one,</p> + + <p>Orders and disposes of everything together.</p> + </div> + + <p>Campanella, even in a revolting prison, sang in praise of the + wisdom and love of God, and His image in Nature. He personified + everything in her; nothing was without feeling; the very movements of + the stars depended on sympathy and antipathy; harmony was the central + soul of all things.</p> + + <p>The most extraordinary of all German thinkers was the King of + Mystics, Jacob Böhme. Theist and pantheist at once, his mind was a + ferment of different <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg203" id= + "pg203">203</a></span>systems of thought. It is very difficult to + unriddle his <i>Aurora</i>, but love of Nature, as well as love of + God, is clear in its mystical utterances:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>God is the heart or source of Nature.</p> + + <p>Nature is the body of God.</p> + </div> + + <p>'As man's mind rules his whole body in every vein and fills his + whole being, so the Holy Ghost fills all Nature, and is its heart and + rules in the good qualities of all things.'</p> + + <p>'But now heaven is a delightful chamber of pleasure, in which are + all the powers, as in all Nature the sky is the heart of the + waters.'</p> + + <p>In another place he calls God the vital power in the tree of life, + the creatures His branches, and Nature the perfection and + self-begotten of God.</p> + + <p>Nature's powers are explained as passion, will, and love, often in + lofty and beautiful comparisons:</p> + + <p>'As earth always bears beautiful flowers, plants, and trees, as + well as metals and animate beings, and these finer, stronger, and + more beautiful at one time than another; and as one springs into + being as another dies, causing constant use and work, so it is in + still greater degree with the begetting of the holy mysteries<a href= + "#i5"><sup>[5]</sup></a> ... creation is nothing else than a + revelation of the all-pervading superficial godhead ... and is like + the music of many flutes combined into one great harmony.'</p> + + <p>But the most representative man, both of the fifteenth century + and, in a sense, of the German race, was Luther. That maxim of + Goethe's for teaching and ethics,' Cheerfulness is the mother of all + virtues, might well serve as a motto for Luther;</p> + + <p>The two men had much in common.</p> + + <p>The one, standing half in the Middle Ages, had to free himself + from mental slavery by strength of will and courage of belief.</p> + + <p>The other, as the prophet of the nineteenth century, the + incarnation of the modern man, had to shake off <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg204" id="pg204">204</a></span>the artificiality + and weak sentimentality of the eighteenth.</p> + + <p>To both alike a healthy joy in existence was the root of being. + Luther was always open to the influence of Nature, and, + characteristically, the Psalter was his favourite book. 'Lord, how + manifold are Thy works, in wisdom hast Thou made them all!'</p> + + <p>True to his German character, he could be profoundly sad; but his + disposition was delightfully cheerful and healthy, and we see from + his letters and table-talk, that after wife and child, it was in + 'God's dear world' that he took the greatest pleasure. He could not + have enough of the wonders of creation, great or small. 'By God's + mercy we begin to see the splendour of His works and wonders in the + little flowers, as we consider how kind and almighty He is; therefore + we praise and thank Him. In His creatures we see the power of His + word--how great it is. In a peach stone, too, for hard as the shell + is, the very soft kernel within causes it to open at the right + time.'<a href="#i6"><sup>[6]</sup></a> Again, 'So God is present in + all creatures, even the smallest leaves and poppy seeds.'</p> + + <p>All that he saw of Nature inspired him with confidence in the + fatherly goodness of God. He wrote, August 5th, 1530, to Chancellor + Brneck:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I have lately seen two wonderful things: the first, looking from + the window at the stars and God's whole beautiful sky dome, I saw + never a pillar to support it, and yet it did not fall, and is still + firm in its place. Now, there are some who search for such pillars + and are very anxious to seize them and feel them, and because they + cannot, fidget and tremble as if the skies would certainly fall ... + the other, I also saw great thick clouds sweep over our heads, so + heavy that they might be compared to a great sea, and yet I saw no + ground on which they rested, and no vats in which they were + contained, yet they did not fall on us, but greeted us with a frown + and flew away. When they had gone, the rainbow lighted both the + ground and the roof which had held them.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Luther often used very forcible images from <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg205" id="pg205">205</a></span>Nature. 'It is + only for the sake of winter that we lie and rot in the earth; when + our summer comes, our grain will spring up--rain, sun, and wind + prepare us for it--that is, the Word, the Sacraments, and the Holy + Ghost.'</p> + + <p>His Bible was an orchard of all sorts of fruit trees; in the + introduction to the Psalter, he says of the thanksgiving psalms: + 'There one looks into the hearts of the saints as into bright and + beautiful gardens--nay, as into heaven itself, where pure and happy + thoughts of God and His goodness are the lovely flowers.'</p> + + <p>His description of heaven for his little son John is full of + simple reverent delight in Nature, quite free from platonic and + mystical speculation as to God's relation to His universe; and + Protestant divines kept this tone up to the following century, until + the days of rationalism and pietism.</p> + + <p>Of such spontaneous hearty joy in Nature as this, the national + songs of a nation are always the medium. They were so now; for, while + a like feeling was nowhere else to be found, the Volkslieder + expressed the simple familiar relationship of the child of Nature to + wood, tree, and flower in touching words and a half-mythical, + half-allegorical tone which often revealed their old Germanic + origin.</p> + + <p>There is a fourteenth-century song, probably from the Lower + Rhine,<a href="#i7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> which suggests the poems of + the eighth and ninth centuries, about a great quarrel between Spring, + crowned with flowers, and hoary-headed Winter, in which one praises + and the other blames the cuckoo for announcing Spring.</p> + + <p>In this song, Summer complains to mankind and other friends that a + mighty master is going to drive him away; this mighty master, Winter, + then takes up the word, and menaces Spring with the approach of + frost, who will slight and imprison him, and then kill him; ice and + hail agree with Winter, and storm, rain, snow, and bitter winds are + called his vassals, etc.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg206" id="pg206">206</a></span> + There are naive verses in praise of Spring and Summer:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When that the breezes blow in May,</p> + + <p>And snow melts from the wood away,</p> + + <p>Blue violets lift their heads on high,</p> + + <p>And when the little wood-birds sing,</p> + + <p>And flow'rets from the ground up-spring,</p> + + <p>Then everybody's glad.</p> + </div> + + <p>Others complaining of Winter, who must have leave of absence, and + the wrongs it has wrought are poured out to Summer. The little birds + are very human; the owlet complains:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i6">Poor little owlet me!</p> + + <p>I have to fly all alone through the wood to-night;</p> + + <p>The branch I want to perch on is broken,</p> + + <p>The leaves are all faded,</p> + + <p>My heart is full of grief.</p> + </div> + + <p>The cuckoo is either praised for bringing good news, or made fun + of as the 'Gutzgauch.'</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>A cuckoo will fly to his heart's treasure, etc.</p> + </div> + + <p>The fable songs<a href="#i8"><sup>[8]</sup></a> of animal weddings + are full of humour. The fox makes arrangements for his wedding: 'Up + with you now, little birds! I am going to take a bride. The starling + shall saddle the horses, for he has a grey mantle; the beaver with + the cap of marten fur must be driver, the hare with his light foot + shall be outrider; the nightingale with his clear voice shall sing + the songs, the magpie with his steady hop must lead the dances,' + etc.</p> + + <p>The nightingale, with her rich tones, is beloved and honoured + before all the winged things; she is called 'the very dear + nightingale,' and addressed as a lady.</p> + + <p>'Thou art a little woodbird, and flyest in and out the green wood; + fair Nightingale, thou little woodbird, thou shalt be my + messenger.'</p> + + <p>It is she who warns the girl against false love, or is the silent + witness of caresses.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg207" id="pg207">207</a></span> + There were a great many wishing songs: 'Were I a little bird and had + two wings, I would fly to thee,' or 'Were I a wild falcon, I would + take flight and fly down before a rich citizen's house--a little maid + is there,' etc. 'And were my love a brooklet cold, and sprang out of + a stone, little should I grieve if I were but a green wood; green is + the wood, the brooklet is cold, my love is shapely.' The betrayed + maiden cries: 'Would God I were a white swan! I would fly away over + mountain and deep valley o'er the wide sea, so that my father and + mother should not know where I was.'</p> + + <p>Flowers were used symbolically in many ways; roses are always the + flowers of love. 'Pretty girls should be kissed, roses should be + gathered,' was a common saying; and 'Gather roses by night, for then + all the leaves are covered with cooling dew.' 'The roses are ready to + be gathered, so gather them to-day. He who does not gather in summer, + will not gather in winter.' There is tenderness in this: 'I only know + a little blue flower, the colour of the sky; it grows in the green + meadow, 'tis called forget-me-not.'</p> + + <p>These are sadder:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>There is a lime tree in this valley,</p> + + <p>O God! what does it there?</p> + + <p>It will help me to grieve</p> + + <p>That I have no lover.</p> + </div> + + <p>'Alas! you mountains and deep valleys, is this the last time I + shall see my beloved? Sun, moon, and the whole sky must grieve with + me till my death.'</p> + + <p>Where lovers embrace, flowers spring out of the grass, roses and + other flowers and grasses laugh, the trees creak and birds + sing;<a href="#i9"><sup>[9]</sup></a> where lovers part, grass and + leaves fade.<a href="#i10"><sup>[10]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Most touching of all is the idea, common to the national songs of + all nations, that out of the grave of <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg208" id="pg208">208</a></span>two lovers, lilies and roses spring + up, or climbing plants, love thus outliving death.</p> + + <p>We look in vain among the master singers of the fifteenth and + sixteenth centuries for such fresh heartfelt tones as these, although + honest Hans Sachs shews joy in Nature here and there; most charmingly + in the famous comparison of 'the Wittenberg Nightingale, which every + one hears everywhere now,' in praise of Luther:</p> + + <p>'Wake up, the dawn is nigh! I hear a joyous nightingale singing in + the green hedge, it fills the hills and valleys with its voice. The + night is stooping to the west, the day is rising from the east, the + morning red is leaping from the clouds, the sun looks through. The + moon quenches her light; now she is pale and wan, but erewhile with + false glamours she dazzled all the sheep and turned them from their + pasture lands and pastor....'</p> + + <p>Fischart too, in his quaint description of a voyage on the Rhine + in <i>Glückhaft Schiff</i>, shews little feeling for Nature; but in + <i>Simplicissimus</i>, on the other hand, that monument of literature + which reflected contemporary culture to a unique degree, it is very + marked; the more so since it appeared when Germany lay crushed by the + Thirty Years' War.</p> + + <p>When the hero as a boy was driven from his village home and fled + into the forest, he came upon a hermit who took care of him, and + waking at midnight, he heard the old man sing:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Come, nightingale, comfort of the night,</p> + + <p>Let your voice rise in a song of joy, come praise the + Creator,</p> + + <p>While other birds are sound asleep and cannot sing!...</p> + + <p>The stars are shining in the sky in honour of God....</p> + + <p>My dearest little bird, we will not be the laziest of all</p> + + <p>And lie asleep; we will beguile the time with praise</p> + + <p>Till dawn refreshes the desolate woods.</p> + </div> + + <p><i>Simplicissimus</i> goes on: 'During this song, methinks, it was + as if nightingale, owl, and echo had combined <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg209" id="pg209">209</a></span>in song, and if + ever I had been able to hear the morning star, or to try to imitate + the melody on my bagpipe, I should have slipt away out of the hut to + join in the melody, so beautiful it seemed; but I was asleep.'</p> + + <p>What was the general feeling for Nature in other countries during + the latter half of the seventeenth century? In Italy and Spain it had + assumed a form partly bucolic and idyllic, partly theosophically + mystical; Shakespeare's plays had brought sympathy to maturity in + England; the Netherlands had given birth to landscape painting, and + France had the splendid poetic landscapes of Claude Lorraine. But the + idealism thus reached soon degenerated into mannerism and + artificiality, the hatching of empty effect.</p> + + <p>The aberrations of taste which found expression in the periwig + style of Louis XIV., and in the pigtails of the eighteenth century, + affected the feeling for Nature too. The histories of taste in + general, and of feeling for Nature, have this in common, that their + line of progress is not uniformly straightforward, but liable to + zigzags. This is best seen in reviewing the different civilized races + together. Moreover, new ideas, however forcible and original, even + epoch-making, do not win acceptance at once, but rather trickle + slowly through resisting layers; it is long before any new gain in + culture becomes the common property of the educated, and hence + opposite extremes are often found side by side--taste for what is + natural with taste for what is artificial. Garden style is always a + delicate test of feeling for Nature, shewing, as it does, whether we + respect her ways or wish to impose our own. The impulse towards the + modern French gardening came from Italy. Ancient and modern times + both had to do with it. At the Renaissance there was a return to + Pliny's style,<a href="#i11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> which the Cinque + cento gardens copied. In this style laurel and box-hedges were clipt, + and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg210" id= + "pg210">210</a></span>marble statues placed against them, 'to break + the uniformity of the dark green with pleasant silhouettes. One looks + almost in vain for flowers and turf; even trees were exiled to a + special wilderness at the edge of the garden; but the great ornament + of the whole was never missing, the wide view over sunny plains and + dome-capt towns, or over the distant shimmering sea, which had + gladdened the eyes of Roman rulers in classic days.'<a href= + "#i12"><sup>[12]</sup></a></p> + + <p>The old French garden as Maître Lenotre laid it out in Louis + XIV.'s time at Versailles, St Germain, and St Cloud, was + architectural in design, and directly connected, like Pliny's, with + various parts of the house, by open halls, pavilions, and colonnades. + Every part of it--from neat turf parterres bordered by box in front + of the terrace, designs worked out in flowers or coloured stones, and + double rows of orange spaliers, to groups of statues and + fountains--belonged to one symmetrical plan, the focus of which was + the house, standing free from trees, and visible from every point. + Farther off, radiating avenues led the eye in the same direction, and + every little intersecting alley, true to the same principle, ran to a + definite object--obelisk, temple, or what not. There was no lack of + bowers, giant shrubberies, and water-courses running canal-wise + through the park, but they all fell into straight lines; every path + was ruled by a ruler, the eye could follow it to its very end. + Artifice was the governing spirit. As Falke says: 'Nature dared not + speak but only supply material; she had to sacrifice her own + inventive power to this taste and this art. Hills and woods were only + hindrances; the straight lines of trees and hedges, with their medley + of statues and "cabinets de verdure," demanded level ground, and the + landscape eye of the period only tolerated woods as a finish to its + cut and clipt artificialities.'<a href="#i13"><sup>[13]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Trees and branches were not allowed to grow at their own sweet + will; they were cut into cubes, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg211" + id="pg211">211</a></span>balls, pyramids, even into shapes of + animals, as the gardener's fancy or his principles decreed; cypresses + were made into pillars or hearts with the apex above or below; and + the art of topiary even achieved complete hunting scenes, with + hunters, stags, dogs, and hares in full chase on a hedge. Of such a + garden one could say with honest Claudius, ''Tis but a tailor's joke, + and shews the traces of the scissors; it has nothing of the great + heart of Nature.'</p> + + <p>It was Nature in bondage: 'green architecture,' with all its + parts, walls, windows, roofs, galleries cut out of leafage, and + theatres with stage and wings in which silk and velvet marquises with + full-bottomed wigs and lace jabots, and ladies in hooped petticoats + and hair in towers, played at private theatricals.</p> + + <p>Where water was available, water devices were added. And in the + midst of all this unnaturalness Greek mythology was introduced: the + story of Daphne and Apollo appeared in one alley, Meleager and + Atalanta in another, all Olympus was set in motion to fill up the + walls and niches. And the people were like their gardens both in + dress and manners; imposing style was everything.</p> + + <p>Then came the Rococo period of Louis XV. The great periwig + shrivelled to a pigtail, and petty flourish took the place of + Lenotre's grandezza.</p> + + <p>'The unnatural remained, the imposing disappeared and caprice took + its place,' says Falke. Coquetry too. All the artistic output of the + time bears this stamp, painting included. Watteau's scenery and + people were unnatural and affected--mere inventions to suit the + gallant <i>fêtes</i>. But he knew and loved Nature, though he saw her + with the intoxicated eye of a lover who forgets the individual but + keeps a glorified impression of her beauty, whereas Boucher's + rosy-blue landscapes look as if he had never seen their originals. + His world had nothing in common with Nature, and with reality + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg212" id="pg212">212</a></span>only + this, that its sensuousness, gaiety, falsity, and coquetry were true + to the period. But in both Watteau and Boucher there was a faint + glimmer of the idyllic--witness the dash of melancholy in Watteau's + brightest pictures. Feeling for Nature was seeking its lost path--the + path it was to follow with such increased fervour.</p> + + <p>German literature too, in the seventeenth century, stood under the + sign manual of the Pigtail and Periwig; it was baroque, stilted, + bombastic, affected, feeling and form alike were forced, not + spontaneous. Verses were turned out by machinery and glued together. + Martin Opitz,<a href="#i14"><sup>[14]</sup></a> the recognized leader + and king of poets, had travelled far, but there is no distinct + feeling for Nature in his poetry. His words to a mountain:</p> + + <p>'Nature has so arranged pleasure here, that he who takes the + trouble to climb thee is repaid by delight,' scarcely admit the + inference that he understood the charm of distance in the modern + sense. He took warmer interest in the bucolic side of country life; + rhyming about the delightful places, dwellings of peace, with their + myrtles, mountains, valleys, stones, and flowers, where he longed to + be; and his <i>Spring Song</i>, an obvious imitation of the classics + (Horace's <i>Beatus ille</i> was his model for <i>Zlatna</i>), has + this conventional contrast between his heart and Nature.</p> + + <p>'The frosty ice must melt; snow cannot last any longer, Favonius; + the gentle breeze is on the, fields again. Seed is growing + vigorously, grass greening in all its splendour, trees are budding, + flowers growing ...thou, too my heart, put off thy grief.'</p> + + <p>There is more nostalgia than feeling for Nature in this:</p> + + <p>'Ye birches and tall limes, waste places, woods and fields, + farewell to you!</p> + + <p>'My comfort and my better dwelling-place is elsewhere!'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg213" id="pg213">213</a></span> + But (and this Winter, strange to say, ignores) his pastorals have all + the sentimental elegiac style of the Pigtail period.</p> + + <p>There had been German adaptations of foreign pastorals, such as + Montreux, <i>Schãferei von der schönen Juliana</i>, since 1595; + Urfé's <i>Astrée</i> and Montemayor's <i>Diana</i> appeared in 1619, + and Sidney's <i>Arcadia</i> ten years later.</p> + + <p>Opitz tried to widen the propaganda for this kind of poetry, and + hence wrote, not to mention little pastorals such as <i>Daphne, + Galatea, Corydon,</i> and <i>Asteria</i>, his <i>Schãferei von der + 'Nymphen Hercinie.'</i></p> + + <p>His references to Nature in this are as exaggerated as everything + else in the poem. He tells how he did not wake 'until night, the + mother of the stars, had gone mad, and the beautiful light of dawn + began to shew herself and everything with her....</p> + + <p>'I sprang up and greeted the sweet rays of the sun, which looked + down from the tops of the mountains and seemed at the same time to + comfort me.'</p> + + <p>He came to a spring 'which fell from a crag with charming murmur + and rustle,' cut a long poem in the fir bark, and conversed with + three shepherds on virtue, love, and travelling, till the nymph + Hercynia appeared and shewed him the source of the Silesian stream. + One of the shepherds, Buchner, was particularly enthusiastic about + water: 'Kind Nature, handmaid of the Highest, has shewn her best + handiwork in sea, river, and spring.'</p> + + <p>Fleming too, who already stood much higher as a lyrist and had + travelled widely, lacked the power of describing scenery, and must + needs call Oreads, Dryads, Castor and Pollux to his aid. He rarely + reached the simple purity of his fine sonnet <i>An Sich,</i> or the + feeling in this: 'Dense wild wood, where even the Titan's brightest + rays give no light, pity my sufferings. In my sick soul 'tis as dark + as in thy black hollow.'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg214" id="pg214">214</a></span> In + this time of decline the hymns of the Evangelical Church (to which + Fleming contributed) were full of feeling, and brought the national + songs to mind as nothing else did.</p> + + <p>A few lines of Paul Gerhardt's seem to me to out-weigh whole + volumes of contemporary rhymes--lines of such beauty as the + <i>Evening Song</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Now all the woods are sleeping,</p> + + <p>And night and stillness creeping</p> + + <p>O'er field and city, man and beast;</p> + + <p>The last faint beam is going,</p> + + <p>The golden stars are glowing</p> + + <p>In yonder dark-blue deep.</p> + </div> + + <p>And after him, and more like him than any one else, came Andreas + Gryphius.</p> + + <p>There was much rhyming about Nature in the poet schools of + Hamburg, Königsberg, and Nuremberg; but, for the most part, it was an + idle tinkle of words without feeling, empty artificial stuff with + high-flown titles, as in Philipp von Zesen's <i>Pleasure of + Spring</i>, and <i>Poetic Valley of Roses and Lilies</i>.</p> + + <p>'Up, my thoughts, be glad of heart, in this joyous pleasant March; + ah! see spring is reviving, earth opens her treasury,' etc.</p> + + <p>His romances were more noteworthy if not more interesting. He + certainly aimed high, striving for simplicity and clearness of + expressions in opposition to the Silesian poets, and hating foreign + words.</p> + + <p>His feeling for Nature was clear; he loved to take his reader into + the garden, and was enthusiastic about cool shady walks, beds of + tulips, birds' songs, and echoes. Idyllic pastoral life was the + fashion--people of distinction gave themselves up to country life and + wore shepherd costume--and he introduced a pastoral episode into his + romance, <i>Die adriatische Rosemund.</i><a href= + "#i15"><sup>[15]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Rosemund, whose father places arbitrary conditions in the way of + her marriage with Markhold, becomes a shepherdess.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg215" id= + "pg215">215</a></span></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Not far off was a delightful spot where limes and alders made + shade on hot summer days for the shepherds and shepherdesses who + dwelt around. The shady trees, the meadows, and the streams which + ran round it, and through it, made it look beautiful ... the + celestial Rosemund had taken up her abode in a little shepherd hut + on the slope of a little hill by a water-course, and shaded by some + lime trees, in which the birds paid her homage morning and + evening.... Such a place and such solitude refreshed the more than + human Rosemund, and in such peace she was able to unravel her + confused thoughts.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>She thought continually of Markhold, and spent her time cutting + his name in the trees. The following description of a walk with her + sister Stillmuth and her lover Markhold, gives some idea of the + formal affected style of the time.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The day was fine, the sky blue, the weather everywhere warm. The + sun shone down on the globe with her pleasant lukewarm beams so + pleasantly, that one scarcely cared to stay indoors. They went into + the garden, where the roses had opened in the warmth of the sun, + and first sat down by the stream, then went to the grottos, where + Markhold particularly admired the shell decorations. When this + charming party had had enough of both, they finally betook + themselves to a leafy walk, where Rosemund introduced pleasant + conversation on many topics. She talked first about the many + colours of tulips, and remarked that even a painter could not + produce a greater variety of tints nor finer pictures than these, + etc.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In describing physical beauty, he used comparisons from Nature; + for instance, in <i>Simson</i><a href="#i16"><sup>[16]</sup></a>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The sun at its brightest never shone so brightly as her two eyes + ... no flower at its best can shew such red as blooms in the meadow + of her cheeks, no civet rose is so milk-white, no lily so delicate + and spotless, no snow fresh-fallen and untrodden is so white, as + the heaven of her brows, the stronghold of her mind.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>H. Anselm von Ziegler und Klipphausen also waxes eloquent in his + famous <i>Asiatischen Banise</i>: 'The suns of her eyes played with + lightnings; her <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg216" id= + "pg216">216</a></span>curly hair, like waves round her head, was + somewhat darker than white; her cheeks were a pleasant Paradise where + rose and lily bloomed together in beauty--yea, love itself seemed to + pasture there.' Elsewhere too this writer, so highly esteemed by the + second Silesian school of poets, indulged in showy description and + inflated rhetoric. Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel tried + more elaborate descriptions of scenery; so that Chovelius says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The Duke's German character shews pleasantly in his delight in + Nature. The story often takes one into woods and fields; already + griefs and cares were carried to the running brook and mossy stone, + and happy lovers listened to the nightingale.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>His language is barely intelligible, but there is a pleasant + breadth about his drawing--for example, of the king's meadow and the + grotto in <i>Aramena</i>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Very cold crystal streams flowed through the fields and ran + softly over the stony ground, making a pleasant murmur. Whilst the + ear was thus contented, a distant landscape delighted the eye. No + more delightful place, possessing all this at once, could have been + found, etc.</p> + + <p>Looking through the numerous air-holes, the eye lost itself in a + deep valley, surrounded by nothing but mountains, where the + shepherds tended their flocks, and one heard their flutes + multiplied by the echo in the most delightful way.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Mawkish shepherd play is mixed here with such verses as + (Rahel):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Thou, Chabras, thou art the dear stream, where Jacob's mouth + gave me the first kiss. Thou, clear brook, often bearest away the + passionate words of my son of Isaac ... on many a bit of wounded + bark, the writing of my wounds is to be found.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The most insipid pastoral nonsense of the time was produced by the + Nuremberg poets, the Pegnitz shepherds Klaj and Harsdörfer. Their + strength lay in imitating the sounds of Nature, and they were + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg217" id="pg217">217</a></span>much + admired. What is still more astonishing, Lohenstein's writings were + the model for thirty years, and it was the fashion for any one who + wrote more simply to apologize for being unable to reach the level of + so great a master! To us the bombast, artificiality, and hidden + sensuality of his poetry and Hoffmannswaldan's, are equally + repulsive.</p> + + <p>What dreary, manufactured stuff this is from Lohenstein's + <i>Praise of Roses sung by the Sun</i><a href= + "#i17"><sup>[17]</sup></a>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>This is the queen of flowers and plants,</p> + + <p>The bride of heaven, world's treasure, child of stars!</p> + + <p>For whom love sighs, and I myself, the sun, do pant,</p> + + <p>Because her crown is golden, and her leaves are velvet,</p> + + <p>Her foot and stylus emerald, her brilliance shames the + ruby.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Other beings possess only single beauties,</p> + + <p>Nature has made the rose beautiful with all at once.</p> + + <p>She is ashamed, and blushes</p> + + <p>Because she sees all the other flowers stand ashamed before + her.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>In <i>Rose Love</i> he finds the reflection of love in + everything:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>In whom does not Love's spirit plant his flame?</p> + + <p>One sees the oil of love burn in the starry lamps,</p> + + <p>That pleasant light can nothing be but love,</p> + + <p>For which the dew from Phoebus' veil doth fall.</p> + + <p>Heaven loves the beauteous globe of earth,</p> + + <p>And gazes down on her by night with thousand eyes;</p> + + <p>While earth to please the heaven</p> + + <p>Doth clover, lilies, tulips in her green hair twine,</p> + + <p>The elm and vine stock intertwine,</p> + + <p>The ivy circles round the almond trees,</p> + + <p>And weeps salt tears when they are forced apart.</p> + + <p>And where the flowers burn with glow of Love,</p> + + <p>It is the rose that shews the brightest flame,</p> + + <p>For is the rose not of all flowers the queen,</p> + + <p>The wondrous beauty child of sun and earth?</p> + </div> + + <p>Artificiality and bombast reached its highest pitch in these + poets, and feeling for Nature was entirely absent. <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg218" id="pg218">218</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch9" id="ch9">CHAPTER IX</a></h2> + + <h3>SYMPTOMS OF A RETURN TO NATURE</h3> + + <p>It is refreshing to find, side by side with these mummified + productions, the traces of a pure national poetry flowing clear as + ever, 'breaking forth from the very heart of the people, ever + renewing its youth, and not misled by the fashion of the + day.'<a href="#j1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p> + + <p>The traces prove that simple primitive love for Nature was not + quite dead. For instance, this of the Virgin Mary: 'Mary, she went + across the heath, grass and flowers wept for grief, she did not find + her son.' And the lines in which the youth forced into the cloister + asks Nature to lament with him: 'I greet you all, hill and dale, do + not drive me away--grass and foliage and all the green things in the + wild forest. O tree! lose your green ornaments, complain, die with + me--'tis your duty.'</p> + + <p>Then the Spring greetings:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Now we go into the wide, wide world,</p> + + <p>With joy and delight we go;</p> + + <p>The woods are dressing, the meadows greening,</p> + + <p>The flowers beginning to blow.</p> + + <p>Listen here! and look there! We can scarce trust our eyes,</p> + + <p>For the singing and soaring, the joy and life everywhere.</p> + </div> + + <p>And:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>What is sweeter than to wander in the early days of Spring</p> + + <p>From one place to another in sheer delight and glee;</p> + + <p>While the sun is shining brightly, and the birds exult + around</p> + + <p>Fair Nightingale, the foremost of them all?</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg219" id="pg219">219</a></span> + + <p>This has the pulse of true and naive feeling (the hunter is + starting for the hunt in the early morning):</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When I come into the forest, still and silent everywhere,</p> + + <p>There's a look of slumber in it, but the air is fresh and + cool.</p> + + <p>Now Aurora paints the fir tops at their very tips with gold,</p> + + <p>And the little finch sits up there launching forth his song of + praise,</p> + + <p>Thanking for the night that's over, for the day that's just + awake</p> + + <p>Gently blows the breeze of morning, rocking in the topmost + twigs,</p> + + <p>And it bends them down like children, like good children when + they pray;</p> + + <p>And the dew is an oblation as it drops from their green + hair.</p> + + <p>O what beauties in the forest he that we may see and know!</p> + + <p>One could melt away one's heart before its wonders manifold!</p> + </div> + + <p>The sixth line in the original has a melody that reminds one of + Goethe's early work.</p> + + <p>But even amidst the artificial poetry then in vogue, there were a + few side streams which turned away from the main current of the great + poet schools, from the unnaturalness and bombast affected especially + by the Silesians. As Winter says, even the satirists Moscherosch and + Logau were indirectly of use in paving the way for a healthier + condition, through their severe criticisms of the corruption of the + language; and Logau's one epigram on May, 'This month is a kiss which + heaven gives to earth, that she may be a bride now, a mother + by-and-by,' outweighs all Harsdörfer's and Zesen's poetry about + Nature.</p> + + <p>But even by the side of Opitz and Fleming there was at least one + poet of real feeling, Friedrich von Spee.<a href= + "#j2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> With all his mystic and pietist + Christianity, he kept an open eye for Nature. His poems are full of + disdain of the world and joy in Nature,<a href= + "#j3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> longings <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg220" id="pg220">220</a></span>for death and lamentations over sin; + he delighted in personifications of abstract ideas, childish playing + with words and feelings, and sentimental enthusiasm. But mawkish and + canting as he was apt to be, he often shewed a fine appreciation of + detail. He was even--a rare thing then--fascinated by the sea.</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Now rages and roars the wild, wild sea,</p> + + <p>Now in soft curves lies quietly;</p> + + <p>Sweetly the light of the sun's bright glow</p> + + <p>Mirrors itself in the water below.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Sad winter's past--the stork is here,</p> + + <p>Birds are singing and nests appear;</p> + + <p>Bowery homes steal into the day,</p> + + <p>Flow'rets present their full array;</p> + + <p>Like little snakes and woods about,</p> + + <p>The streams go wandering in and out.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>His motives, like his diminutives, are constantly recurring. He + uses many bold and poetic personifications; the sun 'combs her golden + hair,' the moon is a good shepherd who leads his sheep the stars + across the blue heath, blowing upon a soft pipe; the sun adorns + herself in spring with a crown and a girdle of roses, fills her + quiver with arrows, and sends her horses to gallop for miles across + the smooth sky; the wind flies about, stopping for breath from time + to time; shakes its wings and withdraws into its house when it is + tired; the brook of Cedron sits, leaning on a bucket in a hollow, + combing his bulrush hair, his shoulders covered by grass and water; + he sings a cradle song to his little brooks, or drives them before + him, etc.</p> + + <p>But the most gifted poet of the set, and the most doughty opponent + of Lohenstein's bombast, was the unhappy Christian Guenther.<a href= + "#j4"><sup>[4]</sup></a></p> + + <p>He vents his feelings in verse because he must. There is a + foretaste of Goethe in his lyrics, poured put to free the soul from a + burden, and melodious as if by accident. As we turn over the leaves + of his <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg221" id= + "pg221">221</a></span>book of songs, we find deep feeling for Nature + mingled with his love and sorrows.<a href= + "#j5"><sup>[5]</sup></a></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Bethink you, flowers and trees and shades,</p> + + <p>Of the sweet evenings here with Flavia!</p> + + <p>'Twas here her head upon my shoulder pressed;</p> + + <p>Conceal, ye limes, what else I dare not say.</p> + + <p>'Twas here she clover threw and thyme at me,</p> + + <p>And here I filled her lap with freshest flowers.</p> + + <p>Ah! that was a good time!</p> + + <p>I care more for moon and starlight than the pleasantest of + days,</p> + + <p>And with eyes and heart uplifted from my chamber often gaze</p> + + <p>With an awe that grows apace till it scarcely findeth space.</p> + </div> + + <p>To his lady-love he writes:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Here where I am writing now</p> + + <p>'Tis lonely, shady, cool, and green;</p> + + <p>And by the slender fig I hear</p> + + <p>The gentle wind blow towards Schweidnitz.</p> + + <p>And all the time most ardently</p> + + <p>I give it thousand kisses for thee.</p> + </div> + + <p>And at Schweidnitz:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>A thousand greetings, bushes, fields, and trees,</p> + + <p>You know him well whose many rhymes</p> + + <p>And songs you've heard, whose kisses seen;</p> + + <p>Remember the joy of those fine summer nights.</p> + </div> + + <p>To Eleanora:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Spring is not far away. Walk in green solitude</p> + + <p>Between your alder rows, and think ...</p> + + <p>As in the oft-repeated lesson</p> + + <p>The young birds' cry shall bear my longing;</p> + + <p>And when the west wind plays with cheek and dress be sure</p> + + <p>He tells me of thy longing, and kisses thee a thousand times for + me.</p> + </div> + + <p>In a time of despair, he wrote:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Storm, rage and tear! winds of misfortune, shew all your + tyranny!</p> + + <p>Twist and split bark and twig,</p> + + <p>And break the tree of hope in two <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg222" id="pg222">222</a></span></p> + + <p>Stem and leaves are struck by this hail and thunder,</p> + + <p>The root remains till storm and rain have laid their wrath.</p> + </div> + + <p>Again:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The woods I'll wander through,</p> + + <p>From men I'll flee away,</p> + + <p>With lonely doves I'll coo,</p> + + <p>And with the wild things stay.</p> + + <p>When life's the prey of misery,</p> + + <p>And all my powers depart,</p> + + <p>A leafy grave will be</p> + + <p>Far kinder than thy heart.</p> + </div> + + <p>True lyrist, he gave Nature her full right in his feelings, and + found comfort in return; but, as Goethe said of him, gifted but + unsteady as he was, 'He did not know how to restrain himself, and so + his life and poetry melted away.'</p> + + <p>Among those who made use of better material than the Silesian + poets, H. Barthold Brockes stood first. Nature was his one and only + subject; but in this he was not original, he was influenced by + England. While France was dictating a taste like the baroque, and + Germany enthusiastically adopting it (every petty prince in the land + copied the gardens at Versailles, Schwetzingen more closely than the + rest), a revolution which affected all Europe was brought about by + England. The order of the following dates is significant: William + Kent, the famous garden artist, died in 1748, James Thomson in the + same year, Brockes a year earlier; and about the same time the + imitations of Robinson Crusoe sprang up like mushrooms.</p> + + <p>We have considered Shakespeare's plays; English lyrists too of the + fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shewed deep feeling for Nature, and + invested scenery with their own feelings in a very delicate way.</p> + + <p>G. Chaucer (1400) praises the nightingale s song in <i>From the + Floure and Leafe</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="i6">So was I with the song</p> + + <p>Thorow ravished, that till late and long <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg223" id="pg223">223</a></span></p> + + <p>Ne wist I in what place I was ne where; ...</p> + + <p>And at the last, I gan full well aspie</p> + + <p>Where she sat in a fresh grene laurer tree</p> + + <p>On the further side, even right by me,</p> + + <p>That gave so passing a delicious smell</p> + + <p>According to the eglentere full well....</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p class="i6">On the sote grass</p> + + <p>I sat me downe, for, as for mine entent,</p> + + <p>The birddes song was more convenient,</p> + + <p>And more pleasant to me by many fold</p> + + <p>Than meat or drink or any other thing.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Thomas Wyatt (1542) says of his lady-love:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The rocks do not so cruelly</p> + + <p>Repulse the waves continually,</p> + + <p>As she my suit and affection</p> + + <p>So that I am past remedy.</p> + </div> + + <p>Robert Southwell (1595), in <i>Love's Servile Lott</i>, compares + love to April:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>May never was the month for love,</p> + + <p>For May is full of floures,</p> + + <p>But rather Aprill, wett by kinde,</p> + + <p>For love is full of showers....</p> + + <p>Like winter rose and summer yce,</p> + + <p>Her joyes are still untymelye;</p> + + <p>Before her hope, behind remorse,</p> + + <p>Fayre first, in fyne unseemely.</p> + </div> + + <p>Edmund Spenser (1598) describes a garden in <i>The Faerie + Queene</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>There the most daintie Paradise on ground</p> + + <p>It selfe did offer to his sober eye,</p> + + <p>In which all pleasures plenteously abownd,</p> + + <p>And none does others' happinesse envye;</p> + + <p>The painted flowres, the trees upshooting hye,</p> + + <p>The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space,</p> + + <p>The trembling groves, the christall running by,</p> + + <p>And, that which all fair workes doth most aggrace,</p> + + <p>The art which all that wrought appeared in no place.</p> + </div> + + <p>Mountain scenery was seldom visited or described.</p> + + <p>Michael Drayton (1731) wrote an ode on the Peak, in + Derbyshire:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Though on the utmost Peak</p> + + <p>A while we do remain,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg224" id= + "pg224">224</a></span>Amongst the mountains bleak</p> + + <p>Exposed to sleet and rain,</p> + + <p>No sport our hours shall break</p> + + <p>To exercise our vein.</p> + </div> + + <p>It is clear that he preferred his comfort to everything, for he + goes on:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Yet many rivers clear</p> + + <p>Here glide in silver swathes,</p> + + <p>And what of all most dear</p> + + <p>Buxton's delicious baths,</p> + + <p>Strong ale and noble chear</p> + + <p>T' assuage breem winter's scathes.</p> + </div> + + <p>Thomas Carew (1639) sings:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Ask me no more where Jove bestows,</p> + + <p>When June is past, the fading rose,</p> + + <p>For in your beauties' orient deep</p> + + <p>These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.</p> + + <p>Ask me no more whither do stray</p> + + <p>The golden atoms of the day,</p> + + <p>For in pure love Heaven did prepare</p> + + <p>Those powders to enrich your hair.</p> + + <p>Ask me no more whither doth haste</p> + + <p>The nightingale, when May is past,</p> + + <p>For in your sweet dividing throat</p> + + <p>She winters and keeps warm her note.</p> + + <p>Ask me no more where these stars shine</p> + + <p>That downwards fall in dead of night,</p> + + <p>For in your eyes they sit, and there</p> + + <p>Fixed become, as in their sphere.</p> + + <p>Ask me no more if east or west</p> + + <p>The phoenix builds her spicy nest,</p> + + <p>For unto you at last she flies</p> + + <p>And in your fragrant bosom dies.</p> + </div> + + <p>William Drummond (1746) avowed a taste which he knew to be very + unfashionable:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove,</p> + + <p>Far from the clamorous world, doth live his own</p> + + <p>Though solitary, who is not alone,</p> + + <p>But doth converse with that eternal love.</p> + + <p>O how more sweet is birds' harmonious moan</p> + + <p>Or the soft sobbings of the widow'd dove,</p> + + <p>Than those smooth whisp'rings near a prince's throne....</p> + + <p>O how more sweet is zephyr's wholesome breath</p> + + <p>And sighs perfum'd, which new-born flowers unfold.</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg225" id="pg225">225</a></span> + + <p>Another sonnet, to a nightingale, says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Sweet bird, that sing'st away the early hours</p> + + <p>Of winters past or coming void of care,</p> + + <p>Well pleased with delights which present are,</p> + + <p>Fair seasons, budding sprays, sweet-smelling flowers;</p> + + <p>To rocks, to springs, to rills, from leafy bowers</p> + + <p>Thou thy Creator's goodness dost declare,</p> + + <p>And what dear gifts on thee He did not spare,</p> + + <p>A stain to human sense in sin that lowers,</p> + + <p>What soul can be so sick which by thy songs</p> + + <p>Attir'd in sweetness, sweetly is not driven</p> + + <p>Quite to forget earth's turmoils, spites, and wrongs?</p> + </div> + + <p>He greets Spring:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Sweet Spring, thou turn'st with all thy goodly train</p> + + <p>Thy head with flames, thy mantle bright with flowers;</p> + + <p>The zephyrs curl the green locks of the plain,</p> + + <p>The clouds for joy in pearls weep down their showers.</p> + </div> + + <p>Robert Blair (1746) sings in <i>The Grave</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i4">Oh, when my friend and I</p> + + <p>In some thick wood have wander'd heedless on,</p> + + <p>Hid from the vulgar eye, and sat us down</p> + + <p>Upon the sloping cowslip-cover'd bank,</p> + + <p>Where the pure limpid stream has slid along</p> + + <p>In grateful errors through the underwood,</p> + + <p>Sweet murmuring; methought the shrill-tongu'd thrush</p> + + <p>Mended his song of love, the sooty blackbird</p> + + <p>Mellowed his pipe and soften'd every note,</p> + + <p>The eglantine smell'd sweeter and the rose</p> + + <p>Assum'd a dye more deep, whilst ev'ry flower</p> + + <p>Vied with its fellow plant in luxury</p> + + <p>Of dress. Oh! then the longest summer's day</p> + + <p>Seem'd too, too much in haste, still the full heart</p> + + <p>Had not imparted half; half was happiness</p> + + <p>Too exquisite to last--Of joys departed</p> + + <p>Not to return, how painful the remembrance!</p> + </div> + + <p>The great painter of Nature among the poets was James Thomson. He + was not original, but followed Pope, who had lighted up the seasons + in a dry, dogmatic way in <i>Windsor Forest</i>, and pastoral poems, + and after the publication of his <i>Winter</i> the taste of the day + carried him on. His deep and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg226" + id="pg226">226</a></span>sentimental affection for Nature was mixed + up with piety and moralizing. He said in a letter to his friend + Paterson:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Retirement and Nature are more and more my passion every day; + and now, even now, the charming time comes on; Heaven is just on + the point, or rather in the very act, of giving earth a green gown. + The voice of the nightingale is heard in our lane. You must know + that I have enlarged my rural domain ... walled, no, no! paled in + about as much as my garden consisted of before, so that the walk + runs round the hedge, where you may figure me walking any time of + day, and sometimes of the night.... May your health continue till + you have scraped together enough to return home and live in some + snug corner, as happy as the Corycius senex in Virgil's fourth + Georgic, whom I recommend both to you and myself as a perfect model + of the truest happy life.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>It is a fact that Solitude and Nature became a passion with him. + He would wander about the country for weeks at a time, noting every + sight and sound, down to the smallest, and finding beauty and divine + goodness in all. His <i>Seasons</i> were the result.</p> + + <p>There is faithful portraiture in these landscapes in verse; some + have charm and delicacy, but, for the most part, they are only + catalogues of the external world, wholly lacking in links with the + inner life.</p> + + <p>Scene after scene is described without pause, or only interrupted + by sermonizing; it is as monotonous as a gallery of landscape + paintings.</p> + + <p>The human beings introduced are mere accessories, they do not + live, and the undercurrent of all is praise of the Highest. His + predilection is for still life in wood and field, but he does not + neglect grander scenery; his muse</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>"Sees Caledonia, in romantic view:</p> + + <p>Her airy mountains, from the waving main</p> + + <p>Invested with a keen diffusive sky,</p> + + <p>Breathing the soul acute; her forests huge,</p> + + <p>Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature's hand</p> + + <p>Planted of old; her azure lakes between,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg227" id= + "pg227">227</a></span>Poured out extensive and of watery wealth</p> + + <p>Full; winding, deep and green, her fertile vales,</p> + + <p>With many a cool translucent brimming flood</p> + + <p>Washed lovely...."</p> + </div> + + <p>And in <i>A Hymn</i> we read:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Ye headlong torrents rapid and profound,</p> + + <p>Ye softer floods that lead the humid maze</p> + + <p>Along the vale; and thou, majestic main,</p> + + <p>A secret world of wonders in thyself.</p> + </div> + + <p>It is the lack of human life, the didactic tone, and the wearisome + detail which destroys interest in the <i>Seasons</i>--the lack of + happy moments of invention. Yet it had great influence on his + contemporaries in rousing love for Nature, and it contains many + beautiful passages. For example:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come,</p> + + <p>And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,</p> + + <p>While music wakes around, veiled in a shower</p> + + <p>Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.</p> + </div> + + <p>His most artistic poem is Winter:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When from the pallid sky the sun descends</p> + + <p>With many a spot, that o'er his glaring orb</p> + + <p>Uncertain wanders, stained; red fiery streaks</p> + + <p>Begin to flush around. The reeling clouds</p> + + <p>Stagger with dizzy poise, as doubting yet</p> + + <p>Which master to obey; while rising slow,</p> + + <p>Blank in the leaden-coloured east, the moon</p> + + <p>Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns.</p> + + <p>Seen through the turbid fluctuating air,</p> + + <p>The stars obtuse emit a shivering ray;</p> + + <p>Or frequent seem to shoot, athwart the gloom,</p> + + <p>And long behind them trail the whitening blaze.</p> + + <p>Snatched in short eddies plays the withered leaf,</p> + + <p>And on the flood the dancing feather floats.</p> + + <p>With broadened nostrils to the sky upturned,</p> + + <p>The conscious heifer snuffs the stormy gale....</p> + + <p>Retiring from the downs, where all day long</p> + + <p>They picked their scanty fare, a blackening train</p> + + <p>Of clamorous rooks thick urge their weary flight</p> + + <p>And seek the closing shelter of the grove,</p> + + <p>Assiduous, in his bower, the wailing owl</p> + + <p>Plies his sad song. The cormorant on high</p> + + <p>Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg228" id= + "pg228">228</a></span>Loud shrieks the soaring heron, and with wild + wing</p> + + <p>The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky skies.</p> + + <p>Ocean, unequal pressed, with broken tide</p> + + <p>And blind commotion heaves, while from the shore,</p> + + <p>Eat into caverns by the restless wave</p> + + <p>And forest-rustling mountains, comes a voice</p> + + <p>That solemn-sounding bids the world prepare.</p> + </div> + + <p>The elaboration of detail in such painting is certain evidence, + not only of a keen, but an enthusiastic eye for Nature. As he says in + Winter:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Nature, great parent! whose unceasing hand</p> + + <p>Rolls round the seasons of the changeful year!</p> + + <p>How mighty, how majestic, are thy works!</p> + + <p>With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul</p> + + <p>That sees astonish'd, and astonish'd sings!</p> + </div> + + <p>Brockes was directly influenced by Pope and Thomson, and + translated the <i>Seasons</i>, when he had finished his <i>Irdisches + Vergnügen in Gott</i>. This unwieldy work, insipid and prosaic as it + is, was still a literary achievement, thanks to the dignity of the + subject and the high seriousness of its aim, at a time when frivolity + was the fashion in poetry. Its long pious descriptions of natural + phenomena have none of the imposing flow of Thomson's strophes. It + treats of fire in 138 verses of eight lines each, of air in 79, water + in 78, earth in 74, while flowers and fruit are dissected and + analyzed at great length; and all this rhymed botany and physics is + loosely strung together, but it shews a warm feeling for Nature of a + moralizing and devotional sort. He says himself<a href= + "#j7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> that he took up the study of poetry first as + an amusement, but later more seriously, and chose Nature as his + theme, not only because her beauty moved him, but as a means 'whereby + man might enjoy a permissible pleasure and be edified at the same + time.'</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>So I resolved to sing the praises of the Creator to the best of + my powers, and felt the more bound to do it, because I held that + such great and almost inexcusable <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg229" id="pg229">229</a></span>neglect and ingratitude was a + wrong to the Creator, and unbecoming in Christendom. I therefore + composed different pieces, chiefly in Spring, and tried my best to + describe the beauties of Nature, in order, through my own pleasure, + to rekindle the praise of the wise Creator in myself and others, + and this led at last to the first part of my <i>Irdisches + Vergnügen</i>. (1721.)</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>His evidence from animal and plant life for the teleological + argument is very laughable; take, for example, the often-quoted + chamois:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The fat is good for phthisis, the gall for the face, chamois + flesh is good to eat, and its blood cures vertigo--the skin is no + less useful. Doth not the love as well as the wisdom and + almightiness of the Creator shine forth from this animal?</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>For the rest, the following lines from <i>Irdisches Vergnügen in + Gott</i> will serve to give an idea of his style; they certainly do + honour to his laborious attempt to miss none of the charms of the + wood:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Lately as I sat on the green grass</p> + + <p>Shaded by a lime tree, and read,</p> + + <p>I raised my eyes by chance and saw</p> + + <p>Different trees here and there, some far, some near,</p> + + <p>Some half, some all in light, and some in shade,</p> + + <p>Their boughs bowed down by leaves.</p> + + <p>I saw how beautifully both air and flowery mead</p> + + <p>Were crowned and adorned.</p> + + <p>To describe the green grace</p> + + <p>And the landscape it makes so sweet,</p> + + <p>And at the same time prolong my pleasure,</p> + + <p>I took pencil and paper</p> + + <p>And tried to describe the beautiful trees in rhyme,</p> + + <p>To the glory of God their Creator.</p> + + <p>Of all the beauty the world lays before our eyes,</p> + + <p>There certainly is none which does not pale</p> + + <p>Beside green boughs,</p> + + <p>Nothing to compare for pure beauty with a wood.</p> + + <p>The green roofing overhead</p> + + <p>Makes me feel young again;</p> + + <p>It hangs there, a living tapestry,</p> + + <p>To the glory of God and our delight....</p> + + <p>Beyond many trees that lay in shade</p> + + <p>I often saw one in full light;</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg230" id="pg230">230</a></span>A + human eye would scarce believe</p> + + <p>How sweetly twilight, light and darkness</p> + + <p>Meet side by side in leafy trees.</p> + + <p>Peering through the leaves with joy</p> + + <p>We notice, as we see the leaves</p> + + <p>Lighted from one side only,</p> + + <p>That we can almost see the sun</p> + + <p>Mixing gold with the tender green, etc.</p> + </div> + + <p>and so on for another twenty lines.</p> + + <p>Yet this rich Burgomaster of Hamburg, for all that he dealt + chiefly in rhymed prose, had his moments of rare elevation of thought + and mystical rapture about Nature; for instance, in the introduction + to <i>Ueber das Firmament</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>As lately in the sapphire depths,</p> + + <p>Not bound by earth nor water, aim nor end,</p> + + <p>In the unplumbed aerial sea I gazed,</p> + + <p>And my absorbed glance, now here, now there,</p> + + <p>But ever deeper sank--horror came over me,</p> + + <p>My eye grew dizzy and my soul aghast.</p> + + <p>That infinite vast vault,</p> + + <p>True picture of Eternity,</p> + + <p>Since without birth or end</p> + + <p>From God alone it comes....</p> + + <p>It overwhelmed my soul.</p> + + <p>The mighty dome of deep dark light,</p> + + <p>Bright darkness without birth or bound,</p> + + <p>Swallowed the very world--burying thought.</p> + + <p>My being dwindled to an atom, to a nought;</p> + + <p>I lost myself,</p> + + <p>So suddenly it beat me down,</p> + + <p>And threatened with despair.</p> + + <p>But in that salutary nothingness, that blessed loss,</p> + + <p>All present God! in Thee--I found myself again.</p> + </div> + + <p>While English poetry and its German imitations were shewing these + signs of reaction from the artificiality of the time, and science and + philosophy often lauded Nature to the skies, as, for instance, + Shaftesbury<a href="#j8"><sup>[8]</sup></a> (1671-1713), a return to + Nature became the principle of English garden-craft in the first half + of the eighteenth century.<a href="#j9"><sup>[9]</sup></a> The line + of progress here, as in taste generally, did not run <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg231" id="pg231">231</a></span>straightforward, + but fluctuated. From the geometric gardens of Lenotre, England passed + to the opposite extreme; in the full tide of periwig and hoop + petticoat, minuets, beauty-patches and rouge, Addison and Pope were + banishing everything that was not strictly natural from the garden. + Addison would even have everything grow wild in its own way, and Pope + wrote:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>To build, to plant, whatever you intend,</p> + + <p>To rear the column, or the arch to bend,</p> + + <p>To swell the terrace or to sink the grot,</p> + + <p>In all let Nature never be forgot.</p> + </div> + + <p>William Kent made allowance for this idea; but, as a painter, and + looking at his native scenery with a painter's eye, he noted its + characteristic features--the gentle undulations, the freshness of the + green, the wealth of trees--and based his garden-craft on these.</p> + + <p>The straight line was banished; in its place came wide spaces of + lawn and scattered groups of trees of different sorts--dark fir and + alder here, silver birch and grey poplar there; and flowery fields + with streams running through them stood out in relief against dark + woodland.</p> + + <p>Stiff walls, balustrades, terraces, statues, and so forth, + disappeared; the garden was not to contrast with the surrounding + landscape, but to merge into it--to be not Art, but a bit of Nature. + It was, in fact, to be a number of such bits, each distinct from the + rest--waterfall, sheltered sunny nook, dark wood, light glade. Kent + himself soon began to vary this mosaic of separate scenes by adding + ruins and pavilions; but it was Chambers the architect who developed + the idea of variety by his writings on the dwellings and manners of + the Chinese.<a href="#j10"><sup>[10]</sup></a></p> + + <p>The fundamental idea that the garden ought to be a sample of the + landscape was common both <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg232" id= + "pg232">232</a></span>to Kent and the Chinese; but, as China is far + richer than England in varieties of scenery, her gardens included + mountains, rocks, swamps, and deserts, as well as sunny fields and + plains, while English gardens were comparatively monotonous. When the + fashion for the Chinese style came in, as unluckily it did just when + we were trying to oust the Rococo, so that one pigtail superseded the + other, variety was achieved by groups of buildings in all sorts of + styles. Stables, ice-houses, gardeners' cottages took the form of + pavilions, pagodas, kiosks, and temples.</p> + + <p>Meanwhile, as a reaction against the Rococo, enthusiasm for Nature + increased, and feeling was set free from restraint by the growing + sentimentality. Richardson's novels fed the taste for the pleasures + of weeping sensibility, and garden-craft fell under its sway. In all + periods the insignificant and non-essential is unable to resist the + general stamp, if that only shews a little originality.</p> + + <p>These gardens, with temples to friendship and love, melancholy, + virtue, re-union, and death, and so forth, were suitable backgrounds + for the sentimental scenes described in the English novels, and for + the idyllic poets and moonshine singers of Germany. Here it was the + fashion to wander, tenderly intertwined, shedding floods of tears and + exchanging kisses, and pausing at various places to read the + inscriptions which directed them what to feel. At one spot they were + to laugh, at another to weep, at a third to be fired with + devotion.</p> + + <p>Hermitages sprang up everywhere, with hermits, real or dummy. Any + good house near a wood, or in a shady position, was called a + hermitage, and dedicated to arcadian life, free from care and + ceremony. Classic and romantic styles competed for favour in + architecture; at one moment everything must needs be purely classic, + each temple Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric; at another Gothic, with the + ruins <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg233" id= + "pg233">233</a></span>and fortresses of mediæval romance. And not + only English gardens, but those of Europe generally, though to a less + degree, passed through these stages of development, for no disease is + so infectious as fashion.</p> + + <p>It was not till the end of the eighteenth century that a healthy + reaction set in in England, when Repton turned back to Kent's + fundamental principle and freed it from its unnatural excrescences, + with the formula: the garden should be an artistic representation of + the landscape, a work of art whose materials are provided by Nature + herself, whether grass, flowers, bushes, trees, water, or whatever it + may be that she has to offer. Thus began our modern landscape + gardening.</p> + + <p>In another region too, a change was brought about from the Rococo + to a more natural style. It is true that Nature plays no direct + <i>rôle</i> in <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>, and wins as little notice + there as in its numberless imitations; yet the book roused a longing + for healthier, more natural conditions in thousands of minds. It led + the idyllic tendency of the day back to its source, and by shewing + all the stages, from the raw state of Nature up to the culture of the + community, in the life of one man, it brought out the contrast + between the far-off age of innocence and the perverted present.</p> + + <p>The German <i>Simplicissimus</i> closed with a Robinsonade, in + which the hero, after long wandering, found rest and peace on an + island in the ocean of the world, alone with himself and Nature. The + readers of <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> were in much the same position. + Defoe was not only a true artist, but a man of noble, patient + character, and his romance proved a healing medicine to many sick + minds, pointing the way back to Nature and a natural fife, and + creating a longing for the lost innocence of man.</p> + + <p>Rousseau, who was also a zealous advocate of <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg234" id="pg234">234</a></span>the English + gardens, and disgusted by the French Pigtail style, was more + impressed by <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> than by any other book. It was + the first book his Emilia gave him, as a gospel of Nature and + unspoilt taste. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg235" id= + "pg235">235</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch10" id="ch10">CHAPTER X</a></h2> + + <h3>THE SENSITIVENESS AND EXAGGERATION OF THE ELEGIAC IDYLLIC + FEELING</h3> + + <p>This longing to return to the lost paradise of Nature gradually + produced a state of melancholy hyper-sensitiveness, an epidemic of + world pain, quite as unnatural as the Rococo.</p> + + <p>The heart came into its rights again and laid claim to absolute + dominion in its kingdom, and regret that it had lain so long deprived + of its own, gave rise to a tearful pensiveness, which added zest to + restitution. It was convalescence, but followed at once by another + complaint. Feeling swung from one extreme to the other.</p> + + <p>German feeling in the first half of the eighteenth century was + chiefly influenced, on the one hand, by Richardson's novels, which + left no room for Nature, and by the poetry of Young and Thomson; on + the other, by the pastoral idylls interspersed with anacreontic + love-passages, affected by the French. At first description and + moralizing preponderated.</p> + + <p>In 1729 Haller's <i>Alps</i> appeared. It had the merit of drawing + the eyes of Europe to Alpine beauty and the moral worth of the Swiss, + but shewed little eye for romantic scenery. It is full of descriptive + painting, but not of a kind that appeals: scene follows scene with + considerable pathos, especially in dealing with the people; but + landscape is looked <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg236" id= + "pg236">236</a></span>at almost entirely from the moralizing or + utilitarian standpoint.</p> + + <p>'Here, where the majestic Mount Gothard elevates its summit above + the clouds, and where the earth itself seems to approach the sun, + Nature has assembled in one spot all the choicest treasure of the + globe. The deserts of Libya, indeed, afford us greater novelties, and + its sandy plains are more fertile in monsters: but thou, favoured + region, art adorned with useful productions only, productions which + can satisfy all the wants of man. Even those heaps of ice, those + frowning rocks in appearance so sterile, contribute largely to the + general good, for they supply inexhaustible fountains to fertilize + the land. What a magnificent picture does Nature spread before the + eye, when the sun, gilding the top of the Alps, scatters the sea of + vapours which undulates below! Through the receding vale the theatre + of a whole world rises to the view! Rocks, valleys, lakes, mountains, + and forests fill the immeasurable space, and are lost in the wide + horizon. We take in at a single glance the confines of divers states, + nations of various characters, languages, and manners, till the eyes, + overcome by such extent of vision, drop their weary lids, and we ask + of the enchanted fancy a continuance of the scene.</p> + + <p>'When the first emotion of astonishment has subsided, how + delightful is it to observe each several part which makes up this + sublime whole! That mass of hills, which presents its graceful + declivity covered with flocks of sheep whose bleatings resound + through the meadows; that large clear lake, which reflects from its + level surface sunbeams gently curved; those valleys, rich in verdure, + which compose by their various outlines points of perspective which + contract in the distance of the landscape! Here rises a bare steep + mountain laden with the accumulated snow of ages; its icy head rests + among the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg237" id= + "pg237">237</a></span>clouds, repelling the genial rays of the moon + and the fervid heat of the dog-star: there a chain of cultivated + hills spreads before the delighted eye; their green pastures are + enlivened by flocks, and their golden corn waves in the wind: yet + climates so different as those are only separated by a cool, narrow + valley. Behold that foaming torrent rushing from a perpendicular + height! Its rapid waves dash among the rocks, and shoot even beyond + their limits. Divided by the rapidity of its course and the depth of + the abyss where it falls, it changes into a grey moving veil; and, at + length scattered into humid atoms, it shines with the tints of the + rainbow, and, suspended over the valley, refreshes it with plenteous + dew. The traveller beholds with astonishment rivers flowing towards + the sky, and issuing from one cloud, hide themselves in the grey veil + of another.</p> + + <p>'Those desert places uncheered by the rays of the sun, those + frozen abysses deprived of all verdure, hide beneath their sterile + sands invaluable treasures, which defy the rigour of the seasons and + all the injuries of time! 'Tis in dark and marshy recesses, upon the + damp grottos, that crystal rocks are formed. Thus splendour is + diffused through their melancholy vaults, and their shadowy depths + gutter with the colours of the rainbow. O Nature, how various are thy + operations, how infinite thy fertility!'</p> + + <p>We cannot agree with Frey<a href="#k1"><sup>[1]</sup></a> that + 'these few strophes may serve as sufficient proof that Haller's + poetry is still, even among the mass of Alpine poetry, unsurpassed + for intense power of direct vision, and easily makes one forget its + partial lack of flexibility of diction.'</p> + + <p>The truth is, flexibility is entirely lacking; but the lines do + express the taste for open-air life among the great sublimities and + with simple people. The poem is not romantic but idyllic, with a + touch of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg238" id= + "pg238">238</a></span>elegiac. It is the same with the poem <i>On the + Origin of Evil</i> (Book I.):</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>On those still heights whence constant springs flow down,</p> + + <p>I paused within a copse, lured by the evening breeze;</p> + + <p>Wide country lay spread out beneath my feet,</p> + + <p>Bounded by its own size alone....</p> + + <p>Green woods covered the hills, through which the pale tints of + the fields</p> + + <p>Shone pleasantly.</p> + + <p>Abundance and repose held sway far as the eye could + reach....</p> + + <p>And yonder wood, what left it to desire</p> + + <p>With the red tints upon the half-bare beeches</p> + + <p>And the rich pine's green shade o'er whitened moss?</p> + + <p>While many a sun-ray through the interstices</p> + + <p>A quivering light upon the darkness shed,</p> + + <p>Blending in varying hues green night with golden day</p> + + <p>How pleasant is the quiet of the copse! ...</p> + + <p>Yea, all I see is given by Providence,</p> + + <p>The world itself is for its burgher's joy;</p> + + <p>Nature's inspired with the general weal,</p> + + <p>The highest goodness shews its trace in all.</p> + </div> + + <p>Friedrich von Hagedorn, too, praises country pleasures in <i>The + Feeling of Spring</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Enamelled meadows! freshly decked in green,</p> + + <p>I sing your praises constantly;</p> + + <p>Nature and Spring have decked you out....</p> + + <p>Delightful quiet, stimulant of joy,</p> + + <p>How enviable thou art!</p> + </div> + + <p>This idyllic taste for country life was common at the time, + especially among the so-called 'anacreontists.' Gleim, for instance, + in his <i>Praise of Country Life</i>: 'Thank God that I have fled + from the bustle of the world and am myself again under the open + sky.'</p> + + <p>And in <i>The Countryman</i>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>How happy is he who, free from cares, ploughs his father's + fields; every morning the sun shines on the grass in which he + lies.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg239" id="pg239">239</a></span> + And Joh. Friedrich von Cronegk:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Fly from sordid cares and the proud tumult of cities ... here in + the peaceful valley shy wisdom sports at ease, where the smiling + Muse crowns herself with dewy roses.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>With this idyllic tone it is not surprising to find the religious + feeling of many hymn writers; for instance, Gleim in <i>The Goodness + of God</i>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>For whom did Thy goodness create the world so beautiful, O God? + For whom are the flowers on hill and dale? ... Thou gavest us power + to perceive the beauty.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And above all, honest Gellert:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The skies, the globe, the seas, praise the eternal glory. O my + Creator, when I consider Thy might and the wisdom of Thy ways.... + Sunshine and storm preach Thee, and the sands of the sea.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Ewald von Kleist excelled Haller as much as Haller had excelled + Brockes.</p> + + <p>Julian Schmidt says<a href="#k3"><sup>[3]</sup></a>: 'Later on, + descriptive poetry, like didactic, fell into disgrace; but at that + time this dwelling upon the minutiæ of Nature served to enrich the + imagination; Kleist's descriptions are thoughtful and interesting.' + It is easy to see that his longer poems cost him much labour; they + were not the pure songs of feeling that gush out spontaneously like a + spring from the rock. But in eloquence and keenness of observation he + excelled his contemporaries, although he, too, followed the fashion + of eighteenth-century literature, and coquetted with Greek nymphs and + deities, and the names of winds and maidens.</p> + + <p>The tendency to depression, increased by his failure to adapt + himself to military life, made him incline more and more to + solitude.</p> + + <p><i>To Doris</i> begins:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Now spring doth warm the flakeless air,</p> + + <p>And in the brook the sky reflects her blue,</p> + + <p>Shepherds in fragrant flowers find delight ...</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg240" id= + "pg240">240</a></span>The corn lifts high its golden head,</p> + + <p>And Zephyr moves in waves across the grain,</p> + + <p>Her robe the field embroiders; the young rush</p> + + <p>Adorns the border of each silver stream,</p> + + <p>Love seeks the green night of the forest shade,</p> + + <p>And air and sea and earth and heaven smile.</p> + </div> + + <p><i>Sighs for Rest</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>O silver brook, my leisure's early soother,</p> + + <p>When wilt thou murmur lullabies again?</p> + + <p>When shall I trace thy sliding smooth and smoother,</p> + + <p>While kingfishers along thy reeds complain;</p> + + <p>Afar from thee with care and toil opprest,</p> + + <p>Thy image still can calm my troubled breast.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>O ye fair groves and odorous violet valleys,</p> + + <p>Girt with a garland blue of hills around,</p> + + <p>Thou quiet lake, where, when Aurora sallies,</p> + + <p>Her golden tresses seem to sweep the ground:</p> + + <p>Soft mossy turf, on which I wont to stray,</p> + + <p>For me no longer bloom thy flow'rets gay.</p> + + <p>As when the chilly nights of March arise</p> + + <p>And whirl the howling dust in eddies swift,</p> + + <p>The sunbeams wither in the dimmer skies,</p> + + <p>O'er the young ears the sand and pebbles drift:</p> + + <p>So the war rages, and the furious forces</p> + + <p>The air with smoke bespread, the field with corses.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The vineyard bleeds, and trampled is the com,</p> + + <p>Orchards but heat the kettles of the camp....</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>As when a lake which gushing rains invade</p> + + <p>Breaks down its dams, and fields are overflowed.</p> + + <p>So floods of fire across the region spread,</p> + + <p>And standing corn by crackling flames is mowed:</p> + + <p>Bellowing the cattle fly; the forests burn,</p> + + <p>And their own ashes the old stems in-urn.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>He too, who fain would live in purity,</p> + + <p>Feels nature treacherous, hears examples urge,</p> + + <p>As one who, falling overboard at sea,</p> + + <p>Beats with his arms and feet the buoyant surge,</p> + + <p>And climbs at length against some rocky brink,</p> + + <p>Only beneath exhausted strength to sink.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>My cheek bedewed with holy tears in vain,</p> + + <p>To love and heaven I vowed a spotless truth:</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg241" id= + "pg241">241</a></span>Too soon the noble tear exhaled again,</p> + + <p>Example conquered, and the glow of youth</p> + + <p>To live as live one's comrades seems allowed;</p> + + <p>He who would be a man, must quit the crowd.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>He, too, wrote with hymn-like swing in praise of the Creator: + 'Great is the Lord! the unnumbered heavens are the chambers of his + fortress, storm and thunder-clouds his chariot.'</p> + + <p>The most famous of his poems, and the one most admired in his own + day, was <i>Spring</i>. This is full of love for Nature. It describes + a country walk after the muggy air of town, and conveys a vivid + impression of fresh germinating spring, though it is overlaid by + monotonous detail:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Receive me, hallowed shades! Ye dwellings of sweet buss!</p> + + <p>Umbrageous arches full of sleeping dark delights ...</p> + + <p>Receive me! Fill my soul with longing and with rest ...</p> + + <p>And you, ye laughing fields,</p> + + <p>Valleys of roses, labyrinths of streams,</p> + + <p>I will inhale an ecstasy with your balsamic breath,</p> + + <p>And, lying in the shade, on strings of gold</p> + + <p>Sing your indwelling joys....</p> + + <p>On rosy clouds, with rose and tulip crowned,</p> + + <p>Spring has come down from heaven....</p> + + <p>The air grew softer, fields took varied hues,</p> + + <p>The shades were leafy, and soft notes awoke</p> + + <p>And flew and warbled round the wood in twilight greenery.</p> + + <p>Brooks took a silver tint, sweet odours filled the air,</p> + + <p>The early shepherd's pipe was heard by Echo in the dale....</p> + + <p>Most dear abode! Ah, were I but allowed</p> + + <p>Down in the shade by yon loquacious brook</p> + + <p>Henceforth to live! O sky! thou sea of love,</p> + + <p>Eternal spring of health, will not thy waters succour me?</p> + + <p>Must, my life's blossom wither, stifled by the weeds?</p> + </div> + + <p>Johann Peter Uz, who was undervalued because of his sickly style, + wrote many little songs full of feeling for Nature, though within + narrow limits. Their titles shew the pastoral taste<a href= + "#k4"><sup>[4]</sup></a>:--<i>Spring</i>, <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg242" id="pg242">242</a></span><i>Morning, + Shepherd's Morning Song, The Muse with the Shepherds, The Meadow in + the Country, Vintage, Evening, May, The Rose, Summer and Wine, Winter + Night, Longing for Spring</i>, etc.</p> + + <p>Many are fresh and full of warm feeling, especially the Spring + Songs:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>See the blossoming of Spring!</p> + + <p>Will't not taste the joys it showers?</p> + + <p>Dost not feel its impulse thrill?</p> + + <p>Friends! away our cares we'll fling!</p> + + <p>In the joyous time of flowers,</p> + + <p>Love and Bacchus have their will.</p> + </div> + + <p>and</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>O forest, O green shady paths,</p> + + <p>Dear place of spring's display!</p> + + <p>My good luck from the thronging town</p> + + <p>Has brought me here away.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>O what a fresh breeze flows</p> + + <p>Down from the wooded hill,</p> + + <p>How pleasantly the west wind flies</p> + + <p>With rustling dewy wing</p> + + <p>Across the vale,</p> + + <p>Where all is green and blossoming.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>The personification is more marked in this:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Thou hast sent us the Spring in his gleaming robe</p> + + <p>With roses round his head. Smiling he comes, O God!</p> + + <p>The hours conduct him to his flowery throne</p> + + <p>Into the groves he enters and they bloom; fresh green is on the + plain,</p> + + <p>The forest shade returns, the west wind lovingly unfurls</p> + + <p>Its dewy plumes, and happy birds begin to sing.</p> + + <p>The face of Nature Thou hast deckt with beauty that + enchants,</p> + + <p>O Thou rich source of all the beautiful ...</p> + + <p>My heart is lifted up to Thee in purest love.</p> + </div> + + <p>His feeling for Nature was warm enough, although most of his + writing was so artificial and tedious from much repetition of a few + ideas, that Kleist could <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg243" id= + "pg243">243</a></span>write to Gleim<a href="#k5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>: + 'The odes please me more the more I read them. With a few exceptions, + they have only one fault, too many laurel woods; cut them down a + little. Take away the marjoram too, it is better in a good sausage + than in a beautiful poem.'</p> + + <p>Joh. Georg Jacobi also belonged to the circle of poets gathered + round Gleim; but in many respects he was above it. He imitated the + French style<a href="#k6"><sup>[6]</sup></a> far less than the + others--than Hagedorn, for example; and though the Anacreontic + element was strong in him, he overcame it, and aimed at pure lyrical + feeling. From his Life, written by a devoted friend, we see that he + had all the sentimentality of the day,<a href= + "#k7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> but with much that was healthy and amiable + in addition, and he touched Nature with peculiar freshness and + genuineness.</p> + + <p>In a poem to his brother, about the Saale valley near Halle, he + wrote:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Lie down in early spring on yon green moss,</p> + + <p>By yon still brook where heart with heart we spoke,</p> + + <p>My brother....</p> + + <p>Will't see the little garden and the pleasant heights above,</p> + + <p>So quiet and unspoilt? O friend, 'tis Nature speaks</p> + + <p>In distant wood, near plain and careless glade,</p> + + <p>Here on my little hill and in the clover....</p> + + <p>Dost hear the rustle of the streamlet through the wood?</p> + </div> + + <p>Jacobi was one whose heart, as he said of Gleim, took a warm + interest in all that breathed, even a violet, and sought sympathy and + companionship in the whole range of creation.</p> + + <p>This is from his <i>Morning Song</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>See how the wood awakes, how from the lighted heights</p> + + <p>With the soft waving breeze</p> + + <p>The morning glory smiles in the fresh green....</p> + + <p>Here by the rippling brook and quivering flower,</p> + + <p>We catch Love's rustle as she gently sweeps</p> + + <p>Like Spring's own breath athwart the plains.</p> + </div> + + <p>Another song is;</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Tell me, where's the violet fled.</p> + + <p>Late so gayly blowing.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg244" id= + "pg244">244</a></span>Springing 'neath fair Flora's tread,</p> + + <p>Choicest sweets bestowing?</p> + + <p>Swain, the vernal scene is o'er,</p> + + <p>And the violet blooms no more.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Say, where hides the blushing rose,</p> + + <p>Pride of fragrant morning,</p> + + <p>Garland meet for beauty's brows,</p> + + <p>Hill and dale adorning?</p> + + <p>Gentle maid, the summer's fled,</p> + + <p>And the hapless rose is dead.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Bear me then to yonder rill,</p> + + <p>Late so freely flowing,</p> + + <p>Watering many a daffodil</p> + + <p>On its margin glowing.</p> + + <p>Sun and wind exhaust its store,</p> + + <p>Yonder rivulet glides no more.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Lead me to the bowery shade,</p> + + <p>Late with roses flaunting,</p> + + <p>Loved resort of youth and maid,</p> + + <p>Amorous ditties chanting.</p> + + <p>Hail and wind with fury shower,</p> + + <p>Leafless mourns the rifled bower!</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Say, where bides the village maid,</p> + + <p>Late yon cot adorning?</p> + + <p>Oft I've met her in the glade</p> + + <p>Fair and fresh as morning.</p> + + <p>Swain, how short is beauty's bloom,</p> + + <p>Seek her in her grassy tomb.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Whither roves the tuneful swain</p> + + <p>Who, of rural pleasures,</p> + + <p>Rose and violet, rill and plain,</p> + + <p>Sang in deftest measures?</p> + + <p>Maiden, swift life's vision flies,</p> + + <p>Death has closed the poet's eyes.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p><i>To Nature</i> runs thus:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Leaves are falling, mists are twining, and to winter sleep + inclining</p> + + <p>Are the trees upon the plain,</p> + + <p>In the hush of stillness ere the snowflakes hide them,</p> + + <p>Friendly Nature, speak to me again!</p> + + <p>Thou art echo and reflection of our striving,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg245" id= + "pg245">245</a></span>Thou art painter of our hopes and of our + fears,</p> + + <p>Thou art singer of our joys and of our sorrows,</p> + + <p>Of our consolations and our groans....</p> + </div> + + <p>While feeling for Nature was all of this character, idyllic, + sensitive, sympathetic, but within very narrow bounds, and the poets + generally were wandering among Greek and Latin bucolics and playing + with Damon, Myrtil, Chloe, and Daphnis, Salomon Gessner made a + speciality of elegiac pastoral poetry. He was a better landscapist + than poet, and his drawings to illustrate his idylls were better than + the poems themselves. The forest, for instance, and the felling of + the tree, are well drawn; whereas the sickly sweet Rococo verse in + imitation of the French, and reminding one more of Longos than + Theocritus, is lifeless. His rhapsody about Nature is uncongenial to + modern readers, but his love was real.</p> + + <p>The introduction 'to the Reader'<a href="#k8"><sup>[8]</sup></a> + is characteristic:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>These Idylls are the fruits of some of my happiest hours; of + those hours when imagination and tranquillity shed their sweetest + influence over me, and, excluding all which belongs to the period + in which we live, recalled all the charms and delights of the + Golden Age. A noble and well-regulated mind dwells with pleasure on + these images of calm tranquillity and uninterrupted happiness, and + the scenes in which the poet delineates the simple beauties of + uncorrupted nature are endeared to us by the resemblance we fancy + we perceive in them to the most blissful moments that we nave + ourselves enjoyed. Often do I fly from the city and seek the + deepest solitudes; there, the beauties of the landscape soothe and + console my heart, and gradually disperse those impressions of + solicitude and disgust which accompanied me from the town; + enraptured, I give up my whole soul to the contemplation of Nature, + and feel, at such moments, richer than an Utopian monarch, and + happier than a shepherd of the Golden Age.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This is a true picture of the time! Man knew that he was sick, and + fled from town and his fellows <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg246" + id="pg246">246</a></span>into solitude, there to dream himself back + to a happier past, and revel in the purity and innocence, the healing + breath, of forest and field.</p> + + <p>The magic of moonlight began to be felt. Mirtilla</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>perceived his old father slumbering in the moonbeams.... + Mirtilla stood long contemplating him, and his eyes rested fondly + on the old man except when he raised them toward heaven through the + glistening leaves of the vine, and tears of filial love and joy + bedewed his cheeks.... How beautiful! how beautiful is the + landscape! How bright, how clear appears the deep blue of heaven + through the broken clouds! They fly, they pass away, these towering + clouds; but strew a shadow as they pass over the sunny + landscape.... Oh, what joy overwhelms my soul! how beautiful, how + excellent is all around, what an inexhaustible source of rapture! + From the enlivening sun down to the little plant that his mild + influence nourishes, all is wonderful! What rapture overpowers me + when I stand on the high hill and look down on the wide-spread + landscape beneath me, when I lay stretched along the grass and + examine the various flowers and herbs and their little inhabitants; + when at the midnight hour I contemplate the starry heavens!... + Wrapt in each other's arms, let us contemplate the approach of + morning, the bright glow of sunset, or the soft beams of moonlight; + and as I press thee to my trembling heart, let us breathe out in + broken accents our praises and thanksgivings. Ah! what + inexpressible joy, when with such raptures are blended the + transports of the tenderest love.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Many prosaic writings of a different kind shew how universally + feeling, in the middle of the eighteenth century, turned towards + Nature.</p> + + <p>The æsthetic writer Sulzer (1750) wrote <i>On the Beauty of + Nature</i>. Crugot's widely-read work of edification, <i>Christ in + Solitude</i> (1761), shewed the same point of view among the mystical + and pietist clergy; and Spalding's <i>Human Vocation</i><a href= + "#k9"><sup>[9]</sup></a> (written with a warmth that reminds one of + Gessner) among the rationalists, whom he headed. He says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Nature contains numberless pleasures, which, through my great + sensitiveness, nourish my mind... I open <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg247" id="pg247">247</a></span>eye and ear, and + through these openings pleasures flow into my soul from a thousand + sides: flowers painted by the hand of Nature, the rich music of the + forest, the bright daylight which pours life and light all round + me.... How indifferent, tasteless, and dead is all the fantastic + glamour of artificial splendour and luxuriance in comparison with + the living radiance of the real beautiful world of Nature, with the + joyousness, repose, and admiration I feel before a meadow in + blossom, a rustling stream, the pleasant awesomeness of night, or + of the majesty of innumerable worlds. Even the commonest and most + familiar things in Nature give me endless delight, when I feel them + with a heart attuned to joy and admiration.... I lose myself, + absorbed in delight, in the consideration of all this general + beauty, of which I hold myself to be a not disfigured part.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Klopstock, the torch-bearer of Germany's greatest poets, owed much + of his power of the wing to religion. He introduced that new epoch in + the literature of his country which culminated in Goethe. As so often + happens in mental development, the reaction against prevailing + conditions and the advance to higher ones, in the middle of the + eighteenth century, led first of all to the opposite extreme--balance + was only reached by degrees. What chiefly made Klopstock a literary + reformer was the glowing enthusiasm and powerful imagination which + compelled the stiff poetic forms, clumsy as they were, to new rhythm + and melodious cadence. And although his style degenerated into + mannerism in the <i>Messias</i>, for the youthful impetus which had + carried his Pegasus over the clouds to the stars could not keep it + there without artificial aid, the immense value of his influence + remained. He is one of the most interesting representatives, not only + of his own, but of all similar periods of exaggerated feelings and + ideals. Despite his loftiness of thought and speech, and his seraphic + raptures, he was not without a full share of sensuous development, + and women's eyes, or a girl's rosy lips, would draw him away from the + finest view in the world.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg248" id="pg248">248</a></span> A + mind so intent upon the noble and beautiful was sure to be + enthusiastic about Nature; his correspondence is the best witness to + this, and at the same time throws side-lights upon the period.</p> + + <p>It is difficult to-day to understand the influence which the + <i>Messias</i> had upon its readers; even Friedenkende spent happy + hours reading it with pious tears of delight, and young and old were + of the same opinion.</p> + + <p>There is a pretty letter from Gustchen Stolberg<a href= + "#k10"><sup>[10]</sup></a> to Klopstock, which runs thus:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>UETERSEN, 25 <i>April</i> 1776.</p> + + <p>In the garden. Yes, in the garden, dearest Klopstock! I have + just been walking about, it was so beautiful: the little birds were + singing, violets and other flowers wafted their fragrance to me, + and I began thinking very warmly of all whom I dearly, dearly love, + and so very soon came to my dear Klopstock, who certainly has no + truer friend than I am, though perhaps others express it better ... + Thanks, thanks, for your very delightful little letter--how dear to + me I don't tell you--can't tell you.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>C. F. Cramer was his enthusiastic panegyrist. It is not only what + he says of the private life and special taste of his adored friend + which is noteworthy, but the way in which he does it--the tone in + which, as a cultivated man of the day, he judged him. 'He will paint + and paint Nature. For this he must be acquainted with her. This is + why he loves her so well. This is why he strays by the brook and + weeps. This is why in spring he goes out into the fields of blossoms, + and his eyes run over with tears. All creation fills him with + yearning and delight. He goes from mountain to valley like a man in a + dream. When he sees a stream, he follows its course; when a hill, he + must climb it; when a river--oh! if only he could rush with it to the + sea! A rock--oh! to look down from its crags to the land below! A + hawk hovers over <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg249" id= + "pg249">249</a></span>him--oh! to have its wings and fly so much + nearer to the stars! He stands for hours looking at a flower or moss, + throws himself down on the grass and decks his hat with ivy and + cornflowers. He goes by moonlight to visit the graves and think of + death, immortality, and eternal life. Nothing hinders his + meditations. He sees everything in relation to something else. Every + visible object has an invisible companion, so ardently, so entirely, + so closely does he feel it all.'</p> + + <p>This, coming straight from life, tells us more than a volume of + odes; it contains the real feeling of the time, sensitive, dreamy, + elegiac.</p> + + <p>His friend goes on: 'He walks often and likes it, but generally + looks for sunny places; he goes very slowly, which is fatal for me, + for I run when I walk ... Often he stands still and silent, as if + there were knots which he could not untie (in his thoughts). And + truly there are unknown depths of feeling as well as thought.'</p> + + <p>In another place: 'He went out and gloated over the great scene of + immeasurable Nature. Orion and the Pleiades moved over his head, the + dear moon was opposite. Looking intently into her friendly face, he + greeted her repeatedly: "Moon, Moon, friend of my thoughts; hurry not + away, dear Moon, but stay. What is thy name? Laura, Cynthia, Cyllene? + Or shall I call thee beautiful Betty of the Sky?" ... He loved + country walks; we made for lonely places, dark fearsome thickets, + lonely unfrequented paths, scrambled up all the hills, spied out + every bit of Nature, came to rest at last under a shady rock ... + Klopstock's life is one constant enjoyment. He gives himself up to + feeling, and revels in Nature's feast ... Winter is his favourite + time of year....<a href="#k11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> He preaches + skating with the unction of a missionary to the heathen, and not + without working miracles, ... the ice by moonlight is a feast of the + Gods to him ... only <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg250" id= + "pg250">250</a></span>one rule, we do not leave the river till the + moon has gone.' Klopstock described this in his <i>Skating</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>O youth, whose skill the ice-cothurn</p> + + <p>Drives glowing now, and now restrains,</p> + + <p>On city hearths let faggots burn,</p> + + <p>But come with me to crystal plains.</p> + + <p>The scene is filled with vapouring light,</p> + + <p>As when the winter morning's prime</p> + + <p>Looks on the lake. Above it night</p> + + <p>Scatters, like stars, the glittering rime.</p> + + <p>How still and white is all around!</p> + + <p>How rings the track with new sparr'd frost!</p> + + <p>Far off the metal's cymbal sound</p> + + <p>Betrays thee, for a moment lost ...</p> + </div> + + <p>Cramer tells how Klopstock paid a long-remembered visit to Count + Bernstoff at Schloss Stintenburg:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It has a most romantic situation in a bewitching part of + Mecklenburg; 'tis surrounded by forest full of delightful gloom, + and a large lake, with a charming little island in the centre, + which wakes echoes. Klopstock is very fond of echoes, and is always + trying to find them in his walks.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This illustrates the lines in <i>Stintenburg</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i6">Isle of pious solitude,</p> + + <p>Loved playmate of the echo and the lake, etc.</p> + </div> + + <p>but in this ode, as in so many of his, simple personal feeling + gives way to the stilted mannerism of the bard poetry.</p> + + <p>He wrote of Soroe,<a href="#k12"><sup>[12]</sup></a> one of the + loveliest places in the Island of Zealand, as 'an uncommonly pleasant + place'; where 'By a sacred tree, on a raised grass plot two hundred + paces from the great alley, and from a view over the Friedensburg + Lake towards a little wooded island ... Fanny appeared to him in the + silver evening clouds over the tree-tops.'</p> + + <p>The day on which he composed <i>The Lake of Zurich</i> was one of + the pleasantest in his life. Cramer says: 'He has often told me and + still tells, with youthful fervour, about those delightful days + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg251" id="pg251">251</a></span>and + this excursion: the boat full of people, mostly young, all in good + spirits; charming girls, his wife Herzel, a lovely May morning.'</p> + + <p>But, unlike St Preux, he 'seemed less impressed by our scenery + than by the beauty of our girls,<a href="#k13"><sup>[13]</sup></a> + and his letters bear out the remark.<a href= + "#k14"><sup>[14]</sup></a> Yet delight in Nature was always with him: + Klopstock's lofty morality pours forth all through it. Nature, love, + fame, wine, everything is looked at from an ennobling point of + view.'</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Fair is the majesty of all thy works</p> + + <p>On the green earth, O Mother Nature fair!</p> + + <p>But fairer the glad face</p> + + <p>Enraptured with their view.</p> + + <p>Come from the vine banks of the glittering lake,</p> + + <p>Or--hast thou climbed the smiling skies anew--</p> + + <p>Come on the roseate tip</p> + + <p>Of evening's breezy wing,</p> + + <p>And teach my song with glee of youth to glow,</p> + + <p>Sweet joy, like thee--with glee of shouting youths,</p> + + <p>Or feeling Fanny's laugh.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Behind us far already Uto lay.</p> + + <p>At whose feet Zurich in the quiet vale</p> + + <p>Feeds her free sons: behind--</p> + + <p>Receding vine-clad hills.</p> + + <p>Uncloud'd beamed the top of silver Alps,</p> + + <p>And warmer beat the heart of gazing youths,</p> + + <p>And warmer to their fair</p> + + <p>Companions spoke its glow.</p> + + <p>And Haller's Doris sang, the pride of song;</p> + + <p>And Hirzel's Daphne, dear to Kleist and Gleim;</p> + + <p>And we youths sang and felt</p> + + <p>As each were--Hagedorn.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Soon the green meadow took us to the cool</p> + + <p>And shadowy forest, which becrowns the isle.</p> + + <p>Then cam'st thou, Joy; thou cam'st</p> + + <p>Down in full tide to us;</p> + + <p>Yes, goddess Joy, thyself; we felt, we clasp'd,</p> + + <p>Best sister of humanity, thyself,</p> + + <p>With thy dear innocence</p> + + <p>Accompanied, thyself.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg252" id= + "pg252">252</a></span></p> + + <p>Sweet thy inspiring breath, O cheerful Spring;</p> + + <p>When the meads cradle thee, and their soft airs</p> + + <p>Into the hearts of youths</p> + + <p>And hearts of virgins glide,</p> + + <p>Thou makest feeling conqueror. Ah! through thee</p> + + <p>Fuller, more tremulous, heaves each blooming breast;</p> + + <p>With lips spell-freed by thee</p> + + <p>Young love unfaltering pleads.</p> + + <p>Fair gleams the wine, when to the social change</p> + + <p>Of thought, or heart-felt pleasure, it invites,</p> + + <p>And the 'Socratic' cup</p> + + <p>With dewy roses bound,</p> + + <p>Sheds through the bosom bliss, and wakes resolves,</p> + + <p>Such as the drunkard knows not--proud resolves</p> + + <p>Emboldening to despair</p> + + <p>Whate'er the sage disowns.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Delightful thrills against the panting heart</p> + + <p>Fame's silver voice--and immortality</p> + + <p>Is a great thought....</p> + + <p>But sweeter, fairer, more delightful, 'tis</p> + + <p>On a friend's arm to know oneself a friend....</p> + + <p>O were ye here, who love me though afar ...</p> + + <p>How would we build us huts of friendship, here</p> + + <p>Together dwell for ever.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>This is of Fredensborg on an August day:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Here, too, did Nature tarry, when her hand</p> + + <p>Pour'd living beauty over dale and hill,</p> + + <p>And to adorn this pleasant land</p> + + <p>Long time she lingered and stood still....</p> + + <p>The lake how tranquil! From its level brim</p> + + <p>The shore swells gently, wooded o'er with green,</p> + + <p>And buries in its verdure dim</p> + + <p>The lustre of the summer e'en....</p> + </div> + + <p>The inner and outer life are closely blended in <i>The Early + Grave</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Welcome, O silver moon,</p> + + <p>Fair still companion of the night!</p> + + <p>Friend of the pensive, flee not soon;</p> + + <p>Thou stayest, and the clouds pass light.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Young waking May alone</p> + + <p>Is fair as summer's night so still,</p> + + <p>When from his locks the dews drop down,</p> + + <p>And, rosy, he ascends the hill. <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg253" id="pg253">253</a></span></p> + + <p>Ye noble souls and true,</p> + + <p>Whose graves with sacred moss are strawn.</p> + + <p>Blest were I, might I see with you</p> + + <p>The glimmering night, the rosy dawn.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>This is true lyric feeling, spontaneous, not forced. Many of his + odes, and parts of the <i>Messias</i>, shew great love for Nature. + There is a fine flight of imagination in <i>The Festival of + Spring</i>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Not into the ocean of all the worlds would I plunge--not hover + where the first created, the glad choirs of the sons of light, + adore, deeply adore and sunk in ecstasy. Only around the drop on + the bucket, only around the earth, would I hover and adore. + Hallelujah! hallelujah! the drop on the bucket flowed also out of + the hand of the Almighty.</p> + + <p>When out of the hand of the Almighty the greater earth flowed, + when the streams of light rushed, and the seven stars began to + be--then flowedst thou, drop, out of the hand of the Almighty.</p> + + <p>When a stream of light rushed, and our sun began to be, a + cataract of waves of light poured, as adown the rock a storm-cloud, + and girded Orion, then flowedst thou, drop, out of the hand of the + Almighty. Who are the thousandfold thousands, who all the myriads + that inhabit the drop?...</p> + + <p>But thou, worm of Spring, which, greenly golden, art fluttering + beside me, thou livest and art, perhaps, ah! not immortal....</p> + + <p>The storm winds that carry the thunder, how they roar, how with + loud waves they stream athwart the forest! Now they hush, slow + wanders the black cloud....</p> + + <p>Ah! already rushes heaven and earth with the gracious rain; now + is the earth refreshed....</p> + + <p>Behold Jehovah comes no longer in storm; in gentle pleasant + murmurs comes Jehovah, and under him bends the bow of peace.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In another ode, <i>The Worlds</i>, he calls the stars 'drops of + the ocean.'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg254" id="pg254">254</a></span> + Again, in <i>Death</i> he shews the sense of his own nothingness, in + presence of the overpowering greatness of the Creator:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Ye starry hosts that glitter in the sky,</p> + + <p>How ye exalt me! Trancing is the sight</p> + + <p>Of all Thy glorious works, Most High.</p> + + <p>How lofty art Thou in Thy wondrous might;</p> + + <p>What joy to gaze upon these hosts, to one</p> + + <p>Who feels himself so little, God so great,</p> + + <p>Himself but dust, and the great God his own!</p> + + <p>Oh, when I die, such rapture on me wait!</p> + </div> + + <p>As regards our subject, Klopstock performed this function--he + tuned the strings of feeling for Nature to a higher pitch, thereby + excelling all his contemporaries. His poetry always tended to + extravagance; but in thought, feeling, and language alike, he was + ahead of his time.</p> + + <p>The idyllic was now cultivated with increased fervour, especially + by the Göttingen Brotherhood of Poets. The artificial and + conventional began to wane, and Nature's own voice was heard again. + The songs of Claudius were like a breath of spring.<a href= + "#k15"><sup>[15]</sup></a> His peasant songs have the genuine ring; + they are hail-fellow-well-met with Nature. Hebel is the only modern + poet like him.</p> + + <h4>EVENING SONG</h4> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The lovely day-star's run its course....</p> + + <p>Come, mop my face, dear wife,</p> + + <p>And then dish up....</p> + + <p>The silvery moon will look down from his place</p> + + <p>And preside at our meal over dishes and grace.</p> + </div> + + <p>He hated artificiality:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Simple joy in Nature, free from artifice, gives as great a + pleasure as an honest lover's kiss.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>His <i>Cradle Song to be sung by Moonlight</i> is delightful in + its naive humour (the moon was his special favourite): <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg255" id="pg255">255</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Sleep then, little one. Why dost thou weep?</p> + + <p>Moonlight so tender and quiet so deep,</p> + + <p>Quickly and easily cometh thy sleep.</p> + + <p>Fond of all little ones is the good moon;</p> + + <p>Girls most of all, but he even loves boys.</p> + + <p>Down from up there he sends beautiful toys....</p> + + <p>He's old as a raven, he goes everywhere;</p> + + <p>Even when father was young, he was there.</p> + </div> + + <p>The pearl of his poems is the exquisite <i>Evening Song</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The moon hath risen on high,</p> + + <p>And in the clear dark sky</p> + + <p>The golden stars all brightly glow;</p> + + <p>And black and hushed the woods,</p> + + <p>While o'er the fields and floods</p> + + <p>The white mists hover to and fro.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>How still the earth, how calm!</p> + + <p>What dear and home-like charm</p> + + <p>From gentle twilight doth she borrow!</p> + + <p>Like to some quiet room,</p> + + <p>Where, wrapt in still soft gloom,</p> + + <p>We sleep away the daylight's sorrow.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Boie's <i>Evening Song</i> is in the same key. None of the + moonshine poets of his day expressed night-fall like this:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i6">How still it is! How soft</p> + + <p class="i6">The breezes blow!</p> + + <p>The lime leaves lisp in whisper and echo answers low;</p> + + <p>Scarce audibly the rivulet running amid the flower</p> + + <p>With murmuring ripple laps the edge of yonder mystic bower.</p> + + <p>And ever darker grows the veil thou weavest o'er the land,</p> + + <p>And ever quieter the hush--a hush as of the grave....</p> + + <p>Listen! 'tis Night! she comes, unlighted by a star,</p> + + <p>And with the slow sweep of her heavy wing</p> + + <p>Awes and revives the timid earth.</p> + </div> + + <p>Bürger sings in praise of idyllic comfort in <i>The Village</i>, + and Hoelty's mild enthusiasm, touched with melancholy, turned in the + same direction.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg256" id= + "pg256">256</a></span></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>My predilection is for rural poetry and melancholy enthusiasm; + all I ask is a hut, a forest, a meadow with a spring in it, and a + wife in my hut.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The beginning of his <i>Country Life</i> shews that moralizing was + still in the air:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Happy the man who has the town escaped!</p> + + <p>To him the whistling trees, the murmuring brooks,</p> + + <p>The shining pebbles preach</p> + + <p>Virtue's and wisdom's lore....</p> + + <p>The nightingale on him sings slumber down;</p> + + <p>The nightingale rewakes him, fluting sweet,</p> + + <p>When shines the lovely red</p> + + <p>Of morning through the trees.</p> + + <p>Then he admires Thee in the plain, O God!</p> + + <p>In the ascending pomp of dawning day,</p> + + <p>Thee in Thy glorious sun.</p> + + <p>The worm--the budding branch--</p> + + <p>Where coolness gushes in the waving branch</p> + + <p>Or o'er the flowers streams the fountain, rests,</p> + + <p>Inhales the breadth of prime</p> + + <p>The gentle airs of eve.</p> + + <p>His straw-decked thatch, where doves bask in the sun,</p> + + <p>And play, and hop, invites to sweeter rest</p> + + <p>Than golden halls of state</p> + + <p>Or beds of down afford.</p> + + <p>To him the plumy people</p> + + <p>Chatter and whistle on his</p> + + <p>And from his quiet hand</p> + + <p>Peck crumbs or peas or grains</p> + </div> + + <p>His <i>Winter Song</i> runs:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Summer joys are o'er,</p> + + <p>Flow'rets bloom no more;</p> + + <p>Wintry joys are sweeping,</p> + + <p>Through the snow-drifts peeping;</p> + + <p>Cheerful evergreen</p> + + <p>Rarely now is seen.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>No more plumèd throng</p> + + <p>Charms the woods with song;</p> + + <p>Ice-bound trees are glittering,</p> + + <p>Merry snow-birds twittering,</p> + + <p>Fondly strive to cheer</p> + + <p>Scenes so cold and drear.<span class="pagenum"><a name="pg257" + id="pg257">257</a></span></p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Winter, still I see</p> + + <p>Many charms in thee,</p> + + <p>Love thy chilly greeting,</p> + + <p>Snow-storms fiercely beating,</p> + + <p>And the dear delights</p> + + <p>Of the long, long nights.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Hoeltz was the most sentimental of this group; Joh. Heinrich Voss + was more robust and cheerful. He put his strength into his longer + poems; the lyrics contain a great deal of nonsense. An extract from + <i>Luise</i> will shew his idyllic taste:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Wandering thus through blue fields of flax and acres of barley, + both paused on the hill-top, which commands such a view of the + whole lake, crisped with the soft breath of the zephyr and + sparkling in sunshine; fair were the forests of white barked birch + beyond, and the fir-trees, lovely the village at the foot half hid + by the wood. Lovely Luise had welcomed her parents and shewn them a + green mound under an old beech tree, where the prospect was very + inviting. 'There we propose,' said she, to unpack and to spread the + breakfast. Then we'll adjourn to the boat and be rowed for a time + on the water,' etc.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>We find the same taste, often expressed in a very original way, in + both the brothers Stolberg. In Christian Stolberg's <i>Elegy to + Hangwitz</i>, for instance, another poem has these lines:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Thither, where 'mong the trees of life,</p> + + <p>Where in celestial bowers</p> + + <p>Under your fig-tree, bowed with fruit</p> + + <p>And warranting repose,</p> + + <p>Under your pine, inviting shady joy,</p> + + <p>Unchanging blooms</p> + + <p>Eternal Spring!</p> + </div> + + <p>Friedrich Stolberg was a very prophet of Nature; in his ode + <i>Nature</i> he says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>He who does not love Nature cannot be my friend.</p> + </div> + + <p>His prayer may serve as the motto of his day:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Holy Nature, heavenly fair,</p> + + <p>Lead me with thy parent care;</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg258" id= + "pg258">258</a></span>In thy footsteps let me tread</p> + + <p>As a willing child is led.</p> + + <p>When with care and grief opprest,</p> + + <p>Soft I sink me on thy breast;</p> + + <p>On thy peaceful bosom laid,</p> + + <p>Grief shall cease, nor care invade.</p> + + <p>O congenial power divine,</p> + + <p>All my votive soul is thine.</p> + + <p>Lead me with thy parent care,</p> + + <p>Holy Nature, heavenly fair!</p> + </div> + + <p>He, too, sang the moon; but Klopstock's influence seems to have + carried him to higher flights than his contemporaries. He wrote in + fine language of wild scenery, even sea and mountains, which had + played no part in German poetry before.</p> + + <h4>TO THE SEA</h4> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Thou boundless, shining, glorious sea,</p> + + <p>With ecstasy I gaze on thee;</p> + + <p>Joy, joy to him whose early beam</p> + + <p>Kisses thy lip, bright ocean stream.</p> + + <p>Thanks for the thousand hours, old sea,</p> + + <p>Of sweet communion held with thee;</p> + + <p>Oft as I gazed, thy billowy roll</p> + + <p>Woke the deep feelings of my soul.</p> + </div> + + <p>There are beautiful notes, reminding one of Goethe, in his + <i>Unsterbliche Jüngling, Ode to a Mountain Torrent</i>.</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Immortal youth!</p> + + <p>Thou streamest forth from rocky caves;</p> + + <p>No mortal saw</p> + + <p>The cradle of thy might,</p> + + <p>No ear has heard</p> + + <p>Thy infant stammering in the gushing Spring.</p> + + <p>How lovely art thou in thy silver locks!</p> + + <p>How dreadful thundering from the echoing crags!</p> + + <p>At thy approach</p> + + <p>The firwood quakes;</p> + + <p>Thou easiest down, with root and branch, the fir</p> + + <p>Thou seizest on the rock,</p> + + <p>And roll'st it scornful like a pebble on.</p> + + <p>Thee the sun clothes in dazzling beams of glory,</p> + + <p>And paints with colours of the heavenly bow</p> + + <p>The clouds that o'er thy dusky cataracts climb.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg259" id= + "pg259">259</a></span>Why hasten so to the cerulean sea?</p> + + <p>Is not the neighbourhood of heaven good?</p> + + <p>Not grand thy temple of encircling rocks?</p> + + <p>Not fair the forest hanging o'er thy bed?</p> + + <p>Hasten not so to the cerulean sea;</p> + + <p>Youth, thou art here,</p> + + <p>Strong as a god,</p> + + <p>Free as a god,</p> + + <p>Though yonder beckon treacherous calms below,</p> + + <p>The wavering lustre of the silent sea,</p> + + <p>Now softly silvered by the swimming moon,</p> + + <p>Now rosy golden in the western beam;</p> + + <p>Youth, what is silken rest,</p> + + <p>And what the smiling of the friendly moon,</p> + + <p>Or gold or purple of the evening sun,</p> + + <p>To him who feels himself in thraldom's bonds?</p> + + <p>Here thou canst wildly stream</p> + + <p>As bids thy heart;</p> + + <p>Below are masters, ever-changeful minds,</p> + + <p>Or the dead stillness of the servile main.</p> + + <p>Hasten not so to the cerulean sea;</p> + + <p>Youth, thou art here,</p> + + <p>Strong as a god,</p> + + <p>Free as a god.</p> + </div> + + <p>Here we have, with all Klopstock's pathos, a love for the wild and + grandiose in Nature, almost unique in Germany, in this time of + idyllic sentimentality. But the discovery of the beauty of romantic + mountain scenery had been made by Rousseau some time before, for + Rousseau, too, was a typical forerunner, and his romances fell like a + bomb-shell among all the idyllic pastoral fiction of the day. + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg260" id="pg260">260</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="ch11" id="ch11">CHAPTER XI</a></h2> + + <h3>THE AWAKENING OF FEELING FOR THE ROMANTIC</h3> + + <p>Rousseau was one of those rare men who bring about a complete + change in the culture of their time by their revolutionary + originality. In such beings the world's history, so to speak, begins + again. Out of touch with their own day, and opposed to its ruling + taste and mode of thought, they are a law unto themselves, and + naturally tend to measure all things by themselves, while their too + great subjectivity is apt to be increased by a morbid sophistry of + passion and the conviction of the prophet.</p> + + <p>Of this type, unchecked by a broad sense of humanity, full of + subversive wilfulness, and not only untrained in moderation, but + degenerating into crass exaggeration, Rousseau was the first + example.</p> + + <p>Hellenism, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, had only produced + forerunners. What in Petrarch was a tendency, became an established + condition in Rousseau: the acedia reached its climax. All that went + on in his mind was so much grit for his own mill, subject-matter for + his observation, and therefore of the greatest value to him. He lived + in introspection, a spectator of his own struggles, his own waverings + between an ideal of simple duty and the imperious demands of a + selfish and sensuous ego. His passion for Nature partially atoned for + his unamiable and doubtful character; he was false in many ways; but + that feeling rang true--it was <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg261" + id="pg261">261</a></span>the best part of him, and of that 'idealism + of the heart' whose right of rule he asserted in an age of + artificiality and petty formalism. Those were no empty words in his + third letter to Malesherbes:</p> + + <p>'Which time of my life do you suppose I recall most often and most + willingly in my dreams? Not the pleasures of youth; they were too + few, too much mixed with bitterness, and they are too far away now. + It is the time of my retreat, of my solitary walks--those fast-flying + delicious days that I passed all alone by myself, with my good and + simple Thérèse, my beloved dog, my old cat, with the wild birds and + the roes of the forest, with all Nature and her inconceivable + Maker.</p> + + <p>'When I got up early to go and watch the sunrise from my garden, + when I saw a fine day begin, my first wish was that neither letters + nor visitors might come to break its charm....</p> + + <p>'Then I would seek out some wild place in the forest, some desert + spot where there was nothing to shew the hand of man, and so tell of + servitude and rule--some refuge which I could fancy I was the first + to discover, and where no importunate third party came between Nature + and me....</p> + + <p>'The gold broom and the purple heather touched my heart; the + majestic trees that shaded me, the delicate shrubs around, the + astonishing variety of plants and flowers that I trod under foot, + kept me alternately admiring and observing.'</p> + + <p>His writings shew that with him return to Nature was no mere + theory, but real earnest; they condemned the popular garden-craft and + carpet fashions, and set up in their place the rights of the heart, + and free enjoyment of Nature in her wild state, undisturbed by the + hand of man.</p> + + <p>It was Rousseau who first discovered that the Alps were beautiful. + But to see this fact in its true light, we must glance back at the + opinions of preceding periods.<a href="#l1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg262" id="pg262">262</a></span> + Though the Alpine countries were the arena of all sorts of + enterprise, warlike and peaceful, in the fifteenth century, most of + the interest excited by foreign parts was absorbed by the great + voyages of discovery; the Alps themselves were almost entirely + omitted from the maps.</p> + + <p>To be just to the time, it must be conceded that security and + comfort in travelling are necessary preliminaries to our modern + mountain rapture, and in the Middle Ages these were non-existent. + Roads and inns were few; there was danger from robbers as well as + weather, so that the prevailing feelings on such journeys were misery + and anxiety, not pleasure. Knowledge of science, too, was only just + beginning; botany, geology, and geognosy were very slightly diffused; + glacier theories were undreamt of. The sight of a familiar scene near + the great snow-peaks roused men's admiration, because they were + surprised to find it there; this told especially in favour of the + idyllic mountain valleys.</p> + + <p>Felix Fabri, the preacher monk of Ulm, visited the East in 1480 + and 1483, and gave a lifelike description of his journeys through the + Alps in his second account. He said<a href= + "#l2"><sup>[2]</sup></a>:</p> + + <p>'Although the Alps themselves seem dreadful and rigid from the + cold of the snow or the heat of the sun, and reach up to the clouds, + the valleys below them are pleasant, and as rich and fruitful in all + earthly delights as Paradise itself. Many people and animals inhabit + them, and almost every metal is dug out of the Alps, especially + silver. 'Mid such charms as these men live among the mountains, and + Nature blooms as if Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres reigned there. No one + who saw the Alps from afar would believe what a delicious Paradise is + to be found amid the eternal snow and mountains of perpetual winter + and never-melting ice.'</p> + + <p>Very limited praise only extended to the valleys!</p> + + <p>In the sixteenth century we have the records of <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg263" id="pg263">263</a></span>those who crossed + the Alps with an army, such as Adam Reissner, the biographer of the + Frundsberg, and mention their 'awe' at sight of the valleys, and of + those who had travelled to Italy and the East, and congratulated + themselves that their troublesome wanderings through the Alps were + over. Savants were either very sparing of words about their travels, + or else made rugged verses which shewed no trace of mountain + inspiration. There were no outbursts of admiration at sight of the + great snow-peaks; 'horrible' and 'dreadful' were the current + epithets. The æsthetic sense was not sufficiently developed, and + discount as we will for the dangers and discomforts of the road, and, + as with the earlier travellers to the East, for some lack of power of + expression, the fact remains that mountains were not appreciated. The + prevalent notion of beautiful scenery was very narrow, and even among + cultured people only meant broad, level country.</p> + + <p>B. Kiechel<a href="#l3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> (1585) was enthusiastic + about 'the beautiful level scenery' of Lichfeld, and found it + difficult to breathe among the Alps. Schickhart wrote: 'We were + delighted to get away from the horrible tedious mountains,' and has + nothing to say of the Brenner Pass except this poor joke: 'It did not + burn us much, for what with the ice and very deep snow and horribly + cold wind, we found no heat.' The most enthusiastic description is of + the Lake of Como, by Paulus Jovius (1552), praising + Bellagio,'<a href="#l4"><sup>[4]</sup></a> In the seventeenth century + there was some admiration for the colossal proportions of the Alps, + but only as a foil to the much admired valleys.</p> + + <p>J.J. Grasser wrote of Rhoetia<a href="#l5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>: + 'There are marble masses projecting, looking like walls and towers in + imitation of all sorts of wonderful architecture. The villages lie + scattered in the valleys, here and there the ground is most fruitful. + There <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg264" id= + "pg264">264</a></span>is luxuriance close to barrenness, gracefulness + close to dreadfulness, life close to loneliness. The delight of the + painter's eye is here, yet Nature excels all the skill of art. The + very ravines, tortuous foot-paths, torrents, alternately raging and + meagre, the arched bridges, waves on the lakes, varied dress of the + fields, the mighty trees, in short, whatever heaven and earth grant + to the sight, is an astonishment and a pastime to the enraptured eye + of the wanderer.'</p> + + <p>But this pastime depended upon the contrast between the charming + valleys and the dreadful mountains.</p> + + <p>Joseph Furttenbach (1591) writing about the same district of + Thusis, described 'the little bridges, under which one hears the + Rhine flowing with a great roar, and sees what a horrible cruel + wilderness the place is.' In Conrad Gessner's <i>De admiratione + Montium</i> (1541)<a href="#l6"><sup>[6]</sup></a> a passage occurs + which shews that even in Switzerland itself in the sixteenth century + one voice was found to praise Alpine scenery in a very different way, + anticipating Rousseau. 'I have resolved that so long as God grants me + life I will climb some mountains every year, or at least one + mountain, partly to learn the mountain flora, partly to strengthen my + body and refresh my soul. What a pleasure it is to see the monstrous + mountain masses, and lift one's head among the clouds. How it + stimulates worship, to be surrounded by the snowy domes, which the + Great Architect of the world built up in one long day of creation! + How empty is the life, how mean the striving of those who only crawl + about on the earth for gain and home-baked pleasures! The earthly + paradise is closed to them.'</p> + + <p>Yet, just as after Rousseau, and even in the nineteenth century, + travellers were to be found who thought the Alps 'dreadful' (I refer + to Chateaubriand's 'hideux'), so such praise as this found no echo in + its own day.</p> + + <p>But with the eighteenth century came a change. <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg265" id="pg265">265</a></span>Travelling no + longer subserved the one practical end of making acquaintance with + the occupations, the morals, the affairs generally, of other peoples; + a new scientific interest arose, geologists and physicists ventured + to explore the glaciers and regions of perpetual snow, and first + admiration, and then love, supplanted the old feeling of horror.</p> + + <p>Modern methods began with Scheuchzer's (1672-1733) <i>Itinera + Alpina</i>. Every corner of the Alps was explored--the Splugen, + Julier, Furka, Gotthard, etc.--and glaciers, avalanches, ores, + fossils, plants examined. Haller, as his verses shew, was botanist as + well as theologian, historian, and poet; but he did not appreciate + mountain beauty.</p> + + <p>Brockes to some extent did. He described the Harz Mountains in the + Fourth Book of his <i>Earthly Pleasure in God (Irdisches Vergüngen in + Gott)</i>; and in his <i>Observations on the Blankenburg Marble</i> + he said: 'In many parts the rough mountain heights were monstrously + beautiful, their size delights and appals us'; and wound up a + discussion of wild scenery in contrast to cultivated with: 'Ponder + this with joy and reverence, my soul. The mountain heights wild and + beautiful shew us a picture of earthly disorder.'<a href= + "#l7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> It was very long before expressions of + horror and fear entirely disappeared from descriptions of the Alps. + In Richardson's <i>Sir Charles Grandison</i> we read: 'We bid adieu + to France and found ourselves in Savoy, equally noted for its poverty + and rocky mountains. We had left behind us a blooming Spring, which + enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we + passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers.... Every object + which here presents itself is excessively miserable.' Savoy is 'one + of the worst countries under Heaven.'</p> + + <p>Addison,<a href="#l8"><sup>[8]</sup></a> on the other hand, + wrote of the Alps from Ripaille: 'It was the pleasantest voyage in + the world to follow the windings of this river Inn <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg266" id="pg266">266</a></span>through such a + variety of pleasing scenes as the course of it naturally led us. We + had sometimes on each side of us a vast extent of naked rocks and + mountains, broken into a thousand irregular steps and precipices + ... but, as the materials of a fine landscape are not always the + most profitable to the owner of them, we met with but little corn + or pasturage,' etc. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu<a + href="#l9"><sup>[9]</sup></a> wrote from Lyons, Sept. 25, 1718: + 'The prodigious aspect of mountains covered with eternal snow, + clouds hanging far below our feet, and the vast cascades tumbling + down the rocks with a confused roaring, would have been solemnly + entertaining to me, if I had suffered less from the extreme cold + that reigns here.'</p> + + <p>On the whole, Switzerland was little known at the beginning of the + eighteenth century. Many travellers still measured the value of + scenery entirely by fertility, like Keyssler,<a href= + "#l10"><sup>[10]</sup></a> who praised garden-like level country such + as that round Mantua, in contrast to the useless wild Tyrolese + mountains and the woods of Westphalia; and Lüneburg or Moser,<a href= + "#l11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> who observed ironically to Abbt (1763), + after reading <i>Emilia</i> and <i>La Nouvelle Héloise</i>: 'The + far-famed Alps, about which so much fuss has been made.'</p> + + <p>Rousseau was the real exponent of rapture for the high Alps and + romantic scenery in general. Isolated voices had expressed some + feeling before him, but it was he who deliberately proclaimed it, and + gave romantic scenery the first place among the beauties of Nature. + He did not, as so many would have it--Du Bois Reymond, for + example--discover our modern feeling for Nature; the great men of the + Renaissance, even the Hellenic poets, fore-ran him; but he directed + it, with feeling itself in general, into new channels.<a href= + "#l12"><sup>[12]</sup></a></p> + + <p>In French literature he stood alone; the descriptions of landscape + before him were either borrowed blossoms of antiquity or sentimental + and erotic <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg267" id= + "pg267">267</a></span>pastorals. He opened up again for his country + the taste for wood and field, sunshine and moonlight, for the + idyllic, and, above all, for the sublime, which had been lost under + artificiality and false taste.</p> + + <p>The primitive freshness, the genuine ring of his enthusiasm for + country life, was worth all the laboured pastorals and fables of + previous periods of literature.</p> + + <p>His <i>Confessions</i> opened not only the eyes of France, but the + heart.</p> + + <p>A Swiss by birth, and living in one of the most beautiful parts of + Europe, Rousseau was devotedly fond of his home on the Lake of + Geneva. As a boy he loved to leave the city and rove in the + country.</p> + + <p>He describes how once on a Sunday in 1728 he wandered about, + forgetting the time. 'Before me were fields, trees, flowers; the + beautiful lake, the hill country, and high mountains unfolded + themselves majestically before my eyes. I gloated over the beautiful + spectacle while the sun was setting. At last, too late, I saw that + the city gates were shut.'</p> + + <p>From that time on he felt more drawn to Nature than to men. In the + Fourth Book of the <i>Confessions</i> he says, speaking of 1732:</p> + + <p>'A view of the Lake of Geneva and its beautiful banks has had even + in my idea a particular attraction that I cannot describe, not + arising merely from the beauty of the prospect, but something, I know + not what, more interesting which affects and softens me. 'Every time + I have approached the Vaudois country, I have experienced an + impression composed of the remembrance of Mademoiselle de Warens, who + was born there; of my father, who lived there; of Mademoiselle de + Wulson, who had been my first love; and of several pleasant journeys + I had made there in my childhood, mingled with some nameless charm, + more powerfully attractive than all the rest. When that ardent desire + for a life of happiness and <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg268" id= + "pg268">268</a></span>tranquillity (which ever follows me, and for + which I was born) inflames my mind, 'tis ever to the country of Vaud, + near the lake, on those charming plains, that imagination leads me. + An orchard on the banks of that lake, and no other, is absolutely + necessary; a firm friend, an amiable woman, a cow, and a little boat; + nor could I enjoy perfect happiness on earth without these + concomitants.... On my way to Vevey I gave myself up to the soft + melancholy ... I sighed and wept like a child.'</p> + + <p>He clung to Nature, and most of all when surrounded by human + beings; a morbid impulse to flee from them was always present as a + negative element in the background of his love for her. His Fifth + Reverie, the most beautiful one, shews this.</p> + + <p>He had gone to the Peter Island on the Lake of Bienne. So far as + he knew, no other traveller had paid any attention to the place; but + that did not disturb his confidence in his own taste.</p> + + <p>'The shores of the Lake of Bienne are wilder and more romantic + than those of the Lake of Geneva, because the rocks and woods come + nearer to the water; but they are not less radiant. With less + cultivation and fewer vineyards, towns, and houses, there are more + green fields and shady sheltered spots, more contrasts and + irregularities. As there are no good carriage roads on these happy + shores, the district is little frequented by travellers; but it is + interesting for the solitary contemplation of those who like to + intoxicate themselves at their leisure with Nature's charms, and to + retire into a silence unbroken by any sound but the eagle's cry, the + intermittent warbling of birds, and the roar of torrents falling from + the mountains,'</p> + + <p>Here he had a delightful Robinson Crusoe existence. The only other + human beings were the Bernese manager with his family and labourers. + He counted his two months among the happiest of his life, and would + have liked to stay for ever. True <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg269" id="pg269">269</a></span>to his character, he proceeded to + analyze the charm of the episode, and decided that it was made up of + the <i>dolce far niente</i>, solitude, absence of books and writing + materials, dealing with simple folk, healthy movement in the open + air, field labour, and, above all, intercourse with Nature, both in + admiring and studying her. He was seized with a passion for + botanizing, and planned a comprehensive Flora Petrinsularis, dividing + the whole island into quarters, so that no part might escape + notice.</p> + + <p>'There is nothing more strange than the ravishment, the ecstasy, I + felt at each observation I made upon vegetable structure and + organization.</p> + + <p>'I would go by myself, throw myself into a boat when the water was + calm, and row to the middle of the lake, and then, lying full-length + in the boat with my eyes to the sky, I would let myself drift, + sometimes for hours, lost in a thousand confused but delicious + reveries.... Often when the sunset reminded me that it was time to + return, I found myself so far from the island that I was forced to + pull with all my strength to get back before night-fall. At other + times, instead of wandering about the lake, I amused myself by + skirting the green shores of the island where the limpid water and + cool shade often invited to a bathe.... When the lake was too rough + for rowing, I would spend the afternoon scouring the island, + botanizing right and left. I often sat down to dream at leisure in + sunny, lonely nooks, or on the terraces and hillocks, to gaze at the + superb ravishing panorama of the lake and its shores--one side + crowned by near mountains, the other spread out in rich and fertile + plains, across which the eye looked to the more distant boundary of + blue mountains.... When evening fell, I came down from the higher + parts of the mountains and sat by the shore in some hidden spot, and + there the sound of the waves and the movements of the water, making + me oblivious of all other distraction, would <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg270" id="pg270">270</a></span>plunge me into + delicious reverie. The ebb and flow of the water, and the sound of + it, restrained and yet swelling at intervals, by striking eye and ear + without ceasing, came to the aid of those inner movements of the mind + which reverie destroys, and sufficed to make me pleasantly conscious + of existence without the trouble of thinking.... There is nothing + actual in all this to which the heart can attach itself; even in our + most intense enjoyment there is scarcely a moment of which the heart + can truly say "I should like it to stay for ever."'</p> + + <p>One thinks of Faust: 'O moment! tarry awhile, thou art so + fair!'</p> + + <p>However, at the close of the Reverie he admits that he has often + had such moments--moments free from all earthly passion--on the lake + and on the island. His feeling was increased by botanical knowledge, + and later on in life the world of trees and plants became his one + safe refuge when pursued by delusions of persecution.</p> + + <p>The Seventh Reverie has a touching account of his pleasure in + botany, of the effect of 'earth in her wedding-dress, the only scene + in the world of which eyes and heart never weary,' the intoxicating + sense that he was part of a great system in which individual detail + disappears, and he only sees and hears the whole.</p> + + <p>'Shunning men, seeking solitude, no longer dreaming, still less + thinking, I began to concern myself with all my surroundings, giving + the preference to my favourites...brilliant flowers, emerald meadows, + fresh shade, streams, thickets, green turf, these purified my + imagination.... Attracted by the pleasant objects around, I note + them, study them, and finally learn to classify them, and so become + at one stroke as much of a botanist as one need be when one only + studies Nature to find ever new reasons for loving her.</p> + + <p>'The plants seem sown in profusion over the <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg271" id="pg271">271</a></span>earth like the + stars in the sky, to invite man, through pleasure and curiosity, to + study them; but the stars are far off; they require preliminary + knowledge ... while plants grow under our very feet--lie, so to + speak, in our very hands.'</p> + + <p>He had a peaceful sense of being free from his enemies when he was + pursuing his botany in the woods. He described one + never-to-be-forgotten ramble when he lost himself in a dense thicket + close to a dizzy precipice, where, save for some rare birds, he was + quite alone. He was just feeling the pride of a Columbus in the + discovery of new ground, when his eye fell upon a manufactory not far + off. His first feeling was a flash of delight at finding himself + again among men; but this gave way to the more lasting and painful + one, that even among the Alps there was no escape from his + tormentors.</p> + + <p>Years later, when he knew that he would never revisit the spot, + the leaves in his herbarium would carry him back to it in memory.</p> + + <p>So strong a personal attachment to Nature, solitude, and + retirement had not been known before; but it was thrown into this + high relief by the morbid dread of man and hatred of culture, which + formed a constant dark background to his mind. It was a state of mind + which naturally led to intense dislike of formal French gardens and + open admiration of the English park. He rejected all the garnish of + garden-craft, even grafted roses and fruit trees, and only admitted + indigenous plants which grew outdoors.<a href= + "#l13"><sup>[13]</sup></a> It is greatly due to his feeling for + English Park style that a healthier garden-craft gained ground in + Germany as well as France. The foremost maxim of his philosophy and + teaching, that everything is good as it comes from the bosom of + mother Nature, or rather from the hand of God, and that man and his + culture are responsible for all the evil, worked out in his attitude + towards Nature.</p> + + <p>He placed her upon a pedestal, worshipping her, <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg272" id="pg272">272</a></span>and the Creator + through her, and this made him the first to recognize the fact that + study of Nature, especially of botany, should be an important factor + in the education of children.</p> + + <p>His <i>Confessions</i>, the truest photographs of a human + character in existence, shew at once the keenest introspection and + intense love for Nature. No one before Rousseau had been so aware of + his own individuality--that is, of himself, as a being--who in this + particular state only exists once, and has therefore not only + relative but absolute value. He gave this peculiarity its full value, + studying it as a thing outside himself, of which every detail was + important, watching with great interest his own change of moods, the + fluctuations of that double self which now lifted him to the ideal, + now cast him down to the lowest and commonest. His relation to Nature + was the best thing about him, and when he was happy, as he was for + the first time in the society of Mademoiselle de Warens, Nature + seemed lovelier than ever.</p> + + <p>The scattered passages about Nature in the <i>Confessions</i> have + a youthful freshness:</p> + + <p>'The appearance of Aurora seemed so delightful one morning, that, + putting on my clothes, I hastened into the country to see the rising + of the sun. I enjoyed that pleasure to its utmost extent. It was one + week after midsummer: the earth was covered with verdure and flowers; + the nightingales, whose soft warblings were almost over, seemed to + vie with each other, and, in concert with birds of various kinds, to + bid adieu to spring and hail the approach of a beautiful summer's + day.'</p> + + <p>He loved rambling over hill and dale, even by night; thus, when he + was at Lyons:</p> + + <p>'It had been a very hot day, the evening was delightful, the dew + moistened the parched grass, no wind was stirring; the air was fresh + without chilliness, the setting sun had tinged the clouds with + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg273" id="pg273">273</a></span>a + beautiful crimson, which was again reflected by the water, and the + trees bordering the terrace were filled with nightingales that were + constantly answering each other's songs. I walked along in a kind of + ecstasy, surrendering my heart and senses to the enjoyment of so many + delights, and sighing only from regret at enjoying them alone. + Absorbed in this pleasing reverie, I lengthened my walk till it grew + very late, without perceiving I was tired. At length I threw myself + on the steps of a kind of niche in a terrace wall. How charming was + that couch! The trees formed a stately canopy, a nightingale sat + directly over me, and with his soft notes lulled me to rest. How + delicious my repose! my awakening more so. It was broad day; on + opening my eyes, I saw the water, the verdure, and an adorable + landscape before me.'</p> + + <p>At the end of the Fourth Book he states his idea of beautiful + scenery:</p> + + <p>'I love to walk at my ease and stop at leisure ... travelling on + foot in a fine country with fine weather ... and having an agreeable + object to terminate my journey. It is already understood what I mean + by a fine country; never can a flat one, though ever so beautiful, + appear such to my eyes. I must have torrents, fir trees, black woods, + mountains to climb or descend, and rugged roads with precipices on + either side to alarm me. I experienced this pleasure to its utmost + extent as I approached Chambéry, not far from a mountain road called + the Pas d'Échelle. Above the main road, hewn through the solid rock, + a small river runs and rushes into fearful chasms, which it appears + to have been millions of ages in forming. The road has been hedged by + a parapet to prevent accidents, and I was thus enabled to contemplate + the whole descent and gain vertigoes at pleasure, for a great part of + my amusement in these steep rocks lies in their causing a giddiness + and swimming in my head, which I am <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg274" id="pg274">274</a></span>particularly fond of, provided I am + in safety. Leaning therefore on the parapet, I remained whole hours, + catching from time to time a glance of the froth and blue water whose + rushing caught my ear, mingled with the cries of ravens and other + birds of prey that flew from rock to rock and bush to bush at 600 + feet below me.'</p> + + <p>His preference was for the wild and sublime, and he was glad that + this was not a popular taste; but he could write glowing descriptions + of more idyllic scenery and of village life.</p> + + <p>He said of a day at the Charmettes, a property near Chambéry, with + his beloved friend Madame de Warens, at the end of 1736:</p> + + <p>'I arose with the sun and was happy; I walked and was happy; I saw + Madame de Warens and was happy; I quitted her and still was happy. + Whether I rambled through the woods, over the hills, or strolled + along the valley; read, was idle, worked in the garden, or gathered + fruits, happiness continually accompanied me.'</p> + + <p>He offered his morning prayer from a hill-top, and in the evening, + before he left, stooped to kiss the ground and the trees, gazing till + they were out of sight at the places where he had been so happy.</p> + + <p>At the Hermitage with Thérèse there was a similar idyll.</p> + + <p>The most epoch--making event in European feeling for Nature was + the appearance of <i>La Nouvelle Héloise</i> (1761). The book + overflows with Rousseau's raptures about the Lake of Geneva. St Preux + says:</p> + + <p>'The nearer I drew to Switzerland, the greater were my emotions. + That instant in which I discovered the Lake of Geneva from the + heights of Jura, was a moment of ecstasy and rapture. The sight of my + country, my beloved country, where a deluge of pleasure had + overflowed my heart; the pure and wholesome air of the Alps, the + gentle breeze <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg275" id= + "pg275">275</a></span>of the country, more sweet than the perfumes of + the East; that rich and fertile spot, that unrivalled landscape, the + most beautiful that ever struck the eye of man, that delightful + abode, to which I found nothing comparable in the vast tour of the + globe; the mildness of the season, the serenity of the climate, a + thousand pleasing recollections which recalled to my mind the + pleasures I had enjoyed;--all these circumstances together threw me + into a kind of transport which I cannot describe, and seemed to + collect the enjoyment of my whole life into one happy moment.'</p> + + <p><i>La Nouvelle Héloise</i> shewed the world three things in quite + a new light: the inner consciousness which was determined to give + feeling its rights again, though well aware that 'a feeling heart is + an unhappy gift from heaven'; the taste for solitude, 'all noble + passions are formed in solitude'; and closely bound up with these, + the love of romantic scenery, which it described for the first time + in glowing language.</p> + + <p>Such expressions as these of St Preux were unheard of at that + time: 'I shall do my best to be free quickly, and able to wander at + my ease in the wild places that to my mind make the charm of this + country.' 'I am of opinion that this unfrequented country deserves + the attention of speculative curiosity, and that it wants nothing to + excite admiration but a skilful spectator'; and 'Nature seems + desirous of hiding her real charms from the sight of men, because + they are too little sensible of them, and disfigure them when within + their reach; she flies from public places; it is on the tops of + mountains, in the midst of forests, on desert islands, that she + displays her most affecting charms.'</p> + + <p>Rousseau certainly announced his views with all the fervour of a + prophet proclaiming a newly-discovered truth. The sketch St Preux + gives of the country that 'deserved a year's study,' in the + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg276" id= + "pg276">276</a></span>twenty-third letter to Julia, is very poetic. + He is ascending a rocky path when a new view breaks upon him:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>One moment I beheld stupendous rocks hanging ruinous over my + head; the next, I was enveloped in a drizzling cloud, which arose + from a vast cascade that, dashing, thundered against the rocks + below my feet. On one side a perpetual torrent opened to my view a + yawning abyss, which my eyes could hardly fathom with safety; + sometimes I was lost in the obscurity of a hanging wood, and then + was greatly astonished with the sudden opening of a flowery + plain.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He was always charmed by 'a surprising mixture of wild and + cultivated Nature':</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Here Nature seems to have a singular pleasure in acting + contradictory to herself, so different does she appear in the same + place in different aspects. Towards the east, the flowers of + spring; to the south, the flowers of autumn; and northwards, the + ice of winter. Add to that the illusions of vision, the tops of the + mountains variously illumined, the harmonious mixture of light and + shade....</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>After climbing, he reflects:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Upon the top of mountains, the air being subtle and pure, we + respire with greater freedom, our bodies are more active, our minds + more serene, our pleasures less ardent, and our passions much more + moderate. Our meditations acquire a degree of sublimity from the + grandeur of the objects around us. It seems as if, being lifted + above all human society, we had left every low terrestrial + sentiment behind.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He can find no words to express 'the amazing variety, magnitude, + and beauty of a thousand stupendous objects, the pleasure of gazing + at an entire new scene ... and beholding, as it were, another Nature + and a new world.'</p> + + <p>Earlier in the year he wrote his letters to Julia upon a block of + stone in his favourite wild spot, and the wintry landscape harmonized + with his feelings:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I run to and fro, climb the rocks and explore my whole district, + and find everything as horrible without <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg277" id="pg277">277</a></span>as I experienced + it within. There is no longer any verdure to be seen, the grass is + yellow and withered, the trees are stripped of their foliage, and + the north-east blast heaps snow and ice around me. In short, the + whole face of Nature appears as decayed to my outward senses as I + myself from within am dead to hope and joy.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Julia, too, is enthusiastic about places, where 'no vestiges are + seen of human toil, no appearance of studied and laborious art; every + object presents only a view of the tender care of Nature, our common + mother.'</p> + + <p>When St Preux knows that she returns his love, his sympathy for + Nature overflows:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I find the country more delightful, the verdure fresher and + livelier, the air more temperate, and the sky more serene than ever + I did before; even the feathered songsters seem to tune their + tender throats with more harmony and pleasure; the murmuring rills + invite to love-inspiring dalliance, while the blossoms of the vine + regale me from afar with the choicest perfumes ... let us animate + all Nature, which is absolutely dead without the genial warmth of + love.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>St Preux escorts his old love to the Meillerie, and it was with + his description of this that Rousseau unrolled the full charm of + mountain scenery, and opened the eyes of his readers to see it.</p> + + <p>They were climbing a mountain top on the Savoy side of the + lake:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>This solitary spot formed a wild and desert nook, but full of + those sorts of beauties which are only agreeable to susceptible + minds, and appear horrible to others. A torrent, occasioned by the + melting of the snow, rolled in a muddy stream within twenty paces + of us, and carried dust, sand, and stones along with it, not + without considerable noise. Behind us, a chain of inaccessible + rocks divided the place where we stood from that part of the Alps + which they call the Ice house.... Forests of gloomy fir trees + afforded us a melancholy shade on the right, while on the left was + a large wood of oak, beyond which the torrent issued; and beneath, + that vast body of water which the <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg278" id="pg278">278</a></span>lake forms in the bay of the Alps, + parted us from the rich coast of the Pays de Vaud, crowning the + whole landscape with the top of the majestic Jura.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Rousseau's influence upon feeling in general, and feeling for + Nature in particular, was an extraordinary one, widening and + deepening at once.</p> + + <p>By his strong personal impulse he impelled it into more natural + paths, and at the same time he discovered the power of the + mountains.</p> + + <p>He brought to flower the germ which had lain dormant in Hellenism + and the Renaissance; and although his readers imbibed a sickly strain + of morbid sentimentality with this passion for the new region of + feeling, the total effect of his individuality and his idealism was + to intensify their love for Nature. His feelings woke the liveliest + echo, and it was not France alone who profited by the lessons he + taught.</p> + + <p>He was no mountaineer himself, but he pointed out the way, and + others soon followed it. Saussure began his climbing in 1760, + exploring the Alps with the indomitable spirit of the discoverer and + the scientist's craving for truth. He ascended Mont Blanc in 1787, + and only too soon the valleys of Chamounix filled with tourists and + speculators. One of the first results of Rousseau's imposing + descriptions of scenery was to rouse the most ardent of French + romance writers, Bernardin de St Pierre; and his writings, especially + his beautiful pictures of the Ile de France, followed hard in the + wake of <i>La Nouvelle Héloise</i>.</p> + + <p>In <i>Paul and Virginia</i> vivid descriptions of Nature were + interwoven with an idyllic Robinson Crusoe romance:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Within this enclosure reigns the most profound silence. The + waters, the air, all the elements are at peace. Scarcely does the + echo repeat the whispers of the palm trees spreading their broad + leaves, the long points of which are gently agitated by the winds. + A soft light illumines the bottom of this deep valley, <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg279" id="pg279">279</a></span>on which the sun + shines only at noon. But even at break of day the rays of light are + thrown on the surrounding rocks, and their sharp peaks, rising + above the shadows of the mountain, appear like tints of gold and + purple gleaming upon the azure sky.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Like Rousseau, St Pierre held that 'to take refuge in the wildest + and most desert places is an instinct common to all feeling and + suffering beings, as if rocks were ramparts against misfortune, and + Nature's calm could appease the sorrows of the soul'<a href= + "#l14"><sup>[14]</sup></a>; but he differed in caring for Nature far + more for her own sake, and not in opposition to culture and a + detested world. He wrote too, not as a philosopher proclaiming a new + gospel, but as a poet<a href="#l15"><sup>[15]</sup></a>; the poetry + of Nature had been revealed to French literature.</p> + + <p>St Pierre drew the beauty of the tropics in a poem, and George + Forster's <i>Voyage round the World</i><a href= + "#l16"><sup>[16]</sup></a> shewed how quickly Rousseau's influence + told upon travels. It was a far cry from the Crusaders and + discoverers to the highly-cultured Forster, alive to everything that + was good and beautiful, and able to express it. He was the first to + describe countries and peoples from both the scientific and artistic + standpoint--a style of writing which Humboldt perfected, and some + later writers, Haeckel, for example, in <i>Indischen Briefen</i>, + have carried on with success.</p> + + <p>To quote Forster:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The town of Santa Cruz in Madeira was abreast of us at six in + the afternoon. The mountains are here intersected by numerous deep + glens and valleys. On the sloping ground we observed several + country houses pleasantly situated amidst surrounding vineyards and + lofty cypresses, which gave the country altogether a romantic + appearance. Early on the 29th we were agreeably surprised with the + picturesque appearance of the city of Funchal....</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In October 1772, off South Africa:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The night was scarcely begun when the water all round us + afforded the most grand and astonishing sight <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg280" id="pg280">280</a></span>that can be + imagined. As far as we could see, the whole ocean seemed to be in a + blaze. Every breaking wave had its summit illuminated by a light + similar to that of phosphorus, and the sides of the vessel, coming + in contact with the sea, were strongly marked by a luminous + line.... There was a singularity and a grandeur in the display of + this phenomenon which could not fail of giving occupation to the + mind, and striking it with a reverential awe, due to + omnipotence.</p> + + <p>The ocean was covered to a great extent with myriads of + animalcules; these little beings, organized, alive, endowed with + locomotive power, a quality of shining whenever they please, of + illuminating every body with which they come in contact ... all + these ideas crowded upon us, and bade us admire the Creator, even + in His minutest works.... I hope I shall not have formed too + favourable an opinion of my readers, if I expect that the + generality will sympathize with me in these feelings.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In Dusky Bay:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>We glided along by insensible degrees, wafted by light airs past + numerous rocky islands, each of which was covered with wood and + shrubberies, where numerous evergreens were sweetly contrasted and + mingled with the various shades of autumnal yellow. Flocks of + aquatic birds enlivened the rocky shores, and the whole country + resounded with the wild notes of the feathered tribe.... The view + of rude sceneries in the style of Rosa, of antediluvian forests + which clothed the rock, and of numerous rills of water which + everywhere rolled down the steep declivity, altogether conspired to + complete our joy.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Cascade Cove in New Zealand:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>This waterfall at a distance of a mile and a half seems to be + but inconsiderable on account of its great elevation; but, after + climbing about 200 yards upwards, we ... found a view of great + beauty and grandeur before us. The first object which strikes the + beholder is a clear column of water eight or ten yards in + circumference, which is projected with great impetuosity from the + perpendicular rock at the height of 100 yards. Nearly at the fourth + part of the whole height this column meeting a part of the same + rock, which now acquires a little inclination, spreads on its + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg281" id= + "pg281">281</a></span>broad back into a limpid sheet of about + twenty-five yards in width. Here its surface is curled, and dashes + upon every little eminence in its rapid descent, till it is all + collected in a fine basin about sixty yards in circuit, included on + three sides by the natural walls of the rocky chasm, and in front + by huge masses of stone irregularly piled above each other. Between + them the stream finds its way, and runs foaming with the greatest + rapidity along the slope of the hill to the sea. The whole + neighbourhood of the cascade ... is filled with a steam or watery + vapour.... We ... were struck with the sight of a most beautiful + rainbow of a perfectly circular form, produced by the meridian rays + of the sun refracted in the vapour of the cascade.</p> + + <p>The scenery on the left consists of steep brown rocks fringed on + the summits with overhanging shrubs and trees; the enchanting + melody of various birds resounded on all sides, and completed the + beauty of this wild and romantic spot.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He described: 'A waterspout, a phenomenon which carried so much + terrific majesty in it, and connected, as it were, the sea with the + clouds, made our oldest mariners uneasy and at a loss how to + behave.'</p> + + <p>He begins his diary of August 1773 with O'Taheite:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It was one of those beautiful mornings which the poets of all + nations have attempted to describe, when we saw the isle of + O'Taheite within two miles before us. The east wind, which had + carried us so far, was entirely vanished, and a faint breeze only + wafted a delicious perfume from the land, and curled the surface of + the sea. The mountains, clothed with forests, rose majestic in + various spiry forms, on which we already perceived the light of the + rising sun ... everything seemed as yet asleep; the morning scarce + dawned, and a peaceful shade still rested on the landscape....</p> + + <p>This spot was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and + could not fail of bringing to remembrance the most fanciful + descriptions of poets, which it eclipsed in beauty; we had a + prospect of the plain below us, and of the sea beyond it. In the + shade of trees, whose branches hung over the water, we enjoyed + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg282" id="pg282">282</a></span>a + pleasant gale, which softened the heat of the day; and, amidst the + solemn uniform noise of the waterfall, which was but seldom + interrupted by the whistling of birds, we sat down....</p> + + <p>We could have been well pleased to have passed the whole day in + this retirement ... however, feasting our eyes once more with the + romantic scenery, we returned to the plain.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>It was such descriptions as these which stimulated Humboldt. There + is a breath of poetry in his writings; his <i>Views of Nature</i> and + <i>Cosmos</i> give ample proof that love of Nature and knowledge of + Nature can condition and deepen each other.</p> + + <p>It is not surprising that in the flood of scientific 'Travels' + which followed, especially in imitation of Forster, there were some + that laid claim to a wonderful grade of feeling. For example, the + description of a day at the Equator by von Spix and v. Martius in + their Travels in Brazil in 1817 to 1820:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>In these seas the sun rises from the ocean with great splendour, + and gilds the clouds accumulated in the horizon, which in grand and + various groups seem to present to the eye of the spectator + continents with high mountains and valleys, with volcanoes and + seas, mythological and other strange creations of fancy.</p> + + <p>The lamp of day gradually rises in the transparent blue sky; the + damp grey fogs subside; the sea is calm or gently rises and falls, + with a surface smooth as a mirror, in a regular motion. At noon a + pale, faintly shining cloud rises, the herald of a sudden tempest, + which at once disturbs the tranquillity of the sea. Thunder and + lightning seem as if they would split our planet; but a heavy rain + of a salt taste, pouring down in the midst of roaring whirlwinds, + puts an end to the raging of the elements, and several + semi-circular rainbows, extended over the ocean like gay triumphal + arches, announce the peaceful termination of the great natural + phenomenon. As soon as the air and sea have recovered their + equilibrium, the sky again shews its transparent azure.... As the + sun gradually sinks in the clouded horizon, the sea and sky assume + a new dress, which is beyond description sublime and magnificent. + The most brilliant red, yellow, violet, in <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg283" id="pg283">283</a></span>infinite shades + and contrasts, are poured out in profusion over the azure of the + firmament, and are reflected in still gayer variety from the + surface of the water. The day departs amid continued lightning on + the dusky horizon, while the moon in silent majesty rises from the + unbounded ocean into the cloudless upper regions. Variable winds + cool the atmosphere; numerous falling stars, coming particularly + from the south, shed a magic light; the dark-blue firmament, + reflected with the constellations on the untroubled bosom of the + water, represents the image of the wholly starry hemisphere; and + the ocean, agitated even by the faintest breeze of the night, is + changed into a sea of waving fire.... The variety of the light and + foliage of the trees, which is seen in the forests, on the slopes + of the mountains: the blending of the most diverse colours, and the + dark azure and transparency of the sky, impart to the landscapes of + the tropical countries a charm to which even the pencil of a + Salvator Rosa and a Claude cannot do justice....</p> + + <p>Except at noon, when all living creatures in the torrid zone + seek shade and repose, and when a solemn silence is diffused over + the scene, illumined by the dazzling beams of the sun, every hour + of the day calls into action another race of animals.... When the + sun goes down, most of the animals retire to rest ... myriads of + luminous beetles now begin to fly about like <i>ignes fatui</i>, + and the blood-sucking bats hover like phantoms in the profound + darkness of the night.... The traveller does not here meet with the + impressions of those sublime and rugged high Alps of Europe, nor, + on the other hand, those of a meaner nature; but the character of + these landscapes combines grandeur with simplicity and + softness....</p> + + <p>He who has not personally experienced the enchantment of + tranquil moonlight nights in these happy latitudes can never be + inspired, even by the most faithful description, with those + feelings which scenes of such wondrous beauty excite in the mind of + the beholder.</p> + + <p>A delicate transparent mist hangs over the country, the moon + shines brightly amid heavy and singularly grouped clouds, the + outlines of the objects illuminated by it are clear and well + defined, while a magic twilight seems to remove from the eye those + which are in shade. Scarce a breath of air is stirring, and the + neighbouring mimosas, that have folded up their leaves to sleep, + stand motionless beside the dark crowns of <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg284" id="pg284">284</a></span>the manga, the + jaca, and the ethereal jambos; or sometimes a sudden wind arises + and the juiceless leaves of the acaju rustle, the richly flowered + grumijama and pitanga let drop a fragrant shower of snow-white + blossoms; the crowns of the majestic palms wave slowly over the + silent roof which they overshade, like a symbol of peace and + tranquillity.</p> + + <p>Shrill cries of the cicada, the grasshopper, and tree frog make + an incessant hum, and produce by their monotony a pleasing + melancholy.... Every half-hour different balsamic odours fill the + air, and other flowers alternately unfold their leaves to the + night.... While the silent vegetable world, illuminated by scores + of fireflies as by a thousand moving stars, charms the night by its + delicate effluvia, brilliant lightnings play incessantly on the + horizon, and elevate the mind in joyful admiration to the stars, + which, glowing in solemn silence in the firmament above the + continent and ocean, fill the soul with a presentiment of still + sublimer wonders.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Travels by sea were described at much greater length and with much + more effusion than travels by land; one might infer from the silence + of the people who moved about in Europe in the eighteenth century, + that no love of Nature existed. The extreme discomfort of the road up + to a hundred years ago may account for this silence within + Germany.</p> + + <p>Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in 1716 of Saxon Switzerland:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>We passed by moonshine the frightful precipices that divide + Bohemia from Saxony, at the bottom of which runs the river Elbe ... + in many places the road is so narrow that I could not discern an + inch of space between the wheels and the precipice....</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and her husband declared that</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>he had passed the Alps five times in different places, without + having gone a road so dangerous.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Scherr relates that in the late autumn of 1721 a citizen of + Schwabisch-Gmünd travelled to Ellwangen, a distance of eight hours' + posting.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg285" id="pg285">285</a></span> + Before starting, he had a mass performed in St John's Church 'for the + safe conclusion of the coming journey.' He set off one Monday with + his wife and a maid in a two-horse vehicle called a small tilt waggon + (<i>Planwägelchen</i>), but in less than an hour the wheels stuck in + mud, and the whole party had to get out and push the carriage, up to + their knees in filth. In the middle of the village of Boebingen the + driver inadvertently drove the front left wheel into a manure hole, + the carriage was overturned, and the lady of the party had her nose + and cheek badly grazed by the iron hoops.</p> + + <p>From Moeggelingen to Aalen they were obliged to use three horses, + and yet it took fully six hours, so that they were obliged to spend + the night there. Next morning they set off early, and reached the + village of Hofen by mid-day without accidents. Here for a time the + travelling ceased, for a hundred paces beyond the village the + carriage fell into a puddle, and they were all terribly soiled; the + maid's right shoulder was dislocated, and the manservant's hand + injured. The axle of one of the wheels was broken, and a horse + completely lamed in the left forefoot. They had to put up a second + time for the night, leave horses, carriage, man, and maid in Hofen, + and hire a rack waggon, in which at last, pitifully shaken, they + reached the gates of Ellwangen on Wednesday at vesper bells.</p> + + <p>When Eva König, Lessing's <i>fiancée</i>, was on her way from + Brunswick to Nuremberg in 1772, she wrote to him from Rattelsdorf + (two miles north of Bamberg), on February 28th, as follows:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>You will certainly never in your life have heard of a village + called Rattelsdorf? We have been in it already twenty-four hours, + and who knows if we shall not have to stay four times as long! It + depends on the Maine, whether it falls or not; as it is now, one + could not cross it, even if one dared to. I have never in my life + met with so many hindrances, so many dangers and hardships, as on + this journey. I can <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg286" id= + "pg286">286</a></span>hardly think of any misfortunes which we have + not already had.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>She goes on to describe that in thirty-eight hours two axles and + two poles had been broken, the horses had bolted with them, one horse + had fallen and died, and so on; on March 2nd they were still + prisoners in the wretched village.</p> + + <p>In 1750 a day's journey was still reckoned at five miles, two + hours to the mile; and when in July 1750 Klopstock travelled with + Gleim from Halberstadt to Magdeburg in a light carriage drawn by four + horses, at the rate of six miles in six hours, he thought this speed + remarkable enough to merit comparison with the racing in the Olympian + games. People of any pretensions shunned the discomforts of + travelling on foot--the bad roads, the insecurity, the dirty inns, + and the rough treatment in them; to walk abroad in good clothes and + admire the scenery was an unknown thing. (G. Freytag.)</p> + + <p>It was only after the widening of thoroughfares, the invention of + steamboats (the first was on the Weser 1827) and railways (1835), + that travelling became commoner and more popular, and feeling for + Nature was thereby increased.</p> + + <p>After the Swiss Alps had been discovered for them, people began to + feel interest in their native mountains; Zimmermann led the way with + his observations on a journey in the Harz 1775, and Gatterer in 1785 + published <i>A Guide to Travelling in the Harz</i> in five + volumes.</p> + + <p>In 1806 appeared Nicolas's <i>Guide to Switzerland</i>, in 1777 + J.T. Volkmar's <i>Journey to the Riesengebirge</i>, and before long + each little country and province, be it Weimar, Mecklenburg, or the + Mark, had discovered a Switzerland within its own boundaries, with + mountains as much like the Swiss Alps as a charming little girl is + like a giant.</p> + + <p>It was the opening of men's eyes to the charms of romantic scenery + at home.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg287" id="pg287">287</a></span> + The Isle of Rügen too, Swedish at that time, with its striking + contrasts of deep blue bays and inlets, chalk rocks and beech woods, + came into fashion with lovers of Nature, especially after the road + from Sagard to Stubbenkamer had been improved<a href= + "#l17"><sup>[17]</sup></a>--so much so, in fact, that in 1805 Grümbke + was complaining that many people only went there to feast, not to + enjoy the scene:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>You know I am no foe to pleasure, and appreciate my food and + drink after physical exertion as much as any one; but it is + desecration to make that the main object here. In this dreadfully + beautiful wilderness, under these green corridors of beeches, on + the battlements of this great dazzling temple, before this huge + azure mirror of the sea, only high and serious thoughts should find + a place--the whole scene, stamped as it is with majesty and + mystery, seems designed to attract the mind to the hidden life of + the unending world around it. For this, solitude and rest are + necessary conditions, hence one must visit Stubbenkamer either + alone or with intimate and congenial friends.</p> + </blockquote><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg288" id= + "pg288">288</a></span> + + <h2><a name="ch12" id="ch12">CHAPTER XII</a></h2> + + <h3>THE UNIVERSAL PANTHEISTIC FEELING OF MODERN TIMES</h3> + + <p>The eighteenth century, so proudly distinguished as the century of + Frederic the Great and Maria Theresa, Kant and Lessing, Rousseau and + Voltaire, the age of enlightenment, and, above all, of the + Revolution, was the most sentimental period in history. Its feeling + for Nature bore the same stamp. Many of the Anacreontists and + Göttingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but + their horizon was narrow, and though F. Stolberg sang of the sea and + his native mountains, most of them only rang the changes on moonlight + and starlight, pastoral idylls, the joys of spring, and winter + excursions on the ice. Even Rousseau, the prophet of high mountains, + was the child of the same sentimental, self-adoring time; a morbid + strain, call it misanthropy, melancholy, what you will, underlay all + his passion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which + lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful + souls, moonshine poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, and + <i>La Nouvelle Héloise</i>, ennobled and purified the tone of the day + and freed it from convention!</p> + + <p>It was by dint of his genius for expression, the gift of finding + the one right word, that he became the world's greatest lyrist: what + he felt became a poem, what he saw a picture.</p> + + <p>To see and to fashion into poetry were one with <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg289" id="pg289">289</a></span>him, whereas his + predecessors had called out the whole artillery of Olympus--nymphs, + Oreads, Chloe, Phyllis, Damon, Aurora, Echo, and Zephyr--even the + still heavier ordnance of the old Teutonic gods and half-gods, only + to repeat stereotyped ideas, and produce descriptions of scenery, + without lyric thought and feeling.</p> + + <p>But Goethe's genius passed through very evident stages of + development, and found forerunners in Lessing and Herder.</p> + + <p>Lessing's mind was didactic and critical, not lyric, so that his + importance here is a negative one. In laying down the limits of + poetry and painting in <i>Laocoon</i>, he attacked the error of his + day which used poetry for pictures, debasing it to mere descriptions + of seasons, places, plants, etc.</p> + + <p>He was dealing with fundamental principles when he said:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Simonides called painting dumb poetry, and poetry speaking + painting; but ... many modern critics have drawn the crudest + conclusions possible from this agreement between painting and + poetry. At one time they confine poetry within the narrow limits of + painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide + sphere of poetry.... This fault-finding criticism has partially + misled the virtuosos themselves. In poetry a fondness for + description, and in painting a fancy for allegory, has arisen from + the desire to make the one a speaking picture without really + knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem + without having considered in how far painting can express universal + ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and degenerating into an + arbitrary method of writing.... Since the artist can use but a + single moment of ever-changing Nature, and the painter must further + confine his study of this one moment to a single point of view, + while their works are made not simply to be looked at, but to be + contemplated long and often, evidently the most fruitful moment and + the most fruitful aspect must be chosen. Now that only is fruitful + which allows free play to the imagination. The more we see, the + more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more + we must think we see.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg290" id="pg290">290</a></span> + And against descriptive poetry he said:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>When a poetaster, says Horace, can do nothing else, he falls to + describing a grove, an altar, a brook winding through pleasant + meadows, a rushing river, or a rainbow. Pope expressly enjoined + upon every one who would not prove himself unworthy the name of + poet, to abandon as early as possible this fondness for + description. A merely descriptive poem he declared to be a feast + made up of sauces.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Acute as his distinction was between poetry as the representative + art of actions in time, and painting as the representative art of + bodies in space, he did not give due value to lyric feeling or + landscape painting.<a href="#m1"><sup>[1]</sup></a> They belong to a + region in which his sharp, critical acumen was not at home.</p> + + <p>But his discussions established the position that external objects + of any sort, including Nature in all her various shapes, are not + proper subjects for poetry when taken as Thomson, Brockes, and Haller + took them, by themselves alone, but must first be imbued with human + feeling. And the same holds good of landscape painting. Goethe's + lyrics are the most perfect examples of this blending of the outer + and inner world.</p> + + <p>Lessing's criticisms had a salutary, emancipating effect upon + prevalent taste; but a more positive influence came into play through + Herder's warm predilection for the popular songs, which had been so + long neglected, and for all that rises, as in the Psalms, Homer, + Shakespeare, Ossian, from primitive sources of feeling, and finds + spontaneous expression in poetry. The effect of his pioneering was + marked, especially upon Goethe. Herder understood the revulsion of + feeling from the unnatural restraint of the Pigtail period, and while + holding up the mirror to his own day, he at the same time led its + taste and the expression of it towards what was simple and natural, + by disclosing the treasures which lay hidden in the poetry of the + people. The lyric was freed from the artificiality and convention + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg291" id="pg291">291</a></span>which + had so long ruled it, and although he did not carry out his plan of a + history of poetry, his collections and his profound remarks upon them + were of great service, sowing a seed that bore fruit in succeeding + days.</p> + + <p>The popular songs to him were children of the same mother as the + plants and flowers. 'All the songs of such unlettered folk,'<a href= + "#m2"><sup>[2]</sup></a> he said, 'weave a living world around + existing objects, actions, and events. How rich and manifold they all + become! And the eye can actually see them, the mind realize them; + they are set in motion. The different parts of the song are no more + connected together than the trees and bushes in a wood, the rocks in + a desert, or the scenes depicted.' In another place<a href= + "#m3"><sup>[3]</sup></a> he put the history of feeling for Nature + very tersely: 'There is no doubt that the spirit of man is made + gentler by studying Nature. What did the classics aim at in their + Georgics, but under various shapes to make man more humane and raise + him gradually to order, industry, and prosperity, and to the power to + observe Nature?...' Hence, when poetry revived in the Middle Ages, + she soon recollected the true land of her birth among the plants and + flowers. The Provencal and the romantic poets loved the same + descriptions. Spenser, for instance, has charming stanzas about + beautiful wilds with their streams and flowers; Cowley's six books on + plants, vegetables, and trees are written with extraordinary + affection and a superfluity of imagination; and of our old Brockes, + Gessner says: 'He observed Nature's many beauties down to their + finest minutiæ, the smallest things move his tender feelings; a + dewdrop on a blade of grass in the sunshine inspires him. His scenes + are often too laboured, too wide in scope, but still his poems are a + storehouse of pictures direct from Nature. Haller's <i>Alps</i>, + Kleist's poems and Gessner's, Thomson's <i>Seasons</i>, speak for + themselves.'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg292" id="pg292">292</a></span> He + delighted in Shaftesbury's praises of Nature as the good and + beautiful in the <i>Moralists</i>, and translated it<a href= + "#m4"><sup>[4]</sup></a>; in fact, in Herder we have already an + æsthetic cult of the beauties of Nature.</p> + + <p>After the moral disquisitions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, etc., + Nature's influence on man, moral and æsthetic, became, as we have + already seen, a favourite theme in Germany too, both in pious and + rationalistic circles<a href="#m5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>; but there are + few traces of any æsthetic analysis.</p> + + <p>The most important one was Kant's, in his <i>Observations on the + Beautiful and Sublime</i> in 1764. He distinguished, in the finer + feeling for Nature, a feeling for the sublime and a feeling for the + beautiful.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Both touch us pleasantly, but in different ways. The sight of a + mountain with a snowy peak reaching above the clouds, the account + of a storm ... these excite pleasure, but mixed with awe; while + flowery meadows, valleys with winding streams and covered by + browsing herds, a description of Elysium ... also cause pleasant + feelings, but of a gay and radiant kind. To appreciate the first + sensations adequately, we must have a feeling for the sublime; to + appreciate the second, a feeling for the beautiful.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He mentioned tall oaks, lonely shades in consecrated groves, and + night-time, as sublime; day, beds of flowers, low hedges, and trees + cut into shapes, as beautiful.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Minds which possess the feeling for the sublime are inclined to + lofty thoughts of friendship, scorn of the world, eternity, by the + quiet stillness of a summer evening, when the twinkling starlight + breaks the darkness. The light of day impels to activity and + cheerfulness. The sublime soothes, the beautiful stimulates.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He goes on to subdivide the sublime:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>This feeling is sometimes accompanied by horror or by dejection, + sometimes merely by quiet admiration, at other times by a sense of + wide-spread beauty. I will call the first the terrible, the second + the noble, the third the splendid sublime.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg293" id="pg293">293</a></span> + Profound solitude is sublime, but in a terrible way. This is why + great deserts, like the Desert of Gamo in Tartary, have always been + the supposed abode of fearful shades, hobgoblins, and ghostly + spectres. The sublime is always great and simple; the beautiful may + be small, elaborate, and ornamental.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He tried, too, to define the romantic in Nature, though very + vaguely:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The dreadful variety of the sublime, when quite unnatural, is + adventurous. When sublimity or beauty is excessive, it is called + romantic.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In his <i>Kalligone</i>, which appeared in 1800, Herder quoted + Kant in making one of the characters say, 'One calls day beautiful, + night sublime,' and tried to carry the idea a step further; 'The + sublime and beautiful are not opposed to each other, but stem and + boughs of a tree whose top is the most sublimely beautiful of all,' + that is the romantic. In the same book he attempted to analyze his + impressions of Nature, calling a rugged place odious, an + insignificant one without character tedious. 'In the presence of + great mountains,' he says, 'the spirit is filled with bold + aspirations, whereas in gentle valleys it lies quiet.' Harmony in + variety was his ideal, like the sea in storm and calm. 'An ocean of + beautiful forms in rest and movement.'</p> + + <p>And in reference to the contrast between a place made 'dreadful + and horrible' by a torrent dashing over rocks and a quiet and + charming valley, he said: 'These changes follow unalterable laws, + which are recognized by our minds, and in harmony with our feelings.' + He saw the same order in variety among plants, from the highest to + the lowest, from palm tree to moss. In the second part of the book he + gave an enthusiastic description of the sublime in sky and sea.</p> + + <p>His beautiful words on the inspiration of Nature shew his insight + into her relation to the poet soul of the people:<span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg294" id="pg294">294</a></span></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Everything in Nature must be inspired by life, or it does not + move me, I do not feel it. The cooling zephyr and the morning + sunbeam, the wind blowing through the trees, and the fragrant + carpet of flowers, must cool, warm, pervade us--then we feel + Nature. The poet does not say he feels her, unless he feels her + intensely, living, palpitating and pervading him, like the wild + Nature of Ossian, or the soft luxuriant Nature of Theocritus and + the Orientals. In Nature, the more varieties the better; for + instance, in a beautiful country I rustle with the wind and become + alive (and give life--inspire), I inhale fragrance and exhale it + with the flowers; I dissolve in water; I float in the blue sky; I + feel all these feelings.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Herder touched the lyre himself with a skilful hand. Thought + predominated with him, but he could make Nature live in his + song.<a href="#m7"><sup>[7]</sup></a> 'I greet thee, thou wing of + heaven,' he sang to the lark; and to the rainbow, 'Beautiful child of + the sun, picture and hope over dark clouds ... hopes are colours, are + broken sun-rays and the children of tears, truth is the sun.'</p> + + <p>In <i>By the Sea at Naples</i> he wrote:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>A-weary of the summer's fiery brand,</p> + + <p>I sat me down beside the cooling sea,</p> + + <p>Where the waves heaving, rolled and kissed the strand</p> + + <p>Of the grey shore, ...</p> + + <p>And over me, high over in the air,</p> + + <p>Of the blue skyey vault, rustled the tree ...</p> + + <p>Queen of all trees, slender and beautiful,</p> + + <p>The pine tree, lifting me to golden dreams.</p> + </div> + + <p>In <i>Recollections of Naples</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Yes! they are gone, those happy, happy hours</p> + + <p>Joyous but short, by Posilippo's bay!</p> + + <p>Sweet dream of sea and lake, of rock and hill,</p> + + <p>Grotto and island, and the mirrored sun</p> + + <p>In the blue water--thou hast passed away!</p> + </div> + + <p>and</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When the glow of evening softly fades</p> + + <p>From the still sea, and with her gleaming host</p> + + <p>The moon ascends the sky.</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg295" id="pg295">295</a></span> + + <p><i>Night</i> is very poetic:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i6">And comest thou again,</p> + + <p>Thou Mother of the stars and heavenly thoughts?</p> + + <p>Divine and quiet Mother, comest thou?</p> + + <p>The earth awaits thee, from thy chalice cup</p> + + <p>But one drop of thy heavenly dew to quaff,</p> + + <p>Her flowers bend low their heads;</p> + + <p>And with them, satiate with vision, droops</p> + + <p>My overcharged soul....</p> + + <p>O starry goddess with the crown of gold,</p> + + <p>Upon whose wide-spread sable mantle gleam</p> + + <p>A thousand worlds ...</p> + + <p>Silence divine, that filleth all the world,</p> + + <p>Flowing so softly to the eternal shores</p> + + <p>Of an eternal universe....</p> + </div> + + <p>And in <i>St John's Night</i>, he exclaims:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Infinite, ah! inexhaustible art thou, Mother Nature!</p> + </div> + + <p>Like the rest, Herder suffered from the over-sensitiveness of his + day. His correspondence with his <i>fiancée</i> shews this<a href= + "#m8"><sup>[8]</sup></a>; one sees Rousseau's influence:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>My pleasantest hours are when, quite alone, I walk in a charming + wood close to Bückeburg, or lie upon a wall in the shade of my + garden, or lastly, for we have had capital moonlight for three + nights, and the last was the best of all, when I enjoy these hours + of sweetly sleeping night with all the songs of the + nightingale.</p> + + <p>I reckon no hours more delightful than those of green solitude. + I live so romantically alone, and among woods and churches, as only + poets, lovers, and philosophers can live.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And his <i>fiancée</i> wrote:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>'Tis all joy within and around me since I have known thee, my + best beloved: every plant and flower, everything in Nature, seems + beautiful to me.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I went early to my little room; the moon was quite covered by + clouds, and the night so melancholy from the croaking of the frogs, + that I could not leave the window for a long time: my whole soul + was dark and cloudy; I thought of thee, my dear one, and that + thought, that sigh, reduced me to tears.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg296" id="pg296">296</a></span> + and</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Do you like the ears of wheat so much? I never pass a cornfield + without stroking them.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Goethe focussed all the rays of feeling for Nature which had found + lyrical expression before him, and purged taste, beginning with his + own, of its unnatural and sickly elements. So he became the + liberating genius of modern culture. Not only did German lyric poetry + reach its climax in him; but he was the most accurate, individual, + and universal interpreter of German feeling for Nature.</p> + + <p>His wide original mind kept open house for the most diverse + elements of feeling, and exercised an ennobling control upon each and + all at will; Homer's naivete, Shakespeare's sympathy, Rousseau's + enthusiasm, even Ossian's melancholy, found room there.</p> + + <p>While most love lyrics of his day were false in feeling, mere + raving extravagances, and therefore poor in those metaphors and + comparisons which prove sympathy between Nature and the inner life, + it could be said of him that 'Nature wished to know what she looked + like, and so she created Goethe.' He was the microcosm in which the + macrocosm of modern times was reflected.</p> + + <p>He was more modern and universal than any of his predecessors, and + his insight into Nature and love for her have been rarely equalled in + later days. He did not live, like so many of the elegiac and idyllic + poets of the eighteenth century, a mere dream-life of the + imagination: Goethe stood firmly rooted among the actualities; from + boyhood up, as he said in <i>Wahrheit und Dichtung</i>, he had 'a + warm feeling for all objective things.'</p> + + <p>No poet, Klopstock not excepted, was richer in verbal invention, + and many of the phrases and epithets which he coined form in + themselves very striking evidence (which is lost in translation) of + his close and original observation of Nature.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg297" id="pg297">297</a></span> He + has many beautiful comparisons to Nature:</p> + + <p>His lady-love is 'brightly beautiful as morning clouds on yonder + height.'</p> + + <p>'I was wont to look at thee as one looks at the stars and moon, + delighting in thee without the most distant wish in my quiet breast + to possess thee.'</p> + + <p>'I give kisses as the spring gives flowers.'</p> + + <p>'My feeling for thee was like seed, which germinates slowly in + winter, but ripens quickly in summer.'</p> + + <p>The stars move 'with flower feet.'</p> + + <p>The graces are 'pure as the heart of the waters, as the marrow of + earth.'</p> + + <p>A delicate poem is a rainbow only existing against a dark + ground.</p> + + <p>In <i>Stella</i>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to + return to thy breast from the sandy desert world.</p> + + <p>I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In <i>Faust</i>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The cataract bursting through the rocks is the image of human + effort; its coloured reflection the image of life.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>When Werther feels himself trembling between existence and + non-existence, everything around him sinking away, and the world + perishing with him:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the + future.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>These are among his still more numerous metaphors:</p> + + <p>A sea of folly, an ocean of fragrance, the waves of battle, the + stream of genius, the tiger claw of despair, the sun-ray of the past. + Iphigenia says to Orestes:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>O let the pure breath of love blow lightly on thy heart's flame + and cool it.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg298" id="pg298">298</a></span> + and Eleonora complains about Tasso:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Let him go! But what twilight falls round me now! Formerly the + stream carried us along upon the light waves without a rudder.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In Goethe we see very clearly how the inner life, under the + pressure of its own intensity, will, so to speak, overflow into the + outer world, making that live in its turn; and how this is especially + the case when the amorous passion is present to add its impetus to + feeling, and attribute its own fervour to all around.</p> + + <p><i>May Song</i>, <i>On the Lake</i>, <i>Ganymede</i>, are + instances of this.</p> + + <p><i>Ganymede</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i2">Oh, what a glow</p> + + <p class="i2">Around me in morning's</p> + + <p class="i2">Blaze thou diffusest,</p> + + <p class="i2">Beautiful spring!</p> + + <p>With the rapture of love but intenser,</p> + + <p>Intenser and deeper and sweeter,</p> + + <p>Nestles and creeps to my heart</p> + + <p class="i2">The sensation divine</p> + + <p class="i2">Of thy fervour eternal,</p> + + <p class="i2">Oh, thou unspeakably fair!</p> + </div> + + <p>Beautiful personifications abound:</p> + + <p>The sun is proudly throned in heaven.</p> + + <p>The glowing sun gazes at the rugged peak or charms it with fiery + love,</p> + + <p>Or bathes like the moon in the ocean.</p> + + <p>The parting glance of Mother Sun broods on the grapes.</p> + + <p>'Morning came frightening away light sleep with its + footsteps.'</p> + + <p>'The young day arose with delight.'</p> + + <p>The moon: 'Thou spreadest thy glance soothingly over my + abode.'</p> + + <p>On a cloudy night: 'Evening already rocked earth, and night hung + on the mountains; from a hill of clouds the moon looked mournfully + out of the mist.'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg299" id="pg299">299</a></span> + 'The lofty stars turn their clear eyes down to me.'</p> + + <p>Even the rock lives: 'The hard rock opens its bosom, not envying + earth its deep springs.'</p> + + <p>The stream: 'Thou hurriest on with joyful light mood; see the rock + spring bright with the glance of the stars, yet no shady valley, no + flowers make him tarry ... his course winds downwards to the plain, + then he scatters in delightful spray, in cloud waves ... foams + gloomily to the abyss.'</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>With gradual step from out the far-off grey,</p> + + <p>Self-heralded draws on the storm.</p> + + <p>Birds on the wing fly low across the water, weighted down,</p> + + <p>And seamen hasten to reef in the sail</p> + + <p>Before its stubborn wrath.</p> + </div> + + <p>His flowers are alive:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The beauteous snowdrops</p> + + <p>Droop o'er the plain,</p> + + <p>The crocus opens</p> + + <p>Its glowing bud ...</p> + + <p>With saucy gesture</p> + + <p>Primroses flare,</p> + + <p>And roguish violets</p> + + <p>Hidden with care.</p> + </div> + + <p>But these are only examples. To obtain a clear idea of Goethe's + attitude, we must take a more general survey of his work, for his + poetic relationship to Nature, like his mental development in + general, passed through various stages of growth. That it was a warm + one even in youth is shewn by the letter in 1766 from Leipzig<a href= + "#m9"><sup>[9]</sup></a>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>You live contented in M. I even so here. Lonely, lonely, + altogether lonely. Dearest Riese, this loneliness has impressed my + soul with a certain sadness.</p> + </blockquote> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>This solitary joy is mine,</p> + + <p>When far apart from all mankind,</p> + + <p>By shady brook-side to recline.</p> + + <p>And keep my loved ones in my mind....</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg300" id="pg300">300</a></span> + + <p>He goes on with these lines:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Then is my heart with sorrow filled,</p> + + <p>Sad is mine eye.</p> + + <p>The flooded brook now rages by,</p> + + <p>That heretofore so gently rilled.</p> + + <p>No bird sings in the bushes now,</p> + + <p>The tree so green is dry,</p> + + <p>The zephyr which on me did blow</p> + + <p>So cheering, now storms northerly,</p> + + <p>And scattered blossoms bears on high.</p> + </div> + + <p>He was already in full sympathy with Nature. A few of his earlier + poems<a href="#m10"><sup>[10]</sup></a> shew prevalent taste, the + allusions to Zephyr and Lima, for instance, in <i>Night</i>; but they + are followed by lines which are all his own.</p> + + <p>He had an incomparable way of striking the chords of love and + Nature together.</p> + + <p>Where his lady-love dwells, 'there is love, and goodness is + Nature.' He thinks of her</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>When the bright sunlight shimmers</p> + + <p class="i4">Across the sea,</p> + + <p>When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Thou art seductive and charming; flowers,</p> + + <p>Sun, moon, and stars only worship thee.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>There is passionate feeling for Nature in the <i>May Song</i> of + his Sesenheimer period:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>How gloriously gleameth</p> + + <p>All Nature to me!</p> + + <p>How bright the sun beameth,</p> + + <p>How fresh is the lea!</p> + + <p>White blossoms are bursting</p> + + <p>The thickets among,</p> + + <p>And all the gay greenwood</p> + + <p>Is ringing with song!</p> + + <p>There's radiance and rapture</p> + + <p>That nought can destroy,</p> + + <p>Oh earth, in thy sunshine,</p> + + <p>Oh heart, in thy joy.</p> + + <p>Oh love! thou enchanter</p> + + <p>So golden and bright,</p> + + <p>Like the red clouds of morning</p> + + <p>That rest on yon height,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg301" id= + "pg301">301</a></span>It is them that art clothing</p> + + <p>The fields and the bowers,</p> + + <p>And everywhere breathing</p> + + <p>The incense of flowers.</p> + </div> + + <p>Looking back in old age to those happy days of youth, he saw in + memory not only Frederica but the scenery around her. He said + (<i>Wahrheit und Dichtung</i>): 'Her figure never looked more + charming than when she was moving along a raised footpath; the charm + of her bearing seemed to vie with the flowering ground, and the + indestructible cheerfulness of her face with the blue sky.' In Alsace + he wrote:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>One has only to abandon oneself to the present in order to enjoy + the charms of the sky, the glow of the rich earth, the mild + evenings, the warm nights, at the side of one's love, or near + her.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and one of the poems to Frederica says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The world lies round me buried deep in mist, but</p> + + <p>In one glance of thine lies sunshine and happiness.</p> + </div> + + <p>There is a strong pulse of life--life that overflows into + Nature--in <i>The Departure</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>To horse! Away, o'er hill and steep,</p> + + <p>Into the saddle blithe I spring;</p> + + <p>The eve was cradling earth to sleep,</p> + + <p>And night upon the mountains hung.</p> + + <p>With robes of mist around him set,</p> + + <p>The oak like some huge giant stood,</p> + + <p>While, with its hundred eyes of jet,</p> + + <p>Peer'd darkness from the tangled wood.</p> + + <p>Amid a bank of clouds the moon</p> + + <p>A sad and troubled glimmer shed;</p> + + <p>The wind its chilly wings unclosed,</p> + + <p>And whistled wildly round my head.</p> + + <p>Night framed a thousand phantoms dire,</p> + + <p>Yet did I never droop nor start;</p> + + <p>Within my veins what living fire!</p> + + <p>What quenchless glow within my heart!</p> + </div> + + <p>And very like it, though in a minor key, is the Elegy which + begins, 'A tender, youthful trouble.'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg302" id="pg302">302</a></span> He + tells in <i>Wahrheit und Dichtung</i> how he found comfort for his + love troubles in Frankfort:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>They were accustomed to call me, on account of wandering about + the district, the 'wanderer.' In producing that calm for the mind, + which I felt under the open sky, in the valleys, on the heights, in + the fields, and in the woods, the situation of Frankfort was + serviceable.... On the setting in of winter a new world was + revealed to us, since I at once determined to skate.... For this + new joyous activity we were also indebted to Klopstock, to his + enthusiasm for this happy species of motion.... To pass a splendid + Sunday thus on the ice did not satisfy us, we continued in movement + late into the night.... The full moon rising from the clouds, over + the wide nocturnal meadows which were frozen into fields of ice, + the night breeze which rustled towards us on our course, the solemn + thunder of the ice which sunk as the water decreased, the strange + echo of our own movements, rendered the scenes of Ossian just + present to our minds.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>His attachment, to Lotte, stirred far deeper feelings than the + earlier ones to Frederica and Lilli:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>(If I, my own dear Lilli, loved thee not, How should I joy to + view this scene so fair! And yet if I, sweet Lilli, loved thee not, + Should I be happy here or anywhere?)</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and drew him correspondingly nearer to Nature.</p> + + <p>There is no book in any language which so lives and moves and has + its being in Nature as <i>Werther</i>.<a href= + "#m11"><sup>[11]</sup></a> In <i>Wahrheit und Dichtung</i> Goethe + said of the 'strange element' in which <i>Werther</i> was designed + and written:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I sought to free myself internally from all that was foreign to + me, to regard the external with love, and to allow all beings, from + man downwards, as low as they were comprehensible, to act upon me, + each after its own kind. Thus arose a wonderful affinity with the + single objects of Nature, and a hearty concord, a harmony with the + whole, so that every change, whether of place or region, or of the + times of the day and year, or whatever else could happen, affected + me in the deepest manner. The glance of the painter associated + itself with that of <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg303" id= + "pg303">303</a></span>the poet; the beautiful rural landscape, + animated by the pleasant river, increased my love of solitude and + favoured my silent observations as they extended on all sides.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The strong influence of <i>La Nouvelle Héloise</i> upon + <i>Werther</i> was very evident, but there was a marked difference + between Goethe's feeling for Nature and Rousseau's. Rousseau had the + painter's eye, but not the keen poetic vision.</p> + + <p>Goethe's romances are pervaded by the penetrating quality peculiar + to his nation, and by virtue of which in <i>Werther</i>, the outer + world, the scenery, was not used as framework, but was always + interwoven with the hero's mood. The contrast between culture and + Nature is always marked in Rousseau, and his religion was deism; + Goethe resolves Nature into feeling, and his religion was a growing + pantheism. As a work of art, <i>Werther</i> is excellent, <i>La + Nouvelle Héloise</i> is not. Goethe used his hero's bearing towards + Nature with marvellous effect to indicate the turns and changes of + his moods, just as he indicated the threatening calamity and the + growing apprehension of it by skilful stress laid upon some of her + little traits--a faculty which only Theodore Storm among later poets + has caught from him.</p> + + <p>The growth of amorous passion is portrayed as an elementary force, + and the revolutionary element in the book really consists in the + strength of this passion and the assertion of its natural rights. + Everything artificial, forced, conventional, in thought, act, and + feeling--and what at that time was not?--was repugnant to Werther; + what he liked most of all was the simplicity of children and + uneducated people.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Nothing distresses me more than to see men torment each other; + particularly when in the flower of their age, in the very season of + pleasure, they waste their few short days of sunshine in quarrels + and disputes, and only perceive their error when it is too late to + repair it.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg304" id="pg304">304</a></span> To + such intense sympathy as this, all that had been sung ere now by + German poets had to give place. Nature, which hitherto had played no + <i>rôle</i> at all in fiction, not even among the English, was + Werther's truest and most intimate friend.</p> + + <p>Werther is sensitive and sentimental, though in a single-hearted + way, with a sentimentality that reminds us more and more, as the + story proceeds, of the gloomy tone of Ossian and Young. He is a + thoroughly original character, who feels that he is right so to be; + and although he falls a prey to his melancholy, yet there is much + more force and thought in his outpourings than in all the moonshine + tirades that preceded him. It is the work of a true poet, in the best + days of a brilliant youth.</p> + + <p>Werther, like Rousseau, was happiest in solitude. Solitude, in the + 'place like paradise,' was precious balm to his feeling heart, which + he considers 'like a sick child'; and the 'warm heavenly imagination + of the heart' illuminates Nature round him--his 'favourite valley,' + the 'sweet spring morning,' Nature's 'unspeakable beauty.' He was + absorbed in artistic feeling, though he could not draw; 'I could not + draw them, not a stroke, and have never been a greater artist than at + that moment.' His power lay in imbuing his whole subject with + feeling; he felt the heart of Nature beating, and its echo in his own + breast.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>When the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the + meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage + of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner + sanctuary, then I throw myself down in the tall grass by the + trickling stream; and as I lie close to the earth, a thousand + unknown plants discover themselves to me. When I hear the buzz of + the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the + countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel + the presence of the Almighty who formed us in His own image, and + the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as + it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg305" id= + "pg305">305</a></span>friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, + and heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, + like the idea of a beloved mistress, then I often long and think: O + that you could describe these conceptions, that you could impress + upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, that it + might be the mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the + infinite God!</p> + + <p>O! my friend! but it is too much for my strength. I sink under + the weight of the grandeur of these visions.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Werther could not express all his love for Nature, but the secret + of it lay in the power to bring his own world of thought and feeling + into communion with her, and so give her speech. He divined something + immortal in her akin to himself. 'The true feeling of Nature,' he + said, 'is love.' He poured 'the stream of his genius' over her, and + she became 'dear and familiar' to him.... The simple homely scenery + delighted him--the valley, the brook, the fine walnut trees.</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>When I go out at sunrise in the morning to Walheim, and with my + own hands gather the peas in the garden, which are to serve for my + dinner; when I sit down to shell them and read my Homer during the + intervals, and then, selecting a saucepan from the kitchen, fetch + my own butter, put my mess on the fire, cover it up.... Nothing + fills me with a more pure and genuine sense of happiness than those + traits of patriarchal life, which, thank heaven, I can imitate + without affectation.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>With the growth of his love-passion his feeling for Nature + increased; on July 24th he wrote:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I never felt happier, I never understood Nature better, even + down to the veriest stem or smallest blade of grass.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Then Albert came on the scene, and love became a torment, and + Nature a tormentor:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p><i>August</i> 18.--Must it ever be thus, that the source of our + happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and + ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of Nature, + overwhelming me with <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg306" id= + "pg306">306</a></span>a torrent of delight, and which brought all + paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a + demon which perpetually pursues and harasses me. When in bye-gone + days I gazed from these rocks upon yonder mountains across the + river and upon the green flowery valley before me, and saw all + nature budding and bursting around--the hills clothed from foot to + peak with tall thick forest trees, the valleys in all their varied + windings shaded with the loveliest woods, and the soft river + gliding along amongst the lisping reeds, mirroring the beautiful + clouds which the soft evening breeze wafted across the sky--when I + heard the groves about me melodious with the music of birds, and + saw the million swarms of insects dancing in the last golden beams + of the sun, whose setting rays awoke the humming beetles from their + grassy beds, whilst the subdued tumult around directed my attention + to the ground, and I there observed the arid rock compelled to + yield nutriment to the dry moss, whilst the heath flourished upon + the barren sands below me--all this displayed to me the inner + warmth which animates all Nature, and filled and glowed within my + heart. I felt myself exalted by this overflowing fulness to the + perception of the Godhead, and the glorious forms of an infinite + universe became visible to my soul.... From the inaccessible + mountains across the desert, which no mortal foot has trod, far as + the confines of the unknown ocean, breathes the spirit of the + eternal Creator, and every atom to which He has given existence + finds favour in His sight. Ah! how often at that time has the + flight of a bird soaring above my head inspired me with the desire + of being transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, + there to quaff the pleasure of life from the foaming goblet of the + infinite, and to partake, if but for a moment, even with the + confined powers of my soul, the beatitude of the Creator, who + accomplishes all things in himself and through himself.... It is as + if a curtain had been drawn from before my eyes.... My heart is + wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies + concealed in every part of universal nature--Nature has formed + nothing that does not consume itself and every object near it; so + that, surrounded by earth, and air, and all the active powers, I + wander on my way with aching heart, and the universe is to me a + fearful monster, for ever devouring its own offspring.... If in + such moments I find no sympathy ... I either wander through the + country, climb some precipitous cliff, or force a path through the + trackless <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg307" id= + "pg307">307</a></span>thicket, where I am lacerated and torn by + thorns and briars, and thence I find relief.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Then, as he was going away, he felt how sympathetic the place had + been to him:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I was walking up and down the very avenue which was so dear to + me--a secret sympathy had frequently drawn me thither....</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>the moon rose from behind a hill, increasing his melancholy, and + Charlotte put his feeling into words, saying (like Klopstock):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p><i>September</i> 10.--Whenever I walk by moonlight, it brings to + my remembrance all my beloved and departed friends, and I am filled + with thoughts of death and futurity.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Even in his misery he realises the [Greek: charisgoôn] of + Euripides, Petrarch's <i>dolendi voluptas</i>--the <i>Wonne der + Wehmuth</i>.</p> + + <p>On September 4th he wrote:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It is even so! As Nature puts on her autumn tints, it becomes + autumn with me and around me. My leaves are sere and yellow, and + the neighbouring trees are divested of their foliage.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>It was due to this autumn feeling that he could say:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Ossian has superseded Homer in my heart. To what a world does + the illustrious bard carry me! To wander over pathless wilds, + surrounded by impetuous whirlwinds, where, by the feeble light of + the moon, we see the spirits of our ancestors; to hear from the + mountain tops, 'mid the roar of torrents, their plaintive sounds + issuing from deep caverns.... And this heart is now dead; no + sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry, and my senses, no more + refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my + brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life, that + active sacred power which created worlds around me, and it is no + more. When I look from my window at the distant hills and behold + the morning sun breaking through the mists and illuminating the + country round it which is still wrapt in silence, whilst the soft + stream <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg308" id= + "pg308">308</a></span>winds gently through the willows which have + shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties + before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to attract + one tear of joy from my withered heart....</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>On November 30th he wrote: 'About dinner-time I went to walk by + the river side, for I had no appetite,' and goes on in the tone of + Ossian:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Everything around me seemed gloomy: a cold and damp easterly + wind blew from the mountains, and black heavy clouds spread over + the plain.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and in the dreadful night of the flood:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Upon the stroke of twelve I hastened forth. I beheld a fearful + sight. The foaming torrents rolled from the mountains in the + moonlight; fields and meadows, trees and hedges, were confounded + together, and the entire valley was converted into a deep lake + which was agitated by the roaring wind. And when the moon shone + forth and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous + torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand + impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of awe and + delight. With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss, + and cried 'Plunge!' For a moment my senses forsook me, in the + intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a plunge + into that gulf.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>To his farewell letter he adds:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Yes, Nature! put on mourning. Your child, your friend, your + lover, draws near his end.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The genuine poetic pantheism, which, for all his melancholy and + sentimentality, was the spring of Werther's feeling, is seen in + loftier and more comprehensive form in the first part of + <i>Faust</i>, when Faust opens the book and sees the sign of + macrocosmos:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>How all things live and work, and ever blending,</p> + + <p>Weave one vast whole from Being's ample range!</p> + + <p>How powers celestial, rising and descending,</p> + + <p>Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange.</p> + + <p>Their flight on rapture-breathing pinions winging,</p> + + <p>From heaven to earth their genial influence bringing,</p> + + <p>Through the wide whole their chimes melodious ringing.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg309" id="pg309">309</a></span> + And the Earth spirit says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>In the currents of life, in action's storm,</p> + + <p>I float and I wave</p> + + <p>With billowy motion,--</p> + + <p>Birth and the grave</p> + + <p>A limitless ocean.</p> + </div> + + <p>Not only of knowledge of, but of feeling for, Nature, it is + said:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Inscrutable in broadest light,</p> + + <p>To be unveiled by force she doth refuse.</p> + </div> + + <p>But Faust is in deep sympathy with her; witness:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Thou full-orbed moon! Would thou wert gazing now</p> + + <p>For the last time upon my troubled brow!</p> + </div> + + <p>and</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Loos'd from their icy fetters, streams and rills</p> + + <p>In spring's effusive, quick'ning mildness flow,</p> + + <p>Hope's budding promise every valley fills.</p> + + <p>And winter, spent with age, and powerless now,</p> + + <p>Draws off his forces to the savage hills.</p> + </div> + + <p>and the idyllic evening mood, which gives way to a burst of + longing:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>In the rich sunset see how brightly glow</p> + + <p>Yon cottage homes girt round with verdant green.</p> + + <p>Slow sinks the orb, the day is now no more;</p> + + <p>Yonder he hastens to diffuse new light.</p> + + <p>Oh! for a pinion from the earth to soar,</p> + + <p>And after, ever after him to strive!</p> + + <p>Then should I see the world outspread below,</p> + + <p>Illumined by the deathless evening beams,</p> + + <p>The vales reposing, every height aglow,</p> + + <p>The silver brooklets meeting golden streams....</p> + + <p>Alas! that when on Spirit wing we rise,</p> + + <p>No wing material lifts our mortal clay.</p> + + <p>But 'tis our inborn impulse, deep and strong,</p> + + <p>To rush aloft, to struggle still towards heaven,</p> + + <p>When far above us pours its thrilling song</p> + + <p>The skylark lost amid the purple even,</p> + + <p>When on extended pinion sweeps amain</p> + + <p>The lordly eagle o'er the pine-crowned height.</p> + + <p>And when, still striving towards its home, the crane</p> + + <p>O'er moor and ocean wings its onward flight.</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg310" id="pg310">310</a></span> + + <p>But the most complete expression of Goethe's attitude, not only in + the period of <i>Werther</i> and the first part of <i>Faust</i>, but + generally, is contained in the <i>Monologue</i>, which was probably + written not earlier than the spring of 1788:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Spirit sublime! Thou gav'st me, gav'st me all</p> + + <p>For which I prayed. Not vainly hast thou turn'd</p> + + <p>To me thy countenance in flaming fire;</p> + + <p>Thou gav'st me glorious Nature for my realm,</p> + + <p>And also power to feel her and enjoy;</p> + + <p>Not merely with a cold and wond'ring glance,</p> + + <p>Thou didst permit me in her depths profound,</p> + + <p>As in the bosom of a friend, to gaze;</p> + + <p>Before me thou dost lead her living tribes,</p> + + <p>And dost in silent grove, in air and stream,</p> + + <p>Teach me to know my kindred....</p> + </div> + + <p>His feeling was not admiration alone, nor reverence alone, but the + sympathy of <i>Childe Harold</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part</p> + + <p>Of me and of my soul, as I of them?</p> + + <p>Is not the love of these deep in my heart</p> + + <p>With a pure passion? Should I not contemn</p> + + <p>All objects, if compared with these?</p> + </div> + + <p>and the very confession of faith of such poetic pantheism is in + Faust's words:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Him who dare name,</p> + + <p>And yet proclaim,</p> + + <p>Yes, I believe?...</p> + + <p>The All-embracer,</p> + + <p>All-sustainer,</p> + + <p>Doth he not embrace, sustain</p> + + <p>Thee, me, himself?</p> + + <p>Lifts not the heaven its dome above?</p> + + <p>Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us rise?</p> + + <p>And beaming tenderly with looks of love,</p> + + <p>Climb not the everlasting stars on high?</p> + </div> + + <p>The poems which date directly after the Wetzlar period are full of + this sympathetic pantheistic love for Nature--<i>Mahomet's Song</i>, + for example, with its splendid comparison of pioneering genius to a + mountain torrent: <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg311" id= + "pg311">311</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Ho! the spring that bursts</p> + + <p>From the mountain height</p> + + <p>Joyous and bright,</p> + + <p>As the gleam of a star....</p> + + <p>Down in the vale below</p> + + <p>Flowers bud beneath his tread ...</p> + + <p>And woo him with fond eyes.</p> + + <p>And the streamlets of the mountains</p> + + <p>Shout to him, and cry out 'Brother'!</p> + + <p>Brother! take thy brothers with thee,</p> + + <p>With thee to thine ancient father,</p> + + <p>To the eternal Ocean,</p> + + <p>Who with outstretch'd arms awaits us....</p> + + <p>And so beareth he his brothers</p> + + <p>To their primal sire expectant,</p> + + <p>All his bosom throbbing, heaving,</p> + + <p>With a wild, tumultuous joy.</p> + </div> + + <p>We see the same pathos--the pathos of Pindar and the Psalms--in + the comparison:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Like water is the soul of man,</p> + + <p>From heaven it comes, to heaven it goes,</p> + + <p>And back again to earth in ceaseless change.</p> + </div> + + <p>in the incomparable <i>Wanderer</i>, in <i>Wanderer's Storm + Song,</i> and, above all, in <i>Ganymede</i>, already given, of which + Loeper remarks:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The poem is, as it were, a rendering of that letter (Werther's + of May 10th) in rhythm. The underlying pantheism had already shewn + itself in the <i>Wanderer's Storm Song</i>. It was not the delight + in God of a Brockes, not the adoration of a Klopstock, not + sesthetic enjoyment of Nature, not, as in later years, scientific + interest; it was rather a being absorbed in, identified with, + Nature, a sympathy carried so far that the very ego was surrendered + to the elements.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>On the Lake of Zurich he wrote, June 15th, 1775:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>And here I drink new blood, fresh food,</p> + + <p>From world so free, so blest;</p> + + <p>How sweet is Nature and how good,</p> + + <p>Who holds me to her breast.</p> + </div> + + <p>and Elmire sings in <i>Ermin and Elmire</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>From thee, O Nature, with deep breath</p> + + <p>I drink in painful pleasure.</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg312" id="pg312">312</a></span> + + <p>One of the gems among his Nature poems is <i>Autumn Feelings</i> + (it was the autumn of his love for Lilli):</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Flourish greener as ye clamber,</p> + + <p>O ye leaves, to seek my chamber;</p> + + <p>Up the trellised vine on high</p> + + <p>May ye swell, twin-berries tender,</p> + + <p>Juicier far, and with more splendour</p> + + <p>Ripen, and more speedily.</p> + + <p>O'er ye broods the sun at even,</p> + + <p>As he sinks to rest, and heaven</p> + + <p>Softly breathes into your ear</p> + + <p>All its fertilizing fulness,</p> + + <p>While the moon's refreshing coolness,</p> + + <p>Magic-laden, hovers near.</p> + + <p>And alas! ye're watered ever</p> + + <p>By a stream of tears that rill</p> + + <p>From mine eyes--tears ceasing never,</p> + + <p>Tears of love that nought can still.</p> + </div> + + <p>The lyrical effect here depends upon the blending of a single + impression of Nature with the passing mood--an occasional poem rare + even for Goethe.</p> + + <p>In a letter to Frau von Stein he admitted that he was greatly + influenced by Nature:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I have slept well and am quite awake, only a quiet sadness lies + upon my soul.... The weather agrees exactly with my state of mind, + and I begin to believe that it is the weather around me which has + the most immediate effect upon me, and the great world thrills my + little one with her own mood.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Again, <i>To the Moon</i>, in the spring 1778, expresses perfect + communion between Nature and feeling:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Flooded are the brakes and dells</p> + + <p>With thy phantom light,</p> + + <p>And my soul receives the spell</p> + + <p>Of thy mystic night.</p> + + <p>To the meadow dost thou send</p> + + <p>Something of thy grace,</p> + + <p>Like the kind eye of a friend</p> + + <p>Beaming on my face.</p> + + <p>Echoes of departed times</p> + + <p>Vibrate in mine ear,</p> + + <p>Joyous, sad, like spirit chimes,</p> + + <p>As I wander here.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg313" id= + "pg313">313</a></span>Flow, flow on, thou little brook,</p> + + <p>Ever onward go!</p> + + <p>Trusted heart and tender look</p> + + <p>Left me even so!</p> + + <p>Richer treasure earth has none</p> + + <p>Than I once possessed--</p> + + <p>Ah! so rich, that when 'twas gone</p> + + <p>Worthless was the rest.</p> + + <p>Little brook! adown the vale</p> + + <p>Rush and take my song:</p> + + <p>Give it passion, give it wail,</p> + + <p>As thou leap'st along!</p> + + <p>Sound it in the winter night</p> + + <p>When thy streams are full,</p> + + <p>Murmur it when skies are bright</p> + + <p>Mirror'd in the pool.</p> + + <p>Happiest he of all created</p> + + <p>Who the world can shun,</p> + + <p>Not in hate, and yet unhated,</p> + + <p>Sharing thought with none,</p> + + <p>Save one faithful friend, revealing</p> + + <p>To his kindly ear</p> + + <p>Thoughts like these, which o'er me stealing,</p> + + <p>Make the night so drear.</p> + </div> + + <p>In January 1778, he wrote to Frau von Stein about the fate of the + unhappy Chr. von Lassberg, who had drowned himself in the Ilm:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>This inviting grief has something dangerously attractive about + it, like the water itself; and the reflections of the stars, which + gleam from above and below at once, are alluring.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>To the same year belongs <i>The Fisher</i>, which gave such + melodious voice to the magic effect of a shimmering expanse of water, + 'the moist yet radiant blue,' upon the mood; just as, later on, + <i>The Erlking</i>, with the grey of an autumn evening woven + ghostlike round tree and shrub, made the mind thrill with + foreboding.</p> + + <p>Goethe was always an industrious traveller. In his seventieth year + he went to Frankfort, Strassburg, the Rhine, Thuringia, and the Harz + Mountains (Harzreise, 1777): 'We went up to the peaks, and down to + the depths of the earth, and hammered at <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg314" id="pg314">314</a></span>all the rocks.' + His love for Nature increased with his science; but, at the same + time, poetic expression of it took a more objective form; the + passionate vehemence, the really revolutionary attitude of the + <i>Werther</i> period, gave way to one equally spiritual and + intellectual, but more temperate.</p> + + <p>This transition is clearly seen in the Swiss letters. In his first + Swiss travels, 1775, he was only just free from <i>Werther</i>, and + his mind was too agitated for quiet observation:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Hasten thee, Kronos!...</p> + + <p>Over stock and stone let thy trot</p> + + <p>Into life straightway lead....</p> + + <p>Wide, high, glorious the view</p> + + <p>Gazing round upon life,</p> + + <p>While from mount unto mount</p> + + <p>Hovers the spirit eterne,</p> + + <p>Life eternal foreboding....</p> + </div> + + <p>Far more significant and ripe--in fact, mature--are the letters in + 1779, shewing, as they do, the attitude of a man of profound mind, in + the prime of his life and time. He was the first German poet to fall + under the spell of the mountains--the strongest spell, as he held, + which Nature wields in our latitudes. 'These sublime, incomparable + scenes will remain for ever in my mind'; and of one view in + particular, over the mountains of Savoy and Valais, the Lake of + Geneva, and Mont Blanc, he said: 'The view was so great, man's eye + could not grasp it.'</p> + + <p>He wrote of his feelings with perfect openness to Frau von Stein, + and these letters extended farther back than those from Switzerland, + and were partly mixed with them.</p> + + <p>From Selz:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>An uncommonly fine day, a happy country--still all green, only + here and there a yellow beech or oak leaf. Meadows still in their + silver beauty--a soft welcome breeze everywhere. Grapes improving + with every step and every day. Every peasant's house has a vine up + to the roof, and every courtyard a great <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg315" id="pg315">315</a></span>overhanging + arbour. The air of heaven soft, warm, and moist. The Rhine and the + clear mountains near at hand, the changing woods, meadows, fields + like gardens, do men good, and give me a kind of comfort which I + have long lacked.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The pen remains as ever the pen of a poet, but he looks at + Switzerland now with a mature, settled taste, analyzing his + impressions, and studying mountains, glaciers, boulders, + scientifically.</p> + + <p>Of the Staubbach Fall, near Lauterbrunnen (Oct. 9th, 1779):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The clouds broke in the upper air, and the blue sky came + through. Clouds clung to the steep sides of the rocks; even the top + where the Staubbach falls over, was lightly covered. It was a very + noble sight ... then the clouds came down into the valley and + covered all the foreground. The great wall over which the water + falls, still stood out on the right. Night came on.... In the + Munsterthal, through which we came, everything was lofty, but more + within the mind's power of comprehension than these. In comparison + with the immensities, one is, and must remain, too small.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And after visiting the Berne glacier from Thun (Oct. 14):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It is difficult to write after all this ... the first glance + from the mountain is striking, the district is surprisingly + extensive and pleasant ... the road indescribably beautiful ... the + view from the Lake of Brienz towards the snow mountains at sunset + is great.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>More eloquent is the letter of October 3rd, from the + Munsterthal:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The passage through this defile roused in me a grand but calm + emotion. The sublime produces a beautiful calmness in the soul, + which, entirely possessed by it, feels as great as it ever can + feel. How glorious is such a pure feeling, when it rises to the + very highest without overflowing. My eye and my soul were both able + to take in the objects before me, and as I was preoccupied by + nothing, and had no false tastes to counteract their impression, + they had on me their full and natural <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg316" id="pg316">316</a></span>effect. When we + compare such a feeling with that we are sensible of, when we + laboriously harass ourselves with some trifle, and strain every + nerve to gain as much as possible for it, and, as it were, to patch + it out, striving to furnish joy and aliment to the mind from its + own creation; we then feel sensibly what a poor expedient, after + all, the latter is....</p> + + <p>When we see such objects as these for the first time, the + unaccustomed soul has to expand itself, and this gives rise to a + sort of painful joy, an overflowing of emotion which agitates the + mind and draws from us the most delicious tears.... If only destiny + had bidden me to dwell in the midst of some grand scenery, then + would I every morning have imbibed greatness from its grandeur, as + from a lonely valley I would extract patience and repose.</p> + + <p>One guesses in the dark about the origin and existence of these + singular forms.... These masses must have been formed grandly and + simply by aggregation. Whatever revolutions may subsequently have + up-heaved, rent, and divided them ... the idea of such nightly + commotions gives one a deep feeling of the eternal stability of the + masses.... One feels deeply convinced that here there is nothing + accidental, that here there is working an eternal law which, + however slowly, yet surely governs the universe.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>By the Lake of Geneva, where he thought of Rousseau, he went up + the Dole:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The whole of the Pays de Vaux and de Gex lay like a plan before + us ... we kept watching the mist, which gradually retired ... one + by one we distinctly saw Lausanne ... Vevey.... There are no words + to express the beauty and grandeur of this view ... the line of + glittering glaciers was continually drawing the eye back again to + the mountains.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>From Cluse he wrote:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The air was as warm as it usually is at the beginning of + September, and the country we travelled through beautiful. Many of + the trees still green; most of them had assumed a brownish-yellow + tint, but only a few were quite bare. The crops were rich and + verdant, the mountains caught from the red sunset a rosy hue + blended with violet, and all these rich tints were combined with + grand, beautiful, and agreeable forms of the landscape.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg317" id="pg317">317</a></span> At + Chamouni, about effects of light:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Here too again it seemed to us as if the sun had first of all + attracted the light mists which evaporated from the tops of the + glaciers, and then a gentle breeze had, as it were, combed the fine + vapours like a fleece of foam over the atmosphere. I never remember + at home, even in the height of summer, to have seen any so + transparent, for here it was a perfect web of light.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>At the Col de Baume:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Whilst I am writing, a remarkable phenomenon is passing along + the sky. The mists, which are shifting about and breaking in some + places, allow you through their openings, as through skylights, to + catch a glimpse of the blue sky, while at the same time the + mountain peaks, rising above our roofs of vapour, are illuminated + by the sun's rays....</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>At Leukertad, at the foot of the Gemmi, he wrote (Nov. 9th):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The clouds which gather here in this valley, at one time + completely hiding the immense rocks and absorbing them in a waste + impenetrable gloom, or at another letting a part of them be seen + like huge spectres, give to the people a cast of melancholy. In the + midst of such natural phenomena, the people are full of + presentiments and forebodings ... and the eternal and intrinsic + energy of his (man's) nature feels itself at every nerve moved to + forebode and to indulge in presentiments.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>On the way across the Rhine glacier to the Furka, he felt the + half-suggestive, half-distressing sense of mountain loneliness:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It was a strange sight ... in the most desolate region of the + world, in a boundless monotonous wilderness of mountains enveloped + in snow, where for three leagues before and behind you would not + expect to meet a living soul, while on both sides you had the deep + hollows of a web of mountains, you might see a line of men wending + their way, treading each in the deep footsteps of the one before + him, and where, in the whole of the wide expanse thus smoothed + over, the eye could discern nothing but the track they left behind + them. The hollows, as we left them, lay behind us grey and + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg318" id= + "pg318">318</a></span>boundless in the mist. The changing clouds + continually passed over the pale disc of the sun, and spread over + the whole scene a perpetually moving veil.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He sums up the impressions made on him with:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The perception of such a long chain of Nature's wonders, excites + within me a secret and inexpressible feeling of enjoyment.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The most profound change in his mental life was brought about by + his visit to Italy, 1786-87. The poetic expression of this refining + process, this striving towards the classic ideal, towards Sophrosyne, + was <i>Iphigenia</i>.</p> + + <p>Its effect upon his feeling for Nature appeared in a more + matter-of-fact tone; the man of feeling gave way to the scientific + observer.</p> + + <p>He had, as he said (Oct. 30th, 1887), lately 'acquired the habit + of looking only at things, and not, as formerly, seeing with and in + the things what actually was not there.'</p> + + <p>He no longer imputed his feelings to Nature, and studied her + influence on himself, but looked at her with impersonal interest. + Weather, cloud, mountain formation, the species of stone, landscape, + and social themes, were all treated almost systematically as so much + diary memoranda for future use. There was no artistic treatment in + such jottings; meteorology, botany, and geology weighed too + heavily.</p> + + <p>The question, 'Is a place beautiful?' paled beside 'Is its soil + clay?' 'Are its rocks quartz, chalk, or mica schist?' The problem of + the archetypal plant was more absorbing than the finest groups of + trees. The years of practical life at Weimar, and, above all, the + ever-growing interest in science, were the chief factors in this + change, which led him, as he said in his <i>Treatise on + Granite</i>,</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>from observation and description of the human heart, that part + of creation which is the most youthful, varied, unstable, and + destructible, to observation of that Son of Nature, which is the + oldest, deepest, most stable, most indestructible.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg319" id="pg319">319</a></span> + The enthusiastic subjective realism of stormy youth was replaced by + the measured objective realism of ripe manhood. Hence the difference + between his letters from Switzerland and those from Italy, where this + inner metamorphosis was completed; as he said, 'Between Weimar and + Palermo I have had many changes.'</p> + + <p>For all that, he revelled in the beauty of Italy. As he once + said:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>It is natural to me to revere the great and beautiful willingly + and with pleasure; and to develop this predisposition day by day + and hour by hour by means of such glorious objects, is the most + delightful feeling.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The sea made a great impression upon him:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I set out for the Lido...landed, and walked straight across the + isthmus. I heard a loud hollow murmur--it was the sea! I soon saw + it; it crested high against the shore as it retired, it was about + noon and time of ebb. I have then at last seen the sea with my own + eyes, and followed it on its beautiful bed, just as it quitted + it.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>But further on he only remarks: 'The sea is a great sight.' + Elsewhere, too, it is only noticed very shortly.</p> + + <p>Rome stimulated his mind to increased productiveness, and, partly + for this reason, he could not assimilate all the new impressions + which poured in upon him from without, from ruins, paintings, + churches, palaces, the life of the people. He drew a great deal too; + from Frascati he wrote (Nov. 15th, 1786):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The country around is very pleasant; the village lies on the + side of a hill, or rather of a mountain, and at every step the + draughtsman comes upon the most glorious objects. The prospect is + unbounded. Rome lies before you, and beyond it on the right is the + sea, the mountains of Tivoli, and so on.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In Rome itself (Feb. 2nd, 1787):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Of the beauty of a walk through Rome by moonlight it is + impossible to form a conception without having witnessed it.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg320" id="pg320">320</a></span> + During Carnival (Feb. 21st):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The sky, so infinitely fine and clear, looked down nobly and + innocently upon the mummeries.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In the voyage to Sicily:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>At noon we went on board; the weather being extremely fine, we + enjoyed the most glorious of views. The corvette lay at anchor near + to the Mole. With an unclouded sun the atmosphere was hazy, giving + to the rocky walls of Sorrento, which were in the shade, a tint of + most beautiful blue. Naples with its living multitudes lay in full + sunshine, and glittered brilliantly with countless tints.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>and on April 1st:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>With a cloudy sky, a bright but broken moonlight, the reflection + on the sea was infinitely beautiful.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>At first, Italy, and especially Rome, felt strange to him, in + scenery, sky, contour, and colour. It was only by degrees that he + felt at home there.</p> + + <p>He refers to this during his second visit to Rome in a notable + remark, which aptly expresses the faculty of apperception--the link + between us and the unfamiliar, which enables mental growth.</p> + + <p>June 16th, 1787:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>One remark more! Now for the first time do the trees, the rocks, + nay, Rome itself, grow dear to me; hitherto I have always felt them + as foreign, though, on the other hand, I took pleasure in minor + subjects having some resemblance to those I saw in youth.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>On August 18th, 1787, he wrote:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Yesterday before sunrise I drove to Acqua Acetosa. Verily, one + might well lose his senses in contemplating the clearness, the + manifoldness, the dewy transparency, the heavenly hue of the + landscape, especially in the distance.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In October, when he heard of the engagement of a beautiful + Milanese lady with whom he had fallen in love:</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg321" id= + "pg321">321</a></span></p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I again turned me instantly to Nature, as a subject for + landscapes, a field I had been meanwhile neglecting, and + endeavoured to copy her in this respect with the utmost fidelity. I + was, however, more successful in mastering her with my eyes.... All + the sensual fulness which that region offers us in rocks and trees, + in acclivities and declivities, in peaceful lakes and lively + streams, all this was grasped by my eye more appreciatively, if + possible, than ever before, and I could hardly resent the wound + which had to such degree sharpened my inward and outward sense.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>On leaving Rome, he wrote:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Three nights before, the full moon shone in the clearest heaven, + and the enchantment shed over the vast town, though often felt + before, was never felt so keenly as now. The great masses of light, + clear as in mild daylight, the contrast of deep shades, + occasionally relieved by reflexions dimly portraying details, all + this transported us as if into another, a simpler and a greater, + world.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The later diaries on his travels are sketchy throughout, and more + laconic and objective: for example, at Schaffhausen (Sept. 18th):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Went out early, 7.30, to see the Falls of the Rhine; colour of + water, green--causes of this, the heights covered by mist--the + depths clear, and we saw the castle of Laufen half in mist; thought + of Ossian. Love mist when moved by deep feeling.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>At Brunnen:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Green of the lake, steep banks, small size of boatman in + comparison to the enormous masses of rock. One saw precipices grown + over by trees, summits covered by clouds. Sunshine over the scene, + one felt the formless greatness of Nature.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He was conscious of the great change in himself since his last + visit there, and wrote to Schiller (Oct. 14th, 1797):</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I remember the effect these things had upon me twenty years ago. + The total impression remained with me, but the details faded, and I + had a wonderful longing to repeat the whole experience and correct + my impressions. I had become another man, and therefore it must + needs appear different to me.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg322" id="pg322">322</a></span> In + later years he travelled a great deal in the Harz Mountains, to + Carlsbad, Toplitz, the Maine, Marienbad, etc. After the death of his + great friends, Schiller and Carl August, he was more and more lonely, + and his whole outlook, with increasing years, grew more impersonal, + his attitude to Nature more abstract and scientific; the archetypal + plant was superseded by the theory of colours. But he kept fresh eyes + for natural beauty into ripe age; witness this letter from + Heidelberg, May 4th, 1808, to Frau von Stein:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Yesterday evening, after finishing my work, I went alone to the + castle, and first scrambled about among the ruins, and then betook + myself to the great balcony from which one can overlook the whole + country. It was one of the loveliest of May evenings and of + sunsets. No! I have really never seen such a fine view! Just + imagine! One looked into the beautiful though narrow Neckar valley, + covered on both sides with woods and vineyards and fruit trees just + coming into flower. Further off the valley widened, and one saw the + setting sun reflected in the Rhine as it flowed majestically + through most beautiful country. On its further side the horizon was + bounded by the Vosges mountains, lit up by the sun as if by a fire. + The whole country was covered with fresh green, and close to me + were the enormous ruins of the old castle, half in light and half + in shade. You can easily fancy how it fascinated me. I stood lost + in the view quite half an hour, till the rising moon woke me from + my dreams.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Goethe's true lyrical period was in the seventies, before his + Italian journeys; during and after that time he wrote more dramatic + and epic poetry, with ballads and the more narrative kind of epic. In + sending <i>Der Jüngling und der Mühlbach</i> to Schiller from + Switzerland in 1797, he wrote: 'I have discovered splendid material + for idylls and elegies, and whatever that sort of poetry is + called.'</p> + + <p>Nature lyrics were few during his Italian travels, as in the + journey to Sicily, 1787; among them were <i>Calm at Sea</i>: + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg323" id="pg323">323</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Silence deep rules o'er the waters,</p> + + <p>Calmly slumbering lies the main.</p> + </div> + + <p>and <i>Prosperous Voyage</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The mist is fast clearing,</p> + + <p>And radiant is heaven,</p> + + <p>Whilst Æolus loosens</p> + + <p>Our anguish-fraught bond.</p> + </div> + + <p>The most perfect of all such short poems was the <i>Evening + Song</i>, written one September night of 1783 on the Gickelhahn, near + Ilmenau. He was writing at the same time to Frau von Stein: 'The sky + is perfectly clear, and I am going out to enjoy the sunset. The view + is great and simple--the sun down.'</p> + + <blockquote> + <div class="poem"> + <p>Every tree top is at peace.</p> + + <p>E'en the rustling woods do cease</p> + + <p>Every sound;</p> + + <p>The small birds sleep on every bough.</p> + + <p>Wait but a moment--soon wilt thou</p> + + <p>Sleep in peace.</p> + </div> + + <p>The hush of evening, the stilling of desire in the silence of + the wood, the beautiful resolution of all discords in Nature's + perfect concord, the naive and splendid pantheism of a soul which + feels itself at one with the world--all this is not expressed in so + many words in the <i>Night Song</i>; but it is all there, like the + united voicesin a great symphony. (SCHURÉ.)</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The lines are full of that pantheism which not only brings subject + and object, Mind and Nature, into symbolic relationship, but works + them into one tissue. Taken alone with <i>The Fisher</i> and <i>To + the Moon</i>, it would suffice to give him the first place as a poet + of Nature.</p> + + <p>He was not only the greatest poet, but the greatest and most + universal thinker of modern times. With him feeling and knowledge + worked together, the one reaching its climax in the lyrics of his + younger days, the other gradually moderating the fervour of passion, + and, with the more objective outlook of age, laying greater stress + upon science. His feeling <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg324" id= + "pg324">324</a></span>for Nature, which followed an unbroken course, + like his mental development generally, stands alone as a type of + perfectly modern feeling, and yet no one, despite the many + intervening centuries, stood so near both to Homer and to + Shakespeare, and in philosophy to Spinoza.</p> + + <p>But because with Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his + pantheism is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise + man of Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the + postulate of this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and + the inner life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and + encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his + religion. In his youth, in the period of <i>Werther, Ganymede</i>, + and the first part of <i>Faust</i>, this pantheism was a nameless, + unquenchable aspiration towards the divine--for wings to reach, like + the rays of light, to unmeasured heights; as he said in the Swiss + mountains, 'Into the limitless spaces of the air, to soar over + abysses, and let him down upon inaccessible rocks.'</p> + + <p>After the Italian journeys science took the lead, the student of + Nature supplanted the lover, even his symbolism took a more abstract + and realistic form. But he never, even in old age, lost his love for + the beauties of Nature, and, holding to Spinoza's fundamental ideas + of the unchangeableness and eternity of Nature's laws, and the + oneness of the Cosmos, he sought to think it out and base it upon + scientific grounds, through the unbroken succession of animal and + vegetable forms of life, the uniform 'formation and transformation of + all organic Nature.' He wrote to Frau von Stein: 'I cannot express to + you how legible the book of Nature is growing to me; my long spelling + out has helped me. It takes effect now all of a sudden; my quiet + delight is inexpressible; I find much that is new, but nothing that + is unexpected--everything fits in and <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg325" id="pg325">325</a></span>conforms, because I have no system, + and care for nothing but truth for its own sake. Soon everything + about living things will be clear to me.'<a href= + "#m13"><sup>[13]</sup></a></p> + + <p>Poetic and scientific intuition were simultaneous with him, and + their common bond was pantheism. This pantheism marked an epoch in + the history of feeling. For Goethe not only transformed the unreal + feeling of his day into real, described scenery, and inspired it with + human feeling, and deciphered the beauty of the Alps, as no one else + had done, Rousseau not excepted; but he also brought knowledge of + Nature into harmony with feeling for her, and with his wonderfully + receptive and constructive mind so studied the earlier centuries, + that he gathered out all that was valuable in their feeling.</p> + + <p>As Goethe in Germany, so Byron in England led the feeling for + Nature into new paths by his demoniac genius and glowing pantheism. + Milton's great imagination was too puritan, too biblical, to allow + her independent importance; he only assigned her a <i>rôle</i> in + relation to the Deity. In fiction, too, she had no place; but, on the + other hand, we find her in such melancholy, sentimental outpourings + as Young's <i>Night Thoughts</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Night, sable Goddess! from her ebon throne</p> + + <p>In rayless majesty now stretches forth</p> + + <p>Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world...</p> + + <p>Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse</p> + + <p>Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause;</p> + + <p>An awful pause, prophetic of her end...etc.</p> + </div> + + <p>There is a wealth of imagery and comparison amid Ossian's + melancholy and mourning; clouds and mist are the very shadows of his + struggling heroes. For instance:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>His spear is a blasted pine, his shield the rising moon. He sat + on the shore like a cloud of mist on the rising hill.</p> + + <p>Thou art snow on the heath; thy hair is the mist of Cromla, when + it curls on the hill, when it shines to <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg326" id="pg326">326</a></span>the beam of the + west. Thy breasts are two smooth rocks seen from Branno of + streams.</p> + + <p>As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high; + as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of + battle.</p> + + <p>As autumn's dark storms pour from two echoing hills, towards + each other approached the heroes.</p> + + <p>The clouds of night came rolling down, Darkness rests on the + steeps of Cromla. The stars of the north arise over the rolling of + Erin's waves; they shew their heads of fire through the flying mist + of heaven. A distant wind roars in the wood. Silent and dark is the + plain of death.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Wordsworth's influence turned in another direction. His real taste + was pastoral, and he preached freer intercourse with Nature, glossing + his ideas rather artificially with a theism, through which one reads + true love of her, and an undeniable, though hidden, pantheism.</p> + + <p>In <i>The Influence of Natural Objects</i> he described how a life + spent with Nature had early purified him from passion:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me</p> + + <p>With stinted kindness. In November days,</p> + + <p>When vapours, rolling down the valleys, made</p> + + <p>A lonely scene more lonesome, among woods</p> + + <p>At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights,</p> + + <p>When by the margin of the trembling lake</p> + + <p>Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went</p> + + <p>In solitude, such intercourse was mine.</p> + + <p>'Twas mine among the fields both day and night,</p> + + <p>And by the waters all the summer long,</p> + + <p>And in the frosty season, when the sun</p> + + <p>Was set, and visible for many a mile,</p> + + <p>The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,</p> + + <p>I heeded not the summons....</p> + </div> + + <p>Like Klopstock, he delighted in sledging</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i4">while the stars</p> + + <p>Eastward were sparkling bright, and in the west</p> + + <p>The orange sky of evening died away.</p> + </div> + + <p>Far more characteristic of the man is the confession in <i>Tintern + Abbey</i>: <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg327" id= + "pg327">327</a></span></p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Nature then</p> + + <p>(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days</p> + + <p>And their glad animal movements all gone by)</p> + + <p>To me was all in all. I cannot paint</p> + + <p>What then I was. The sounding cataract</p> + + <p>Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,</p> + + <p>The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,</p> + + <p>The colours and their forms, were then to me</p> + + <p>An appetite, a feeling and a love</p> + + <p>That had no need of a remoter charm</p> + + <p>By thought supplied, or any interest</p> + + <p>Unborrow'd from the eye.</p> + </div> + + <p>Beautiful notes, to be struck again more forcibly by the frank + pantheism of Byron.</p> + + <p>What Scott had been doing for Scotland,<a href= + "#m14"><sup>[14]</sup></a> and Moore for Ireland, Wordsworth, with + still greater fidelity to truth, tried to do for England and her + people; in contrast to Byron and Shelley, who forsook home to range + more widely, or Southey, whose <i>Thalaba</i> begins with an imposing + description of night in the desert:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i2">How beautiful is night!</p> + + <p>A dewy freshness fills the silent air,</p> + + <p>No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain</p> + + <p>Breaks the serene of heaven;</p> + + <p>In full-orb'd glory yonder Moon divine</p> + + <p>Rolls through the dark blue depths.</p> + + <p>Beneath her steady ray</p> + + <p>The desert-circle spreads</p> + + <p>Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.</p> + + <p>How beautiful is night!</p> + </div> + + <p>But all that previous English poets had done seemed harmless and + innocent in comparison with Byron's revolutionary poetry. Prophecy in + Rousseau became poetry in Byron.</p> + + <p>There was much common ground between these two passionate aspiring + spirits, who never attained to Goethe's serenity. Both were + melancholy, and fled from their fellows; both strove for perfect + liberty and unlimited self-assertion; both felt with the wild and + uproarious side of Nature, and found idyllic scenes marred by + thoughts of mankind.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg328" id="pg328">328</a></span> + Byron's turbulence never subsided; and his love for Nature, + passionate and comprehensive as it was, was always 'sickled o'er' + with misanthropy and pessimism, with the 'world-pain.'</p> + + <p>He turned to her first through disdain of his kind and love of + introspection, and later on, when he was spurned by the London world + which had been at his feet, and disdain grew into hatred and disgust, + from a wish to be alone. But, as Boettger says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Though this heart, in which the whole universe is reflected, is + a sick one, it has immeasurable depths, and an intensified spirit + life which draws everything under its sway and inspires it, feeling + and observing everything only as part of itself.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The basis of Byron's feeling for Nature was a revolutionary + one--elementary passion. The genius which threw off stanza after + stanza steeped in melody, was coupled with an unprecedented + subjectivity and individualism. When the first part of <i>Childe + Harold</i> came out, dull London society was bewitched by the music + and novelty of this enthusiastic lyric of Nature, with its + incomparable interweaving of scenery and feeling:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The sails were fill'd, and fair the light winds blew,</p> + + <p>As glad to waft him from his native home....</p> + + <p>But when the sun was sinking in the sea,</p> + + <p>He seized his harp...</p> + + <p>Adieu, adieu! my native shore</p> + + <p>Fades o'er the waters blue;</p> + + <p>The night winds sigh, the breakers roar,</p> + + <p>And shrieks the wild sea-mew;</p> + + <p>Yon sun that sets upon the sea</p> + + <p>We follow in his flight;</p> + + <p>Farewell awhile to him and thee,</p> + + <p>My native land, good-night!</p> + </div> + + <p>He says of the beauty of Lusitania:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Oh Christ! it is a goodly sight to see</p> + + <p>What Heaven hath done for this delicious land.</p> + + <p>What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree!</p> + + <p>What goodly prospects o'er the hills expand!...</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg329" id= + "pg329">329</a></span>The horrid crags, by toppling convent + crown'd,</p> + + <p>The cork trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,</p> + + <p>The mountain moss, by scorching skies imbrown'd,</p> + + <p>The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep.</p> + + <p>The tender azure of the unruffled deep,</p> + + <p>The orange tints that gild the greenest bough,</p> + + <p>The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,</p> + + <p>The vine on high, the willow branch below,</p> + + <p>Mix'd in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow.</p> + </div> + + <p>Yet his spirit drives him away, 'more restless than the swallow in + the skies.'</p> + + <p>The charm of the idyllic is in the lines:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>But these between, a silver streamlet glides....</p> + + <p>Here leans the idle shepherd on his crook,</p> + + <p>And vacant on the rippling waves doth look,</p> + + <p>That peaceful still 'twixt bitterest foemen flow.</p> + </div> + + <p>The beauty of the sea and night in this:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The moon is up; by Heaven a lovely eve!</p> + + <p>Long streams of light o'er dancing waves expand....</p> + + <p>How softly on the Spanish shore she plays,</p> + + <p>Disclosing rock, and slope, and forest brown</p> + + <p>Distinct....</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Bending o'er the vessel's laving side</p> + + <p>To gaze on Dian's wave-reflected sphere.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>He reflects that:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,</p> + + <p>To slowly trace the forest's shady scene....</p> + + <p>To climb the trackless mountain all unseen</p> + + <p>With the wild flock that never needs a fold,</p> + + <p>Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean,--</p> + + <p>This is not solitude; 'tis but to hold</p> + + <p>Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd.</p> + + <p>But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,</p> + + <p>To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,</p> + + <p>And roam along, the world's tired denizen,</p> + + <p>With none who bless us, none whom we can bless ...</p> + + <p>This is to be alone--this, this is solitude.</p> + </div> + + <p>His preference for wild scenery shews here:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Dear Nature is the kindest mother still,</p> + + <p>Though always changing, in her aspect mild;</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg330" id= + "pg330">330</a></span>From her bare bosom let me take my fill,</p> + + <p>Her never-wean'd, though not her favour'd child.</p> + + <p>O she is fairest in her features wild,</p> + + <p>Where nothing polish'd dares pollute her path;</p> + + <p>To me by day or night she ever smiled,</p> + + <p>Though I have mark'd her when none other hath,</p> + + <p>And sought her more and more, and loved her best in wrath.</p> + </div> + + <p>He observes everything--now 'the billows' melancholy flow' under + the bows of the ship, now the whole scene at Zitza:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Where'er we gaze, around, above, below,</p> + + <p>What rainbow tints, what magic charms are found!</p> + + <p>Rock, river, forest, mountain, all abound,</p> + + <p>And bluest skies that harmonize the whole;</p> + + <p>Beneath, the distant torrent's rushing sound</p> + + <p>Tells where the volumed cataract doth roll</p> + + <p>Between those hanging rocks, that shock yet please the soul.</p> + </div> + + <p>This is full of poetic vision:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Where lone Utraikey forms its circling cove,</p> + + <p>And weary waves retire to gleam at rest,</p> + + <p>How brown the foliage of the green hill's grove,</p> + + <p>Nodding at midnight o'er the calm bay's breast,</p> + + <p>As winds come lightly whispering from the west,</p> + + <p>Kissing, not ruffling, the blue deep's serene;--</p> + + <p>Here Harold was received a welcome guest;</p> + + <p>Nor did he pass unmoved the gentle scene,</p> + + <p>For many a job could he from Night's soft presence glean.</p> + </div> + + <p>Feeling himself 'the most unfit of men to herd with man,' he is + happy only with Nature:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Once more upon the waters! yet once more!</p> + + <p>And the waves bound beneath me as a steed</p> + + <p>That knows his rider. Welcome to the roar!</p> + + <p>Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;</p> + + <p>Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home;</p> + + <p>Where a blue sky and glowing clime extends,</p> + + <p>He had the passion and the power to roam;</p> + + <p>The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg331" id= + "pg331">331</a></span>Were unto him companionship; they spake</p> + + <p>A mutual language, clearer than the tome</p> + + <p>Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake</p> + + <p>For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Again:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>I live not in myself, but I become</p> + + <p>Portion of that around me, and to me</p> + + <p>High mountains are a feeling, but the hum</p> + + <p>Of human cities torture; I can see</p> + + <p>Nothing to loathe in Nature save to be</p> + + <p>A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,</p> + + <p>Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee,</p> + + <p>And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain</p> + + <p>Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part</p> + + <p>Of me and of my soul, as I of them?</p> + + <p>Is not the love of these deep in my heart</p> + + <p>With a pure passion? Should I not contemn</p> + + <p>All objects, if compared with these?</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>Love of Nature was a passion with him, and when he looked</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Upon the peopled desert past</p> + + <p>As on a place of agony and strife,</p> + </div> + + <p>mountains gave him a sense of freedom.</p> + + <p>He praised the Rhine:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Where Nature, nor too sombre nor too gay,</p> + + <p>Wild but not rude, awful yet not austere,</p> + + <p>Is to the mellow earth as autumn to the year.</p> + </div> + + <p>and far more the Alps:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i2">Above me are the Alps,</p> + + <p>The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls</p> + + <p>Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps,</p> + + <p>And throned eternity in icy halls</p> + + <p>Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls</p> + + <p>The avalanche, the thunderbolt of snow!</p> + + <p>All that expands the spirit, yet appals,</p> + + <p>Gather around these summits, as to shew</p> + + <p>How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below.</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg332" id="pg332">332</a></span> + + <p>On the Lake of Geneva:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Ye stars which are the poetry of heaven...</p> + + <p>All heaven and earth are still--though not in sleep,</p> + + <p>But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;</p> + + <p>And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep.</p> + + <p>All heaven and earth are still: from the high host</p> + + <p>Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain coast,</p> + + <p>All is concenter'd in a life intense,</p> + + <p>Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,</p> + + <p>But hath a part of being, and a sense</p> + + <p>Of that which is of all Creator and defence.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>And this is in the night. Most glorious night,</p> + + <p>Thou wert not sent for slumber; let me be</p> + + <p>A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,</p> + + <p>A portion of the tempest and of thee!</p> + + <p>How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,</p> + + <p>And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!</p> + + <p>And now again 'tis black--and now, the glee</p> + + <p>Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain mirth,</p> + + <p>As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth.</p> + + <p>But where of ye, oh tempests, is the goal?</p> + + <p>Are ye like those within the human breast?</p> + + <p>Or do ye find, at length, like eagles, some high nest?</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The morn is up again, the dewy morn</p> + + <p>With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,</p> + + <p>Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,</p> + + <p>And living as if earth contained no tomb.</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>In Clarens:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love,</p> + + <p>Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought,</p> + + <p>Thy trees take root in Love; the snows above</p> + + <p>The very glaciers have his colours caught,</p> + + <p>And sunset into rose-hues sees them wrought</p> + + <p>By rays which sleep there lovingly; the rocks,</p> + + <p>The permanent crags, tell here of Love.</p> + </div> + + <p>Yet</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Ever and anon of griefs subdued</p> + + <p>There comes a token like a scorpion's sting,</p> + + <p>Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued;</p> + + <p>And slight withal may be the things which bring</p> + + <p>Back on the heart the weight which it would fling</p> + + <p>Aside for ever; it may be a sound,</p> + + <p>A tone of music, summer's eve or spring,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg333" id="pg333">333</a></span>A + flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound,</p> + + <p>Striking the electric chain with which we are darkly bound.</p> + </div> + + <p>The unrest and torment of his own heart he finds reflected in + Nature:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The roar of waters! from the headlong height</p> + + <p>Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;</p> + + <p>The fall of waters! rapid as the light</p> + + <p>The flashing mass foams, shaking the abyss;</p> + + <p>The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,</p> + + <p>And boil in endless torture; while the sweat</p> + + <p>Of their great agony, wrung out from this</p> + + <p>Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet</p> + + <p>That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,</p> + + <p>And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again</p> + + <p>Returns in an unceasing shower, which round</p> + + <p>With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain</p> + + <p>Is an eternal April to the ground,</p> + + <p>Making it all one emerald; how profound</p> + + <p>The gulf, and how the giant element</p> + + <p>From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,</p> + + <p>Crushing the cliffs, which downward, worn and rent</p> + + <p>With his fierce footsteps, yields in chasms a fearful + rent....</p> + + <p>Horribly beautiful! but, on the verge</p> + + <p>From side to side, beneath the glittering morn,</p> + + <p>An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge,</p> + + <p>Like Hope upon a deathbed.</p> + </div> + + <p>The 'enormous skeleton' of Rome impresses him most by + moonlight:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>When the rising moon begins to climb</p> + + <p>Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;</p> + + <p>When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,</p> + + <p>And the low night breeze waves along the air!</p> + </div> + + <p>Underlying all his varying moods is this note:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,</p> + + <p>There is a rapture on the lonely shore,</p> + + <p>There is society, where none intrudes,</p> + + <p>By the deep sea, and music in its roar:</p> + + <p>I love not man the less, but Nature more,</p> + + <p>From these our interviews, in which I steal</p> + + <p>From all I may be, or have been before,</p> + + <p>To mingle with the Universe and feel</p> + + <p>What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.</p> + </div><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg334" id="pg334">334</a></span> + + <p>The sea, the sky with its stars and clouds, and the mountains, are + his passion:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!</p> + + <p>Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;</p> + + <p>Man marks the earth with ruin--his control</p> + + <p>Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain</p> + + <p>The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain</p> + + <p>A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,</p> + + <p>When, for a moment, like a drop of rain</p> + + <p>He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,</p> + + <p>Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Childe Harold</i>.)</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The day at last has broken. What a night</p> + + <p>Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven!</p> + + <p>Though varied with a transitory storm,</p> + + <p>More beautiful in that variety!...</p> + + <p class="i8">And can the sun so rise,</p> + + <p>So bright, so rolling back the clouds into</p> + + <p>Vapours more lovely than the unclouded sky,</p> + + <p>With golden pinnacles and snowy mountains,</p> + + <p>And billows purpler than the ocean's, making</p> + + <p>In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>Sardanapalus.)</i></p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>He had loved the Scotch Highlands in youth:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Amidst Nature's native scenes,</p> + + <p>Loved to the last, whatever intervenes</p> + + <p>Between us and our childhood's sympathy</p> + + <p>Which still reverts to what first caught the eye.</p> + + <p>He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue</p> + + <p>Will love each peak that shews a kindred hue,</p> + + <p>Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face,</p> + + <p>And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>The Island</i>.)</p> + </div> + + <p>and in <i>The Island</i> he says:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>How often we forget all time, when lone,</p> + + <p>Admiring Nature's universal throne,</p> + + <p>Her woods, her wilds, her waters, the intense</p> + + <p>Reply of hers to our intelligence!</p> + + <p>Live not the stars and mountains? Are the waves</p> + + <p>Without a spirit? Are the dropping cares</p> + + <p>Without a feeling in their silent tears?</p> + + <p>No, no; they woo and clasp us to their spheres,</p> + + <p>Dissolve this clog and clod of clay before</p> + + <p>Its hour, and merge our soul in the great shore.</p> + + <p class="i14">(<i>The Island</i>.)</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg335" id="pg335">335</a></span> + Byron's feeling was thus, like Goethe's in <i>Werther</i> and + <i>Faust</i>, a pantheistic sympathy. But there was this great + difference between them--Goethe's mind passed through its period of + storm and stress, and attained a serene and ripe vision; Byron's + never did. Melancholy and misanthropy always mingled with his + feelings; he was, in fact, the father of our modern 'world-pain.'</p> + + <p>Still more like a brilliant meteor that flashes and is gone was + Shelley, the most highly strung of all modern lyrists. With him, too, + love of Nature amounted to a passion; but it was with her remote + aerial forms that he was most at home. His imagination, a cosmic one, + revelling among the spheres, was like Byron's in its preference for + the great, wide, and distant; but unlike his in giving first place to + the serene and passionless. As Brandes says: 'In this familiarity + with the great forms and movements of Nature, Shelley is like Byron; + but like him as a fair genius is like a dark one, as Ariel is like + the flame-bringing angel of the morning star.'</p> + + <p>We see his love for the sea, especially at rest, in the 'Stanzas + written in dejection near Naples,' which contain the beautiful line + which proved so prophetic of his death:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The sun is warm, the sky is clear,</p> + + <p>The waves are dancing fast and bright;</p> + + <p>Blue isles and snowy mountains wear</p> + + <p>The purple noon's transparent might....</p> + + <p>I see the deep's untrampled floor</p> + + <p>With green and purple sea-weeds strewn;</p> + + <p>I see the waves upon the shore</p> + + <p>Like light dissolved, in star showers thrown....</p> + + <p>Yet now despair itself is mild,</p> + + <p>Even as the winds and waters are;</p> + + <p>I could lie down like a tired child</p> + + <p>And weep away the life of care</p> + + <p>Which I have borne, and yet must bear,--</p> + + <p>Till death like sleep might steal on me,</p> + + <p>And I might feel in the warm air</p> + + <p>My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea</p> + + <p>Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg336" id="pg336">336</a></span> In + his <i>Essay on Love</i>, speaking of the irresistible longing for + sympathy, he says:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>In solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by + human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the + flowers, the grass, and the water and the sky. In the motion of the + very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a + secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the + tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the + rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable + relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a + dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious + tenderness to the eyes, like the voice of one beloved singing to + you alone.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>As Brandes says: 'His pulses beat in secret sympathy with + Nature's. He called plants and animals his dear sisters and brothers, + and the words which his wife inscribed upon his tombstone in Rome, + "cor cordium," are true of his relation to Nature also.'</p> + + <p><i>The Cloud</i>, with its marvellously vivid personification, is + a perfect example of his genius.</p> + + <p>It gives the measure of his unlikeness to the more homekeeping + imaginations of his contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, and + Moore; and at the same time to Byron, for here there are no morbid + reflections; the poem is pervaded by a naive, childlike tone, such as + one hears in the old mythologies.</p> + + <p><i>The Cloud</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers</p> + + <p>From the seas and the streams;</p> + + <p>I bear light shade for the leaves when laid</p> + + <p>In their noonday dreams.</p> + + <p>From my wings are shaken the dews that waken</p> + + <p>The sweet buds every one,</p> + + <p>When rocked to rest on their Mother's breast</p> + + <p>As she dances about the sun.</p> + + <p>I wield the flail of the lashing hail,</p> + + <p>And whiten the green plains under;</p> + + <p>And then again I dissolve it in rain,</p> + + <p>And laugh as I pass in thunder.<span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg337" id="pg337">337</a></span></p> + + <p>I sift the snow on the mountains below,</p> + + <p>And their great pines groan aghast,</p> + + <p>And all the night 'tis my pillow white</p> + + <p>While I sleep in the arms of the Blast....</p> + + <p>From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,</p> + + <p>Over a torrent sea,</p> + + <p>Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,</p> + + <p>The mountains its columns be.</p> + + <p>The triumphal arch through which I march,</p> + + <p>With hurricane, fire, and snow,</p> + + <p>When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,</p> + + <p>Is the million-coloured bow;</p> + + <p>The Sphere-fire above its soft colours wove</p> + + <p>While the moist earth was laughing below.</p> + + <p>I am the daughter of Earth and Water,</p> + + <p>And the nursling of the Sky.</p> + </div> + + <p>As Brandes puts it; When the cloud sings thus of the moon:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i14">When</p> + + <p>That orbed maiden with white fire laden,</p> + + <p>Whom Mortals call the Moon,</p> + + <p>Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor</p> + + <p>By the midnight breezes strewn;</p> + + <p>And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,</p> + + <p>Which only the angels hear,</p> + + <p>May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,</p> + + <p>The Stars peep behind her and peer.</p> + </div> + + <p>or of--</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,</p> + </div> + + <p>the reader is carried back, by dint of the virgin freshness of the + poet's imagination, to the time when the phenomena of Nature were + first moulded into mythology.</p> + + <p>This kinship to the myth is very clear in the finest of all his + poems, the <i>Ode to the West Wind</i>, when the poet says to the + wind:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,...</p> + + <p>Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,</p> + + <p>Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed.</p> + + <p>Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean.</p> + + <p>Angels of rain and lightning, there are spread</p> + + <p>On the blue surface of thine airy surge,</p> + + <p>Like the bright hair uplifted from the head</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg338" id= + "pg338">338</a></span>Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim + verge</p> + + <p>Of the horizon to the zenith's height,</p> + + <p>The locks of the approaching storm.</p> + </div> + + <p>He calls the wind the 'breath of Autumn's being,' the one</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed</p> + + <p>The winged seeds.</p> + </div> + + <p>And cries to it:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;</p> + + <p>If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;</p> + + <p>A wave to pant beneath thy power and share</p> + + <p>The impulse of thy strength, only less free</p> + + <p>Than thou, O uncontrollable!...</p> + + <p>0 lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!</p> + + <p>I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!</p> + + <p>A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed</p> + + <p>One too like thee, tameless, and swift, and proud.</p> + + <p>Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;</p> + + <p>What if my leaves are falling like its own?</p> + + <p>The tumult of thy mighty harmonies</p> + + <p>Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,</p> + + <p>Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,</p> + + <p>My spirit. Be thou me, impetuous one!</p> + + <p>Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,</p> + + <p>Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth;</p> + + <p>And by the incantation of this verse,</p> + + <p>Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth</p> + + <p>Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!</p> + + <p>Be through my lips to unawakened earth</p> + + <p>The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,</p> + + <p>If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?</p> + </div> + + <p>His poems are full of this power of inspiring all the elements + with life, breathing his own feeling into them, and divining love and + sympathy in them; for instance:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>The fountains mingle with the river,</p> + + <p>And the river with the ocean;</p> + + <p>The winds of heaven mix for ever</p> + + <p>With a sweet emotion....</p> + + <p>See the mountains kiss high heaven,</p> + + <p>And the waves clasp one another...</p> + + <p>And the sunlight clasps the earth,</p> + + <p>And the moonbeams kiss the sea.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg339" id= + "pg339">339</a></span>and:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>I love all thou lovest,</p> + + <p>Spirit of Delight;</p> + + <p>The fresh earth in new leaves dressed,</p> + + <p>And the starry night,</p> + + <p>Autumn evening and the morn</p> + + <p>When the golden mists are born.</p> + + <p>I love snow and all the forms</p> + + <p>Of the radiant frost;</p> + + <p>I love waves and winds and storms--</p> + + <p>Everything almost</p> + + <p>Which is Nature's, and may be</p> + + <p>Untainted by man's misery.</p> + </div> + + <p>To Goethe, Byron, and Shelley, this pantheism, universal love, + sympathy with Nature in all her forms, was the base of feeling; but + both of England's greatest lyrists, dying young, failed to attain + perfect harmony of thought and feeling. There always remained a + bitter ingredient in their poetry.</p> + + <p>Let us now turn to France.</p> + + <h4>LAMARTINE AND VICTOR HUGO</h4> + + <p>Rousseau discovered the beauty of scenery for France; St Pierre + portrayed it poetically, not only in <i>Paul and Virginia</i>, but in + <i>Chaumiére Indienne</i> and <i>Etudes de la Nature</i>. The science + which these two writers lacked, Buffon possessed in a high degree; + but he had not the power to delineate Nature and feeling in + combination: he lacked insight into the hidden analogies between the + movements of the mind and the phenomena of the outer world. + Chateaubriand, on the contrary, had this faculty to its full modern + extent. It is true that his ego was constantly to the fore, even in + dealing with Nature, but his landscapes were full of sympathetic + feeling. He had Rousseau's melancholy and unrest, and cared nothing + for those 'oppressive masses,' mountains, except as backgrounds; but + he was enthusiastic about the scenery which he saw in America, the + virgin forests, and the Mississippi--above all, about the sea. His + Réné, that life-like <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg340" id= + "pg340">340</a></span>figure, half-passionate, half-<i>blasé</i>, + measuring everything by himself, and flung hither and thither by the + waves of passion, shewed a lover's devotion to the sea and to Nature + generally.<a href="#m15"><sup>[15]</sup></a> 'It was not God whom I + contemplated on the waves in the magnificence of His works: I saw an + unknown woman, and the miracle of his smile, the beauties of the sky, + seemed to me disclosed by her breath. I would have bartered eternity + for one of her caresses. I pictured her to myself as throbbing behind + this veil of the universe which hid her from my eyes. Oh! why was it + not in my power to rend the veil and press the idealized woman to my + heart, to spend myself on her bosom with the love which is the source + of my inspiration, my despair, and my life?'</p> + + <p>In subjectivity and dreaminess both Chateaubriand and Lamartine + were like the German romanticists, but their fundamental note was + theism, not pantheism. The storm of the French Revolution, which made + radical changes in religion, as in all other things, was followed by + a reaction. Christianity acquired new power and inwardness, and + Nature was unceasingly praised as the mirror of the divine idea of + creation.</p> + + <p>In his <i>Génie du Christianisme</i>, Chateaubriand said:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The true God, in entering into His Works, has given his + immensity to Nature... there is an instinct in man, which puts him + in communication with the scenes of Nature.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Lamartine was a sentimental dreamer of dreams, a thinker of lofty + thoughts which lost themselves in the inexpressible. His + <i>Meditations</i> shew his ardent though sad worship of Nature; his + love of evening, moonlight, and starlight. For instance, + <i>L'Isolement</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Ici gronde le fleuve aux vagues écumantes,</p> + + <p>Il serpente et s'enfonce en un lointain obscur:</p> + + <p>Là le lac immobile étend ses eaux dormantes</p> + + <p>Oò l'étoile du soir se lève dans l'azur.</p> + + <p>An sommet de ces monts couronnés de bois sombres,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg341" id= + "pg341">341</a></span>Le crépuscule encore jette un dernier + rayon;</p> + + <p>Et le char vaporeux de la reine des ombres</p> + + <p>Monte et blanchit déjà les bords de l'horizon.</p> + </div> + + <p><i>Le Soir</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Le soir ramène le silence....</p> + + <p>Venus se lève à l'horizon;</p> + + <p>A mes pieds l'étoile amoureuse</p> + + <p>De sa lueur mystérieuse</p> + + <p>Blanchit les tapis de gazon.</p> + + <p>De ce hêtre au feuillage sombre</p> + + <p>J'entends frissonner les rameaux;</p> + + <p>On dirait autour des tombeaux</p> + + <p>Qu'on entend voltiger une ombre,</p> + + <p>Tout-à-coup, détaché des cieux,</p> + + <p>Un rayon de l'astre nocturne,</p> + + <p>Glissant sur mon front taciturne,</p> + + <p>Vient mollement toucher mes yeux.</p> + + <p>Doux reflet d'un globe de flamme</p> + + <p>Charmant rayon, que me veux-tu?</p> + + <p>Viens-tu dans mon sein abattu</p> + + <p>Porter la lumière à mon âme?</p> + + <p>Descends-tu pour me révéler</p> + + <p>Des mondes le divin mystére,</p> + + <p>Ces secrets cachés dans la sphère</p> + + <p>Où le jour va te rappeler?</p> + </div> + + <p>In the thought of happy past hours, he questions the lake:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Un soir, t'en souvient-il, nous voguions en silence;</p> + + <p>On n'entendait au loin, sur l'onde et sous les cieux,</p> + + <p>Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence</p> + + <p>Tes flots harmonieux.</p> + + <p>O lac! rochers muets! grottes! forêt obscure!</p> + + <p>Vous que le temps épargne ou qu'il peut rajeunir</p> + + <p>Gardez de cette nuit, gardez, belle nature,</p> + + <p>Au moins le souvenir!...</p> + + <p>Que le vent qui gémit, le roseau qui soupire</p> + + <p>Que les parfums légers de ton air embaumé,</p> + + <p>Que tout ce qu'on entend, l'on voit, ou l'on respire,</p> + + <p>Tout dise: 'ils out aimés!</p> + </div> + + <p><i>La Prière</i> has:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Le roi brillant du jour, se couchant dans sa gloire,</p> + + <p>Descend avec lenteur de son char de victoire;</p> + + <p>Le nuage éclatant qui le cache à nos yeux</p> + + <p>Conserve en sillons d'or sa trace dans les cieux,</p> + + <p>Et d'un reflet de pourpre inonde l'étendue.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg342" id= + "pg342">342</a></span>Comme une lampe d'or dans l'azur + suspendue,</p> + + <p>La lune se balance aux bords de l'horizon;</p> + + <p>Ses rayons affaiblis dorment sur le gazon,</p> + + <p>Et le voile des nuits sur les monts se déplie.</p> + + <p>C'est l'heure, où la nature, un moment recueillie,</p> + + <p>Entre la nuit qui touche et le jour qui s'enfuit</p> + + <p>S'élève au créateur du jour et de la nuit,</p> + + <p>Et semble offrir à Dieu dans son brillant langage,</p> + + <p>De la création le magnifique hommage.</p> + + <p>Voilà le sacrifice immense, universelle!</p> + + <p>L'univers est le temple, et la terre est l'autel;</p> + + <p>Les cieux en sont le dôme et ses astres sans nombre,</p> + + <p>Ces feux demi-voilés, pâle ornement de l'ombre,</p> + + <p>Dans la voûte d'azur avec ordre semés,</p> + + <p>Sont les sacrés flambeaux pour ce temple allumés...</p> + + <p>Mais ce temple est sans voix...</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>...Mon coeur seul parle dans ce silence--</p> + + <p>La voix de l'univers c'est mon intelligence.</p> + + <p>Sur les rayons du soir, sur les ailes du vent,</p> + + <p>Elle s'élève à Dieu...</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p><i>Le Golfe de Baia</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Vois-tu comme le flot paisible</p> + + <p>Sur le rivage vient mourir?</p> + + <p>Mais déjà l'ombre plus épaisse</p> + + <p>Tombe et brunit les vastes mers;</p> + + <p>Le bord s'efface, le bruit cesse,</p> + + <p>Le silence occupe les airs.</p> + + <p>C'est l'heure où la Mélancholie</p> + + <p>S'assied pensive et recueillie</p> + + <p>Aux bords silencieux des mers.</p> + </div> + + <p>The decay of autumn corresponds to his own dolorous feelings:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Oui, dans ces jours d'automne où la nature expire,</p> + + <p>A ses regards voilés je trouve plus d'attraits;</p> + + <p>C'est l'adieu d'un ami, c'est le dernier sourire</p> + + <p>Des lèvres que la mort va fermer pour jamais.</p> + </div> + + <p>This is from <i>Ischia</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Le Soleil va porter le jour à d'autres mondes;</p> + + <p>Dans l'horizon désert Phébé monte sans bruit,</p> + + <p>Et jette, en pénétrant les ténébres profondes,</p> + + <p>Un voile transparent sur le front de la nuit.</p> + + <p>Voyez du haut des monts ses clartés ondoyantes</p> + + <p>Comme un fleuve de flamme inonder les coteaux,</p> + + <p>Dormir dans les vallons on glisser sur les pentes,</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg343" id= + "pg343">343</a></span>Ou rejaillir au loin du sein brillant des + eaux....</p> + + <p>Doux comme le soupir d'un enfant qui sommeille,</p> + + <p>Un son vague et plaintif se répand dans les airs....</p> + + <p>Mortel! ouvre ton âme à ces torrents de vie,</p> + + <p>Reçois par tous les sens les charmes de la nuit....</p> + </div> + + <p>He sees the transitoriness of all earthly things reflected in + Nature:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>L'onde qui baise ce rivage,</p> + + <p>De quoi se plaint-elle à ses bords?</p> + + <p>Pourquoi le roseau sur la plage, pourquoi le ruisseau sous + l'ombrage,</p> + + <p>Rendent-ils de tristes accords?</p> + + <p>De quoi gémit la tourterelle? Tout naist, tout paise.</p> + </div> + + <p>Such a depth of sympathy and dreamy dolorous reverie was new to + France, but Rousseau had broken the ice, and henceforward feeling + flowed freely. To Lamartine the theist, as to the pantheists Goethe, + Shelley, and Byron, Nature was a friend and lover.</p> + + <p>Victor Hugo was of the same mind, but his poetry is clearer and + more plastic than Lamartine's. We quote from his finest poems, the + <i>Feuilles d'Automne</i>. He was a true lyrist, familiar both with + the external life of Nature and the inner life of man. His beautiful + 'Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne' has the spirit of <i>Faust</i>. He + imagines himself upon a mountain top, with earth on one side, the sea + on the other; and there he hears two voices unlike any ever heard + before:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>L'une venait des mers, chant de gloire! hymne heureux!</p> + + <p>C'était la voix des flots qui se parlaient entre eux....</p> + + <p>Or, comme je l'ai dit, l'Océan magnifique</p> + + <p>Epandait une voix joyeuse et pacifique</p> + + <p>Chantant comme la harpe aux temples de Sion,</p> + + <p>Et louait la beauté de la création.</p> + </div> + + <p>while from the other voice:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Pleurs et cris! L'injure, l'anatheme....</p> + + <p>C'était la terre et l'homme qui pleuraient!...</p> + + <p>L'une disait, Nature! et l'autre, Humanité!</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg344" id="pg344">344</a></span> + The personifications in this poem are beautiful. He, too, like + Lamartine, loves sea and stars most of all. These verses from <i>Les + Orientales</i> remind one of St Augustine:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>J'étais seul près des flots par une nuit d'étoiles,</p> + + <p>Pas un nuage aux cieux; sur les mers pas de voiles,</p> + + <p>Et les bois et les monts et toute la nature</p> + + <p>Semblaient interroger dans confus murmure</p> + + <p>Les flots des mers, les feux du ciel.</p> + + <p>Et les étoiles d'or, légions infinies,</p> + + <p>A voix haute, à voix basse, avec mille harmonies</p> + + <p>Disaient en inclinant leurs couronnes de feu,</p> + + <p>Et les flots bleus, que rien gouverne et n'arrête,</p> + + <p>Disaient en recourbant l'écume de leur crête:</p> + + <p>C'est le Seigneur Dieu, le Seigneur Dieu!</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Parfois lorsque tout dort, je m'assieds plein de joie</p> + + <p>Sous le dôme étoilé qui sur nos fronts flamboie;</p> + + <p>J'écoute si d'en haut il tombe quelque bruit;</p> + + <p>Et l'heure vainement me frappe de son aile</p> + + <p>Quand je contemple ému cette fête eternelle</p> + + <p>Que le ciel rayonnant donne au monde la nuit!</p> + + <p>Souvent alors j'ai cru que ces soleils de flamme</p> + + <p>Dans ce monde endormi n'échauffaient que mon âme;</p> + + <p>Qu'à les comprendre seul j'étais prédestiné;</p> + + <p>Que j'étais, moi, vaine ombre obscure et taciturne,</p> + + <p>Le roi mystérieuse de la pompe nocturne;</p> + + <p>Que le ciel pour moi seul s'était illuminé!</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>The necessary condition of delight in Nature is very strikingly + given:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Si vous avez en vous, vivantes et pressées,</p> + + <p>Un monde intérieur d'images, de pensées,</p> + + <p>De sentimens, d'amour, d'ardente passion</p> + + <p>Pour féconder ce monde, échangez-le sans cesse</p> + + <p>Avec l'autre univers visible qui vous presse!</p> + + <p>Mêlez toute votre âme à la création....</p> + + <p>Que sous nos doigts puissans exhale la nature,</p> + + <p>Cette immense clavier!</p> + </div> + + <p>His lyrics are rich in fine scenes from Nature, unrolled in cold + but stately periods, and the poetic intuition which always divines + the spirit life brought him near to that pantheism which we find in + all the greatest English and German poets of his time,<a href= + "#m16"><sup>[16]</sup></a> and which lay, too, at the root of German + romanticism. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg345" id= + "pg345">345</a></span></p> + + <h4>THE GERMAN ROMANTICISTS</h4> + + <p>Schiller did not possess the intrinsically lyrical genius of + Goethe; his strength lay, not in song, but drama, and in a didactic + form of epic--the song not of feeling, but of thought.</p> + + <p>Descriptions of Nature occur here and there in his epics and + dramas; but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his + contemporaries, he passed through a sentimental period; + <i>Evening</i> shews this, and <i>Melancholy, to Laura</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Laura, a sunrise seems to break</p> + + <p>Where'er thy happy looks may glow....</p> + + <p>Thy soul--a crystal river passing,</p> + + <p>Silver clear and sunbeam glassing,</p> + + <p>Mays into blossom sad autumn by thee:</p> + + <p>Night and desert, if they spy thee,</p> + + <p>To gardens laugh--with daylight shine,</p> + + <p>Lit by those happy smiles of thine!</p> + </div> + + <p>With such ecstatic extravagances contrast the excellent + descriptions of Nature full of objective life in his longer + poems--for instance, the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain + in <i>The Diver</i>, evening in <i>The Hostage</i>, and landscape in + <i>William Tell</i> and <i>The Walk</i>. In the last, as Julian + Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery is made a 'frame for a kind of + phenomenology of mankind.'</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Flowers of all hue are struggling into glow</p> + + <p>Along the blooming fields; yet their sweet strife</p> + + <p>Melts into one harmonious concord. Lo!</p> + + <p>The path allures me through the pastoral green</p> + + <p>And the wide world of fields! The labouring bee</p> + + <p>Hums round me, and on hesitating wing</p> + + <p>O'er beds of purple clover, quiveringly</p> + + <p>Hovers the butterfly. Save these, all life</p> + + <p>Sleeps in the glowing sunlight's steady sheen--</p> + + <p>E'en from the west no breeze the lull'd airs bring.</p> + + <p>Hark! in the calm aloft I hear the skylark sing.</p> + + <p>The thicket rustles near, the alders bow</p> + + <p>Down their green coronals, and as I pass,</p> + + <p>Waves in the rising wind the silvering grass;</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg346" id= + "pg346">346</a></span>Come! day's ambrosial night! receive me + now</p> + + <p>Beneath the roof by shadowy beeches made</p> + + <p>Cool-breathing, etc.</p> + </div> + + <p>Schiller's interest in Nature was more a matter of reflection than + direct observation; its real tendency was philosophical and ethical. + He called Nature naive (he included naturalness in Nature); those who + seek her, sentimental; but he overlooked (as we saw in an earlier + chapter) the fact that antiquity did not always remain naive, and + that not all moderns are sentimental.</p> + + <p>As Rousseau's pupil he drew a sharp distinction between Nature and + Art, and felt happy in solitude where 'man with his torment does not + come,' lying, as he says in <i>The Bride of Messina</i>, like a child + on the bosom of Nature.</p> + + <p>In Schiller's sense of the word, perhaps no poet has been more + sentimental about Nature than Jean Paul.</p> + + <p>He was the humorous and satirical idyllist <i>par excellence</i>, + and laid the scenes of his romances in idyllic surroundings, using + the trifling events of daily life to wonderful purpose. There is an + almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious + metaphors and mixture of ideas. With the exception of Lake Maggiore + in <i>Titan</i>, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all + his references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated + with the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling. + They all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own + countryside, finding the reflection of their feelings in her. There + is a constant interweaving of the human soul and the universe; + therein lies his pantheistic trait. 'To each man,' he said,<a href= + "#m17"><sup>[17]</sup></a> 'Nature appears different, and the only + question is, which is the most beautiful? Nature is for ever becoming + flesh for mankind; outer Nature takes a different form in each mind.' + Certainly the nature of Jean Paul was different <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg347" id="pg347">347</a></span>from the Nature of + other mortals. Was she more beautiful? He wrote of her in his usual + baroque style, with a wealth of thought and feeling, and everywhere + the sparkle of genius; but it is all presented in the strangest + motley, as exaggerated and unenjoyable as can be. For example, from + <i>Siebenkâs</i>:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I appeared again then on the last evening of the year 1794, on + the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne + away to the ocean of eternity.</p> + + <p>To the butterfly--proboscis of Siebenkäs, enough honey--cells + were still open in every blue thistle-blossom of destiny.</p> + + <p>When they had passed the gate--that is to say, the + un-Palmyra-like ruins of it--the crystal reflecting grotto of the + August night stood open and shining above the dark green earth, and + the ocean-calm of Nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. + Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent + suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it) up above the world, and + down beneath it the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a + rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man + gathering snails for the snail pits, seemed to be the only things + that dwelt in the far-reaching darkness.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>When it was autumn in his heart:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead; + above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim + phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over + the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in + clinging folds, as if all Nature, trembling into dust, must vanish + in its wreaths.... But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs + of Nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a + dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon + flowers.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>When his married life grew more unhappy, in December:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet, as he stood + upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of Nature.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg348" id="pg348">348</a></span> + and in spring</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>it seemed to him as if his life dwelt, not in a bodily heart, + but in some warm and tender tear, as if his heavy-laden soul were + expanding and breaking away through some chink in its prison, and + melting into a tone of music, a blue ether wave.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And <i>Titan</i> expresses that inner enfranchisement which Nature + bestows upon us:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Exalted Nature! when we see and love thee, we love our + fellow-men more warmly, and when we must pity or forget them, thou + still remainest with us, reposing before the moist eye like a + verdant chain of mountains in the evening red. Ah! before the soul + in whose sight the morning dew of its ideals has faded to a cold, + grey drizzle ... thou remainest, quickening Nature, with thy + flowers and mountains and cataracts, a faithful comforter; and the + bleeding son of the gods, cold and speechless, dashes the drop of + anguish from his eyes, that they may rest, far and clear, on thy + volcanoes, and on thy springs and on thy suns.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>This is sunset in his abstruse artistic handling:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The sun sinks, and the earth closes her great eye like that of a + dying god. Then smoke the hills like altars; out of every wood + ascends a chorus; the veils of day, the shadows, float around the + enkindled transparent tree-tops, and fall upon the gay, gem-like + flowers. And the burnished gold of the west throws back a dead gold + on the east, and tinges with rosy light the hovering breast of the + tremulous lark--the evening bell of Nature.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>And this sunrise:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The flame of the sun now shot up ever nearer to the kindled + morning clouds; at length in the heavens, in the brooks and ponds, + and in the blooming cups of dew, a hundred suns rose together, + while a thousand colours floated over the earth, and one pure + dazzling white broke from the sky. It seemed as if an almighty + earthquake had forced up from the ocean, yet dripping, a + new-created blooming plain, stretching out beyond the bounds of + vision, with all its young instincts and powers; the fire of earth + glowed beneath the roots of the immense hanging garden, and the + fire of heaven poured down its flames and burnt the colours into + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg349" id="pg349">349</a></span>the + mountain summits and the flowers. Between the porcelain towers of + white mountains the coloured blooming heights stood as thrones of + the Fruit-Goddess; over the far-spread camp of pleasure + blossom-cups and sultry drops were pitched here and there like + peopled tents; the ground was inlaid with swarming nurseries of + grasses and little hearts, and one heart detached itself after + another with wings, or fins, or feelers, from the hot breeding-cell + of Nature, and hummed and sucked and smacked its little lips, and + sung: and for every little proboscis some blossom-cup of; joy was + already open. The darling child of the infinite mother, man, alone + stood with bright joyful eyes upon the market-place of the living + city of the sun, full of brilliance and noise, and gazed, + delighted, around him into all its countless streets; but his + eternal mother rested veiled in immensity, and only by the warmth + which went to his heart did he feel that he was lying upon + hers.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>For very overflow of thought and imagery and ecstasy of feeling, + Jean Paul never achieved a balanced beauty of expression.</p> + + <p>The ideal classic standard which Winckelmann and Lessing had laid + down--simple and plastic, calm because objective, crystal-clear in + thought and expression--and which Goethe and Schiller had sought to + realize and imbue with modern ideas, was too strictly limited for the + Romanticists. Hyperion's words expressed their taste more accurately: + 'O, man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks!' and they + laid stress upon restless movement, fantastic, highly-coloured + effects, a crass subjectivity, a reckless licence of the + imagination.</p> + + <p>Actual and visible things were disregarded; they did not accord + with this claim for infinity and the nebulous, for exploring the + secret depths of the soul.</p> + + <p>It was perhaps a necessary reaction from Goethe's classicism; but + it passed like a bad dream, after tending, thanks to its + heterogeneous elements, now to the mediæval period, now to that of + Storm and Stress, and now to Goethe, Herder, and <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg350" id="pg350">350</a></span>Winckelmann. It + certainly contained germs of good, which have grown and flourished in + our own day.</p> + + <p>In keeping with its whole character, the Romantic feeling for + Nature was subjective and fantastic to excess, mystically + enthusiastic, often with a dreamy symbolism at once deep and naive; + its inmost core was pantheistic, with a pantheism shading off + imperceptibly into mysticism.</p> + + <p>After <i>Werther</i>, there is perhaps no work of modern fiction + in which Nature plays so artistic a part as in Holderlin's + <i>Hyperion</i>.</p> + + <p>Embittered by life's failure to realize his ideals, he cries: 'But + thou art still visible, sun in the sky! Thou art still green, sacred + earth! The streams still rush to the sea, and shady trees rustle at + noon. The spring's song of joy sings my mortal thoughts to sleep. The + abundance of the universe nourishes and satiates my famished being to + intoxication.'</p> + + <p>This mystical pantheism could not be more clearly expressed than + here:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>O blessed Nature! I know not how it happens when I lift my eyes + to your beauty; but all the joy of the sky is in the tears which I + shed before you--a lover before the lady of his love. When the soft + waves of the air play round my breast, my whole being is speechless + and listens. Absorbed in the blue expanse, I often look up to the + ether and down to the holy sea; and it seems as if a kindred spirit + opened its arms to me, as if the pain of loneliness were lost in + the divine life. To be one with all that lives, in blessed + self-forgetfulness to return to the All of Nature, that is the + height of thought and bliss--the sacred mountain height, the place + of eternal rest, where noon loses its sultriness and thunder its + voice, and the rough sea is like the waves in a field of wheat.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>To such feeling as this the actualities are but fetters, hindering + aspiration.</p> + + <p>'O, if great Nature be the daughter of a father, is the daughter's + heart not his heart? Is not he her deepest feeling? But have I found + it? Do I know it?'</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg351" id="pg351">351</a></span> He + tries to discern the 'soul of Nature,' hears 'the melody of morning + light begin with soft notes.' He says to the flower, 'You are my + sister,' and to the springs, 'We are of one race': he finds symbolic + resemblance between his heart and all the days and seasons: he feels + the beauty of the 'land like paradise,' while scarcely ever, except + in the poem <i>Heidelberg</i>, giving a clear sketch of scenery. A + number of fine comparisons from Nature are scattered through his + writings <a href="#m18"><sup>[18]</sup></a>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <div class="stanza"> + <p>The caresses of the charming breezes.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>She light, clear, flattering sea.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Sacred air, the sister of the mind which moves and</p> + + <p>lives in us with fiery force, present everywhere immortal.</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Earth, 'one of the flowers of the sky.'</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Heaven, 'the unending garden of life.'</p> + </div> + + <div class="stanza"> + <p>Beauty, that 'which is one and all.'</p> + </div> + </div> + + <p>He describes his love in a mystical form:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>We were but one flower, and our souls lived in each other as + flowers do, when they love and hide their joy within a closed + calyx.... The clear starry night had now become my element, for the + beautiful life of my love grew in the stillness as in the depths of + earth gold grows mysteriously.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>He delights 'thus to drink the joy of the world out of one cup + with the lady of his love.'</p> + + <p>'Yea, man is a sun, seeing all and transfiguring all when he + loves; and when he does not love, he is like a dark dwelling in which + a little smelly lamp is burning.' All this is soft and feminine, but + it has real poetic charm.</p> + + <p>Beautiful too, though sad and gloomy, is his <i>Song of + Fate</i>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p class="i2">Nowhere may man abide,</p> + + <p>But painfully from hour to hour</p> + + <p>He stumbles blindly on to the unknown,</p> + + <p>As water falls from rock to rock</p> + + <p class="i2">The long year through.</p> + </div> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg352" id="pg352">352</a></span> + His pantheism finds expression in the odes--in <i>To Nature</i>, for + instance:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Since my heart turneth upward to the sun</p> + + <p class="i2">As one that hears her voice,</p> + + <p>Hailing the stars as brothers, and the spring</p> + + <p class="i2">As melody divine;</p> + + <p>Since in the breath that stirs the wood thy soul,</p> + + <p class="i2">The soul of joy, doth move</p> + + <p>On the still waters of my heart--therefore,</p> + + <p class="i2">O Nature! these are golden days to me!</p> + </div> + + <p>Tieck, too, was keenly alive to Nature. Spring<a href= + "#m19"><sup>[19]</sup></a>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Look all around thee how the spring advances!</p> + + <p>New life is playing through the gay green trees!</p> + + <p>See how in yonder bower the light leaf dances</p> + + <p>To the bird's tread and to the quivering breeze!</p> + + <p>How every blossom in the sunlight glances!</p> + + <p>The winter frost to his dark cavern flees,</p> + + <p>And earth, warm wakened, feels through every vein</p> + + <p>The kindling influence of the vernal rain.</p> + + <p>Now silvery streamlets, from the mountain stealing,</p> + + <p>Dance joyously the verdant vales along;</p> + + <p>Cold fear no more the songster's tongue is sealing,</p> + + <p>Down in the thick dark grove is heard his song.</p> + + <p>And all their bright and lovely hues revealing,</p> + + <p>A thousand plants the field and forest throng;</p> + + <p>Light comes upon the earth in radiant showers,</p> + + <p>And mingling rainbows play among the flowers.</p> + </div> + + <p>All his writings seem intoxicated with Nature. The hero of his + novel <i>William Lovell</i>, scamp though he is, a man of criminal + egotism whose only law is licence, is deeply in love with Nature.</p> + + <p>He wrote from Florence:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Nature refreshes my soul with her endless beauty. I am often + full of enthusiasm at the thousand charms of Nature and Art ... at + last my longing to travel to wonderful distant places is satisfied. + Even as a child, when I stood outside my father's country-house, + and gazed at the distant mountains and discovered a windmill on the + very line of the horizon, it seemed to beckon me as it turned, my + blood pulsed more quickly, my mind flew to distant regions, a + strange longing often filled my eyes with tears.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg353" id="pg353">353</a></span> + Often it seems to me as if the enigma in ourselves were about to be + unriddled, as if we were suddenly to see the transformation of all + our feelings and strange experiences. Night surrounded me with a + hundred terrors, the transparent moonlight sky was like a crystal + dome overhead--in this world the most unusual feelings were as + shadows.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>'Franz Sternbald' had the same intoxicated feeling for Nature:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I should like to fill the whole world with songs of love, to + move moonrise and sunrise to echo back my joys and sorrows; and + trees, twigs, leaves, grasses to catch the melody and all repeat my + music with a thousand tongues.<a href= + "#m20"><sup>[20]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>To the Romantic School, Music and Nature were a passion; they + longed to resolve all their feelings, like Byron, at one flash, into + music. 'For thought is too distant.' Night and the forest, moonlight + and starlight, were in all their songs.</p> + + <p>There is a background of landscape all through <i>Franz + Sternbald's Wanderings</i>.</p> + + <p>In the novels of the eighteenth century landscape had had no + place; Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an + extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he + only wanted to fill up the page.</p> + + <p>Rousseau altered this; Sophie la Roche, in her + <i>Freundschaftlichen Frauenzimmerbriefen</i>, introduced ruins, + moonlight scenery, hills, vales, and flowering hedges, etc., into + scenes of thought and feeling; and most of all, Goethe in + <i>Werther</i> tunes scenery and soul to one key. In his later + romances he avoided descriptions of scenery. Jean Paul, like Tieck in + <i>Franz Sternbald</i>, never spares us one sunset or sunrise. Some + of Tieck's concise descriptions are very telling, like Theodore + Storm's at the present day:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Rosy light quivered on the blades of grass, and morning moved in + waves along them.</p> + + <p>The redder the evening grew, the heavier became his dreams; the + darkened trees, the shadows lengthening <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg354" id="pg354">354</a></span>across the + fields, the smoke from the roofs of a little village, and the stars + coming into view one by one in the sky--all this moved him deeply, + moved him to a wistful compassion for himself.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>As Franz wanders about the wood:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>He observes the trees reflected in a neighbouring pond. He had + never looked at landscape with this pleasure, it had never been + given to him to discern the various colours and their shadows, the + charm of the stillness, the effect of the foliage, as now in the + clear water. Till now he had never drawn a landscape, only looked + at it as a necessary adjunct to many historical pictures, had never + felt that lifeless Nature could herself compose something whole and + complete in itself, and so worthy to be represented.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Tieck's shorter stories, fairy tales and others, shew taste for + the mysterious and indefinite aspects of Nature--reflections in + water, rays of light, cloud forms:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>They became to him the most fitting characters in which to + record that indefinite inexpressible feeling which gave its special + colour to his spiritual life.<a href="#m21"><sup>[21]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>The pantheism of Boehme, with whom he was closely associated, + always attracted him, and in Jena he came under the influence of + Steffens, and also of Schelling, whose philosophy of Nature called + Nature a mysterious poem, a dreaming mind. This mind it became the + chief aim of Novalis, as well as Tieck, to decipher.</p> + + <p>From simple descriptions of Nature he went on to read mystic + meanings into her, seeking, psychologically in his novels and + mystically in his fairy tales, to fathom the connection between + natural phenomena and elementary human feeling. <i>Blond Egbert</i> + was the earliest example of this:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Night looked sullenly through the windows, and the trees without + rustled in the wet cold ... the moon looked fitfully through breaks + in the driving clouds.<a href="#m22"><sup>[22]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>In the same book Bertha describes the horror of <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg355" id="pg355">355</a></span>loneliness, the + vague longings, and then the overwhelming delight in new impressions, + which seized her when she fled from home as a child and lost herself + among the mountains.</p> + + <p><i>The Runenberg</i> gives in a very powerful way the idea of the + weird fascination which the subterranean powers were supposed to + exert over men, alluring and befooling them, and rousing their thirst + for gold.</p> + + <p>The demoniacal elements in mountain scenery, its crags and + abysses, are contrasted with idyllic plains. The tale is sprinkled + over with descriptions of Nature, which give it a fairy-like + effect.<a href="#m23"><sup>[23]</sup></a></p> + + <p>The most extraordinary product of this School was Novalis. With + him everything resolved itself into presentiment, twilight, night, + into vague longings for a vague distant goal, which he expressed by + the search for 'the blue flower.' This is from <i>Heinrich von + Ofterdingen</i>:</p> + + <p>'The cheerful pageant of the glorious evening rocked him in soft + imaginings; the flower of his heart was visible now and then as by + sheet lightning.' He looked at Nature with the mystic's eye, and + described her fantastically:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>I am never tired of looking minutely at the different plants. + Growing plants are the direct language of the earth; each new leaf, + each remarkable flower, is a mystery which projects itself, and + because it cannot move with love and longing, nor attain to words, + is a dumb, quiet plant. When in solitude one finds such a flower, + does it not seem as if all around it were brightened, and, best of + all, do not the little feathered notes around it remain near? One + could weep for joy, and there, far from the world, stick hands and + feet into the earth, to take root, and never more leave so + delightful a spot. This green mysterious carpet of love is drawn + over the whole earth.</p> + </blockquote> + + <p>It is not surprising that night should attract this unnaturally + excited imagination most of all:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>Sacred, inexpressible, mysterious Night, delicious <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg356" id="pg356">356</a></span>balsam drops + from thy hands, from the poppy sheaf; thou upliftest the heavy + wings of the Spirit.<a href="#m24"><sup>[24]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Night and death are delight and bliss.</p> + + <p>The fairy-like tale of <i>Hyacinth and Little Rose,</i> with its + charming personifications, is refreshing after all this:</p> + + <blockquote> + <p>The violet told the strawberry in confidence, she told her + friend the gooseberry, who never ceased to jeer when Hyacinth went, + so the whole garden and wood soon knew it, and when Hyacinth went + out, voices from all sides cried out, 'Little Rose is my + favourite.' When he goes into the wide world to find the land of + Isis, he asks the way of the animals, and of springs, rocks, and + trees, and the flowers smile at him, the springs offer him a fresh + drink, and there is wonderful music when he comes home. 'O that men + could understand the music of Nature!' cries the listener in the + tale. Then follows a description of 'the sweet passion for the + being of Nature and her enchanting raptures,' and the charm of the + poetic imagination which finds 'a great sympathy with man's heart' + in all the external world. For example, in the breath of wind, + which 'with a thousand dark and dolorous notes seems to dissolve + one's quiet grief into one deep melodious sigh of all Nature.'</p> + + <p>'And am I myself other than the stream when I gaze gloomily down + into its waters and lose my thoughts in its flow?' And in ecstasy + the youth exclaims: 'Whose heart does not leap for joy, when he + feels Nature's innermost life in its fulness, when that powerful + feeling, for which language has no other name than love and bliss, + spreads like a vapour through his being, and he sinks, palpitating, + on the dark alluring breast of Nature, and his poor self is lost in + the overwhelming waves of joy?'<a href= + "#m25"><sup>[25]</sup></a></p> + </blockquote> + + <p>Here we have the key to the romantic feeling for Nature--communion + of the soul with Nature in a twilight mood of dreamy absorption.</p> + + <p>Yet amidst all this, real delight in romantic scenery was not + quite lacking: witness Hulsen's<a href="#m26"><sup>[26]</sup></a> + <i>Observations on Nature on a Journey through Switzerland</i>; and + the genuine lyric of Nature, untainted by mystic and sickly + influences, was still to be heard, <span class="pagenum"><a name= + "pg357" id="pg357">357</a></span>as in Eichendorff's beautiful songs + and his <i>Tautgenichts</i>.</p> + + <p>The Romantic School, in fact, far as it erred from the path, did + enlarge the life of feeling generally, and with that, feeling for + Nature, and modern literature is still bound to it by a thousand + threads.</p> + + <p>Our modern rapture has thus been reached by a path which, with + many deviations in its course, has come to us from a remote past, and + is still carrying us farther forward.</p> + + <p>Its present intensity is due to the growth of science, for + although feeling has become more realistic and matter-of-fact in + these days of electricity and the microscope, love for Nature has + increased with knowledge. Science has even become the investigator of + religion, and the pantheistic tendency of the great poets has passed + into us, either in the idea of an all-present God, or in that of + organic force working through matter--the indestructible active + principle of life in the region of the visible. Our explorers combine + enthusiasm for Nature with their tireless search for truth--for + example, Humboldt, Haeckel, and Paul Güssfeldt; and though, as the + shadow side to this light, travelling and admiration of Nature have + become a fashion, yet who nowadays can watch a great sunset or a + storm over the sea, and remain insensible to the impression?</p> + + <p>Landscape painting and poetry shew the same deviations from the + straight line of development as in earlier times. Our garden craft, + like our architecture, is eclectic; but the English park style is + still the most adequate expression of prevalent taste: spaces of turf + with tree groups, a view over land or sea, gradual change from garden + to field; to which has been added a wider cultivation of foreign + plants. In landscape painting the zigzag course is very marked: + landscapes such as Bocklin's, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg358" + id="pg358">358</a></span>entirely projected by the imagination and + corresponding to nothing on earth, hang together in our galleries + with the most faithful studies from Nature. It is the same with + literature. In fiction, novels which perpetuate the sentimental + rhapsodies of an early period, and open their chapters with forced + descriptions of landscape, stand side by side with the masterly work + of great writers--for example, Spielhagen, Wilhelmine von Hillern, + and Theodore Storm.</p> + + <p>In poetry, the lyric of Nature is inexhaustible. Heine, the + greatest lyrist after Goethe, though his poetry has, like the Nixie, + an enchantingly fair body with a fish's tail, wrote in the <i>Travels + in the Harz</i>: 'How infinitely blissful is the feeling when the + outer world of phenomena blends and harmonizes with the inner world + of feeling; when green trees, thoughts, birds' songs, sweet + melancholy, the azure of heaven, memory, and the perfume of flowers, + run together and form the loveliest of arabesques.'</p> + + <p>But his delight in Nature was spoilt by irony and straining after + effect--for example, in <i>The Fig Tree</i>; and although <i>The + Lotos Flower</i> is a gem, and the <i>North Sea Pictures</i> shew the + fine eye of a poet who, like Byron and Shelley, can create myths, his + personifications as a whole are affected, and his personal feeling is + forced upon Nature for the sake of a witty effect.</p> + + <p>Every element of Nature has found skilled interpreters both in + poetry and painting, and technical facility and truth of + representation now stand on one level with the appreciation of her + charms. <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg359" id= + "pg359">359</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="notes" id="notes">NOTES</a></h2> + + <h4>INTRODUCTION</h4> + + <p><a name="a1" id="a1">1</a>: <i>Kritische Gänge</i>. Comp. Vischer, + <i>Ueber den optischen Formsinn,</i> and Carl du Prel, <i>Psychologie + der Lyrik</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="a2" id="a2">2</a>: As in elegy <i>Ghatarkarparam</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="a3" id="a3">3</a>: Comp. Humboldt, <i>Cosmos</i>. + Schnaase, <i>Geschichte der bildenden Künste</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="a4" id="a4">4</a>: See <i>Die Entwickelung des + Naturgefühls bei den Griechen und Römern</i>, Biese. + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER I</h4> + + <p><a name="b1" id="b1">1</a>: Lucos ac nemora consecrant deorumque + nominibus adpellant secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident, Tac. + Germ. Comp. Grimm, <i>Deutsche Mythologie</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="b2" id="b2">2</a>: Grimm. Simrock, <i>Handbuch der + Mythologie</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="b3" id="b3">3</a>: Grimm.</p> + + <p><a name="b4" id="b4">4</a>: Grimm.</p> + + <p><a name="b5" id="b5">5</a>: Grimm.</p> + + <p><a name="b6" id="b6">6</a>: <i>Geschichte der bildenden + Künste</i>. Comp. Grimm, <i>Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="b7" id="b7">7</a>: Grimm.</p> + + <p><a name="b8" id="b8">8</a>: Carrière, <i>Die Poesie</i>. + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER II</h4> + + <p><a name="c1" id="c1">1</a>: Clement of Rome, i <i>Cor.</i> 19, 20. + Zoeckler, <i>Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und + Naturwissenschaft</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="c2" id="c2">2</a>: Comp. <i>Vita S. Basilii</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="c3" id="c3">3</a>: <i>Basilii opera omnia</i>. Parisus, + 1730.</p> + + <p><a name="c4" id="c4">4</a>: <i>Cosmos</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="c5" id="c5">5</a>: Biese, <i>Die Entwickelung des + Naturgefühls bei den Griechen und Römern</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="c6" id="c6">6</a>: <i>Mélanges philosophiques, + historiques, et littéraires</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="c7" id="c7">7</a>: <i>Homily</i> 4.</p> + + <p><a name="c8" id="c8">8</a>: <i>Homily</i> 6.</p> + + <p><a name="c9" id="c9">9</a>: Biese, <i>Die Entwickelung des + Naturgefühls bei den Griechen und Römern</i>.</p> + + <p>'In spring the Cydmian apple trees give blossom watered by river + streams in the hallowed garden of the nymphs; in spring the buds grow + and swell beneath the leafy shadow of the vine branch. But my heart + knoweth no season of respite; nay, like the Thracian blast that + rageth with its lightning, so doth it bear down from Aphrodite's + side, dark and fearless, with scorching frenzy in its train, and from + its depths shaketh my heart with might.'</p> + + <p><a name="c10" id="c10">10</a>: Comp. Biese, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="c11" id="c11">11</a>: <i>Deutsche Rundschau</i>, + 1879.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg360" id="pg360">360</a></span> + <a name="c12" id="c12">12</a>: Comp. Biese, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="c13" id="c13">13</a>: Chrysostom was not only + utilitarian, but praised and enjoyed the world's beauty. From the + fifth to third century, Greek progress in feeling for Nature can be + traced from unconscious to conscious pleasure in her beauty.</p> + + <p><a name="c14" id="c14">14</a>: <i>De Mortalitate</i>, cap. 4.</p> + + <p><a name="c15" id="c15">15</a>: <i>Geschichte der + christlich-lateinischen Literatur</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="c16" id="c16">16</a>: When one thinks of Sappho, + Simonides, Theocritus, Meleager, Catullus, Ovid, and Horace, it + cannot be denied that this is true of Greek and Roman lyric.</p> + + <p><a name="c17" id="c17">17</a>: As in the Homeric time, when each + sphere of Nature was held to be subject to and under the influence of + its special deity. But it cannot be admitted that metaphor was freer + and bolder in the hymns; on the contrary, it was very limited and + monotonous.</p> + + <p><a name="c18" id="c18">18</a>: In <i>Cathemerinon</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="c19" id="c19">19</a>: Comp. fragrant gardens of Paradise, + Hymn 3.</p> + + <p>In Hamartigenia he says that the evil and ugly in Nature + originates in the devil.</p> + + <p><a name="c20" id="c20">20</a>: Ebert.</p> + + <p><a name="c21" id="c21">21</a>: The Robinsonade of the hermit + Bonosus upon a rocky island is interesting.</p> + + <p><a name="c22" id="c22">22</a>: Comp. Biese, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="c23" id="c23">23</a>: Comp. <i>ad Paulinum</i>, epist. + 19, <i>Monum. German.</i> v. 2.</p> + + <p><a name="c24" id="c24">24</a>: <i>Carm. nat. 7.</i></p> + + <p><a name="c25" id="c25">25</a>: <i>Ep.</i> xi.</p> + + <p><a name="c26" id="c26">26</a>: <i>Migne Patrol</i> 60.</p> + + <p><a name="c27" id="c27">27</a>: <i>Migne Patrol</i> 59.</p> + + <p><a name="c28" id="c28">28</a>: Ebert.</p> + + <p><a name="c29" id="c29">29</a>: Comp. Biese, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="c30" id="c30">30</a>: Comp. Biese, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="c31" id="c31">31</a>: <i>Migne Patrol</i> 58.</p> + + <p><a name="c32" id="c32">32</a>: <i>Carm.</i> lib. i.</p> + + <p><a name="c33" id="c33">33</a>: <i>Amoenitas loci</i>: Variorum + libri Lugduni, 1677.</p> + + <p><a name="c34" id="c34">34</a>: <i>Monum. Germ.</i>, 4th ed., Leo, + lib. viii.</p> + + <p><a name="c35" id="c35">35</a>: <i>Deutsche Rundschau</i>, + 1882.</p> + + <p><a name="c36" id="c36">36</a>: <i>Monum. German Histor., poet. + lat. medii ævi</i>, I. Berlin 1881, ed. Dümmler. Alcuin, + <i>Carmen</i> 23.</p> + + <p><a name="c37" id="c37">37</a>: Zoeckler, <i>Geschichte der + Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft</i>. 'On rocky + crags by the sea, on shores fringed by oak or beech woods, in the + shady depths of forests, on towering mountain tops, or on the banks + of great rivers, one sees the ruins or the still inhabited buildings + which once served as the dwellings of the monks who, with the cross + as their only weapon, were the pioneers of our modern culture. Their + flight from the life of traffic and bustle in the larger towns was by + no means a flight from the beauties of Nature.' The last statement is + only partly true. In the prime of the monastic era the beauties of + Nature were held to be a snare of the devil. Still, in choosing a + site, beauty of position was constantly referred to as an auxiliary + motive. 'Bernhard loved the valley,' 'but Bernhard chose mountains,' + are significant phrases.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg361" id="pg361">361</a></span> + <a name="c38" id="c38">38</a>: Comp. Grimm, <i>Deutsche + Mythologie</i>, on the old Germanic idea of a conflict between winter + and spring.</p> + + <p><a name="c39" id="c39">39</a>: Dümmler, vi. <i>Carolus et Leo + papa.</i></p> + + <p><a name="c40" id="c40">40</a>: Walahfridi Strabi, <i>De cultura + hortorum</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="c41" id="c41">41</a>: Comp. H. von Eichen, <i>Geschichte + und System der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung</i>. Stuttg. Cotta, + 1887. + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER III</h4> + + <p><a name="d1" id="d1">1</a>: Prutz, <i>Geschichte der + Kreuzzüge</i>. Berlin, 1883.</p> + + <p><a name="d2" id="d2">2</a>: Allatius, <i>Symmicta</i>. Coeln, + 1653.</p> + + <p><a name="d3" id="d3">3</a>: <i>Deutsche Pilgerreisen nach dem + heiligen Lande</i>, Roehricht und Meissner. Berlin, 1880.</p> + + <p><a name="d4" id="d4">4</a>: For excellent bibliographical evidence + see <i>Die geographische Kenntnis der Alpen im Mittelalter</i> in + supplement to <i>Münchner Allgem. Zeitung</i>, January 1885.</p> + + <p><a name="d5" id="d5">5</a>: Comp. Oehlmann, <i>Die Alpenpässe im + Mittelalter, Jahrbuch für Schweizer</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="d6" id="d6">6</a>: Biese, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="d7" id="d7">7</a>: Fr. Diez, <i>Leben und Werke der + Troubadours</i>. Zwickau, 1829</p> + + <p><a name="d8" id="d8">8</a>: <i>Des Minnesangs Frühling</i>, von + Lachmann-Haupt.</p> + + <p><a name="d9" id="d9">9</a>: <i>Geschichte der Malerei.</i> + Woermann und Wottmann.</p> + + <p><a name="d10" id="d10">10</a>: 'Detailed study of Nature had + begun; but the attempt to blend the separate elements into a + background landscape in perspective betrayed the insecurity and + constraint of dilettante work at every point.' Ludwig Kämmerer on the + period before Van Eyck in <i>Die Landschaft in der deutschen Kunst + bis zum Tode Albrecht Dürers</i>. Leipzig, 1880 + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER IV</h4> + + <p><a name="e1" id="e1">1</a>: <i>Die Kultur der Renaissance in + Italien.</i></p> + + <p><a name="e2" id="e2">2</a>: <i>Untersuchungen über die kampanische + Wandmalerei.</i> Leipzig, 1873.</p> + + <p><a name="e3" id="e3">3</a>: Comp. Schnaase, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="e4" id="e4">4</a>: <i>Argon</i>, ii. 219; iii. 260, 298. + Comp. Cic. <i>ad Att.</i>, iv. 18, 3.</p> + + <p><a name="e5" id="e5">5</a>: <i>Renaissance und Humanismus in + Italien und Deutschland.</i> Berlin, 1882. (Oncken, <i>Allgemeine + Geschichte in Einzeldarstettungen</i>, ii. 8.)</p> + + <p><a name="e6" id="e6">6</a>: <i>Itinerar. syr.</i>, Burckhardt + ii.</p> + + <p><a name="e7" id="e7">7</a>: <i>Loci specie percussus</i>, + Burckhardt i.</p> + + <p><a name="e8" id="e8">8</a>: In his paper 'Kulturgeschichte und + Naturwissenschaft' (<i>Deutsche Rundschau</i>, vol. xiii.), which is + full both of original ideas and of exaggerated summary opinions, Du + Bois Reymond fails to do justice to this, and altogether misjudges + Petrarch's feeling for Nature. After giving this letter in proof of + mediæval feeling, he goes on to say: 'Full <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg362" id="pg362">362</a></span>of shame and + remorse, he descends the mountain without another word. The poor + fellow had given himself up to innocent enjoyment for a moment, + without thinking of the welfare of his soul, and instead of gloomy + introspection, had looked into the enticing outer world. Western + humanity was so morbid at that time, that the consciousness of having + done this was enough to cause painful inner conflict to a man like + Petrarch--a man of refined feeling, and scientific, though not a deep + thinker.' Even granting this, which is too tragically put, the world + was on the very eve of freeing itself from this position, and + Petrarch serves as a witness to the change.</p> + + <p><a name="e9" id="e9">9</a>: Comp., too, <i>De Genealogia + Deorum</i>, xv., in which he says of trees, meadows, brooks, flocks + and herds, cottages, etc., that these things 'animum mulcent,' their + effect is 'mentem in se colligere.'</p> + + <p><a name="e10" id="e10">10</a>: Comp. Voigt, <i>Enea Silvio de' + Piccolomini als Papst Pius II. und sein Zeitalter</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="e11" id="e11">11</a>: Comp. Geiger and Ad. Wolff, <i>Die + Klassiker aller Zeiten und Nationen</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="e12" id="e12">12</a>: Quando mira la terra ornata e + bella. Rime di V. Colonna.</p> + + <p><a name="e13" id="e13">13</a>: Ombrosa selva che il mio duolo + ascolti. + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER V</h4> + + <p><a name="f1" id="f1">1</a>: Ruge, <i>Geschichte des Zeitalters der + Entdeckungen.</i> Berlin, 1881. (<i>Allgem. Geschichte in + Einzeldarstellungen</i>, von Oncken.) <i>Die neu Welt der + Landschaften</i>, etc. Strasburg, 1534.</p> + + <p><a name="f2" id="f2">2</a>: <i>De rebus oceanicis et novo orbi + Decades tres Petri Martyris at Angleria Mediolanensis, Coloniæ</i>, + 1574.</p> + + <p><a name="f3" id="f3">3</a>: <i>Il viaggio di Giovan Leone e Le + Navagazioni, di Aloise da Mosto, di Pietro, di Cintra, di Anxone, di + un Piloto Portuguese e di Vasco di Gama quali si leggono nella + raccolta di Giovambattista Ramusio.</i> Venezia, 1837.</p> + + <p><a name="f4" id="f4">4</a>: For example, this from Ramusio: 'And + the coast is all low land, full of most beautiful and very tall + trees, which are evergreen, as the leaves do not wither as do those + in our country, but a new leaf appears before the other is cast off: + the trees extend right down into the marshy tract of shore, and look + as if flourishing on the sea. The coast is a most glorious sight, and + in my opinion, though I have cruised about in many parts both in the + East and in the West, I have never seen any coast which surpassed + this in beauty. It is everywhere washed by many rivers, and small + streams of little importance, as big ships will not be able to enter + them.</p> + + <p><a name="f5" id="f5">5</a>: Ideler, <i>Examen critique</i>. + Cosmos.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg363" id="pg363">363</a></span> + <a name="f6" id="f6">6</a>: <i>Coleccion de los viajes y + decubrimientos que hicieron por mar los espanoles desde fines del + siglo XV. con varios documentos ineditos ... co-ordinata e illustrada + por Don Martin Fernandez de Navarrete.</i> Madrid, 1858.</p> + + <p><a name="f7" id="f7">7</a>: <i>Geschichte des Zeitalters der + Entdeckungen.</i></p> + + <p><a name="f8" id="f8">8</a>: As he lay sick and despairing off + Belem, an unknown voice said to him compassionately: 'O fool! and + slow to believe and serve thy God.... He gave thee the keys of those + barriers of the ocean sea which were closed with such mighty chains, + and thou wast obeyed through many lands, and hast gained an + honourable fame throughout Christendom.' In a letter to the King and + Queen of Spain in fourth voyage.</p> + + <p><a name="f9" id="f9">9</a>: Humboldt.</p> + + <p><a name="f10" id="f10">10</a>: Biese, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="f11" id="f11">11</a>: Zoeckler, <i>Geschichte der + Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="f12" id="f12">12</a>: F. Hammerich, <i>St + Birgitta.</i></p> + + <p><a name="f13" id="f13">13</a>: Zoeckler, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="f14" id="f14">14</a>: Comp. Wilkens' <i>Fray Luis de + Leon</i>. Halle, 1866.</p> + + <p><a name="f15" id="f15">15</a>: Comp. Wilkens' <i>Fray Luis de + Leon</i>. Halle, 1866.</p> + + <p><a name="f16" id="f16">16</a>: Comp. Wilkens' <i>Fray Luis de + Leon</i>. Halle, 1866.</p> + + <p><a name="f17" id="f17">17</a>: Comp. Wilkens' <i>Fray Luis de + Leon</i>. Halle, 1866.</p> + + <p><a name="f18" id="f18">18</a>: Humboldt.</p> + + <p><a name="f19" id="f19">19</a>: Comp. Carrière, <i>Die + Poesie</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="f20" id="f20">20</a>: Zoeckler, in Herzog's + <i>Real-Encykl.</i>, xxi., refers to 'Le Solitaire des Indes ou la + Vie de Gregoire Lopez.' Goerres, <i>Die christliche Mystik</i>; S. + Arnold, <i>Leben der Gläubigen</i>; French, <i>Life of St Teresa</i>. + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER VI</h4> + + <p><a name="g1" id="g1">1</a>: In <i>Shakespeare Studien</i>, chap. + 4, Hense treats Shakespeare's attitude towards Nature very + suggestively; but I have gone my own way.</p> + + <p><a name="g2" id="g2">2</a>: <i>Hamlet</i>, i. 3: 'The canker galls + the infants of the spring too oft before their buttons be disclosed.' + Comp. i. 1; <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, i. 1; <i>Henry VI.</i>, part 2, + iii. 1; <i>Tempest</i>, i. 2.</p> + + <p><a name="g3" id="g3">3</a>: Comp. Henkel, <i>Das Goethe'sche + Gleichnis</i>; <i>Henry IV.</i>, 2nd pt., iv. 4; <i>Richard II.</i>, + i. i; <i>Othello</i>, iii. 3, and v. 2; <i>Cymbeline</i>, ii. 4; + <i>King John</i>, ii. 2; <i>Hamlet</i>, iii. 1; <i>Tempest</i>, iv. + 2.</p> + + <p><a name="g4" id="g4">4</a>: See Hense for bucolic idyllic + traits.</p> + + <p><a name="g5" id="g5">5</a>: <i>Poetische Personifikation in + griechischen Dichtungen.</i> + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER VII</h4> + + <p><a name="h1" id="h1">1</a>: Comp. Woermann, <i>Ueber den + landschaftlichen Natursinn der Griechen und Römer, Vorstudien zu + einer Arckäologie der Landschaftsmalerei</i>. München, 1871.</p> + + <p><a name="h2" id="h2">2</a>: Comp. Schnaase, <i>Geschichte der + bildenden Künste im 15 Jahrhundert</i>, edited by Lübke. Stuttgart, + 1879.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg364" id="pg364">364</a></span> + <a name="h3" id="h3">3</a>: Falke, <i>Geschichte des modernen + Geschmacks</i>. Leipzig, 1880</p> + + <p><a name="h4" id="h4">4</a>: <i>Geschichte der deutschen + Renaissance</i>. Stuttgart, 1873.</p> + + <p><a name="h5" id="h5">5</a>: Comp. also Kaemmerer, <i>op. + cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="h6" id="h6">6</a>: Lûbke, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="h7" id="h7">7</a>: Lûbke refers to A. von Zahn's + searching work, <i>Durer's Kunstlehre und sein Verhältnis zur + Renaissance</i>. Leipzig, 1866.</p> + + <p><a name="h8" id="h8">8</a>: Proportion III., B.T. iii. b. + Nuremberg, 1528.</p> + + <p><a name="h9" id="h9">9</a>: <i>Op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="h10" id="h10">10</a>: In what follows, I have borrowed + largely from Rosenberg's interesting writings (<i>Greuzboten</i>, + Nos. 43 and 44, 1884-85), and still more from Schnaase, Falke, and + Carrière, as I myself only know the masters represented at Berlin and + Munich.</p> + + <p><a name="h11" id="h11">11</a>: Kaemmerer, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="h12" id="h12">12</a>: Kaemmerer, <i>op. cit.</i> + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER VIII</h4> + + <p><a name="i1" id="i1">1</a>: <i>Renaissance und Humanismus in + Italien und Deutschland.</i></p> + + <p><a name="i2" id="i2">2</a>: <i>Renaissance und Humanismus in + Italien und Deutschland.</i></p> + + <p><a name="i3" id="i3">3</a>: Zoeckler.</p> + + <p><a name="i4" id="i4">4</a>: Comp. Hase, <i>Sebastian Frank von + Woerd der Schwarmgeist</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="i5" id="i5">5</a>: Comp. Hubert, <i>Kleine + Schriften</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="i6" id="i6">6</a>: Zoeckler, etc.</p> + + <p><a name="i7" id="i7">7</a>: Comp. Uhland, <i>Schriften zur + Geschichte der Dichtung und Sage</i>. Alte hoch und nieder deutsche + Volkslieder, where plants, ivy, holly, box, and willow, represent + summer and winter.</p> + + <p><a name="i8" id="i8">8</a>: Uhland.</p> + + <p><a name="i9" id="i9">9</a>: Uhland.</p> + + <p><a name="i10" id="i10">10</a>: Wunderhorn.</p> + + <p><a name="i11" id="i11">11</a>: Biese, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="i12" id="i12">12</a>: Fred Cohn, '<i>Die Gärten in alter + und neuer Zeit,' D. Rundschau</i> 18, 1879. In Italy in the sixteenth + century there was a change to this extent, that greenery was no + longer clipt, but allowed to grow naturally, and the garden + represented the transition from palace to landscape, from bare + architectural forms to the free creations of Nature. The passion for + flowers--the art of the pleasure garden, flourished in Holland and + Germany. (Falke.)</p> + + <p><a name="i13" id="i13">13</a>: W.H. Riehl states (<i>Kulturstudien + aus drei Jahrhunderten</i>) that Berlin, Augsburg, Leipzig, + Darmstadt, and Mannheim were described in the seventeenth century as + having 'very fine and delightful positions'; and the finest parts of + the Black Forest, Harz and Thuringian mountains as 'very desolate,' + deserted, and monotonous, or, at best, as not particularly pleasant + scenery. If only a region were flat and treeless, a delicious + landscape could be charmed out of it. Welcker, Court physician at + Hesse Cassel, describing Schlangenbad in 1721, said that it lay in a + desolate, unpleasing district, where nothing grew but foliage and + grass, <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg365" id= + "pg365">365</a></span>but that through ingenious planting of clipt + trees in lines and cross lines, some sort of artistic effect had been + produced. Clearly the principles of French garden-craft had become a + widely accepted dogma of taste. Riehl contrasts the periwig period + with the mediæval, and concludes that the mediæval backgrounds of + pictures implied feeling for the wild and romantic. He says: 'In the + Middle Ages the painters chose romantic jagged forms of mountains and + rocks for backgrounds, hence the wild, bare, and arid counted as a + prototype of beautiful scenery, while some centuries later such forms + were held to be too rustic and irregular for beauty.' One cannot + entirely agree with this. He weakens it himself in what follows. 'It + was not a real scene which rose Alp-like before their mind's eye, but + an imaginary and sacred one; their fantastic, romantic ideal called + for rough and rugged environment': and adds, arguing in a circle, + 'Their minds passed then to real portraiture of Nature, and decided + the landscape eye of the period.' My own opinion is that the + loftiness of the 'heroic' mountain backgrounds seemed suitable for + the sacred subjects which loomed so large and sublime in their own + minds, and that these backgrounds did not reveal their ideal of + landscape beauty, nor 'a romantic feeling for Nature,' nor 'a taste + for the romantic,' nor yet a wondrous change of view in the periwig + period.</p> + + <p><a name="i14" id="i14">14</a>: In his <i>Harburg Program</i> of + 1883 <i>(Beiträge zur Geschichte des Naturgefühls</i>), after an + incomplete survey of ancient and modern writings on the subject, + Winter sketches the development of modern feeling for Nature in + Germany from Opitz to 1770, as shewn in the literature of that + period, basing his information chiefly upon Goedeke's <i>Deutsche + Dichtung.</i></p> + + <p><a name="i15" id="i15">15</a>: Comp. Chovelius <i>Die + bedeutendsten deutschen Romanz des 17 Jahrhunderts</i>. Leipzig, + 1866.</p> + + <p><a name="i16" id="i16">16</a>: Chovelius.</p> + + <p><a name="i17" id="i17">17</a>: Daniel Lohenstein's <i>Blumen</i>. + Breslau, 1689. + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER IX</h4> + + <p><a name="j1" id="j1">1</a>: Freiherr von Ditfurth, <i>Deutsche + Volks und Gesellschaftslieder des 17 und 18 Jahrhunderts</i>, + 1872.</p> + + <p><a name="j2" id="j2">2</a>: Goedeke-Tittmannschen Sammlung, xiii., + <i>Trutz-Nachtigall.</i></p> + + <p><a name="j3" id="j3">3</a>: <i>Geschichte der deutschen + Litteratur</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="j4" id="j4">4</a>: Tittmann's <i>Deutsche Dichter des 17 + Jahrhunderts</i>, vol. vi.</p> + + <p><a name="j5" id="j5">5</a>: Comp., too, iv. 5: 'Die ihr alles hört + und saget, Luft and Forst und Meer durchjaget; Echo, Sonne, Mond, und + Wind, Sagt mir doch, wo steckt mein Kind?'</p> + + <p>21. 'Den sanften West bewegt mein Klagen, Es rauscht <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg366" id="pg366">366</a></span>der Bach den + Seufzern nach Aus Mitleid meiner Plagen; Die Vögel schweigen, Um nur + zu zeigen Dass diese schöne Tyrannei Auch Tieren überlegen sei.' + <i>Abendlied</i> contains beautiful personifications: 'Der Feierabend + ist gemacht, Die Arbeit schläft, der Traum erwacht, Die Sonne führt + die Pferde trinken; Der Erdkreis wandert zu der Ruh, Die Nacht drückt + ihm die Augen zu, Die schon dem süssen Schlafe winken.'</p> + + <p><a name="j6" id="j6">6</a>: Hettner, <i>Litteraturgeschichte des + 18 Jahrhunderts</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="j7" id="j7">7</a>: Lappenberg in <i>Zeitschrift für + Hamburgische Geschichte</i>, ii. Hettner, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="j8" id="j8">8</a>: 'Ye fields and woods, my refuge from + the toilsome world of business, receive me in your quiet sanctuaries + and favour my Retreat and thoughtful Solitude. Ye verdant plains, how + gladly I salute ye! Hail all ye blissful Mansions! Known Seats! + Delightful Prospects! Majestick Beautys of this earth, and all ye + rural Powers and Graces! Bless'd be ye chaste Abodes of happiest + Mortals who here in peaceful Innocence enjoy a Life unenvy'd, the + Divine, whilst with its bless'd Tranquility it affords a happy + Leisure and Retreat for Man, who, made for contemplation and to + search his own and other natures, may here best meditate the cause of + Things, and, plac'd amidst the various scenes of Nature, may nearer + view her Works. O glorious Nature! supremely fair and sovereignly + good! All-loving and All-lovely All-Divine! Whose looks are so + becoming, and of such infinite grace, whose study brings such Wisdom, + and whose contemplation such Delight.... Since by thee (O Sovereign + mind!) I have been form'd such as I am, intelligent and rational; + since the peculiar Dignity of my Nature is to know and contemplate + Thee; permit that with due freedom I exert those Facultys with which + thou hast adorn'd me. Bear with my ventrous and bold approach. And + since not vain Curiosity, nor fond Conceit, nor Love of aught save + Thee alone, inspires me with such thoughts as these, be thou my + Assistant, and guide me in this Pursuit; whilst I venture thus to + tread the Labyrinth of wide Nature, and endeavour to trace thee in + thy Works.'</p> + + <p><a name="j9" id="j9">9</a>: Comp. Jacob von Falke, '<i>Der + englische Garten</i>' (<i>Nord und Süd</i>, Nov. 1884), and his + <i>Geschichte des modernen Geschmacks</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="j10" id="j10">10</a>: <i>Dessins des édifices, meubles, + habits, machines, et utensils des Chinois</i>, 1757. + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER X</h4> + + <p><a name="k1" id="k1">1</a>: '<i>Die Alpen im Lichte verschiedener + Zeitalter</i>,' <i>Sammlung wissenschaftlicher Vorträge</i>, Virchow + und Holtzendorff. Berlin, 1877.</p> + + <p><span class="pagenum"><a name="pg367" id="pg367">367</a></span> + <a name="k2" id="k2">2</a>:</p> + + <div class="poem"> + <p>Geschäfte Zwang und Grillen Entweihn nicht diese Trift;</p> + + <p>Ich finde hier im Stillen Des Unmuts Gegengift.</p> + + <p>Es webet, wallt, und spielet, Das Laub um jeden Strauch,</p> + + <p>Und jede Staude fühlet Des lauen Zephyrs Hauch.</p> + + <p>Was mir vor Augen schwebet Gefällt und hüpft und singt,</p> + + <p>Und alles, alles lebet, Und alles scheint verjüngt.</p> + + <p>Ihr Thäler und ihr Höhen Die Lust und Sommer schmückt!</p> + + <p>Euch ungestört zu sehen, Ist, was mein Herz erquickt.</p> + + <p>Die Reizung freier Felder Beschämt der Gärten Pracht,</p> + + <p>Und in die offnen Wälder Wird ohne Zwang gelacht....</p> + + <p>In jährlich neuen Schätzen zeigt sich des Landmanns Glück,</p> + + <p>Und Freiheit und Ergötzen Erheitern seinen Blick....</p> + + <p>Ihm prangt die fette Weide Und die betante Flur;</p> + + <p>Ihm grünet Lust und Freude Ihm malet die Natur.'</p> + </div> + + <p><a name="k3" id="k3">3</a>: <i>Litteratur geschichte</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="k4" id="k4">4</a>: <i>Sämtliche poetische Werke</i>, J.P. + Uz. Leipzig, 1786.</p> + + <p><a name="k5" id="k5">5</a>: <i>Sämtliche Werke</i>. Berlin, + 1803.</p> + + <p><a name="k6" id="k6">6</a>: <i>Sämtliche Werke</i>, J.G. Jacobi, + vol. viii. Zurich, 1882.</p> + + <p><a name="k7" id="k7">7</a>: He said of his garden at Freiburg, + which was laid out in terraces on a slope, that all that Flora and + Pomona could offer was gathered there. It had a special Poet's Corner + on a hillock under a poplar, where a moss-covered seat was laid for + him upon some limestone rock-work; white and yellow jasmine grew + round, and laurels and myrtles hung down over his head. Here he would + rest when he walked in the sun; on his left was a mossy Ara, a little + artificial stone altar on which he laid his book, and from here he + could gaze across the visible bit of the distant Rhine to the Vosges, + and give himself up undisturbed to his thoughts.</p> + + <p><a name="k8" id="k8">8</a>: Gessners <i>Schriften</i>. Zurich, + 1770.</p> + + <p><a name="k9" id="k9">9</a>: Spalding, <i>Die Bestimmung des + Menschen</i>. Leipzig, 1768.</p> + + <p><a name="k10" id="k10">10</a>: Klopstock's <i>Briefe</i>. + Brunswick, 1867.</p> + + <p><a name="k11" id="k11">11</a>: Comp. <i>Odes</i>, 'Die Kunst + Tialfs' and 'Winterfreuden.'</p> + + <p><a name="k12" id="k12">12</a>: <i>Briefe</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="k13" id="k13">13</a>: Julian Schmidt.</p> + + <p><a name="k14" id="k14">14</a>: Comp. his letters from Switzerland, + which contain nothing particular about the scenery, although he + crossed the Lake of Zurich, and 'a wicked mountain' to the Lake of + Zug and Lucerne.</p> + + <p><a name="k15" id="k15">15</a>: Claudius, who, at a time when the + lyric both of poetry and music was lost in Germany in conventional + tea and coffee songs, was the first to rediscover the direct + expression of feeling--that is, Nature feeling. (Storm's + <i>Hausbuch</i>.) <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg368" id= + "pg368">368</a></span> + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER XI</h4> + + <p><a name="l1" id="l1">1</a>: I have obtained much information and + suggestion from '<i>Ueber die geographische Kenntnis der Alpen im + Mittelalter</i>,' and '<i>Ueber die Alpine Reiselitteratur in + fruherer Zeit</i>,' in <i>Allgem. Zeitung</i>. Jan. 11, 1885, and + Sept. 1885, respectively.</p> + + <p><a name="l2" id="l2">2</a>: <i>Evagatorium 3, Bibliothek d. + litterar. Vereins</i>. Stuttgart, 1849.</p> + + <p><a name="l3" id="l3">3</a>: <i>Bibliothek des litterar. + Vereins</i>. Stuttgart, 1886.</p> + + <p><a name="l4" id="l4">4</a>: <i>Descriptio Larii lacus</i>. Milan, + 1558.</p> + + <p><a name="l5" id="l5">5</a>: <i>Itinerarium Basil</i>. 1624.</p> + + <p><a name="l6" id="l6">6</a>: Osenbrüggen, <i>Wanderungen in der + Schweiz</i>, 1867; <i>Entwickelungsgeschichte des Schweizreisens</i>; + Friedländer, <i>Ueber die Entstehung und Entwickelung</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="l7" id="l7">7</a>: Comp. Erich Schmidt, <i>Richardson, + Rousseau, and Goethe</i>. Jena, 1875.</p> + + <p><a name="l8" id="l8">8</a>: Remarks on several parts of Italy. + London, 1761.</p> + + <p><a name="l9" id="l9">9</a>: Letters of Lady M. Wortley Montagu, + Sept. 25, 1718.</p> + + <p><a name="l10" id="l10">10</a>: Friedländer, <i>op. cit.</i></p> + + <p><a name="l11" id="l11">11</a>: Schmidt. Moser's description of a + sensitive soul in <i>Patriotischen Phantasien</i> is most + amusing.</p> + + <p><a name="l12" id="l12">12</a>: Laprade adduces little of + importance in his book <i>Le Sentiment de la Nature</i> (2nd + edition), the first volume of which I have dealt with elsewhere. I + have little in common with Laprade, although he is the only writer + who has treated the subject comprehensively and historically. His + standpoint is that of Catholic theology; he never separates feeling + for Nature from religion, and is severe upon unbelievers. The book is + well written, and in parts clever, but only touches the surface and + misses much. His position is thus laid down: 'Le vrai sentiment de la + Nature, le seul poétique, le seul fécond et puissant, le seul + innocent de tout danger, est celui qui ne sépare jamais l'idée des + choses visibles de la pensée de Dieu.' He accounts for the lack of + any important expressions of feeling for Nature in French classics + with: 'Le génie de la France est le génie de l'action.' and 'L'âme + humaine est le but de la poésie.' He recognizes that even with + Fénélon 'la Nature reste à ses yeux comme une simple décoration du + drame que l'homme y joue, le poëte en lui ne la regarde jamais à + travers les yeux du mystique.' Of the treatment of Nature in La + Fontaine's Fables, he says: 'Ce n'est pas peindre la Nature, c'est + l'abolir'; and draws this conclusion: 'Le sentiment de l'infini est + absent de la poésie du dix-septième siècle aussi bien que le + sentiment de la Nature'; and again: 'L'esprit général du dix-huitième + siècle est la négation même de la poésie ... l'amour de la Nature + n'était guerre autre <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg369" id= + "pg369">369</a></span>chose qu'une haine déguisée et une déclaration + de guerre a la société et a la réligion. Il n'y a pai trace du + sentiment légitime et profond qui attire l'artiste et le poëte vers + les splendeurs de la création, révélatrices du monde invisible. Ne + demandez pas an dix-huitème siècle la poésie de la Nature, pas plus + que celle du coeur.' Buffon shews 'l'état poétique des sciences de la + Nature,' but his brilliant prose painting lacks 'la présence de Dieu, + la révélation de l'infini les harmonies de l'âme et de la Nature + n'existent pas pour Buffon.... plus de la rhétorique que de vrai + sentiment de la Nature.'</p> + + <p><a name="l13" id="l13">13</a>: Comp. the garden of Elysium in + <i>La Nouvelle Héloise:</i> Where the gardener's hand is nowhere to + be discerned, nothing contradicts the idea of a desert island, and I + cannot perceive any footsteps of men ... you see nothing here in an + exact row, nothing level, Nature plants nothing by the ruler.'</p> + + <p><a name="l14" id="l14">14</a>: <i>OEuvres de Jacques Bernardin + Henri de Saint Pierre</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="l15" id="l15">15</a>: 'B. de S. Pierre a plus que + Rousseau les facultés propres du paysagiste, l'amour même du + pittoresque, la vive curiosité des sites, des animaux, et des plants, + la couleur et une certaine magie spéciale du pinceau,' Laprade adds + the reproof: 'Sa pensée réligieuse est au-dessous de son talent + d'artiste et en abaisse le niveau.'</p> + + <p><a name="l16" id="l16">16</a>: <i>Voyage round the World</i>, + 1772-1775.</p> + + <p><a name="l17" id="l17">17</a>: Paul Lemnius, 1597, <i>Landes + Rugiae</i>; Kosegarten, 1777-1779; Rellstab, 1799, <i>Ausflucht noch + der Insel Rügen;</i> Navest, 1800, <i>Wanderungen durch die Insel + Rügen</i>; Grümbke, 1805; <i>Indigena, Streifzüge durch das + Rügenland</i>. J.P. Hackert in 1762, and K. D. Friedrichs in 1792, + painted the scenery. Comp. E. Boll, <i>Die Inset Rügen</i>, 1858. + <br /></p> + + <h4>CHAPTER XII</h4> + + <p><a name="m1" id="m1">1</a>: Comp. Gottschall, <i>Poetik</i>. + Breslau, 1853.</p> + + <p><a name="m2" id="m2">2</a>: <i>Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter + Völker</i>, Sämtliche <i>Werke</i>, Teil 7.</p> + + <p><a name="m3" id="m3">3</a>: <i>Op. cit.</i>, Teil 15.</p> + + <p><a name="m4" id="m4">4</a>: <i>Zur Philosophie und Gesehichte,</i> + 2 Teil.</p> + + <p><a name="m5" id="m5">5</a>: J.G. Sulzer's <i>Unterredungen über + die Schönheit der Nätur nebst desselben moralischen Betrachtungen + über besondere Gegenstände der Naturlehre</i> is typical. Charites + describes his conversion to the love of Nature by his friend + Eukrates. Eukrates woke him at dawn and led him to a hill close by, + as the sun rose. The fresh air, the birds' songs, and the wide + landscape move him, and Eukrates points out that the love of Nature + is the 'most natural of pleasures,' making <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg370" id="pg370">370</a></span>the labourer so + happy that he forgets servitude and misery, and sings at his work. + 'This pleasure is always new to us, and the heart, provided it be not + possessed by vanity or stormy passions, lies always open to it. Do + you not know that they who are in trouble, and, above all, they who + are in love, find their chief relief here? Is not a sick man better + cheered by sunshine than by any other refreshment?' Then he points + out Nature's harmonies and changes of colour, and warns Charites to + avoid the storms of the passions. 'Yonder brook is a picture of our + soul; so long as it runs quietly between its banks, the water is + clear and grass and flowers border it; but when it swells and flows + tumultuously, all this ornament is torn away, and it becomes turbid. + To delight in Nature the mind must be free.... She is a sanctity only + approached by pure souls.... As only the quiet stream shews the sky + and the objects around, so it is only on quiet souls that Nature's + pictures are painted; ruffled water reflects nothing.' He waxes + eloquent about birds' songs, flowers, and brooks, and wanders by the + hour in the woods, 'all his senses open to Nature's impressions,' + which are 'rays from that source of all beauty, the sight of which + will one day bless the soul.' His friend is soon convinced that + Nature cannot be overpraised, and that her art is endlessly + great.</p> + + <p><a name="m6" id="m6">6</a>: <i>Vorn Gefühl des Schönen und + Physiologie überhaupt.</i> Winter.</p> + + <p><a name="m7" id="m7">7</a>: Comp. <i>Das Fluchtigste</i>. 'Tadle + nicht der Nachtigallen, Bald verhallend süsses Lied,' oder 'Nichts + verliert sich,' etc.</p> + + <p><a name="m8" id="m8">8</a>: Herder's <i>Nachlass</i>, Düntzer und + F.G. von Herder, 1857.</p> + + <p><a name="m9" id="m9">9</a>: Bernay's <i>Der junge Goethe</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="m10" id="m10">10</a>: <i>Die Sprödde, Die Bekehrte, März, + Lust und Qual, Luna, Gegenwart</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="m11" id="m11">11</a>: Laprade is all admiration for the + 'incomparable artiste et poëte inspiré du sentiment de la Nature, + c'est qu'il excelle à peindre le monde extérieur et le coeur humain + l'un par l'autre, qu'il mêle les images de l'univers visible à + l'expression des sentiments intimes, de manière à n'en former qu'un + seul tissu.... Tous les éléments d'un objet d'une situation + apparaissent à la fois, et dans leur harmonie, essentielle à cet + incomparable esprit.' He is astonished at the symbolism in + <i>Werthtr</i>: 'Chaque lettre répond à la saison ou elle est + écrite.... l'idee et l'image s'identifient dans un fait suprême, dans + un cri; il se fait entre l'émotion intime et l'impression du dehors + une sorte de fusion.' And despite Goethe's Greek paganism and + pantheism, he declares: 'Le nom de Goethe marque une de ces grandes + dates, une de ces grandes révolutions de la poésie--la plus grande, + nous le croyons, depuis Homer.' ... 'Goethe <span class= + "pagenum"><a name="pg371" id="pg371">371</a></span>est la plus haut + expression poétique des tendances de notre siècle vers le monde + extérieur et la philosophie de la Nature.'</p> + + <p><a name="m12" id="m12">12</a>: Comp. <i>Tagebucher und Briefe + Goethe's aus Italien an Frau von Stein und Herder</i>. E. Schmidt, + Weimar, 1886.</p> + + <p><a name="m13" id="m13">13</a>: Julian Schmidt.</p> + + <p><a name="m14" id="m14">14</a>: <i>The Lady of the Lake</i> + breathes a delightful freshness, the very spirit of mountain and + wood, free alike from the moral preaching of Wordsworth, and from the + storms of passion.</p> + + <p><a name="m15" id="m15">15</a>: Laprade.</p> + + <p><a name="m16" id="m16">16</a>: 'Sa formule réligieuse, c'est une + question; sa pensée, c'est le doute ... l'artiste divinise chaque + détail. Son panthéisme ne s'applique pas seulement à l'ensemble des + choses; Dieu tout entier est réellement présent poor lui dans chaque + fragment de matière dans le plus immonde animal ... c'est une + réligion aussi vieille que l'humanité décline; cela s'appelle + purement et simplement le fétichisme.' (Laprade.)</p> + + <p><a name="m17" id="m17">17</a>: <i>Vorschule der Æsthetik</i>. + Compare 'With every genius a new Nature is created for us in the + further unveiling of the old.' 2 Aufi. <i>Berlin Reimer</i>, + 1827.</p> + + <p><a name="m18" id="m18">18</a>: 'Like a lily softly swaying in the + hushed air, so my being moves in its elements, in the charming dream + of her.' 'Our souls rush forward in colossal plans, like exulting + streams rushing perpetually through mountain and forest.' 'If the old + mute rock of Fate did not stand opposing them, the waves of the heart + would never foam so beautifully and become mind.' 'There is a night + in the soul which no gleam of starlight, not even dry wood, + illuminates,' etc.</p> + + <p><a name="m19" id="m19">19</a>: Comp. Tieck's <i>Biographie von + Koepke</i>. Brandes.</p> + + <p><a name="m20" id="m20">20</a>: <i>Franz Sternbald</i>, I. Berlin, + 1798.</p> + + <p><a name="m21" id="m21">21</a>: Haym, <i>Die romantische + Schule</i>. Berlin, 1870.</p> + + <p><a name="m22" id="m22">22</a>: <i>Phantasus</i>, i. Berlin, + 1812.</p> + + <p><a name="m23" id="m23">23</a>: 'A young hunter was sitting in the + heart of the mountains in a thoughtful mood beside his fowling-piece, + while the noise of the water and the woods was sounding through the + solitude ... it grew darker ... the birds of night began to shoot + with fitful wing along their mazy courses ... unthinkingly he pulled + a straggling root from the earth, and on the instant heard with + affright a stifled moan underground, which winded downwards in + doleful tones, and died plaintively away in the deep distance. The + sound went through his inmost heart; it seized him as if he had + unwittingly touched the wound, of which the dying frame of Nature was + expiring in its agony.' (Runenberg.)</p> + + <p><a name="m24" id="m24">24</a>: <i>Hymnen an die Nacht</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="m25" id="m25">25</a>: In <i>Die Lehrlinge von + Sais</i>.</p> + + <p><a name="m26" id="m26">26</a>: <i>Athenäum</i>, iii., 1800. + <span class="pagenum"><a name="pg372" id="pg372">372</a></span></p> + + <h2><a name="index" id="index">INDEX</a></h2> + + <ul> + <li>Addison, <a href="#pg231">231</a>, <a href="#pg265">265</a>, + <a href="#pg292">292</a></li> + + <li>Æschylus, <a href="#pg153">153</a>, <a href= + "#pg176">176</a></li> + + <li>Agrippa v. Nettesheim, <a href="#pg201">201</a></li> + + <li>Alamanni, <a href="#pg132">132</a></li> + + <li>Alberti, Leon, <a href="#pg102">102</a></li> + + <li>Alcantara, <a href="#pg164">164</a></li> + + <li>Alcuin, <a href="#pg059">59</a></li> + + <li>Alexander, <a href="#pg066">66</a>, <a href="#pg098">98</a>, + <a href="#pg100">100</a>, <a href="#pg120">120</a></li> + + <li>Ambrose, <a href="#pg042">42</a></li> + + <li>Angilbert, <a href="#pg060">60</a></li> + + <li>Anno v. Coeln, <a href="#pg073">73</a></li> + + <li>Apollonios Rhodios, <a href="#pg120">120</a>, <a href= + "#pg151">151</a></li> + + <li>Apollonius Sidonius, <a href="#pg049">49</a>, <a href= + "#pg050">50</a>, <a href="#pg051">51</a>, <a href= + "#pg109">109</a></li> + + <li>Apuleius, <a href="#pg018">18</a></li> + + <li>Aquinus, Thomas, <a href="#pg157">157</a></li> + + <li>Aribert v. Mailand, <a href="#pg073">73</a></li> + + <li>Aribo, <a href="#pg072">72</a></li> + + <li>Ariosto, <a href="#pg127">127</a></li> + + <li>Aristophanes, <a href="#pg016">16</a></li> + + <li>Aristotle, <a href="#pg016">16</a>, <a href="#pg036">36</a>, + <a href="#pg038">38</a>, <a href="#pg100">100</a>, <a href= + "#pg200">200</a></li> + + <li>Augustine, <a href="#pg043">43</a>, <a href="#pg044">44</a>, + <a href="#pg045">45</a>, <a href="#pg062">62</a></li> + + <li>Augustus, <a href="#pg018">18</a></li> + + <li>Ausonius, <a href="#pg018">18</a>, <a href="#pg045">45</a>, + <a href="#pg046">46</a>, <a href="#pg047">47</a>, <a href= + "#pg057">57</a>, <a href="#pg062">62</a></li> + + <li>Aventinus, <a href="#pg201">201</a></li> + + <li>Avitus, <a href="#pg049">49</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Baccioli, Lucca, <a href="#pg101">101</a></li> + + <li>Bakhuysen, <a href="#pg198">198</a></li> + + <li>Basil, <a href="#pg032">32</a>, <a href="#pg033">33</a>, + <a href="#pg034">34</a>, <a href="#pg037">37</a>, <a href= + "#pg062">62</a></li> + + <li>Beauvais, V. v., <a href="#pg156">156</a></li> + + <li>Beda, <a href="#pg059">59</a></li> + + <li>v. Bern, <a href="#pg071">71</a></li> + + <li>Bernhard v. Clairvaux, <a href="#pg155">155</a></li> + + <li>Bernhard v. Hildesheim, <a href="#pg073">73</a></li> + + <li>Bernhard v. Ventadour, <a href="#pg086">86</a></li> + + <li>Bertran de Born, <a href="#pg087">87</a></li> + + <li>Birgitta, <a href="#pg156">156</a></li> + + <li>Blair, <a href="#pg225">225</a></li> + + <li>de Bles, <a href="#pg193">193</a></li> + + <li>Boccaccio, <a href="#pg121">121</a></li> + + <li>Boecklin, <a href="#pg357">357</a></li> + + <li>Boehme, <a href="#pg165">165</a>, <a href="#pg202">202</a></li> + + <li>Boetius, <a href="#pg051">51</a></li> + + <li>Boie, <a href="#pg255">255</a></li> + + <li>Bojardo, <a href="#pg137">137</a></li> + + <li>Bonaventura, <a href="#pg155">155</a></li> + + <li>Boucher, <a href="#pg211">211</a>, <a href= + "#pg212">212</a></li> + + <li>Bouts, <a href="#pg193">193</a></li> + + <li>Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, A. v., <a href="#pg216">216</a></li> + + <li>Brockes, <a href="#pg222">222</a>, <a href="#pg228">228</a>, + <a href="#pg239">239</a>, <a href="#pg265">265</a>, <a href= + "#pg290">290</a>, <a href="#pg291">291</a></li> + + <li>Brueghel, Peter and Jan, <a href="#pg194">194</a>, <a href= + "#pg195">195</a></li> + + <li>Bruno, <a href="#pg165">165</a>, <a href="#pg202">202</a></li> + + <li>Buffon, <a href="#pg339">339</a></li> + + <li>Bürger, <a href="#pg255">255</a></li> + + <li>Burkhard v. Monte Sion, <a href="#pg069">69</a></li> + + <li>Byron, <a href="#pg127">127</a>, <a href="#pg179">179</a>, + <a href="#pg325">325</a>, <a href="#pg327">327</a>-335, <a href= + "#pg339">339</a>, <a href="#pg343">343</a>, <a href= + "#pg353">353</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Calderon, <a href="#pg160">160</a>, <a href="#pg163">163</a>, + <a href="#pg164">164</a>, <a href="#pg166">166</a>, <a href= + "#pg167">167</a>, <a href="#pg170">170</a></li> + + <li>Calpernius, <a href="#pg060">60</a></li> + + <li>Camoens, <a href="#pg149">149</a></li> + + <li>Campanella, <a href="#pg165">165</a>, <a href= + "#pg202">202</a></li> + + <li>Carew, <a href="#pg224">224</a></li> + + <li>Cassiodorus, <a href="#pg051">51</a></li> + + <li>Catullus, <a href="#pg018">18</a>, <a href="#pg049">49</a>, + <a href="#pg054">54</a>, <a href="#pg129">129</a></li> + + <li>Celtes, <a href="#pg200">200</a></li> + + <li>Chambers, <a href="#pg231">231</a></li> + + <li>Charlemagne, <a href="#pg060">60</a>, <a href="#pg061">61</a>, + <a href="#pg072">72</a></li> + + <li>Chateaubriand, <a href="#pg264">264</a>, <a href= + "#pg339">339</a>, <a href="#pg340">340</a></li> + + <li>Chaucer, <a href="#pg222">222</a></li> + + <li>Chlodwig, <a href="#pg053">53</a></li> + + <li>Chlotaire, <a href="#pg054">54</a></li> + + <li>Chrysostom, <a href="#pg039">39</a>, <a href= + "#pg040">40</a></li> + + <li>Cicero, <a href="#pg036">36</a></li> + + <li>Claudius, <a href="#pg254">254</a></li> + + <li>Clement of Rome, <a href="#pg030">30</a></li> + + <li>v. Clugny, Abbé M., <a href="#pg073">73</a></li> + + <li>Colonna, Vittoria, <a href="#pg136">136</a></li> + + <li>Columbus, <a href="#pg141">141</a>, <a href="#pg145">145</a>, + <a href="#pg150">150</a></li> + + <li>Columella, <a href="#pg061">61</a></li> + + <li>Corneille, <a href="#pg196">196</a></li> + + <li>Cornelia, <a href="#pg018">18</a></li> + + <li>Correggio, <a href="#pg188">188</a></li> + + <li>Cowley, <a href="#pg291">291</a></li> + + <li>Cramer, <a href="#pg310">310</a>, <a href="#pg312">312</a></li> + + <li>Cronegk, <a href="#pg239">239</a></li> + + <li>Crugot, <a href="#pg246">246</a></li> + + <li>Cuyp, <a href="#pg197">197</a></li> + + <li>Cyprian, <a href="#pg042">42</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Dante, <a href="#pg099">99</a>, <a href="#pg101">101</a>, + <a href="#pg106">106</a>, <a href="#pg110">110</a>, <a href= + "#pg117">117</a>, <a href="#pg130">130</a></li> + + <li>Darius, <a href="#pg120">120</a></li> + + <li>Defoe, <a href="#pg233">233</a></li> + + <li>Dionisius da B.S. Sepolchro, <a href="#pg118">118</a></li> + + <li>Domidius, <a href="#pg050">50</a>, <a href="#pg051">51</a></li> + + <li>Dracontius, <a href="#pg048">48</a></li> + + <li>Drayton, <a href="#pg223">223</a></li> + + <li>Drummond, <a href="#pg224">224</a></li> + + <li>du Bois-Reymond, <a href="#pg038">38</a>, <a href= + "#pg266">266</a></li> + + <li>Dürer, <a href="#pg189">189</a>, <a href="#pg190">190</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>v. Eichendorff, <a href="#pg357">357</a></li> + + <li>Eist, Deitmar v., <a href="#pg088">88</a></li> + + <li>Ekkehart, <a href="#pg156">156</a></li> + + <li>Ennodius, <a href="#pg051">51</a></li> + + <li>Epiphanius, M.H., <a href="#pg071">71</a></li> + + <li>Euripides, <a href="#pg014">14</a>, <a href="#pg015">15</a>, + <a href="#pg016">16</a>, <a href="#pg166">166</a>, <a href= + "#pg307">307</a></li> + + <li>Everdingen, A. v., <a href="#pg198">198</a></li> + + <li>v. Eyck, <a href="#pg191">191</a>, <a href="#pg192">192</a>, + <a href="#pg193">193</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Fabri, <a href="#pg262">262</a></li> + + <li>Fénélon, <a href="#pg196">196</a></li> + + <li>Fischart, <a href="#pg208">208</a></li> + + <li>Fleming, <a href="#pg213">213</a></li> + + <li>Forster, <a href="#pg279">279</a>, <a href= + "#pg282">282</a></li> + + <li>Fortunatus, <a href="#pg053">53</a>-62, <a href= + "#pg073">73</a></li> + + <li>Francis of Assisi, <a href="#pg155">155</a></li> + + <li>Frank, Sebastian, <a href="#pg202">202</a></li> + + <li>Fredegar, <a href="#pg072">72</a></li> + + <li>Frederic the Great, <a href="#pg288">288</a></li> + + <li>Friedlander, <a href="#pg109">109</a></li> + + <li>Fürttenbach, <a href="#pg264">264</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Gatterer, <a href="#pg286">286</a></li> + + <li>Gellert, <a href="#pg239">239</a></li> + + <li>Gerhard, Paul, <a href="#pg214">214</a></li> + + <li>Gervinus, <a href="#pg016">16</a></li> + + <li>Gessner, Conrad, <a href="#pg246">246</a>, <a href= + "#pg264">264</a>, <a href="#pg291">291</a></li> + + <li>Gessner, Salomon, <a href="#pg245">245</a></li> + + <li>Giorgione, <a href="#pg188">188</a></li> + + <li>Gleim, <a href="#pg239">239</a>, <a href="#pg243">243</a>, + <a href="#pg286">286</a></li> + + <li>Goethe, <a href="#pg002">2</a>, <a href="#pg003">3</a>, + <a href="#pg038">38</a>, <a href="#pg039">39</a>, <a href= + "#pg110">110</a>, <a href="#pg113">113</a>, <a href= + "#pg117">117</a>, <a href="#pg127">127</a>, <a href= + "#pg164">164</a>, <a href="#pg179">179</a>, <a href= + "#pg180">180</a>, <a href="#pg203">203</a>, <a href= + "#pg219">219</a>, <a href="#pg222">222</a>, <a href= + "#pg247">247</a>, <a href="#pg288">288</a>, <a href= + "#pg289">289</a>, <a href="#pg290">290</a>, <a href= + "#pg296">296</a>-325, <a href="#pg339">339</a>, <a href= + "#pg343">343</a>, <a href="#pg349">349</a></li> + + <li>Gogen, <a href="#pg197">197</a></li> + + <li>Gottfried v. Strassburg, <a href="#pg083">83</a></li> + + <li>Gozzoli, <a href="#pg188">188</a></li> + + <li>Grasser, <a href="#pg263">263</a></li> + + <li>Gregory Nazianzen, <a href="#pg032">32</a>, <a href= + "#pg034">34</a>, <a href="#pg035">35</a>, <a href="#pg037">37</a>, + <a href="#pg039">39</a></li> + + <li>Gregory of Nyssa, <a href="#pg035">35</a>, <a href= + "#pg037">37</a>, <a href="#pg038">38</a></li> + + <li>Gregory of Tours, <a href="#pg072">72</a></li> + + <li>Grümbke, <a href="#pg287">287</a></li> + + <li>Gryphius, <a href="#pg214">214</a></li> + + <li>Guarini, G., <a href="#pg135">135</a></li> + + <li>Günther, Christian, <a href="#pg220">220</a></li> + + <li>Günther d. Liguriner, <a href="#pg073">73</a></li> + + <li>Guotenberg, U. v., <a href="#pg089">89</a></li> + + <li>Gussfeldt, <a href="#pg357">357</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Hadrian, <a href="#pg018">18</a></li> + + <li>Haeckel, <a href="#pg279">279</a>, <a href= + "#pg357">357</a></li> + + <li>Hagedorn, <a href="#pg238">238</a>, <a href= + "#pg243">243</a></li> + + <li>Haller, <a href="#pg235">235</a>, <a href="#pg237">237</a>, + <a href="#pg239">239</a>, <a href="#pg265">265</a>, <a href= + "#pg290">290</a>, <a href="#pg291">291</a></li> + + <li>Harsdörfer, <a href="#pg216">216</a>, <a href= + "#pg219">219</a></li> + + <li>Hartmann, <a href="#pg081">81</a>, <a href="#pg083">83</a></li> + + <li>Hebel, <a href="#pg254">254</a></li> + + <li>Hegel, <a href="#pg013">13</a>, <a href="#pg075">75</a></li> + + <li>Heine, <a href="#pg358">358</a></li> + + <li>Herder, <a href="#pg289">289</a>, <a href="#pg290">290</a>, + <a href="#pg292">292</a>, <a href="#pg294">294</a>, <a href= + "#pg295">295</a>, <a href="#pg349">349</a></li> + + <li>Hermes, <a href="#pg353">353</a></li> + + <li>Hilary, <a href="#pg042">42</a></li> + + <li>Hillern, W. v. <a href="#pg358">358</a></li> + + <li>Hobbema, <a href="#pg198">198</a></li> + + <li>Hoffmannswaldau, <a href="#pg217">217</a></li> + + <li>Hölderlin, <a href="#pg350">350</a></li> + + <li>Hölty, <a href="#pg255">255</a>, <a href="#pg257">257</a></li> + + <li>Homer, <a href="#pg014">14</a>, <a href="#pg016">16</a>, + <a href="#pg075">75</a>, <a href="#pg076">76</a>, <a href= + "#pg099">99</a>, <a href="#pg127">127</a>, <a href= + "#pg170">170</a>, <a href="#pg324">324</a></li> + + <li>Horace, <a href="#pg014">14</a>, <a href="#pg018">18</a>, + <a href="#pg290">290</a></li> + + <li>Hugo v. St. Victor, <a href="#pg155">155</a></li> + + <li>Hugo, Victor, <a href="#pg343">343</a></li> + + <li>Hulsen, <a href="#pg356">356</a></li> + + <li>Humboldt, <a href="#pg014">14</a>, <a href="#pg033">33</a>, + <a href="#pg037">37</a>, <a href="#pg091">91</a>, <a href= + "#pg106">106</a>, <a href="#pg109">109</a>, <a href= + "#pg145">145</a>, <a href="#pg279">279</a>, <a href= + "#pg357">357</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Ibykos, <a href="#pg035">35</a>, <a href="#pg177">177</a></li> + + <li>Isodore, <a href="#pg059">59</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Jacob v. Bern, <a href="#pg071">71</a></li> + + <li>Jacobi, Joh. G., <a href="#pg243">243</a></li> + + <li>Jerome, <a href="#pg043">43</a></li> + + <li>Jovius, <a href="#pg263">263</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Kalidasa, <a href="#pg006">6</a>, <a href="#pg007">7</a>, + <a href="#pg008">8</a>, <a href="#pg133">133</a></li> + + <li>Kallimachos, <a href="#pg016">16</a>, <a href="#pg019">19</a>, + <a href="#pg177">177</a></li> + + <li>Kant, <a href="#pg288">288</a>, <a href="#pg292">292</a></li> + + <li>Kent, <a href="#pg222">222</a>, <a href="#pg231">231</a>, + <a href="#pg233">233</a></li> + + <li>Keyssler, <a href="#pg266">266</a></li> + + <li>Kiechel, <a href="#pg263">263</a></li> + + <li>Klaj, <a href="#pg216">216</a></li> + + <li>Kleist, E. v., <a href="#pg239">239</a>, <a href= + "#pg242">242</a>, <a href="#pg291">291</a></li> + + <li>Klipphausen, <a href="#pg215">215</a></li> + + <li>Klopstock, <a href="#pg247">247</a>, <a href="#pg248">248</a>, + <a href="#pg249">249</a>, <a href="#pg250">250</a>, <a href= + "#pg254">254</a>, <a href="#pg258">258</a>, <a href= + "#pg259">259</a>, <a href="#pg286">286</a>, <a href= + "#pg288">288</a>, <a href="#pg296">296</a>, <a href= + "#pg326">326</a></li> + + <li>König, Eva, <a href="#pg285">285</a></li> + + <li>Kürenberg, <a href="#pg088">88</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Lamartine, <a href="#pg340">340</a>, <a href= + "#pg343">343</a></li> + + <li>Lamprecht, <a href="#pg080">80</a></li> + + <li>Leman, <a href="#pg071">71</a></li> + + <li>Lenôtre, <a href="#pg210">210</a>, <a href= + "#pg231">231</a></li> + + <li>Leon, Luis de, <a href="#pg157">157</a>, <a href= + "#pg160">160</a></li> + + <li>Leonardo da Vinci, <a href="#pg101">101</a></li> + + <li>Lessing, <a href="#pg288">288</a>, <a href="#pg289">289</a>, + <a href="#pg290">290</a>, <a href="#pg349">349</a></li> + + <li>Livy, <a href="#pg019">19</a></li> + + <li>Logau, <a href="#pg219">219</a></li> + + <li>Lohenstein, <a href="#pg217">217</a>, <a href= + "#pg220">220</a></li> + + <li>Longos, <a href="#pg016">16</a>, <a href="#pg134">134</a>, + <a href="#pg245">245</a></li> + + <li>Lopez, <a href="#pg164">164</a></li> + + <li>Lorraine, Claude, <a href="#pg196">196</a>, <a href= + "#pg209">209</a></li> + + <li>Louis XIV., <a href="#pg209">209</a>, <a href= + "#pg211">211</a></li> + + <li>Louis XV., <a href="#pg211">211</a></li> + + <li>Lucretius, <a href="#pg017">17</a>, <a href= + "#pg019">19</a></li> + + <li>Ludwig zu Nassau, <a href="#pg073">73</a></li> + + <li>Luis de Leon, <a href="#pg155">155</a></li> + + <li>Lüneberg, <a href="#pg266">266</a></li> + + <li>Luther, <a href="#pg203">203</a>, <a href="#pg204">204</a>, + <a href="#pg208">208</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Maghas, <a href="#pg006">6</a></li> + + <li>Mantegna, <a href="#pg188">188</a></li> + + <li>Mareuil, A. v., <a href="#pg087">87</a></li> + + <li>Maria Theresa, <a href="#pg288">288</a></li> + + <li>v. Martius, <a href="#pg282">282</a></li> + + <li>Medici, Lorenzo de, <a href="#pg137">137</a></li> + + <li>Meer, Aart v. d., <a href="#pg197">197</a></li> + + <li>Meleager, <a href="#pg126">126</a></li> + + <li>Memling, <a href="#pg193">193</a></li> + + <li>Menander, <a href="#pg100">100</a></li> + + <li>Michael Angelo, <a href="#pg188">188</a></li> + + <li>Milton, <a href="#pg325">325</a></li> + + <li>Minucius Felix, <a href="#pg040">40</a></li> + + <li>Molanus, <a href="#pg193">193</a></li> + + <li>Montagu, <a href="#pg266">266</a>, <a href= + "#pg284">284</a></li> + + <li>Montemayor, <a href="#pg213">213</a></li> + + <li>Montreux, <a href="#pg213">213</a></li> + + <li>Moore, <a href="#pg327">327</a></li> + + <li>Morungen, H. v., <a href="#pg090">90</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Moscherosch, <a href="#pg219">219</a></li> + + <li>Möser, <a href="#pg266">266</a></li> + + <li>Mosto, A. da, <a href="#pg144">144</a></li> + + <li>Murdach, <a href="#pg155">155</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Navarrete, F. de, <a href="#pg145">145</a></li> + + <li>Nemesianus, <a href="#pg061">61</a></li> + + <li>Nettesheim, C.A. v., <a href="#pg201">201</a></li> + + <li>Nicolas, <a href="#pg286">286</a></li> + + <li>Nonnos, <a href="#pg133">133</a></li> + + <li>Novalis, <a href="#pg355">355</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Opitz, <a href="#pg212">212</a></li> + + <li>Osorio, <a href="#pg142">142</a></li> + + <li>Ossian, <a href="#pg325">325</a></li> + + <li>Ouwater, <a href="#pg193">193</a></li> + + <li>Ovid, <a href="#pg017">17</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Paracelsus, <a href="#pg201">201</a></li> + + <li>Patenir, <a href="#pg193">193</a></li> + + <li>Paul, Jean, <a href="#pg004">4</a>, <a href="#pg013">13</a>, + <a href="#pg346">346</a>, <a href="#pg349">349</a>, <a href= + "#pg353">353</a></li> + + <li>Paul, St, <a href="#pg039">39</a></li> + + <li>Paulinus of Nola, <a href="#pg045">45</a>, <a href= + "#pg046">46</a>, <a href="#pg047">47</a>, <a href= + "#pg057">57</a></li> + + <li>Perdiccas, <a href="#pg071">71</a></li> + + <li>Peter Martyr, <a href="#pg140">140</a>, <a href= + "#pg143">143</a></li> + + <li>Petrarch, <a href="#pg016">16</a>, <a href="#pg019">19</a>, + <a href="#pg101">101</a>, <a href="#pg102">102</a>, <a href= + "#pg106">106</a>, <a href="#pg109">109</a>, <a href= + "#pg110">110</a>, <a href="#pg113">113</a>, <a href= + "#pg116">116</a>, <a href="#pg117">117</a>, <a href= + "#pg120">120</a>, <a href="#pg121">121</a>, <a href= + "#pg122">122</a>, <a href="#pg126">126</a>, <a href= + "#pg127">127</a>, <a href="#pg136">136</a>, <a href= + "#pg137">137</a>, <a href="#pg199">199</a>, <a href= + "#pg307">307</a></li> + + <li>Pfintzing, <a href="#pg071">71</a></li> + + <li>Phidias, <a href="#pg099">99</a></li> + + <li>Philip of Macedon, <a href="#pg119">119</a>, <a href= + "#pg120">120</a></li> + + <li>Phokas, <a href="#pg070">70</a></li> + + <li>Pico della Mirandola, <a href="#pg139">139</a></li> + + <li>Pierre, B. de St, <a href="#pg278">278</a>, <a href= + "#pg279">279</a>, <a href="#pg339">339</a></li> + + <li>Pindar, <a href="#pg016">16</a></li> + + <li>Pisanello, <a href="#pg188">188</a></li> + + <li>Pius II. (Enea Silvio), <a href="#pg122">122</a>, <a href= + "#pg126">126</a>, <a href="#pg127">127</a>, <a href= + "#pg199">199</a></li> + + <li>Plato, <a href="#pg036">36</a></li> + + <li>Pliny, <a href="#pg018">18</a>, <a href="#pg033">33</a>, + <a href="#pg126">126</a>, <a href="#pg209">209</a>, <a href= + "#pg210">210</a></li> + + <li>Polo, Marco, <a href="#pg141">141</a></li> + + <li>Pope, <a href="#pg225">225</a>, <a href="#pg228">228</a>, + <a href="#pg231">231</a>, <a href="#pg290">290</a>, <a href= + "#pg292">292</a></li> + + <li>Potter, Paul, <a href="#pg190">190</a></li> + + <li>Poussin, <a href="#pg196">196</a></li> + + <li>Propertius, <a href="#pg017">17</a></li> + + <li>Prudentius, <a href="#pg043">43</a></li> + + <li>Ptolemaios, <a href="#pg034">34</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Racine, <a href="#pg196">196</a></li> + + <li>Radegunde, <a href="#pg054">54</a>, <a href="#pg056">56</a>, + <a href="#pg058">58</a></li> + + <li>Raphael, <a href="#pg188">188</a></li> + + <li>Regensburg, <a href="#pg156">156</a></li> + + <li>Reinmar, <a href="#pg090">90</a></li> + + <li>Reissner, <a href="#pg263">263</a></li> + + <li>Richardson, <a href="#pg235">235</a>, <a href= + "#pg265">265</a></li> + + <li>Rickel, D. v., <a href="#pg156">156</a></li> + + <li>Roche, Sophie la, <a href="#pg353">353</a></li> + + <li>Ronsard, <a href="#pg196">196</a></li> + + <li>Rousseau, <a href="#pg015">15</a>, <a href="#pg016">16</a>, + <a href="#pg043">43</a>, <a href="#pg044">44</a> <a href= + "#pg127">127</a>, <a href="#pg233">233</a>, <a href= + "#pg259">259</a>, <a href="#pg260">260</a>-266, <a href= + "#pg279">279</a>, <a href="#pg288">288</a>, <a href= + "#pg303">303</a>, <a href="#pg327">327</a>, <a href= + "#pg339">339</a>, <a href="#pg353">353</a></li> + + <li>Rubens, <a href="#pg194">194</a>, <a href="#pg195">195</a></li> + + <li>Rucellai, <a href="#pg132">132</a></li> + + <li>Rückert, <a href="#pg003">3</a></li> + + <li>Rugge, <a href="#pg090">90</a></li> + + <li>Ruysbroek, <a href="#pg156">156</a></li> + + <li>Ruysdael, <a href="#pg197">197</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Sabiende, R. v., <a href="#pg157">157</a></li> + + <li>Sachs, Hans, <a href="#pg208">208</a></li> + + <li>Sannazaro, <a href="#pg131">131</a>, <a href= + "#pg133">133</a></li> + + <li>Sappho, <a href="#pg016">16</a>, <a href="#pg129">129</a></li> + + <li>Saussure, <a href="#pg278">278</a></li> + + <li>v. Schachten, <a href="#pg071">71</a></li> + + <li>Schaller, <a href="#pg109">109</a></li> + + <li>Scherr, <a href="#pg284">284</a></li> + + <li>Scheuchzer, <a href="#pg265">265</a></li> + + <li>Schickhart, <a href="#pg263">263</a></li> + + <li>Schiller, <a href="#pg013">13</a>, <a href="#pg014">14</a>, + <a href="#pg016">16</a>, <a href="#pg017">17</a>, <a href= + "#pg116">116</a>, <a href="#pg345">345</a>-346, <a href= + "#pg349">349</a></li> + + <li>Scipio Africanus, <a href="#pg018">18</a></li> + + <li>Scott, <a href="#pg327">327</a></li> + + <li>Seneca, <a href="#pg018">18</a>, <a href="#pg019">19</a>, + <a href="#pg038">38</a>, <a href="#pg166">166</a></li> + + <li>Shaftesbury, <a href="#pg230">230</a>, <a href= + "#pg292">292</a></li> + + <li>Shakespeare, <a href="#pg014">14</a>, <a href="#pg163">163</a>, + <a href="#pg164">164</a>, <a href="#pg166">166</a>-209, <a href= + "#pg324">324</a></li> + + <li>Shelley, <a href="#pg127">127</a>, <a href="#pg179">179</a>, + <a href="#pg327">327</a>, <a href="#pg335">335</a>-339, <a href= + "#pg343">343</a></li> + + <li>Sidney, <a href="#pg213">213</a></li> + + <li>Simonides, <a href="#pg016">16</a></li> + + <li>Socrates, <a href="#pg036">36</a></li> + + <li>Sophocles, <a href="#pg099">99</a>, <a href= + "#pg166">166</a></li> + + <li>Southey, <a href="#pg327">327</a></li> + + <li>Southwell, <a href="#pg223">223</a></li> + + <li>Spalding, <a href="#pg246">246</a></li> + + <li>Spee, <a href="#pg219">219</a></li> + + <li>Spenser, <a href="#pg223">223</a>, <a href= + "#pg291">291</a></li> + + <li>Spielhagen, <a href="#pg358">358</a></li> + + <li>Spinoza, <a href="#pg324">324</a></li> + + <li>Spix, <a href="#pg282">282</a></li> + + <li>Stolberg, <a href="#pg257">257</a>, <a href= + "#pg288">288</a></li> + + <li>Storm, Th., <a href="#pg303">303</a>, <a href="#pg353">353</a>, + <a href="#pg358">358</a></li> + + <li>Sulzer, <a href="#pg246">246</a></li> + + <li>Summenhart, <a href="#pg200">200</a></li> + + <li>Suso, <a href="#pg156">156</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Tasso, <a href="#pg130">130</a>, <a href="#pg131">131</a></li> + + <li>Tauler, <a href="#pg156">156</a></li> + + <li>Teresa v. Avila, <a href="#pg164">164</a></li> + + <li>Theocritus, <a href="#pg016">16</a>, <a href="#pg049">49</a>, + <a href="#pg055">55</a>, <a href="#pg061">61</a>, <a href= + "#pg099">99</a>, <a href="#pg113">113</a>, <a href= + "#pg126">126</a>, <a href="#pg134">134</a>, <a href= + "#pg177">177</a>, <a href="#pg245">245</a></li> + + <li>Theodoric, <a href="#pg051">51</a></li> + + <li>Theodulf, <a href="#pg061">61</a></li> + + <li>Thomson, <a href="#pg222">222</a>, <a href="#pg225">225</a>, + <a href="#pg228">228</a>, <a href="#pg235">235</a>, <a href= + "#pg290">290</a>, <a href="#pg291">291</a></li> + + <li>Tiberius, <a href="#pg018">18</a></li> + + <li>Tibullus, <a href="#pg054">54</a></li> + + <li>Tieck, <a href="#pg197">197</a>, <a href="#pg353">353</a>, + <a href="#pg354">354</a></li> + + <li>Titian, <a href="#pg188">188</a></li> + + <li>Toscanelli, Paolo, <a href="#pg101">101</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Uhland, <a href="#pg089">89</a></li> + + <li>d'Urfé, <a href="#pg196">196</a>, <a href="#pg213">213</a></li> + + <li>Uz, Joh. P., <a href="#pg241">241</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Vasco da Gama, <a href="#pg142">142</a></li> + + <li>Velde, Adrian v. d., <a href="#pg190">190</a>, <a href= + "#pg198">198</a></li> + + <li>Veldegge, H. v., <a href="#pg089">89</a></li> + + <li>Vespucci, <a href="#pg149">149</a></li> + + <li>Virgil, <a href="#pg014">14</a>, <a href="#pg017">17</a>, + <a href="#pg059">59</a>, <a href="#pg060">60</a>, <a href= + "#pg061">61</a>, <a href="#pg132">132</a></li> + + <li>Vischer, <a href="#pg003">3</a>, <a href="#pg004">4</a>, + <a href="#pg013">13</a>, <a href="#pg024">24</a></li> + + <li>Vives, Luis, <a href="#pg157">157</a></li> + + <li>Volkmar, <a href="#pg286">286</a></li> + + <li>Voltaire, <a href="#pg288">288</a></li> + + <li>Voss, <a href="#pg257">257</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Wahlafried, <a href="#pg061">61</a></li> + + <li>Walther v. d. Vogelweide, <a href="#pg092">92</a>, <a href= + "#pg093">93</a>, <a href="#pg177">177</a></li> + + <li>Wandelbert, <a href="#pg062">62</a></li> + + <li>Watteau, <a href="#pg211">211</a>, <a href= + "#pg212">212</a></li> + + <li>Weyden, Roger v. d., <a href="#pg193">193</a></li> + + <li>William of Tours, <a href="#pg068">68</a></li> + + <li>Winckelmann, <a href="#pg349">349</a></li> + + <li>Wolfram v. Eschenbach, <a href="#pg082">82</a>, <a href= + "#pg083">83</a></li> + + <li>Wordsworth, <a href="#pg326">326</a>, <a href= + "#pg327">327</a></li> + + <li>Wyatt, <a href="#pg223">223</a></li> + + <li>Wynant, <a href="#pg197">197</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Young, <a href="#pg232">232</a>, <a href="#pg325">325</a></li> + </ul> + + <ul> + <li>Zesen, P. v., <a href="#pg214">214</a>, <a href= + "#pg219">219</a></li> + + <li>Ziegler, A. v., <a href="#pg215">215</a></li> + + <li>Zimmermann, <a href="#pg286">286</a></li> + + <li>Zweibrücken, A. v., <a href="#pg073">73</a></li> + </ul> + +<br /> +<br /> +<hr class="full" /> +<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND MODERN TIMES***</p> +<p>******* This file should be named 13814-h.txt or 13814-h.zip *******</p> +<p>This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:<br /> +<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/8/1/13814">https://www.gutenberg.org/1/3/8/1/13814</a></p> +<p>Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed.</p> + +<p>Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and +Modern Times + +Author: Alfred Biese + +Release Date: October 20, 2004 [eBook #13814] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR +NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND MODERN TIMES*** + + +E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Leonard Johnson, and the Project +Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team + + + +THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES +AND MODERN TIMES + +by + +ALFRED BIESE + +Director of the K. K. Gymnasium at Neuwied + +Authorized translation from the German + +1905 + + + + + + + +AUTHOR'S PREFACE + + +The encouraging reception of my "Development of the Feeling for +Nature among the Greeks and Romans" gradually decided me, after some +years, to carry the subject on to modern tunes. Enticing as it was, I +did not shut my eyes to the great difficulties of a task whose +dimensions have daunted many a savant since the days of Humboldt's +clever, terse sketches of the feeling for Nature in different times +and peoples. But the subject, once approached, would not let me go. +Its solution seemed only possible from the side of historical +development, not from that of _a priori_ synthesis. The almost +inexhaustible amount of material, especially towards modern times, +has often obliged me to limit myself to typical forerunners of the +various epochs, although, at the same time, I have tried not to lose +the thread of general development. By the addition of the chief +phases of landscape, painting, and garden craft, I have aimed at +giving completeness to the historical picture; but I hold that +literature, especially poetry, as the most intimate medium of a +nation's feelings, is the chief source of information in an enquiry +which may form a contribution, not only to the history of taste, but +also to the comparative history of literature. At a time too when the +natural sciences are so highly developed, and the cult of Nature is +so widespread, a book of this kind may perhaps claim the interest of +that wide circle of educated readers to whom the modern delight in +Nature on its many sides makes appeal. And this the more, since books +are rare which seek to embrace the whole mental development of the +Middle Ages and modern times, and are, at the same time, intended for +and intelligible to all people of cultivation. + +The book has been a work of love, and I hope it will be read with +pleasure, not only by those whose special domain it touches, but by +all who care for the eternal beauties of Nature. To those who know my +earlier papers in the _Preussische Jahrbuecher_, the _Zeitschrift fuer +Vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte_, and the _Litteraturbeilage des +Hamburgischen Correspondents_, I trust this fuller and more connected +treatment of the theme will prove welcome. + +ALFRED BIESE. + + + + +Published Translations of the following Authors have been used: + +SANSCRIT.--Jones, Wilson, Arnold, anonymous translator in a +publication of the Society for Resuscitation of Ancient Literature. + +LATIN AND GREEK.--Lightfoot, Jowett, Farrar, Lodge, Dalrymple, Bigg, +Pilkington, Hodgkin, De Montalembert, Gary, Lok, Murray, Gibb, a +translator in Bonn's Classics. + +ITALIAN.--Gary, Longfellow, Cayley, Robinson, Kelly, Bent, Hoole, +Roscoe, Leigh Hunt, Lofft, Astley, Oliphant. + +GERMAN.--Horton and Bell, Middlemore, Lytton, Swanwick, Dwight, +Boylau, Bowling, Bell, Aytoun, Martin, Oxenford, Morrison, M'Cullum, +Winkworth, Howorth, Taylor, Nind, Brooks, Lloyd, Frothingham, Ewing, +Noel, Austin, Carlyle, Storr, Weston, Phillips. + +SPANISH.--Markham, Major, Bowring, Hasell, M'Carthy, French. + +FRENCH.--Anonymous translator of Rousseau. + +PORTUGUESE.--Aubertin. + +The Translator's thanks are also due to the author for a few +alterations in and additions to the text, and to Miss Edgehill, Miss +Tomlinson, and Dr B. Scheifers for translations from Greek and Latin, +Italian, and Middle German respectively. + + + + +INTRODUCTION + + +Nature in her ever-constant, ever-changing phases is indispensable to +man, his whole existence depends upon her, and she influences him in +manifold ways, in mind as well as body. + +The physical character of a country is reflected in its inhabitants; +the one factor of climate alone gives a very different outlook to +northerner and southerner. But whereas primitive man, to whom the +darkness of night meant anxiety, either feared Nature or worshipped +her with awe, civilised man tries to lift her veil, and through +science and art to understand her inner and outer beauty--the +scientist in her laws, the man of religion in her relation to his +Creator, the artist in reproducing the impressions she makes upon +him. + +Probably it has always been common to healthy minds to take some +pleasure in her; but it needs no slight culture of heart and mind to +grasp her meaning and make it clear to others. Her book lies open +before us, but the interpretations have been many and dissimilar. A +fine statue or a richly-coloured picture appeals to all, but only +knowledge can appreciate it at its true value and discover the full +meaning of the artist. And as with Art, so with Nature. + +For Nature is the greatest artist, though dumb until man, with his +inexplicable power of putting himself in her place, transferring to +her his bodily and mental self, gives her speech. + +Goethe said 'man never understands how anthropomorphic he is.' No +study, however comprehensive, enables him to overstep human limits, +or conceive a concrete being, even the highest, from a wholly +impersonal point of view. His own self always remains an encumbering +factor. In a real sense he only understands himself, and his measure +for all things is man. To understand the world outside him, he must +needs ascribe his own attributes to it, must lend his own being to +find it again. + +This unexplained faculty, or rather inherent necessity, which implies +at once a power and a limit, extends to persons as well as things. +The significant word sympathy expresses it. To feel a friend's grief +is to put oneself in his place, think from his standpoint and in his +mood--that is, suffer with him. The fear and sympathy which condition +the action of tragedy depend upon the same mental process; one's own +point of view is shifted to that of another, and when the two are in +harmony, and only then, the claim of beauty is satisfied, and +aesthetic pleasure results. + +By the well-known expression of Greek philosophy, 'like is only +understood by like,' the Pythagoreans meant that the mathematically +trained mind is the organ by which the mathematically constructed +cosmos is understood. The expression may also serve as an aesthetic +aphorism. The charm of the simplest lyrical song depends upon the +hearer's power to put himself in the mood or situation described by +the poet, on an interplay between subject and object. + +Everything in mental life depends upon this faculty. We observe, +ponder, feel, because a kindred vibration in the object sets our own +fibres in motion. + +'You resemble the mind which you understand.' + +It is a magic bridge from our own mind, making access possible to a +work of art, an electric current conveying the artist's ideas into +our souls. + +We know how a drama or a song can thrill us when our feeling vibrates +with it; and that thrill, Faust tells us, is the best part of man. + +If inventive work in whatever art or science gives the purest kind of +pleasure, Nature herself seeming to work through the artist, rousing +those impulses which come to him as revelations, there is pleasure +also in the passive reception of beauty, especially when we are not +content to remain passive, but trace out and rethink the artist's +thoughts, remaking his work. + +'To invent for oneself is beautiful; but to recognise gladly and +treasure up the happy inventions of others is that less thine?' said +Goethe in his _Jahreszeiten_; and in the _Aphorisms_, confirming what +has just been said: 'We know of no world except in relation to man, +we desire no art but that which is the expression of this relation.' +And, further, 'Look into yourselves and you will find everything, and +rejoice if outside yourselves, as you may say, lies a Nature which +says yea and amen to all that you have found there.' + +Certainly Nature only bestows on man in proportion to his own inner +wealth. As Rueckert says, 'the charm of a landscape lies in this, that +it seems to reflect back that part of one's inner life, of mind, +mood, and feeling, which we have given it.' And Ebers, 'Lay down your +best of heart and mind before eternal Nature; she will repay you a +thousandfold, with full hands.' + +And Vischer remarks, 'Nature at her greatest is not so great that she +can work without man's mind.' Every landscape can be beautiful and +stimulating if human feeling colours it, and it will be most so to +him who brings the richest endowment of heart and mind to bear: +Nature only discloses her whole self to a whole man. + +But it is under the poet's wand above all, that, like the marble at +Pygmalion's breast, she grows warm and breathes and answers to his +charm; as in that symbolic saga, the listening woods and waters and +the creatures followed Orpheus with his lute. Scientific knowledge, +optical, acoustical, meteorological, geological, only widens and +deepens love for her and increases and refines the sense of her +beauty. In short, deep feeling for Nature always proves considerable +culture of heart and mind. + +There is a constant analogy between the growth of this feeling and +that of general culture. + +As each nation and time has its own mode of thought, which is +constantly changing, so each period has its 'landscape eye.' The same +rule applies to individuals. Nature, as Jean Paul said, is made +intelligible to man in being for ever made flesh. We cannot look at +her impersonally, we must needs give her form and soul, in order to +grasp and describe her. + +Vischer says[1] 'it is simply by an act of comparison that we think +we see our own life in inanimate objects.' We say that Nature's +clearness is like clearness of mind, that her darkness and gloom are +like a dark and gloomy mood; then, omitting 'like,' we go on to +ascribe our qualities directly to her, and say, this neighbourhood, +this air, this general tone of colour, is cheerful, melancholy, and +so forth. Here we are prompted by an undeveloped dormant +consciousness which really only compares, while it seems to take one +thing for another. In this way we come to say that a rock projects +boldly, that fire rages furiously over a building, that a summer +evening with flocks going home at sunset is peaceful and idyllic; +that autumn, dripping with rain, its willows sighing in the wind, is +elegiac and melancholy and so forth. + +Perhaps Nature would not prove to be this ready symbol of man's inner +life were there no secret rapport between the two. It is as if, in +some mysterious way, we meet in her another mind, which speaks a +language we know, wakening a foretaste of kinship; and whether the +soul she expresses is one we have lent her, or her own which we have +divined, the relationship is still one of give and take. + +Let us take a rapid survey of the course of this feeling in +antiquity. Pantheism has always been the home of a special tenderness +for Nature, and the poetry of India is full of intimate dealings +between man and plants and animals. + +They are found in the loftiest flights of religious enthusiasm in the +Vedas, where, be it only in reference to the splendour of dawn or the +'golden-handed sun,' Nature is always assumed to be closely connected +with man's inner and outer life. Later on, as Brahminism appeared, +deepening the contemplative side of Hindoo character, and the drama +and historical plays came in, generalities gave way to definite +localizing, and in the Epics ornate descriptions of actual landscape +took independent place. Nature's sympathy with human joys and griefs +was taken for granted, and she played a part of her own in drama. + +In the _Mahabharata_, when Damajanti is wandering in search of her +lost Nala and sees the great mountain top, she asks it for her +prince. + + Oh mountain lord! + Far seen and celebrated hill, that cleav'st + The blue o' the sky, refuge of living things, + Most noble eminence, I worship thee!... + O Mount, whose double ridge stamps on the sky + Yon line, by five-score splendid pinnacles + Indented; tell me, in this gloomy wood + Hast thou seen Nala? Nala, wise and bold! + Ah mountain! why consolest thou me not, + Answering one word to sorrowful, distressed, + Lonely, lost Damajanti? + +And when she comes to the tree Asoka, she implores: + + Ah, lovely tree! that wavest here + Thy crown of countless shining clustering blooms + As thou wert woodland king! Asoka tree! + Tree called the sorrow-ender, heart's-ease tree! + Be what thy name saith; end my sorrow now, + Saying, ah, bright Asoka, thou hast seen + My Prince, my dauntless Nala--seen that lord + Whom Damajanti loves and his foes fear. + +In Maghas' epic, _The Death of Sisupala_, plants and animals lead the +same voluptuous life as the 'deep-bosomed, wide-hipped' girls with +the ardent men. + +'The mountain Raivataka touches the ether with a thousand heads, +earth with a thousand feet, the sun and moon are his eyes. When the +birds are tired and tremble with delight from the caresses of their +mates, he grants them shade from lotos leaves. Who in the world is +not astonished when he has climbed, to see the prince of mountains +who overshadows the ether and far-reaching regions of earth, standing +there with his great projecting crags, while the moon's sickle +trembles on his summit?' + +In Kalidasa's _Urwasi_, the deserted King who is searching for his +wife asks the peacock: + + Oh tell, + If, free on the wing as you soar, + You have seen the loved nymph I deplore-- + You will know her, the fairest of damsels fair, + By her large soft eye and her graceful air; + Bird of the dark blue throat and eye of jet, + Oh tell me, have you seen the lovely face + Of my fair bride--lost in this dreary wilderness? + +and the mountain: + + Say mountain, whose expansive slope confines + The forest verge, oh, tell me hast thou seen + A nymph as beauteous as the bride of love + Mounting with slender frame thy steep ascent, + Or wearied, resting in thy crowning woods? + +As he sits by the side of the stream, he asks whence comes its charm: + + Whilst gazing on the stream, whose new swollen waters + Yet turbid flow, what strange imaginings + Possess my soul and fill it with delight. + The rippling wave is like her aching brow; + The fluttering line of storks, her timid tongue; + The foaming spray, her white loose floating vest; + And this meandering course the current tracks + Her undulating gait. + +Then he sees a creeper without flowers, and a strange attraction +impels him to embrace it, for its likeness to his lost love: + + Vine of the wilderness, behold + A lone heartbroken wretch in me, + Who dreams in his embrace to fold + His love, as wild he clings to thee. + +Thereupon the creeper transforms itself into Urwasi. + +In Kalidasa's _Sakuntala_, too, when the pretty girls are watering +the flowers in the garden, Sakuntala says: 'It is not only in +obedience to our father that I thus employ myself. I really feel the +affection of a sister for these young plants.' Taking it for granted +that the mango tree has the same feeling for herself, she cries: 'Yon +Amra tree, my friends, points with the fingers of its leaves, which +the gale gently agitates, and seems inclined to whisper some secret'; +and with maiden shyness, attributing her own thoughts about love to +the plants, one of her comrades says: 'See, my Sakuntala, how yon +fresh Mallica which you have surnamed Vanadosini or Delight of the +Grove, has chosen the sweet Amra for her bridegroom....' + +'How charming is the season, when the nuptials even of plants are +thus publicly celebrated!'--and elsewhere: + +'Here is a plant, Sakuntala, which you have forgotten.' Sakuntala: +'Then I shall forget myself.' + +Birds,[2] clouds, and waves are messengers of love; all Nature +grieves at the separation of lovers. When Sakuntala is leaving her +forest, one of her friends says: 'Mark the affliction of the forest +itself when the time of your departure approaches! + +'The female antelope browses no more on the collected Cusa grass, and +the pea-hen ceases to dance on the lawn; the very plants of the +grove, whose pale leaves fall on the ground, lose their strength and +their beauty.' + +The poems of India, especially those devoted to descriptions of +Nature, abound in such bold, picturesque personifications, which are +touching, despite their extravagance, through their intense sympathy +with Nature. They shew the Hindoo attitude toward Nature in general, +as well as his boundless fancy. I select one example from 'The +Gathering of the Seasons' in Kalidasa's _Ritusanhare_: a description +of the Rains. + +'Pouring rain in torrents at the request of the thirst-stricken +Chatakas, and emitting slow mutterings pleasing to the ears, clouds, +bent down by the weight of their watery contents, are slowly moving +on.... + +'The rivers being filled up with the muddy water of the rivers, their +force is increased. Therefore, felling down the trees on both the +banks, they, like unchaste women, are going quickly towards the +ocean.... + +'The heat of the forest has been removed by the sprinkling of new +water, and the Ketaka flowers have blossomed. On the branches of +trees being shaken by the wind, it appears that the entire forest is +dancing in delight. On the blossoming of Ketaka flowers it appears +that the forest is smiling. Thinking, "he is our refuge when we are +bent down by the weight of water, the clouds are enlivening with +torrents the mount Vindhya assailed with fierce heat (of the +summer)."' + +Charming pictures and comparisons are numerous, though they have the +exaggeration common to oriental imagination, 'Love was the cause of +my distemper, and love has healed it; as a summer's day, grown black +with clouds, relieves all animals from the heat which itself had +caused.' + +'Should you be removed to the ends of the world, you will be fixed in +this heart, as the shade of a lofty tree remains with it even when +the day is departed.' + +'The tree of my hope which had risen so luxuriantly is broken down.' + +'Removed from the bosom of my father, like a young sandal tree rent +from the hill of Malaja, how shall I exist in a strange soil?' + +This familiar intercourse with Nature stood far as the poles asunder +from the monotheistic attitude of the Hebrew. The individual, it is +true, was nothing in comparison with Brahma, the All-One; but the +divine pervaded and sanctified all things, and so gave them a certain +value; whilst before Jehovah, throned above the world, the whole +universe was but dust and ashes. The Hindoo, wrapt in the +contemplation of Nature, described her at great length and for her +own sake, the Hebrew only for the sake of his Creator. She had no +independent significance for him; he looked at her only 'sub specie +eterni Dei,' in the mirror of the eternal God. Hence he took interest +in her phases only as revelations of his God, noting one after +another only to group them synthetically under the idea of Godhead. +Hence too, despite his profound inwardness--'The heart is deceitful +above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?' +(_Jeremiah_)--human individuality was only expressed in its relation +to Jehovah. + +'The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his +handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth +knowledge.'--_Psalm_ 19. + +'Let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, +and the fulness thereof. + +'Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein; then shall all the +trees of the wood rejoice.'--_Psalm_ 96. + +'Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful +together.'--_Psalm_ 98. + +'The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their +voice; the floods lift up their waves. The Lord on high is mightier +than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the +sea.'--_Psalm_ 93. + +'The sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back. The mountains +skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs.'--_Psalm_ 114. + +'The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee; they were afraid: +the depths also were troubled.'--_Psalm_ 77. + +All these lofty personifications of inanimate Nature only +characterise her in her relation to another, and that not man but +God. Nothing had significance by itself, Nature was but a book in +which to read of Jehovah; and for this reason the Hebrew could not be +wrapt in her, could not seek her for her own sake, she was only a +revelation of the Deity. + +'Lord, how great are thy works, in wisdom hast thou made them all: +the earth is full of thy goodness.' + +Yet there is a fiery glow of enthusiasm in the songs in praise of +Jehovah's wonders in creation. + +'0 Lord my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and +majesty. + +'Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest +out the heavens like a curtain. + +'Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters; who maketh the +clouds his chariot; who walketh upon the wings of the wind. + +'Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire; who +laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for +ever. + +'Thou coveredst the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above +the mountains. + +'At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted +away. + +'They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the +place which thou hast founded for them. + +'Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn +not again to cover the earth. + +'He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills. + +'They give drink to every beast of the field: the wild asses quench +their thirst. + +'By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which +sing among the branches ... + +'He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the +service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth. + +'And wine that maketh glad the heart of man ... + +'The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which +he hath planted. + +'Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees +are her house. + +'The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats, and the rocks for +the conies. + +'He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down. + +'Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the +forest do creep forth. + +'The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God. + +'The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down +in their dens. + +'Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening.... + +'This great and wide sea, wherein are creeping things innumerable, +both small and great beasts.... + +'He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth; he toucheth the hills, +and they smoke. + +'I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to +my God as long as I have my being.'--_Psalm_ 104. + +And what a lofty point of view is shewn by the overpowering words +which Job puts into the mouth of Jehovah; 'Where wast thou when I +laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast +understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof if thou knowest, or +who hath stretched the line upon it? + +'Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the +corner stone thereof? + +'When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God +shouted for joy?... + +'Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the +dayspring to know his place? + +'That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked +might be shaken out of it?... + +'Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea, or hast thou walked +in the search of the deep?... + +'Declare, if thou knowest it all!... + +'Where is the way where light dwelleth, and as for darkness, where is +the place thereof?' etc. + +Compare with this _Isaiah_ xl. verse 12, etc. + +Metaphors too, though poetic and fine, are not individualized. + +'Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy water-spouts: all thy +waves and thy billows are gone over me.'--_Psalm_ 42. + +'Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in +deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, +where the floods overflow me.'--_Psalm_ 69. + +There are many pictures from the animal world; and these are more +elaborate in Job than elsewhere (see _Job_ xl. and xli.). +Personifications, as we have seen, are many, but Nature is only +called upon to sympathise with man in isolated cases, as, for +instance, in 2 _Samuel_ i.: + +'Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be +rain upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the +mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as if he had not been +anointed with oil.' + +The Cosmos unfolded itself to the Hebrew[3] as one great whole, and +the glance fixed upon a distant horizon missed the nearer lying +detail of phenomena. His imagination ranged the universe with the +wings of the wind, and took vivid note of air, sky, sea, and land, +but only, so to speak, in passing; it never rested there, but hurried +past the boundaries of earth to Jehovah's throne, and from that +height looked down upon creation. + +The attitude of the Greek was very different. Standing firmly rooted +in the world of sense, his open mind and his marvellous eye for +beauty appreciated the glorious external world around him down to its +finest detail. His was the race of the beautiful, the first in +history to train all its powers into harmony to produce a culture of +beauty equal in form and contents, and his unique achievement in art +and science enriched all after times with lasting standards of the +great and beautiful. + +The influence of classic literature upon the Middle Ages and modern +times has not only endured, but has gone on increasing with the +centuries; so that we must know the position reached by Greece and +Rome as to feeling for Nature, in order to discover whether the line +of advance in the Middle Ages led directly forward or began by a +backward movement--a zigzag. + +The terms ancient and modern, naive and sentimental, classic and +romantic, have been shibboleths of culture from Jean Paul, Schiller, +and Hegel, to Vischer. Jean Paul, in his _Vorschule zur Aesthetik_, +compares the ideally simple Greek poetry, with its objectivity, +serenity, and moral grace, with the musical poetry of the romantic +period, and speaks of one as the sunlight that pervades our waking +hours, the other as the moonlight that gleams fitfully on our +dreaming ones. Schiller's epoch-making essay _On Naive and +Sentimental Poetry_, with its rough division into the classic-naive +depending on a harmony between nature and mind, and the +modern-sentimental depending on a longing for a lost paradise, is +constantly quoted to shew that the Greeks took no pleasure in Nature. +This is misleading. Schiller's Greek was very limited; in the very +year (1795) in which the essay appeared in _The Hours_, he was asking +Humboldt's advice as to learning Greek, with special reference to +Homer and Xenophon. + +To him Homer was the Greek _par excellence_, and who would not agree +with him to-day? + +As in Greek mythology, that naive poem of Nature, the product of the +artistic impulse of the race to stamp its impressions in a beautiful +and harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in Homer, the +feeling for Nature is profound; but the Homeric hero had no personal +relations with her, no conscious leaning towards her; the +descriptions only served to frame human action, in time or space. + +But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive Homeric +time, was short in spite of Schiller, who, in the very essay referred +to, included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the sentimental, and +Shakespeare among the naive, poets--a fact often overlooked. + +In line with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for +Nature passed through various stages. These can be clearly traced +from objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic +personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions, in which +scenery was brought into harmony or contrast with man's inner life; +until finally, in Hellenism, Nature was treated for her own sake, and +man reduced to the position of supernumerary both in poetry and +also--so approaching the modern--in landscape-painting. + +Greece had her sentimental epoch; she did not, as we have said, long +remain naive. From Sophist days a steady process of decomposition +went on--in other words, a movement towards what we call modern, a +movement which to the classic mind led backward; but from the wider +standpoint of general development meant advance. For the path of +culture is always the same in the nations; it leads first upward and +then downward, and all ripening knowledge, while it enriches the +mind, brings with it some unforeseen loss. Mankind pays heavily for +each new gain; it paid for increased subjectivity and inwardness by a +loss in public spirit and patriotism which, once the most valued of +national possessions, fell away before the increasing individuality, +the germ of the modern spirit. For what is the modern spirit but +limitless individuality? + +The greater the knowledge of self, the richer the inner life. Man +becomes his own chief problem--he begins to watch the lightest +flutter of his own feelings, to grasp and reflect upon them, to look +upon himself in fact as in a mirror; and it is in this doubling of +the ego, so to speak, that sentimentality in the modern sense +consists. It leads to love of solitude, the fittest state for the +growth of a conscious love of Nature, for, as Rousseau said 'all +noble passions are formed in solitude,' 'tis there that one +recognizes one's own heart as 'the rarest and most valuable of all +possessions.' 'Oh, what a fatal gift of Heaven is a feeling heart!' +and elsewhere he said: 'Hearts that are warmed by a divine fire find +a pure delight in their own feelings which is independent of fate and +of the whole world.' Euripides, too, loved solitude, and avoided the +noise of town life by retiring to a grotto at Salamis which he had +arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his +biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He, +rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. +His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible +that I should see myself standing face to face, in which case I +should have wept for the sorrows that we suffer'; and in the chorus +of _The Suppliants_ we have: 'This insatiate joy of mourning leads me +on like as the liquid drop flowing from the sun-trodden rock, ever +increasing of groans.' In Euripides we have the first loosening of +that ingenuous bond between Nature and the human spirit, as the +Sophists laid the axe to the root of the old Hellenic ideas and +beliefs. Subjectivity had already gained in strength from the birth +of the lyric, that most individual of all expressions of feeling; and +since the lyric cannot dispense with the external world, classic song +now shewed the tender subjective feeling for Nature which we see in +Sappho, Pindar, and Simonides. Yet Euripides (and Aristophanes, whose +painful mad laugh, as Doysen says, expresses the same distraction and +despair as the deep melancholy of Euripides) only paved the way for +that sentimental, idyllic feeling for Nature which dwelt on her quiet +charms for their own sake, as in Theocritus, and, like the modern, +rose to greater intensity in the presence of the amorous passion, as +we see in Kallimachos and the Anthology. It was the outcome of +Hellenism, of which sentimental introspection, the freeing of the ego +from the bonds of race and position, and the discovery of the +individual in all directions of human existence, were marks. And this +feeling developing from Homer to Longos, from unreflecting to +conscious and then to sentimental pleasure in Nature, was expressed +not only in poetry but in painting, although the latter never fully +mastered technique. + +The common thoughtless statement, so often supported by quotations +from Schiller, Gervinus, and others, that Greek antiquity was not +alive to the beauty of Nature and her responsiveness to human moods, +and neither painted scenery nor felt the melancholy poetic charm of +ruins and tombs, is therefore a perversion of the truth; but it must +be conceded that the feeling which existed then was but the germ of +our modern one. It was fettered by the specific national beliefs +concerning the world and deities, by the undeveloped state of the +natural sciences, which, except botany, still lay in swaddling-clothes, +by the new influence of Christendom, and by that strict feeling for +style which, very much to its advantage, imposed a moderation that +would have excluded much of our senseless modern rhapsody. + +It was not unnatural that Schiller, in distaste for the weak riot of +feeling and the passion for describing Nature which obtained in his +day, was led to overpraise the Homeric naivete and overblame the +sentimentality which he wrongly identified with it. + +In all that is called art, the Romans were pupils of the Greek, and +their achievements in the region of beauty cannot be compared with +his. But they advanced the course of general culture, and their +feeling--always more subjective, abstract, self-conscious, and +reflective--has a comparatively familiar, because modern, ring in the +great poets. + +The preference for the practical and social-economic is traceable in +their feeling for Nature. Their mythology also lay too much within +the bounds of the intelligible; shewed itself too much in forms and +ceremonies, in a cult; but it had not lost the sense of awe--it still +heard the voices of mysterious powers in the depths of the forest. + +The dramatists wove effective metaphors and descriptions of Nature +into their plays. + +Lucretius laid the foundations of a knowledge of her which refined +both his enjoyment and his descriptions; and the elegiac sentimental +style, which we see developed in Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil, +and Horace, first came to light in the great lyrist Catullus. In +Imperial times feeling for Nature grew with the growth of culture in +general; men turned to her in times of bad cheer, and found comfort +in the great sky spaces, the constant stars, and forests that +trembled with awe of the divine Numen. + +It was so with Seneca, a pantheist through and through. Pliny the +younger was quite modern in his choice of rural solitudes, and his +appreciation of the views from his villa. With Hadrian and Apuleius +the Roman rococo literature began; Apuleius was astonishingly modern, +and Ausonius was almost German in the depth and tenderness of his +feeling for Nature. Garden-culture and landscape-painting shewed the +same movement towards the sympathetic and elegiac-sentimental. + +Those who deny the Roman feeling for Nature might learn better from a +glance at the ruins of their villas. As H. Nissen says in his +_Italische Landeskunde_: + +'It was more than mere fashion which drew the Roman to the sea-side, +and attracted so strongly all those great figures, from the elder +Scipio Africanus and his noble daughter, Cornelia, down to Augustus +and Tiberius and their successors, whenever their powers flagged in +the Forum. There were soft breezes to cool the brow, colour and +outline to refresh the eye, and wide views that appealed to a race +born to extensive lordship. + +'In passing along the desolate, fever-stricken coasts of Latium and +Campania to-day, one comes upon many traces of former splendour, and +one is reminded that the pleasure which the old Romans took in the +sea-side was spoilt for those who came after them by the havoc of the +time.' + +In many points, Roman feeling for Nature was more developed than +Greek. For instance, the Romans appreciated landscape as a whole, and +distance, light and shade in wood and water, reflections, the charms +of hunting and rowing, day-dreams on a mountain side, and so forth. + +That antiquity and the Middle Ages had any taste for romantic scenery +has been energetically denied; but we can find a trace of it. The +landscape which the Roman admired was level, graceful, and gentle; he +certainly did not see any beauty in the Alps. Livy's 'Foeditas +Alpinum' and the dreadful descriptions of Ammian, with others, are +the much-quoted vouchers for this. Nor is it surprising; for modern +appreciation, still in its youth, is really due to increased +knowledge about Nature, to a change of feeling, and to the +conveniences of modern travelling, unknown 2000 years ago. + +The dangers and hardships of those days must have put enjoyment out +of the question; and only served to heighten the unfavourable +contrast between the wildness of the mountain regions and the +cultivation of Italy. + +Lucretius looked at wild scenery with horror, but later on it became +a favourite subject for description; and Seneca notes, as shewing a +morbid state of mind, in his essay on tranquillity of mind, that +travelling not only attracts men to delightful places, but that some +even exclaim: 'Let us go now into Campania; now that delicate soil +delighteth us, let us visit the wood countries, let us visit the +forest of Calabria, and let us seek some pleasure amidst the deserts, +in such sort as these wandering eyes of ours may be relieved in +beholding, at our pleasure, the strange solitude of these savage +places.' + +We have thus briefly surveyed on the one hand, in theory, the +conditions under which a conscious feeling for Nature develops, and +the forms in which it expresses itself; and, on the other, the course +this feeling has followed in antiquity among the Hindoos, Hebrews, +Greeks, and Romans. The movement toward the modern, toward the +subjective and individual, lies clear to view. We will now trace its +gradual development along lines which are always strictly analogous +to those of culture in general, through the Middle Ages. + + + + +CHAPTER I + +CHRISTIANITY AND GERMANISM + + +When the heathen world had outlived its faculties, and its creative +power had failed, it sank into the ocean of the past--a sphinx, with +her riddle guessed,--and mediaeval civilization arose, founded upon +Christianity and Germanism. There are times in the world's history +when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept away and all +things made new at a stroke, as if by the world-consuming fire of the +old Saga. But, in reality, all change is gradual; the old is for ever +failing and passing out of sight, to be taken up as a ferment into +the ever emerging new, which changes and remodels as it will. It was +so with Christianity. It is easy to imagine that it arose suddenly, +like a phoenix, from the ashes of heathendom; but, although dependent +at heart upon the sublime personality of its Founder, it was none the +less a product of its age, and a result of gradual development--a +river with sources partly in Judea, partly in Hellas. And mediaeval +Christianity never denied the traces of its double origin. + +Upon this syncretic soil its literature sprang up, moulded as to +matter upon Old Testament and specifically Christian models, as to +form upon the great writers of antiquity; but matter and form are +only separable in the abstract, and the Middle Ages are woven through +and through with both Greco-Roman and Jewish elements. + +But these elements were unfavourable to the development of feeling +for Nature; Judaism admitted no delight in her for her own sake, and +Christianity intensified the Judaic opposition between God and the +world, Creator and created. + +'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; if any +man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him': by which +John meant, raise your eyes to your Heavenly Father, throned above +the clouds. + +Christianity in its stringent form was transcendental, despising the +world and renouncing its pleasures. It held that Creation, through +the entrance of sin, had become a caricature, and that earthly +existence had only the very limited value of a thoroughfare to the +eternal Kingdom. + +While joy in existence characterized the Hellenic world until its +downfall, and the Greek took life serenely, delighting in its smooth +flow; with Christianity, as Jean Paul put it, 'all the present of +earth vanished into the future of Heaven, and the Kingdom of the +Infinite arose upon the ruins of the finite.' + +The beauty of earth was looked upon as an enchantment of the devil; +and sin, the worm in the fruit, lurked in its alluring forms. + +Classic mythology created a world of its own, dimly veiled by the +visible one; every phase of Nature shewed the presence or action of +deities with whom man had intimate relations; every form of life, +animated by them, held something familiar to him, even sacred--his +landscape was absorbed by the gods. + +To Judaism and Christianity, Nature was a fallen angel, separated as +far as possible from her God. They only recognized one world--that of +spirit; and one sphere of the spiritual, religion--the relation +between God and man. Material things were a delusion of Satan's; the +heaven on which their eyes were fixed was a very distant one. + +The Hellenic belief in deities was pandemonistic and cosmic; +Christianity, in its original tendency, anti-cosmic and hostile to +Nature. And Nature, like the world at large, only existed for it in +relation to its Creator, and was no longer 'the great mother of all +things,' but merely an instrument in the hands of Providence. + +The Greek looked at phenomena in detail, in their inexhaustible +variety, rarely at things as a whole; the Christian considered Nature +as a work of God, full of wonderful order, in which detail had only +the importance of a link in a chain. + +As Lotze says, 'The creative artistic impulse could be of no use to a +conception of life in which nothing retained independent +significance, but everything referred to or symbolized something +else.' But yet, the idea of individuality, of the importance of the +ego, gained ground as never before through this introspection and +merging of material in spiritual, this giving spirit the exclusive +sway; and Christianity, while it broke down the barriers of nation, +race, and position, and widened the cleft between Nature and spirit, +discovered at the same time the worth of the individual. + +And this individuality was one of the chief steps towards an +artistic, that is, individual point of view about Nature, for it was +not possible to consider her freely and for her own sake alone, until +the unlimited independence of mind had been recognized. + +But the full development of Christianity was only reached when it +blended with the Germanic spirit, with the German Gemueth (for which +no other language has a word), and intensified, by so doing, the +innately subjective temperament of the race. + +The northern climate gives pause for the development of the inner +life; its long bleak winter, with the heavy atmosphere and slow +coming of spring, wake a craving for light and warmth, and throw man +back on himself. This inward inclination, which made itself felt very +early in the German race, by bringing out the contemplative and +independent sides of his character, and so disinclining him for +combined action with his fellows, forwarded the growth of the +over-ripe seeds of classic culture and vital Christianity. + +The Romanic nations, with their brilliant, sharply-defined landscape +and serene skies, always retained something of the objective delight +in life which belonged to antiquity; they never felt that mysterious +impulse towards dreams and enthusiastic longing which the Northerner +draws from his lowering skies and dark woods, his mists on level and +height, the grey in grey of his atmosphere, and his ever varying +landscape. A raw climate drives man indoors in mind as well as body, +and prompts that craving for spring and delight in its coming which +have been the chief notes in northern feeling for Nature from +earliest times. + +Vischer has shewn in his _Aesthetik_, that German feeling was early +influenced by the different forms of plant life around it. Rigid +pine, delicate birch, stalwart oak, each had its effect; and the +wildness and roughness of land, sea, and animal life in the North +combined with the cold of the climate to create the taste for +domestic comfort, for fireside dreams, and thought-weaving by the +hearth. + +Nature schooled the race to hard work and scanty pleasure, and yet +its relationship to her was deep and heartfelt from the first. +Devoutly religious, it gazed at her with mingled love and fear; and +the deposit of its ideas about her was its mythology. + +Its gods dwelt in mountain tops, holes in the rocks, and rivers, and +especially in dark forests and in the leafy boughs of sacred trees; +and the howling of wind, the rustle of leaves, the soughing in the +tree tops, were sounds of their presence. The worship of woods lasted +far into Christian times, especially among the Saxons and +Frisians.[1] + +Wodan was the all-powerful father of gods and men--the highest god, +who, as among all the Aryan nations, represented Heaven. Light was +his shining helmet, clouds were the dark cap he put on when he spread +rain over the earth, or crashed through the air as a wild hunter with +his raging pack. His son Donar shewed himself in thunder and +lightning, as he rode with swinging axe on his goat-spanned car. +Mountains were sacred to both, as plants to Ziu. Freyr and Freya were +goddesses of fertility, love, and spring; a ram was sacred to them, +whose golden fleece illuminated night as well as day, and who drew +their car with a horse's speed.[2] As with Freya, an image of the +goddess Nerthus was drawn through the land in spring, to announce +peace and fertility to mortals. + +The suggestive myth of Baldur, god of light and spring, killed by +blind Hoedur, was the expression of general grief at the passing of +beauty. + +The _Edda_ has a touching picture of the sorrow of Nature, of her +trees and plants, when the one beloved of all living things fell, +pierced by an arrow. Holda was first the mild and gracious goddess, +then a divine being, encompassing the earth. She might be seen in +morning hours by her favourite haunts of lake and spring, a beautiful +white woman, who bathed and vanished. When snow fell, she was making +her bed, and the feathers flew. Agriculture and domestic order were +under her care. + +Ostara was goddess of bright dawn, of rising light, and awakening +spring, as Hel of subterranean night, the darkness of the underworld. +Frigg, wife of the highest god, knew the story of existence, and +protected marriage. She was the Northern Juno or Hera. + +Ravines and hollows in the mountains were the dwelling-places of the +dwarfs (Erdmaennlein), sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly to +man; now peaceful and helpful, now impish spirits of mischief in +cloud caps and grey coats, thievish and jolly. + +They were visible by moonlight, dancing in the fields; and when their +track was found in the dew,[3] a good harvest was expected. Popular +belief took the floating autumn cobwebs for the work of elves and +fairies. The spirits of mountain and wood were related to the +water-spirits, nixies who sat combing their long hair in the sun, or +stretched up lovely arms out of the water. The elves belonged to the +more spiritual side of Nature, the giants to the grosser. Rocks and +stones were the weapons of the giants; they removed mountains and +hills, and boulders were pebbles shaken out of their shoes. + +Among animals the horse was sacred to many deities, and gods and +goddesses readily transformed themselves into birds. Two ravens, +Hugin and Munin, whose names signify thought and memory, were Odin's +constant companions. The gift of prophecy was ascribed to the cuckoo, +as its monotonous voice heralded the spring: + + Kukuk vam haven, wo lange sail ik leven? + +There were many legends of men and snakes who exchanged shapes, and +whom it was unlucky to kill.[4] + +The sun and moon, too, were familiar figures in legends. + +Their movement across the sky was a flight from two pursuing wolves, +of which one, the Fenris wolf, was fated one day to catch and devour +the moon. The German, like the Greek, dreaded nothing more than the +eclipse of sun or moon, and connected it with the destruction of all +things and the end of the world. In the moon spots he saw a human +form carrying a hare or a stick or an axe on his shoulder. + +The Solstices impressed him most of all, with their almost constant +day in summer, almost constant night in winter. Sun, moon, and stars +were the eyes of heaven; there was a pious custom to greet the stars +before going to bed. Still earlier, they were sparks of fire from +Muspilli, to light the gods home. Night, day, and the sun had their +cars--night and day with one horse, the sun with two: sunrise brought +sounds sweeter than the song of birds or strings; the rising sun, it +was said, rings for joy, murmuring daybreak laughs.[5] + +Day brought joy, night sorrow; the first was good and friendly, the +second bad and hostile. The birds greeted daytime and summer with +songs of delight, but grieved in silence through night and winter: +the first swallow and stork were hailed as spring's messengers. May +with greening woods led in beloved summer, frost and snow the winter. + +So myth, fable, and legend were interlaced in confusion; who can +separate the threads? + +At any rate, the point of view which they indicate remained the +common one even far into the Middle Ages, and shewed simple familiar +intercourse with Nature. Even legal formulae were full of pictures +from Nature. In the customary oath to render a contract binding, the +promise is to hold, so it runs, 'so long as the sun shines and rivers +flow, so long as the wind blows and birds sing, so far off as earth +is green and fir trees grow, so far as the vault of heaven reaches.' +As Schnaase says,[6] though with some exaggeration, such formulae, in +their summary survey of earth and sky, often give a complete +landscape poem in a few words. He points out that in northern, as +opposed to classic mythology, Nature was considered, not in the +cursory Hebrew way, that hurried over or missed detail, but as a +whole, and in her relation to man's inner life. + +'The collective picture of heaven and earth, of cloud movement, of +the mute life of plants--that side of Nature which had almost escaped +the eye of antiquity--occupied the Northerner most of all. + +'The _Edda_ even represents all Nature together in one colossal +form--the form of the giant Ymir, whom the sons of Boer slew, in +order to make the mountains from his bones, the earth from his flesh, +the skies from his skull.' + +A still grander mythical synthesis was the representation of the +whole world under the form of the sacred ash tree Yggdrasil. This was +the world tree which united heaven, earth, and hell. Its branches +stretched across the world and reached up to the skies, and its roots +spread in different directions--one toward the race of Asa in heaven, +another toward the Hrimthursen, the third toward the underworld; and +on both roots and branches creatures lived and played--eagle, +squirrel, stag, and snake; while by the murmuring Urdhar stream, +which rippled over one root, the Nones sat in judgment with the race +of Asa. + +Not less significant was the conception of the end of the world, the +twilight of the gods (Goetterdaemmerung), according to which all the +wicked powers broke loose and fought against the gods; the sun and +moon were devoured by wolves, the stars fell and earth quaked, the +monster world-serpent Joermungande, in giant rage, reared himself out +of the water and came to land: Loki led the Hrimthursen and the +retinue of hell, and Surt, with his shining hair, rode away from the +flaming earth across Bifroest, the rainbow, which broke beneath him. + +After the world conflagration a new and better earth arose, with +rejuvenated gods.[7] + +German mediaeval poetry, as a whole, epic and lyric, was interwoven +with a hazy network of suggestive myth and legend; and moral +elements, which in mythology were hidden by the prominence of Nature, +stood out clear to view in the fate and character of the heroes. The +germ of many of our fairy tales is a bit of purest poetry of +Nature--a genuine Nature myth transferred to human affairs, which lay +nearer to the child-like popular mind, and were therefore more +readily understood by it. + +So, for instance, from the Maiden of the Shield, Sigrdrifa, who was +pierced by Odin's sleep thorn, and who originally represented the +earth, frozen in winter, kissed awake by the sun-god, came Brunhild, +whose mail Siegfried's sword penetrated as the sun rays penetrate the +frost, and lastly the King's daughter, who pricked herself with the +fateful spindle, and sank into deep sleep. And as Sigrdrifa was +surrounded by walls of flame, so now we have a thorny hedge of wild +briar round the beautiful maiden (hence named Dornroeschen) when the +lucky prince comes to waken her with a kiss.[8] + +Not all fairy tales have preserved the myth into Christian times in +so poetic and transparent a form as this. Its poetic germ arose from +hidden depths of myth and legend, and, like heathen superstitions in +the first centuries of Christianity, found its most fruitful soil +among the people. It has often been disguised beyond recognition by +legends, and by the worship of the Madonna and saints, but it has +never been destroyed, and it keeps its magic to the present day. + +We see then that the inborn German feeling for Nature, conditioned by +climate and landscape, and pronounced in his mythology, found both an +obstacle and a support in Christianity--an obstacle in its +transcendentalism, and a support in its inwardness. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE THEOLOGICAL CHRISTIAN AND THE SYMPATHETIC +HEATHEN FEELING OF THE FIRST TEN CENTURIES A.D. + + +The Middle Ages employed its best intellectual power in solving the +problems of man's relation to God and the Redeemer, his moral +vocation, and his claim to the Kingdom of the blessed. Mind and heart +were almost entirely engrossed by the dogmas of the new faith, such +as the incarnation, original sin, and free-will, and by doubts which +the Old Testament had raised and not solved. Life was looked upon as +a test-place, a thoroughfare to the heavenly Kingdom; earth, with its +beauty and its appeal to the senses, as a temptress. + +To flee the world and to lack artistic feeling were therefore marks +of the period. We have no trace of scientific knowledge applied to +Nature, and she was treated with increasing contempt, as the +influence of antiquity died out. In spite of this, the attitude of +the Apostolic Fathers was very far from hostile. Their fundamental +idea was the Psalmist's 'Lord, how great are Thy works; in wisdom +hast Thou made them all!' and yet they turned to Nature--at any rate, +the noblest Grecians among them--not only for proof of divine wisdom +and goodness, but with a degree of personal inclination, an +enthusiasm, to which antiquity was a stranger. + +Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians: + +'Let us note how free from anger He is towards all His creatures. The +heavens are moved by His direction and obey Him in peace. Day and +night accomplish the course assigned to them by Him, without +hindrance one to another. The sun and the moon and the dancing stars, +according to His appointment, circle in harmony within the bounds +assigned to them, without any swerving aside. The earth, bearing +fruit in fulfilment of His will at her proper seasons, putteth forth +the food that supplieth abundantly both men and beasts and all living +things which are thereupon, making no dissension, neither altering +anything which He hath decreed. Moreover, the inscrutable depths of +the abysses and unutterable statutes of the nether regions are +constrained by the same ordinances. The basin of the boundless sea, +gathered together by His workmanship into its reservoirs, passeth not +the barriers wherewith it is surrounded; but even as He ordered it, +so it doeth. For He said, "so far shalt thou come, and thy waves +shall be broken within thee." The ocean which is impassable for men, +and the worlds beyond it, are directed by the same ordinances of the +Master. The seasons of spring and summer and autumn and winter give +way in succession one to another in peace. The winds in their several +quarters at their proper seasons fulfil their ministry without +disturbance, and the overflowing fountains, created for enjoyment and +health, without fail give their breasts which sustain the life for +men. Yea, the smallest of living things come together in concord and +peace.'[1] + +The three great Cappadocians, the most representative of the Greek +Fathers and leaders of the fourth century, wrote about the scenery +round them in a tone of sentimentality not less astonishing, in view +of the prejudice which denies all feeling for Nature to the Middle +Ages, than their broad humanity and free handling of dogma. + +It was no ascetic renouncing the world and solitude[2]; but rather a +sensitive man, thoughtful and dreamy at once, who wrote as follows +(Basil the Great to Gregory Nazianzen): + + It is a lofty mountain overshadowed with a deep wood, irrigated + on the north by cold and transparent streams. At its foot is + spread a low plain, enriched perpetually with the streams from + the mountains. The wood, a virgin forest of trees of various + kinds and foliage which grows around it, almost serves it as a + rampart; so that even the Isle of Calypso, which Homer evidently + admired as a paragon of loveliness, is nothing in comparison with + this. For indeed it is very nearly an island, from its being + enclosed on all sides with rocky boundaries. On two sides of it + are deep and precipitous ravines, and on another side the river + flowing from the steep is itself a continuous and almost + impassable barrier. The mountain range, with its moon-shaped + windings, walls off the accessible parts of the plain. There is + but one entrance, of which we are the masters. My hut is built on + another point, which uplifts a lofty pinnacle on the summit, so + that this plain is outspread before the gaze, and from the height + I can catch a glimpse of the river flowing round, which to my + fancy affords no less delight than the view of the Strymore as + you look from Amphipolis. For the Strymore broadens into lakes + with its more tranquil stream, and is so sluggish as almost to + forfeit the character of a river. The Iris, on the other hand, + flowing with a swifter course than any river I know, for a short + space billows along the adjacent rock, and then, plunging over + it, rolls into a deep whirlpool, affording a most delightful view + to me and to every spectator, and abundantly supplying the needs + of the inhabitants, for it nurtures an incredible number of + fishes in its eddies. + + Why need I tell you of the sweet exhalations from the earth or + the breezes from the river? Other persons might admire the + multitude of the flowers, or of the lyric birds, but I have no + time to attend to them. But my highest eulogy of the spot is, + that, prolific as it is of all kinds of fruits from its happy + situation, it bears for me the sweetest of all fruits, + tranquillity; not only because it is free from the noises of + cities, but because it is not traversed by a single visitor + except the hunters, who occasionally join us. For, besides its + other advantages, it also produces animals--not bears and wolves, + like yours--heaven forbid! But it feeds herds of stags, and of + wild goats and hares, and creatures of that kind. Do you not then + observe what a narrow risk I ran, fool that I was, to change such + a spot for Tiberine, the depth of the habitable world? I am now + hastening to it, pardon me. For even Alcmaeon, when he discovered + the Echinades, no longer endured his wanderings.[3] + +This highly-cultured prince of the Church clearly valued the place +quite as much for its repose, its idyllic solitude, for what we +moderns would call its romantic surroundings, sylvan and rugged at +once, as for its fertility and practical uses. But it is too much to +say, with Humboldt[4]: + + In this simple description of scenery and forest life, feelings + are expressed which are more intimately in unison with those of + modern tunes, than anything which has been transmitted to us from + Greek or Roman antiquity. From the lonely Alpine hut to which + Basil withdrew, the eye wanders over the humid and leafy roof of + the forest below.... The poetic and mythical allusion at the + close of the letter falls on the Christian ear like an echo from + another and earlier world. + +The Hellenic poets of the Anthology, and the younger Pliny in +Imperial days, held the same tone, elegiac and idyllic[5]; as +Villemain says, 'These pleasant pictures, these poetic allusions, do +not shew the austerity of the cloister.'[6] The specifically +Christian and monastic was hidden by the purely human. + +Other writings of Basil's express still more strongly the mild +dejection which longs for solitude. For instance, when Gregory had +been dwelling upon the emptiness of all earthly things, he said in +reply, that peace of soul must be man's chief aim, and could only be +attained by separation from the world, by solitude; 'for the +contemplation of Nature abates the fever of the soul, and banishes +all insincerity and presumption.' Therefore he loved the quiet corner +where he was undisturbed by human intercourse. + +He drew melancholy comparisons from Nature: men were compared to +wandering clouds that dissolve into nothing, to wavering shadows, and +shipwrecked beings, etc. + +His homilies on the Hexameron, too, shew thought of Nature. There is +a fine sense for the play of colour on the sea here: 'A pleasant +sight is the glistening sea when a settled calm doth hold it; but +pleasant too it is to behold its surface ruffled by gentle breezes, +and its colour now purple, now white, now dark; when it dasheth not +with violence against the neighbouring coast, but holdeth it in +tranquil embrace.'[7] + +There is enthusiastic admiration for Nature mixed with his profound +religious feeling in the whole description of the stars, the seasons, +etc. The expression of Ptolymaeos, that when he gazed at the stars he +felt himself raised to the table of Zeus, is weak in comparison with +Basil's words, 'If, on a clear night, you have fixed your gaze upon +the beauty of the stars, and then suddenly turned to thoughts of the +artist of the universe, whoever he be, who has adorned the sky so +wonderfully with these undying flowers, and has so planned it that +the beauty of the spectacle is not less than its conformity to +law....if the finite and perishable world is so beautiful, what must +the infinite and invisible be?'[8] + +For him, as for modern minds, starlight brought thoughts of eternity: +'If the greatness of the sky is beyond human comprehension, what +mind, what understanding could fathom eternal things?' + +Gregory Nazianzen's feeling for Nature was intensely melancholy. His +poem _On Human Nature_ says: + + For yesterday, worn out with my grief alone, I sat apart in a + shady grove, gnawing my heart out. For somehow I love this remedy + in time of grief, to talk with mine own heart in silence. And the + breezes whispered to the note of the songster birds, and from the + branches brought to me sweet slumber, though my heart was + well-nigh broken. And the cicadas, friends of the sun, chirped + with the shrill note that issues from their breasts, and filled + the whole grove with sound. A cold spring hard by bedewed my feet + as it flowed gently through the glen; but I was held in the + strong grip of grief, nor did I seek aught of these things, for + the mind, when it is burdened with sorrow, is not fain to take + part in pleasure. + +The classic writers had also contrasted Nature with mind, as, for +example, Ibykos in his famous _Spring Song_[9]; but not with +Gregory's brooding melancholy and self-tormenting introspection. The +poem goes on to compare him to a cloud that wanders hither and +thither in darkness, without even a visible outline of that for which +he longed; without peace: + + I am a stream of troubled water: ever onward I move, nor hath any + part of me rest; thou wilt not a second time pass over that + stream thou didst before pass over, nor wilt thou see a second + time the man thou sawest before. + +In his dreamy enthusiasm he likes nothing better than solitude: +'Happy he who leads a lonely life, happy he who with the mighty force +of a pure mind seeth the glory of the lights of heaven.' + +The same tone constantly recurs in his writings. Human life is but +dust, blown by the wind; a stormy voyage, faded grass; kingdoms and +powers are waves of the sea, which suck under and drown; a charming +girl is a rose with thorns, etc. + +Gregory of Nyssa again praises the order and splendour of Nature and +her Creator in Old Testament style: 'Seeing the harmony of the whole, +of wonders in heaven and in earth, and how the elements of things, +though mutually opposed, are all by Nature welded together, and make +for one aim through a certain indefinable intercommunion.' + +With the pathos of Job he cries: + + Who has spread out the ground at my feet? + Who has made the sky firm over me as a dome? + Who carries the sun as a torch before me? + Who sends springs into the ravines? + Who prepares the path of the waters? + + And who gives my spirit the wing for that high flight in which I + leave earth behind and hasten through the wide ocean of air, know + the beauty of the ether, and lift myself to the stars and observe + all their splendour, and, not staying there, but passing beyond + the limits of mutable things, comprehend unchangeable Nature--the + immutable Power which is based upon itself, and leads and + supports all that exists? + +This, with its markedly poetic swing, is surprisingly like the +passage in Plato's _Phaedo_, where Socrates says: 'If any man could +arrive at the exterior limit or take the wings of a bird and come to +the top, then, like a fish who puts his head out of the water and +sees this world, he would see a world beyond; and if the nature of +man could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this other +world was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the +true earth.' But even the thought, that the order and splendour of +Nature witnessed to the eternal powers which had created her, was not +strange to the Greek, as Aristotle proves in the remarks which Cicero +preserved to us in his treatise _On the Nature of the Gods_. + +Well then did Aristotle observe: 'If there were men whose habitations +had been always underground, in great and commodious houses, adorned +with statues and pictures, finished with everything which they who +are reputed happy abound with, and if, without stirring from thence, +they should be informed of a certain divine power and majesty, and +after some time the earth should open, and they should quit their +dark abode to come to us, where they should immediately behold the +earth, the seas, the heavens, should consider the vast extent of the +clouds and force of the winds, should see the sun, and observe his +grandeur and beauty, and also his generative power, inasmuch as day +is occasioned by the diffusion of his light through the sky, and when +night has obscured the earth, they should contemplate the heavens +bespangled and adorned with stars, the surprising variety of the moon +in her increase and wane, the rising and setting of all the stars and +the inviolable regularity of all their courses; when,' says he, 'they +should see these things, they would undoubtedly conclude that there +are gods, and that these are their mighty works.' + +Thus unconsciously the Greek Fathers of the Church took over the +thoughts of the great classic philosophers, only substituting a unity +for a plurality of godhead. To soar upon the wings of bird, wind, or +cloud, a _motif_ which we find here in Gregory of Nyssa, and which +reached its finest expression in Ganymede and the evening scene in +Faust, had reached a very modern degree of development in +antiquity.[10] + +Gregory of Nyssa was still more sentimental and plaintive than Basil +and Gregory Nazianzen: + + When I see every ledge of rock, every valley and plain, covered + with new-born verdure, the varied beauty of the trees, and the + lilies at my feet decked by Nature with the double charms of + perfume and of colour, when in the distance I see the ocean, + towards which the clouds are onward borne, my spirit is + overpowered by a sadness not wholly devoid of enjoyment. When in + autumn the fruits have passed away, the leaves have fallen, and + the branches of the trees, dried and shrivelled, are robbed of + their leafy adornments, we are instinctively led, amid the + everlasting and regular change in Nature, to feel the harmony of + the wondrous powers pervading all things. He who contemplates + them with the eye of the soul, feels the littleness of man amid + the greatness of the universe. + +Are not these thoughts, which Humboldt rightly strings together, +highly significant and modern? Especially in view of the opinion +which Du Bois Reymond, for example, expresses: 'In antiquity, +mediaeval times, and in later literature up to the last century, one +seeks in vain for the expression of what we call a feeling for +Nature.'[11] + +Might not Werther have written them? They have all his sentimental +melancholy, coupled with that 'delight of sorrow' which owes its name +(Wonne der Wehmuth) to Goethe, although its meaning was known to +Euripides. + +Yet it was only in rare cases, such as Seneca and Aristotle, that +classic writers combined such appreciation of Nature's individual +traits with that lofty view of the universe which elevates and +humbles at once. + +Gregory shewed the blending of Christian with classic feeling; and +the deepening of the inner life through the new faith is quite as +clear in patristic writings as their close relationship to the +classic. + +But the thinkers and poets of the Middle Ages did not always see +Nature under the brilliant light of Hellenic influence; there were +wide spaces of time in which monkish asceticism held sway, and she +was treated with most unscientific contempt. For the development of +feeling did not proceed in one unswerving line, but was subject to +backward movements. The rosy afterglow of the classic world was upon +these Greek Fathers; but at the same time they suffered from the +sorrowfulness of the new religion, which held so many sad and +pessimistic elements. + +The classic spirit seemed to shudder before the eternity of the +individual, before the unfathomable depths which opened up for +mankind with this religion of the soul, which can find no rest in +itself, no peace in the world, unless it be at one with God in +self-forgetting devotion and surrender. + +Solitude, to which all the deeper minds at this time paid homage, +became the mother of new and great thoughts, and of a view of the +world little behind the modern in sentimentality. + +What Villemain says of the quotation from Gregory Nazianzen just +given, applies with equal force to the others: + + No doubt there is a singular charm in this mixture of abstract + thoughts and emotions, this contrast between the beauties of + Nature and the unrest of a heart tormented by the enigma of + existence and seeking to find rest in faith.... It was not the + poetry of Homer, it was another poetry.... It was in the new form + of contemplative poetry, in this sadness of man about himself, in + these impulses towards God and the future, in this idealism so + little known by the poets of antiquity, that the Christian + imagination could compete without disadvantage. It was there that + that poetry arose which modern satiety seeks for, the poetry of + reverie and reflection, which penetrates man's heart and + deciphers his most intimate thoughts and vaguest wishes. + +Contempt for art was a characteristic of the Fathers of the Church, +and to that end they extolled Nature; man's handiwork, however +dazzling, was but vanity in their eyes, whereas Nature was the +handiwork of the Creator. Culture and Nature were purposely set in +opposition to each other.[12] St Chrysostom wrote: + + If the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would lead + thy spirit astray, look upwards to the vault of heaven, and + around thee on the open fields, in which herds graze by the + water's side. Who does not despise all the creations of art, when + in the stillness of his soul he watches with admiration the + rising of the sun, as it pours its golden light over the face of + the earth; when resting on the thick grass beside the murmuring + spring, or beneath the sombre shade of a thick and leafy tree, + the eye rests on the far receding and hazy distance? + +The visible to them was but a mirror of the invisible; as Paul says +(13th of the 1st Corinthians): 'Here we see in a glass darkly,' and +Goethe: 'Everything transitory is but a similitude.' + + God (says St Chrysostom again) has placed man in the world as in + a royal palace gleaming with gold and precious stones; but the + wonderful thing about this palace is, that it is not made of + stone, but of far costlier material; he has not lighted up a + golden candelabra, but given lights their fixed course in the + roof of the palace, where they are not only useful to us, but an + object of great delight.[13] + +The Roman secular writers of the first Christian centuries had not +this depth of thought and sadness; but from them too we have notable +descriptions of Nature in which personal pleasure and sympathy are +evident motives as well as religious feeling. + +In the little _Octavius_ of Minucius Felix, a writing full of genuine +human feeling of the time of Commodus, the mixture of the heathen +culture and opinions of antiquity with the Christian way of thinking +has a very modern ring. The scenery is finely sketched. + + The heats of summer being over, autumn began to be temperate ... + we (two friends, a heathen and a Christian) agreed to go to the + delightful city of Ostia.... As, at break of day, we were + proceeding along the banks of the Tiber towards the sea, that the + soft breeze might invigorate our limbs, and that we might enjoy + the pleasure of feeling the beach gently subside under our + footsteps, Caecilius observed an image of Serapis, and having + raised his hands to his lips, after the wont of the superstitious + vulgar, he kissed it.... Then Octavius said: 'It is not the part + of a good man, brother Marcus, thus to leave an intimate + companion and friend amidst blind popular ignorance, and to + suffer him, in such open daylight, to stumble against stones,' + etc.... Discoursing after this sort, we traversed the space + between Ostia and the sea, and arrived at the open coast. There + the gentle surges had smoothed the outermost sands like a + pleasure walk, and as the sea, although the winds blow not, is + ever unquiet, it came forward to the shore, not hoary and + foaming, but with waves gently swelling and curled. On this + occasion we were agreeably amused by the varieties of its + appearance, for, as we stood on the margin and dipped the soles + of our feet in the water, the wave alternately struck at us, and + then receding, and sliding away, seemed to swallow up itself. We + saw some boys eagerly engaged in the game of throwing shells in + the sea.... Caecilius said: 'All things ebb into the fountain from + which they spring, and return back to their original without + contriver, author, or supreme arbiter ... showers fall, winds + blow, thunder bellows, and lightnings flash ... but they have no + aim.' Octavius answers: 'Behold the heaven itself, how wide it is + stretched out, and with what rapidity its revolutions are + performed, whether in the night when studded with stars, or in + the daytime when the sun ranges over it, and then you will learn + with what a wonderful and divine hand the balance is held by the + Supreme Moderator of all things; see how the circuit made by the + sun produces the year, and how the moon, in her increase, wanes + and changes, drives the months around.... Observe the sea, it is + bound by a law that the shore imposes; the variety of trees, how + each of them is enlivened from the bowels of the earth! Behold + the ocean, it ebbs and flows alternately. Look at the springs, + they trickle with a perpetual flow; at rivers, they hold on their + course in quick and continued motion. Why should I speak of the + ridges of mountains, aptly disposed? of the gentle slope of + hills, or of plains widely extended?... In this mansion of the + world, when you fully consider the heaven and the earth, and that + providence, order, and government visible in them, assure + yourself that there is indeed a Lord and Parent of the whole ... + do not enquire for the name of God--God is his name.... If I + should call Him Father, you would imagine Him earthly; if King, + carnal; and if Lord, mortal. Remove all epithets, and then you + will be sensible of His glory....' + +How like Faust's confession of faith to Gretchen: + + Him who dare name + And yet proclaim, + Yes! I believe... + The All-embracer, + All-sustainer, + Doth he not embrace, sustain, + Thee, me, Himself? + Lifts not the Heaven its dome above? + Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us rise?... + And beaming tenderly with looks of love + Climb not the everlasting stars on high?... + Fill thence thy heart, how large so e'er it be, + And in the feeling when thou'rt wholly blest, + Then call it what thou wilt--Bliss! Heart! Love! God! + I have no name for it--'tis feeling all + Name is but sound and smoke + Shrouding the glow of Heaven. + +Such statements of belief were not rare in the Apologists; but Nature +at this time was losing independent importance in men's minds, like +life itself, which after Cyprian was counted as nothing but a fight +with the devil.[14] + +There is deep reverence for Nature in the lyrics, the hymns of the +first centuries A.D., as a work of God and an emblem of moral ideas. +Ebert observes[15] + + In comparison with the old Roman, one can easily see the + peculiarities and perfect originality of these Christian lyrics. + I do not mean merely in that dominance of the soul life in which + man appeared to be quite merged, and which makes them such + profound expressions of feeling; but in man's relationship to + Nature, which, one might say, supplies the colour to the + painter's brush.[16] Nature appears here in the service of ideal + moral powers and robbed of her independence;[17] the servant of + her Creator, whose direct command she obeys. She is his + instrument for man's welfare, and also at times, under the + temporary mastery of the devil, for his destruction. Thus Nature + easily symbolizes the moral world. + +'Bountiful Giver of light, through whose calm brightness, when the +time of night is past and gone, the daylight is suffused abroad, +Thou, the world's true morning star, clearer than the full glorious +sun, Thou very dayspring, very light in all its fulness, that dost +illumine the innermost recesses of the heart,' sings St Hilary in his +Morning Hymn; and in another hymn, declaring himself unworthy to lift +his sinful eyes to the clear stars, he urges all the creatures, and +heaven, earth, sea and river, hill and wood, rose, lily, and star to +weep with him and lament the sinfulness of man. + +In the Morning Hymn of St Ambrose dawn is used symbolically; dark +night pales, the light of the world is born again, and the new birth +of the soul raises to new energy; Christ is called the true sun, the +source of light; 'let modesty be as the dawn, faith as the noonday, +let the mind know no twilight.' + +And Prudentius sings in a Morning Hymn [18]: 'Night and mist and +darkness fade, light dawns, the globe brightens, Christ is coming!' +and again: 'The herald bird of dawn announces day, Christ the awaker +calls us to life.' And in the ninth hymn: 'Let flowing rivers, waves, +the seashore's thundering, showers, heat, snow, frost, forest and +breeze, night, day, praise Thee throughout the ages.'[19] + +He speaks of Christ as the sun that never sets, never is obscured by +clouds, the flower of David, of the root of Jesse; of the eternal +Fatherland where the whole ground is fragrant with beds of purple +roses, violets, and crocuses, and slender twigs drop balsam. + +St Jerome united Christian genius, as Ebert says, with classic +culture to such a degree that his writings, especially his letters, +often shew a distinctly modern tone,[20] and go to prove that +asceticism so deepened and intensified character that even literary +style took individual stamp.[21] But the most perfect representative, +the most modern man, of his day was Augustine. + +As Rousseau's _Confessions_ revealed the revolutionary genius of the +eighteenth century, Augustine's opened out a powerful character, +fully conscious of its own importance, striving with the problems of +the time, and throwing search-lights into every corner of its own +passionate heart. He had attained, after much struggling, to a +glowing faith, and he described the process in characteristic and +drastic similes from Nature, which are scarcely suitable for +translation. He said on one occasion: + + For I burned at times in my youth to satiate myself with deeds of + hell, and dared to run wild in many a dark love passage.... In + the time of my youth I took my fill passionately among the wild + beasts, and I dared to roam the woods and pursue my vagrant loves + beneath the shade; and my beauty consumed away and I was + loathsome in Thy sight, pleasing myself and desiring to please + the eyes of men.... The seething waves of my youth flowed up to + the shores of matrimony.... + +Comfortless at the death of his friend: + + I burned, I sighed, I wept, I was distraught, for I bore within + me a soul rent and bloodstained, that would no longer brook my + carrying; yet I found no place where I could lay it down, neither + in pleasant groves nor in sport was it at rest. All things, even + the light itself, were filled with shuddering. + +Augustine, like Rousseau, understood 'que c'est un fatal present du +ciel qu'une ame sensible.' + +He looked upon his own heart as a sick child, and sought healing for +it in Nature and solitude, though in vain. + +The pantheistic belief of the Manicheans that all things, fire, air, +water, etc., were alive, that figs wept when they were picked and the +mother tree shed milky tears for the loss of them, that everything in +heaven and earth was a part of godhead, gave him no comfort; it was +rather the personal God of the Psalms whom he saw in the ordering of +Nature. + +The cosmological element in theism has never been more beautifully +expressed than in his words: + + I asked the earth, and she said: 'I am not He,' and all things + that are in her did confess the same. I asked the sea and the + depths and creeping things, and they answered: 'We are not thy + God, seek higher.' I asked the blowing breezes, and the whole + expanse of air with its inhabitants made answer: 'Anaxagoras was + at fault, I am not God.' I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the + stars, and with a loud voice did they exclaim: 'He made us.' My + question was the enquiry of my spirit, their answer was the + beauty of their form. + +In another place: + + Not with uncertain but with sure consciousness, Lord, I love + Thee. But behold, sea and sky and all things in them from all + sides tell me that I must love Thee, nor do they cease to give + all men this message, so that they are without excuse. Sky and + earth speak to the deaf Thy praises: when I love Thee, I love not + beauty of form, nor radiancy of light; but when I love my God, I + love the light, the voice, the sweetness, the food, the embrace + of my innermost soul. That is what I love when I love my God. + +Augustine's interest in Nature was thus religious. At the same time, +the soothing influence of quiet woods was not unknown to him. + +The likeness and unlikeness between the Christian and heathen points +of view are very clear in the correspondence between Ausonius, the +poet of the Moselle, and Paulinus, Bishop of Nola; and the deep +friendship expressed in it raises their dilettante verses to the +level of true poetry. + +Ausonius, thoroughly heathen as he was, carries us far forward into +Christian-Germanic times by his sentimentality and his artistic +descriptions of the scenery of the Moselle.[22] + +It is characteristic of the decline of heathendom, that the lack of +original national material to serve as inspiration, as the AEneas Saga +had once served, led the best men of the time to muse on Nature, and +describe scenery and travels. Nothing in classic Roman poetry attests +such an acute grasp of Nature's little secret charms as the small +poem about the sunny banks of the Moselle, vine-clad and crowned by +villas, and reflected in the crystal water below. It seemed as if the +Roman, with the German climate, had imbibed the German love of +Nature; as if its scenery had bewitched him like the German maiden +whom he compared to roses and lilies in his song. + +Many parts of his poetical epistles are in the same tone, and we +learn incidentally from them that a lengthy preamble about weather +and place belonged to letter-writing even then.[23] + +Feeling for Nature and love of his friend are interwoven into a truly +poetic appeal in No. 64, in which Ausonius complains that Paulinus +does not answer his letters: + + Rocks give answer to the speech of man, and his words striking + against the caves resound, and from the groves cometh the echo of + his voice. The cliffs of the coast cry out, the rivers murmur, + the hedge hums with the bees that feed upon it, the reedy banks + have their own harmonious notes, the foliage of the pine talks in + trembling whispers to the winds: what time the light south-east + falls on the pointed leaves, songs of Dindymus give answer in the + Gargaric grove. Nature has made nothing dumb; the birds of the + air and the beasts of the earth are not silent, the snake has its + hiss, the fishes of the sea as they breathe give forth their + note.... Have the Basque mountains and the snowy haunts of the + Pyrenees taken away thy urbanity?... May he, who advises thee to + keep silence, never enjoy the singing of sweet songs nor the + voices of Nature ... sad and in need may he live in desolate + regions, and wander silent in the rounded heights of the Alpine + range. + +The sounds of Nature are detailed with great delicacy in this appeal, +and we see that the Alps are referred to as desolate regions. + +In another letter (25) he reminded his friend of their mutual love, +their home at Burdigala, his country-house with its vine-slopes, +fields, woods, etc., and went on: + + Yet without thee no year advanceth with grateful change of + season; the rainy spring passeth without flower, the dog-star + burns with blazing heat, Pomona bringeth not the changing scents + of autumn, Aquarius pours forth his waters and saddens winter. + Pontius, dear heart, seest thou what thou hast done? + +Closing in the same tender strain with a picture of his hope +fulfilled: + + Now he leaves the snowy towns of the Iberians, now he holds the + fields of the Tarbellians, now passeth he beneath the halls of + Ebromagus, now he is gliding down the stream, and now he knocketh + at thy door! Can we believe it? Or do they who love, fashion + themselves dreams? + +The greater inwardness of feeling here, as contrasted with classic +times, is undeniable; the tone verges on the sentimentality of the +correspondences between 'beautiful souls' in the eighteenth century. + +Paulinus was touchingly devoted to his former teacher Ausonius, and +in every way a man of fine and tender feeling. He gave himself with +zeal to Christianity, and became an ascetic and bishop. + +It was a bitter grief to him that his Ausonius remained a heathen +when he himself had sworn allegiance to Christ and said adieu to +Apollo. There is a fine urbanity and humanity in his writings, but he +did not, like Ausonius, love Nature for her own sake. The one took +the Christian ascetic point of view, the other the classic heathen, +with sympathy and sentiment in addition. + +Paulinus recognized the difference, and contrasted their ideas of +solitude. 'They are not crazed, nor is it their savage fierceness +that makes men choose to live in lonely spots; rather, turning their +eyes to the lofty stars, they contemplate God, and set the leisure +that is free from empty cares, to fathom the depths of truth they +love.' + +In answer to his friend's praise of home, he praised Spain, in which +he was living, and many copious descriptions of time and place run +through his other writings[24]; but while he yielded nothing to +Ausonius in the matter of friendship, 'sooner shall life disappear +from my body than thy image from my heart,' he was without his quiet +musing delight in Nature. For her the heathen had the clearer eye and +warmer heart; the Christian bishop only acknowledged her existence in +relation to his Creator, declaring with pride that no power had been +given to us over the elements, nor to them over us, and that not from +the stars but from our own hearts come the hindrances to virtue. + +Lives of the saints and paraphrases of the story of creation were the +principal themes of the Christian poets of the fourth and fifth +centuries. In some of these the hermit was extolled with a dash of +Robinson Crusoe romance, and the descriptions of natural phenomena in +connection with Genesis often showed a feeling for the beauty of +Nature in poetic language. Dracontius drew a detailed picture of +Paradise with much self-satisfaction. + + Then in flight the joyous feathered throng passed through the + heavens, beating the air with sounding wings, various notes do + they pour forth in soothing harmony, and, methinks, together + praise for that they were accounted worthy to be created.[26] + +For the charming legend of Paradise was to many Christian minds of +this time what the long-lost bliss of Elysium and the Golden Age had +been to the Hellenic poets and the Roman elegist--the theme of much +vivid imagery and highly-coloured word-painting. + + Eternal spring softens the air, a healing flame floods the world + with light, all the elements glow in healing warmth; as the + shades of night fade, day rises.... Then the feathered flocks fly + joyfully through the air, beating it with their wings in the rush + of their passage, and with flattering satisfaction their voices + are heard, and I think they praise God that they were found + worthy to be created; some shine in snowy white, some in purple, + some in saffron, some in yellow gold; others have white feathers + round the eyes, while neck and breast are of the bright tint of + the hyacinth ... and upon the branches, the birds are moved to + and fro with them by the wind. + +This shews careful observation of detail; but, for the most part, +such idyllic feeling was checked by lofty religious thoughts. + +'Man,' he cries, 'should rule over Nature, over all that it contains, +over all earth offers in fruit, flowers, and verdure that tree and +vine, sea and spring, can give.' He summons all creation to praise +the Creator--stars and seasons, hail-storm and lightning, earth, sea, +river and spring, cloud and night, plants, animals, and light; and he +describes the flood in bold flights of fancy. + +In the three books of Avitus[27] we have 'a complete poem of the lost +Paradise, far removed from a mere paraphrase or versification of the +Bible,'[28] which shews artistic leanings and sympathetic feeling +here and there. As Catullus[29] pictures the stars looking down upon +the quiet love of mortals by night, and Theocritus[30] makes the +cypresses their only witnesses, the Christian poet surrounds the +marriage of our first parents with the sympathy of Nature: + + And angel voices joined in harmony and sang to the chaste and + pure; Paradise was their wedding-chamber, earth their dowry, and + the stars of heaven rejoiced with gladsome radiance.... The + kindness of heaven maintains eternal spring there; the tumultuous + south wind does not penetrate, the clouds forsake an air which is + always pure.... The soil has no need of rains to refresh it, and + the plants prosper by virtue of their own dew. The earth is + always verdant, and its surface animated by a sweet warmth + resplendent with beauty. Herbs never abandon the hills, the trees + never lose their leaves, etc. + +And when Adam and Eve leave it, they find all the rest of the +beautiful world ugly and narrow in comparison. 'Day is dark to their +eyes, and under the clear sun they complain that the light has +disappeared.' + +It was the reflection of their own condition in Nature. Among heathen +writers who were influenced, without being entirely swayed, by +Christian teaching, and imitated the rhetorical Roman style in +describing Nature, Apollonius Sidonius takes a prominent place. In +spite of many empty phrases and a stilted style, difficult to +understand as well as to translate, his poems, and still more his +letters, give many interesting pictures of the culture of his part of +the fifth century. In Carm. 2 he draws a highly--coloured picture of +the home of Pontius Leontas,[31] a fine country property, and paints +the charms of the villa with all the art of his rhetoric and some +real appreciation. The meeting of the two rivers, the Garonne and the +Dordogne, in the introduction is poetically rendered, and he goes on +to describe the cool hall and grottos, state-rooms, pillars--above +all, the splendid view: 'There on the top of the fortress I sit down +and lean back and gaze at the mountains covered by olives, so dear to +the Muse and the goats. I shall wander in their shade, and believe +that coward Daphne grants me her love.' He delighted in unspoilt +Nature, and describes: + + My fountain, which, as it flows from the mountain-side, is + overshadowed by a many-covered grotto with its wide circle. It + needs not Art; Nature has given it grace. That no artist's hand + has touched it is its charm; it is no masterpiece of skill, no + hammer with resounding blow will adorn the rocks, nor marble fill + up the place where the tufa is worn away. + +He lays stress upon the contrast between culture and Nature, town +luxury and country solitude, in his second letter to Domidius, and +describes the beauties of his own modest estate with sentimental +delight: + + You reproach me for loitering in the country; I might complain + with more reason that you stay in the town when the earth shines + in the light of spring, the ice is melting from the Alps, and the + soil is marked by the dry fissures of tortuous furrows ... the + stones in the stream, and the mud on the banks are dried up ... + here neither nude statues, comic actors, nor Hippodrome are to be + found ... the noise of the waters is so great that it drowns + conversation. From the dining-room, if you have time to spare at + meals, you can occupy it with the delight of looking at the + scenery, and watch the fishing ... here you can find a hidden + recess, cool even in summer heat, a place to sleep in. Here what + joy it is to listen to the cicadas chirping at noonday, and to + the frogs croaking when the twilight is coming on, and to the + swans and geese giving note at the early hours of the night, and + at midnight to the cocks crowing together, and to the boding + crows with three-fold note greeting the ruddy torch of the rising + dawn; and in the half light of the morning to hear the + nightingale warbling in the bushes, and the swallow twittering + among the beams.... Between whiles, the shepherds play in their + rustic fashion. Not far off is a wood where the branches of two + huge limes interlace, though their trunks are apart (in their + shade we play ball), and a lake that rises to such fury in a + storm that the trees that border it are wetted by the spray. + +In another letter to Domidius he described a visit to the +country-seat of two of his friends: + + We were torn from one pleasure to another--games, feastings, + chatting, rowing, bathing, fishing. + +As a true adherent even as a bishop of classic culture and humanity, +Sidonius is thus an interesting figure in these wild times, with his +Pliny-like enthusiasm for country rather than city, and his +susceptibility to woodland and pastoral life. + +The limit of extravagance in the bombastic rhetoric of the period was +reached in the travels of Ennodius,[32] who was scarcely more than a +fantastic prattler. The purest, noblest, and most important figure of +the sixth century was undoubtedly Boetius; but it is Cassiodorus, a +statesman of the first rank under Theodoric, who in his _Variorium +libris_ gives the most interesting view of the attitude of his day +towards Nature. He revelled in her and in describing her. After +praising Baja for its beauty[33] and Lactarius for its healthiness, +he said of Scyllacium: + + The city of Scyllacium hangs upon the hills like a cluster of + grapes, not that it may pride itself upon their difficult ascent, + but that it may voluptuously gaze on verdant plains and the blue + back of the sea. The city beholds the rising sun from its very + cradle, when the day that is about to be born sends forward no + heralding Aurora; but as soon as it begins to rise, the quivering + brightness displays its torch. It beholds Phoebus in his joy; it + is bathed in the brightness of that luminary so that it might be + thought to be itself the native land of the sun, the claims of + Rhodes to that honour being outdone.... It enjoys a translucent + air, but withal so temperate, that its winters are sunny and its + summers cool, and life passes there without sorrow, since hostile + seasons are feared by none. Hence, too, man himself is here freer + of soul than elsewhere, for this temperateness of the climate + prevails in all things.... Assuredly for the body to imbibe muddy + waters is a different thing from sucking in the transparency of a + sweet fountain. Even so the vigour of the mind is repressed when + it is clogged by a heavy atmosphere. Nature itself hath made us + subject to these influences.... clouds make us feel sad, and + again a bright day fills us with joy.... At the foot of the + Moscian Mount we hollowed out the bowels of the rock, and + tastefully introduced therein the eddying waves of Nereus. Here a + troop of fishes sporting in free captivity refreshes all minds + with delight, and charms all eyes with admiration. They run + greedily to the hand of man, and, before they become his food, + seek dainties from him. + +He described the town as rich in vineyards and olive woods, +cornfields and villas. + +He awarded the palm of beauty to Como and its lake, and although he +wrote in the clumsy language of a decaying literature, this +sixth-century sketch still strikes us as surprisingly complete and +artistic in feeling: + + Como, with its precipitous mountains and its vast expanse of + lake, seems placed there for the defence of the Province of + Liguria; and yet again, it is so beautiful, that one would think + it was created for pleasure only. + + To the south lies a fertile plain with easy roads for the + transport of provisions; on the north, a lake sixty miles long + abounding in fish, soothing the mind with delicious + recreation.... Rightly is it called Como, because it is adorned + with such gifts. The lake lies in a shell-like valley with white + margins. Above rises a diadem of lofty mountains, their slopes + studded with bright villas; a girdle of olives below, vineyards + above, while a crest of thick chestnut woods adorns the very + summit of the hills. Streams of snowy clearness dash from the + hill-sides into the lake. On the eastern side these unite to form + the river Addua, so called because it contains the added volume + of two streams.... So delightful a region makes men delicate and + averse to labour.... Therefore the inhabitants deserve special + consideration, and for this reason we wish them to enjoy + perpetually the royal bounty. + +This shews, beyond dispute, that the taste for the beauty of Nature, +even at that wild time, was not dead, and that the writer's attitude +was not mainly utilitarian. He noted the fertility of the land in +wine and grain, and of the sea in fish, but he laid far greater +stress upon its charms and their influence upon the inhabitants. + +On _a priori_ grounds (so misleading in questions of this kind) one +would scarcely expect the most disturbed period in the history of the +European people to have produced a Venantius Fortunatus, the greatest +and most celebrated poet of the sixth century. His whole personality, +as well as his poetry, shewed the blending of heathenism and +Christianity, of Germanism and Romanism, and it is only now and then +among the Roman elegists and later epic poets that we meet a feeling +for Nature which can be compared to his. Like all the poets of this +late period, his verse lacks form, is rugged and pompous, moving upon +the stilts of classic reminiscences, and coining monstrous new +expressions for itself; but its feeling is always sincere. It was the +last gleam of a setting sun of literature that fell upon this one +beneficent figure. He was born in the district of Treviso near +Venice, and crossed the Alps a little before the great Lombard +invasion, while the Merovingians, following in the steps of Chlodwig, +were outdoing each other in bloodshed and cruelty. In the midst of +this hard time Fortunatus stood out alone among the poets by virtue +of his talent and purity of character. His poems are often disfigured +by bombast, prolixity, and misplaced learning; but his keen eye for +men and things is undeniable, and his feeling for Nature shews not +only in dealing with scenery, but in linking it with the inner life. + +The lover's wish in _On Virginity_,[34] one of his longer poems, +suggests the Volkslieder: + + O that I too might go, if my hurrying foot could poise amid the + lights of heaven and hold on its starry course. But now, without + thee, night comes drearily with its dark wings, and the day + itself and the glittering sunshine is darkness to me. Lily, + narcissus, violet, rose, nard, amomum, bring me no joy--nay, no + flower delights my heart. That I may see thee, I pass hovering + through each cloud, and my love teaches my wandering eyes to + pierce the mist, and lo! in dread fear I ask the stormy winds + what they have to tell me of my lord. Before thy feet I long to + wash the pavement, and with my hair to sweep thy temples. + Whatever it be, I will bear it; all hard things are sweet; if + only I see thee, this penalty is my joy. But be thou mindful, for + thy vows do I yearn; I have thee in my heart, have me in thy + heart too. + +This is more tender in feeling than any poem by Catullus or Tibullus. +We can only explain it by two facts--the deepening of the inner life +through Christianity (we almost hear Christ's words about the 'great +sinner'), and the intimate friendship which Fortunatus enjoyed with a +German lady, who may justly be called the noblest and purest figure +of her time in Franconia. + +This was Radegunde, the unhappy daughter of a Thuringian king, who +first saw her father's kingdom lost, and then, fleeing from the +cruelty of her husband, the bloodstained Chlotaire, took the veil in +Poitiers and founded a convent, of which she made Agnes, a noble +Franconian lady, the abbess. When Fortunatus visited the place, these +ladies became his devoted friends, and he remained there as a priest +until the death of Radegunde. His poems to them, which were often +letters and notes written off-hand, are full of affection and +gratitude (he was, by the way, a gourmet, and the ladies made +allowance for this weakness in dainty gifts), and form an enduring +witness of a pure and most touching friendship. They contain many +pretty sketches of Nature and delicate offerings of flowers. In one +he said: 'If the season brought white lilies or blossomed in red +roses, I would send them to you, but now you must be content with +purple violets for a greeting'; and in another, because gold and +purple are not allowable, he sends her flowers, that she may have +'her gold in crocuses, her purple in violets, and they may adorn her +hair with even greater delight than she draws from their fragrance.' +Once, when following pious custom, she had withdrawn into her cell, +his 'straying thoughts go in search of her': + + How quickly dost thou hide the light from mine eyes! for without + thee I am o'erweighted by the clouds that bear me down, and + though thou flee and hide thyself here but for a few short days, + that month is longer than the whole hurrying year. Prithee, let + the joys of Easter bring thee back in safety, and so may a + two-fold light return to us at once. + +And when she comes out, he cries: + + Thou hadst robbed me of my happiness; now it returns to me with + thee, thou makest me doubly celebrate this solemn festival.... + Though the seedlings are only just beginning to shoot up from the + furrows, yet I to-day will reap my harvest in seeing thee once + more. To-day do I gather in the fruit and lay the peaceful + sheaves together. Though the field is bare, nor decked with ears + of corn, yet all, through thy return, is radiant fulness. + +The comparison is tedious and spun out; but the idea is poetic. We +find it in the classics: for instance, in Theocritus, when he praises +Nais, whose beauty draws even Nature under her sway, and whose coming +makes spring everywhere: + + Where has my light hidden herself from my straying eyes? When I + see not thee, I am ne'er satisfied. Though the heavens be bright, + though the clouds have fled, yet for me is the day sunless, if it + hide thee from me. + +The most touching evidence of this friendship is the poem _On the +Downfall of Thuringia_. + +'One must,' says Leo,[35] 'refer the chief excellence of the poem to +the lady who tells the tale, must grant that the irresistible power +of the description, the spectacle of the freshly open wounds, the +sympathy in the consuming sorrow of a friend, gave unwonted power of +the wing to this low-flying pen.' Radegunde is thinking of her only +remaining relative, Amalafried: + + When the wind murmurs, I listen if it bring me some news, but of + all my kindred not even a shadow presents itself to me.... And + thou, Amalafried, gentle son of my father's brother, does no + anxiety for me consume thy heart? Hast thou forgotten what + Radegunde was to thee in thy earliest years, and how much thou + lovedst me, and how thou heldst the place of the father, mother, + brother, and sister whom I had lost? An hour absent from thee + seemed to me eternal; now ages pass, and I never hear a word from + thee. A whole world now lies betwixt those who loved each other + and who of old were never separate. If others, for pity alone, + cross the Alps to seek their lost slaves, wherefore am I + forgotten?--I who am bound to thee by blood? Where art thou? I + ask the wind as it sighs, the clouds as they pass--at least some + bird might bring me news of thee. If the holy enclosure of this + monastery did not restrain me, thou shouldst see me suddenly + appear beside thee. I could cross the stormy seas in winter if it + were necessary. The tempest that alarms the sailors should cause + no fear to me who love thee. If my vessel were dashed to pieces + by the tempest, I should cling to a plank to reach thee, and if I + could find nothing to cling to, I should go to thee swimming, + exhausted. If I could but see thee once more, I should deny all + the perils of the journey.... + +There is little about Nature in this beautiful avowal of love and +longing, but the whole colouring of the mood forms a background of +feeling for his longer descriptions. His very long and tedious poem +about the bridal journey of Gelesiuntha, the Spanish princess, who +married King Chilperic, shews deep and touching feeling in parts. She +left her Toledo home with a heavy heart, crossing the Pyrenees, where +'the mountains shining with snow reach to the stars, and their sharp +peaks project over the rain clouds.' In the same vein as Ausonius, +when he urged Paulinus to write to him, she begs her sister for news: + + By thy name full oft I call thee, Gelesiuntha, sister mine: with + this name fountains, woods, rivers, and fields resound. Art thou + silent, Gelesiuntha? Answer as to thy sister stones and + mountains, groves and waters and sky, answer in language mute. + +In troubled thought and care she asked the very breezes, but of her +sister's safety all were silent. + +Fortunatus, like Ausonius, not only looked at Nature with sympathy, +but was a master in description of scenery. His lengthy descriptions +of spring are mostly only decorative work, but here and there we find +a really poetic idea. For example: + +At the first spring, when earth has doffed her frost, +the field is clothed with variegated grass; the mountains +stretch their leafy heads towards the sky, the +shady tree renews its verdant foliage, the lovely vine +is swelling with budding branches, giving promise that +a weight of grapes shall hang from its prolific stems. +While all joys return, the earth is dead and dull. + +And: + + The soft violets paint the field with their own purple, the + meadows are green with grass, the grass is bright with its fresh + shoots. Little by little, like stars, the bright flowers spring + up, and the sward is joyous and gay with flecks of colour, and + the birds that through the winter cold have been numb and silent, + with imprisoned song, are now recalled to their song. + +He describes the cold winter, and a hot summer's day, when + + Even in the forests no shade was to be found, and the traveller + almost fainted on the burning roads, longing for shade and cool + drinks. At last the rustle of a crystal stream is heard, he + hurries to it with delight, he lies down and lays his limbs in + the soft kisses of the grass. + +His poems about beautiful and noteworthy places include some on the +Garonne and Gers (Egircius): + + So dried up by heat that it is neither river nor land, and the + grumbling croak of the frog, sole ruler of the realm from which + the fish are banished, is heard in the lonely swamp; but when the + rain pours down, the flood swells, and what was a lake suddenly + becomes a sea. + +He has many verses of this sort, written with little wit but great +satisfaction. + +More attractive are descriptions of the Rhine and Moselle, recalling +Ausonius, and due to love partly of Nature, partly of verbal +scene-painting. The best and most famous of these is on his journey +by the Moselle from Metz to Andernach on the Rhine. Here he shews a +keen eye and fine taste for wide views and high mountains, as well as +for the minutiae of scenery, with artistic treatment. He also blends +his own thoughts and feelings with his impressions of Nature, making +it clear that he values her not merely for decoration, but for her +own sake. + +He has been called the last Roman poet; in reality, he belonged not +only to the period which directly succeeded his own, when the Roman +world already lay in ruins, but to the fully-developed Middle +Ages--the time when Christianity and Germanism had mated with Roman +minds. + +In his best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the classic +tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of +bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and +under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all its +depth and intensity. His touching friendship with Radegunde is, as it +were, a symbol of the blending of the two elements out of which the +modern sprang. It was the stimulating influence of the noble Germanic +princess, herself Christian in soul, which fanned the dying sparks of +classic poetry into a flame. + +Fortunatus stood upon a borderland. Literature was retreating further +and further from the classic models, and culture was declining to its +fall. In Gaul, as in Spain and Italy, the shadows of coming night +were broadening over literary activity, thought, and feeling. + +It is a characteristic fact in Roman literature, that not only its +great lights, but the lesser ones who followed them, were +enthusiastically imitated. Latin poetry of the Middle Ages lived upon +recollections of the past, or tried to raise itself again by its +help; even so late a comer as Fortunatus became in his turn an object +of marvel, and was copied by poets who never reached his level. + +It is not surprising that feeling for Nature shewed a corresponding +shallowness and lassitude. + +Not only bucolic but didactic writing was modelled upon the classic. +Isodorus and Beda, in their works with identical titles 'concerning +the existence of things,' relied on Roman models no less than Alcuin, +who had formed himself on the pattern of Augustine's time in his +_Conflict between Winter and Spring_, as well as in many single +verses, directly inspired by Virgil.[36] + +His _Farewell to his Cell_ caught the idyllic tone very neatly: + + Beloved cell, retirement's sweet abode! + Farewell, a last farewell, thy poet bids thee! + Beloved cell, by smiling woods embraced, + Whose branches, shaken by the genial breeze, + To meditation oft my mind disposed. + Around thee too, their health-reviving herbs + In verdure gay the fertile meadows spread; + And murmuring near, by flowery banks confined, + Through fragrant meads the crystal streamlets glide, + Wherein his nets the joyful fisher casts, + And fragrant with the apple bending bough, + With rose and lily joined, the gardens smile; + While jubilant, along thy verdant glades + At dawn his melody each songster pours, + And to his God attunes the notes of praise. + +These heartfelt effusions express a feeling which certainly inspired +many monks when they turned from their gloomy cells to the gardens +and woods beyond--a feeling compounded of renunciation of the world +with idyllic comfort in their surroundings. If their fundamental +feeling was worship and praise of the Creator, their constant outdoor +work, which, during the first centuries, was strenuous cultivation of +the soil, must have roused a deep appreciation of Nature in the +nobler minds among them. Their choice of sites for monasteries and +hermitages fully bears out this view.[37] + +_The Conflict between Spring and Winter_, with its classic +suggestions, is penetrated by a truly German love of spring.[38] It +described the time when the cuckoo sings high in the branches, grass +clothes earth with many tints, and the nightingale sings untiringly +in the red-gold butcher's broom, captivating us with her changing +melodies. + +Among the savants whom Charlemagne gathered round him was Angilbert. +Virgil was his model, but the influence of the lighter fluency of +Fortunatus was visible, as in so many of his contemporaries. With a +vivid and artistic pen he described the wood and park of Aachen and +the Kaiser's brilliant hunt[39]; the great forest grove, the grassy +meadows with brooks and all sorts of birds flitting about, the +thicket stocked with many kinds of game. + +At the same time, his writing betrayed the conventional tone of +courts in its praise of his great secular lord, and a 'thoughtful +romantic inclination' for the eternal feminine, for the beautiful +women with splendid ornaments, and necks shining like milk or snow or +glowing like a rose, who, as Ebert puts it, 'lay far from the +asceticism of the poetry of the saints.' + +Naso Muadorinus in his pastorals took Calpurnius and Nemesianus for +his models, just as they had taken Virgil, and Virgil Theocritus. +Muadorinus imitated the latter in his pastorals. + +In an alternate song of his between an old man and a boy, the old man +draws an artistic contrast between the shady coolness of the wood and +the mid-day glow of the sun, while the boy praises Him whose songs +the creatures follow as once they followed Orpheus with his lute; and +at the end, Charlemagne, who was extolled at the beginning as a +second Caesar, is exalted to heaven as the founder of a new Golden +Age. + +In the Carolingian Renaissance of the Augustine epoch of literature, +Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, takes first place. At any rate, he +described in a very superior way, and, like Fortunatus, with some +humour, the draining of the Larte at Le Mans, Feb. 820; also, in a +light and lively strain, the Battle of the Birds, and, with the same +strong colouring, Paradise. + +The idyll of the cloister garden, so often treated, became famous in +the much-read _Hortulus_ of Wahlafried.[40] + +Despite classical flourishes from Virgil and Columella, and +pharmaceutical handling of plants, there is a good deal of thoughtful +observation of Nature in these 444 hexameters. + +They contain descriptions of seasons, of recipes, flowers and +vegetables, of the gardener's pleasure in digging his fields in +spring, clearing them of nettles, and levelling the ground thrown up +by the moles, in protecting his seedlings from rain and sun, and, +later on, in his gay beds of deciduous plants. + +There is a touch here and there which is not unpoetic--for instance: + + A bright green patch of dark blue rue paints this shady grove; it + has short leaves and throws out short umbels, and passes the + breath of the wind and the rays of the sun right down to the end + of the stalk, and at a gentle touch gives forth a heavy scent. + +and: + + With what verse, with what song, can the dry thinness of my + meagre muse rightly extol the shining lily, whose whiteness is as + the whiteness of gleaming snow, whose sweet scent is as the scent + of Sabian woods? + +He closes pleasantly too, adjuring Grimald to read the book under the +shade of the peach tree, while his school-fellows play round and pick +the great delicate fruit which they can barely grasp with one hand. +In the poem to the layman Ruodbern (100 hexameters) he described the +dangers of Alpine travelling, both from weather and other foes. In +those days the difficulties of the road excluded all interest in +mountain beauty. There is a tender and expressive poem in Sapphic +metre, in which, homesick and cold in winter, he sang his longing for +beautiful Reichenau. But even he, like most of his predecessors and +all his followers, wielded his pen with labour, expression often +failing to keep pace with thought. + +It only remains to mention Wandalbert, a monk of the monastery at +Pruen, who, in a postscript to the _Conclusio des Martyrologium_, +gives a charming account of a landowner's life in field, garden, and +hunt. + +In the cloister, then, idyllic comfort, delighting in Nature and a +quiet country life, was quite as much at home as scholarship and +classical study. But we shall look there in vain for any trace of the +sentimental, the profoundly melancholy attitude of the Fathers of the +Church, Basil and Gregory, or for Augustine's deep faith and devout +admiration of the works of creation: even the tone of Ausonius and +Fortunatus, in their charming descriptions of scenery, was now a +thing of the past. Feeling for Nature--sentimental, sympathetic, +cosmic, and dogmatic--had dwindled down to mere pleasure in +cultivating flowers in the garden, to the level Aachen landscape and +such like; and the power to describe the impression made by scenery +was, like the impression itself, lame and weary. + +It was the night of the decline breaking over Latin literature. + +And how did it stand with German literature up to the eleventh +century? A German Kingdom had existed from the treaties of Verdun and +Mersen (842), but during this period traces of German poetry are few, +outweighed by Latin. + +The two great Messianic poems, _Heliand_ and _Krist_, stand out +alone. In the _Heliand_ the storm on the lake of Gennesaret is +vividly painted: + + Then began the power of the storm; in the whirlwind the waves + rose, night descended, the sea broke with uproar, wind and water + battled together; yet, obedient to the command and to the + controlling word, the water stilled itself and flowed serenely. + +In _Krist_ there is a certain distinction in the description of the +Ascension, as the rising figures soar past the constellations of +stars, which disappear beneath their feet; for the rest, the symbolic +so supplants the direct meaning, that in place of an epic we have a +moralizing sermon. But there are traces of delight in the beauty of +the outer world, in the sunshine, and sympathy is attributed to +Nature: + + She grew very angry at such deeds. + +The poem _Muspilli_ (the world fire) shews the old northern feeling +for Nature; still more the few existing words of the _Wessobrunner +Prayer_: + + This I heard as the greatest marvel among men, + That once there was no earth nor heaven above, + The bright stars gave no light, the sun shone not, + Nor the moon, nor the glorious sea. + +How plainly 'the bright stars' and the 'glorious sea' shew joy in the +beauty of the world! + +In the oldest Scandinavian poems the inflexible character of the +Northerner and the northern landscape is reflected; the descriptions +are short and scanty; it is not mountain, rock, and sea which count +as beautiful, but pleasant, and, above all, fruitful scenery. The +imagery is bold: (Kenninger) the wind is the wolf of wood or sail, +the sea the pathway of the whale, the bath of the diving bird, etc. + +The Anglo-Saxon was especially distinguished by his forcible images +and epithets. In Rynerwulf we have 'night falls like a helmet, dark +brown covers the mountains.' 'The sky is the fortress of the storm, +the sun the torch of the world, the jewel of splendour.' 'Fire is +eager, wild, blind, and raging; the sea is the gray sea, and the +sparkling splendid sea; waves are graves of the dead,' etc. + +Vivid feeling for Nature is not among the characteristic features of +either Scandinavian or old German poetry. + +It is naive and objective throughout, and seldom weighty or forcible. + +The Waltharius shews the influence of Virgil's language, in +highly-coloured and sympathetic descriptions like those of the Latin +poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance. + +Animal saga probably first arose just before the twelfth century, and +their home was probably Franconia. + +Like the genial notices of plant life in the Latin poems of the +Carlovingian period, the animal poems shewed interest in the animal +world--the interest of a child who ponders individual differences and +peculiarities, the virtues and failings so closely allied to its own. +It was a naive 'hand-and-glove' footing between man and the +creatures, which attributed all his wishes and weaknesses to them, +wiped out all differences between them with perfect impartiality, and +gave the characteristics of each animal with exactness and poetry. + +The soil for the cultivation of poetry about animals was prepared by +the symbolic and allegorical way of looking at Nature which held sway +all through the Middle Ages. + +The material was used as a symbolic language for the immaterial, the +world of sense conceived of as a great picture-book of the truths of +salvation, in whose pages God, the devil, and, between them man, +figured: thus plant life suggested the flower of the root of Jesse, +foretold by Isaiah, red flowers the Saviour's wounds, and so forth. +In the earliest Christian times, a remarkable letter existed in +Alexandria, the so-called 'Physiologus,' which has affected the +proverbial turns of speech in the world's literature up to the +present day to an almost unequalled degree. + +It gave the symbolic meanings of the different animals. The lamb and +unicorn were symbols of Christ; sheep, fish, and deer, of his +followers; dragons, serpents, and bears, of the devil; swine, hares, +hyenas, of gluttony; the disorderly luxuriance of snow meant death, +the phoenix the resurrection, and so forth, indeed, whole categories +of animals were turned into allegories of the truths of +salvation.[41] The cleverest fables of animals were in _Isengrimen_, +published in Ghent about 1140 in Latin verse--the story of the sick +lion and his cure by the fox, and the outwitting of the wolf. Such +fables did not remain special to German national literature, but +became popular subjects in the literature of the whole world; and it +is a significant fact that they afterwards took root especially in +Flanders, where the taste for still life and delight in Nature has +always found a home, and which became the nursery, in later times, of +landscape, animal, and genre painting. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +THE NAIVE FEELING AT THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES + + +In the development and maturing of the race, as of the individual, +nothing is more helpful than contact with foreign elements, people of +other manners, thoughts, and feelings. Intimate intercourse between +different nationalities rouses what is best in the soul of a nation, +inviting, as it does, to discussion and opposition, as well as to the +acquisition of new ideas. The conquests of Alexander the Great opened +up a new world to the Greek, and a new culture arose--Hellenism. It +was a new world that rose before the astonished eyes of the +Crusader--in his case too, the East; but the resulting culture did +not last. The most diverse motives fused to bring about this great +migration to a land at once unknown and yet, through religion, +familiar; and a great variety of characters and nations met under the +banner of the Cross. + +Naturally this shaking up together, not only of Europeans among +themselves, but of the eastern with the western world, brought about +a complete revolution in manners, speech, art, science, trade, +manufacture, thought, and feeling, and so became an important factor +in general progress. + +The narrow boundaries of nationality, race, and education were broken +through; all felt equal before the leading idea; men, places, plants, +and animals were alike new and wonderful. Little wonder if German +knights returning home from the East wove fiction with their fact, +and produced the most fantastic and adventurous heroic songs. + +Many of the noblest of the nations joined the Crusades in pious +ardour for the cause, and it is easy to imagine the effect of the +complete novelty of scene upon them. With such tremendous new +impressions to cope with, it is not surprising that even the best +minds, untrained as they were, were unequal to the task, and that the +descriptions of real experiences or events in poetic form failed to +express what they meant. Besides this, there is no doubt that in many +ways the facts fell below their ideals; also that the Crusader's +mantle covered at the same time a rabble, which joined from the +lowest motives, the scum of Europe. It must also be remembered that +it is far easier to experience or feel than to pass on that +experience and feeling to others; that those who wrote did not always +belong to the most educated; and that they wrote, for the most part, +with difficulty in Greek or Latin. When all this has been weighed and +admitted, the fact remains that in existing accounts of the Crusades +there is great poverty of description of scenery, and lack of much +feeling for Nature. The historian, as such, was bound to give first +place to matters of fact and practical importance, and so to judge a +place by its value to an army passing through or occupying it; by its +fertility, water-supply, its swamps or stony ground, and so forth; +but still the modern reader is astonished to see how little +impression the scenery of the Holy Land made, judged by the accounts +we possess, upon the Crusaders. Even when it is conceded that other +important concerns came first, and that danger, want, and hunger must +often have made everything disagreeable, still, references to Nature +are very scanty, and one may look in vain for any interest in +beautiful scenery for its own sake. + +There is only matter-of-fact geographical and mythological +information in William of Tours' _History of the Crusades_; for +instance, in his description of the Bosphorus he does not waste a +word over its beauty. But, as 'fruitful' and 'pleasant' are +ever-recurring adjectives with him, one cannot say that he absolutely +ignored it. + +He said of Durazzo: 'They weather the bad seasons of the year in +fruitful districts rich in woods and fields, and all acceptable +conditions'; of Tyre, 'The town has a most excellent position on a +plain, almost entirely surrounded by mountains. The soil is +productive, the wood of value in many ways.' Of Antioch, 'Its +position is very convenient and pleasant, it lies in valleys which +have excellent and fertile soil, and are most pleasantly watered by +springs and streams. The mountains which enclose the town on both +sides are really very high; but send down very clear water, and their +sides and slopes are covered by buildings up to the very summits.' +There is nothing about beautiful views, unless one takes this, which +really only records a meteorological curiosity: 'From the top of one +mountain one can see the ball of the sun at the fourth watch of the +night, and if one turns round at the time when the first rays light +up the darkness, one has night on one side and day on the other.' + +Tyre is described again as 'conspicuous for the fertility of its soil +and the charm of its position.' Its great waterworks are especially +admired, since by their means 'not only the gardens and most fruitful +orchards flourish, but the cane from which sugar is made, which is so +useful to man for health and other purposes, and is sent by merchants +to the most distant parts of the world.' Other reporters were charmed +by the fertility and wealth of the East. 'On those who came from the +poorer and colder western countries, the rich resources of the sunny +land in comparison with the poverty of home made an impression of +overflowing plenty, and at times almost of inexhaustibleness. The +descriptions of certain districts, extolled for their special +richness, sound almost enthusiastic.[1] + +Burkhard von Monte Sion was enthusiastic about Lebanon's wealth of +meadows and gardens, and the plain round Tripolis, and considered the +Plain of Esdraelon the most desirable place in the world; but, on +exact and unprejudiced examination, there is nothing in his words +beyond homely admiration and matter-of-fact discussion of its great +practical utility. + +He says of La Boneia, 'That plain has many homesteads, and beautiful +groves of olive and fig and other trees of various kinds, and much +timber. Moreover, it abounds in no common measure in rivers and +pasture land'; closes a geographical account of Lebanon thus, 'There +are in Libanus and Antilibanus themselves fertile and well-tilled +valleys, rich in pasture land, vineyards, gardens, plantations--in a +word, in all the good things of the world'; and says of the Plain of +Galilee, 'I never saw a lovelier country, if our sins and wrong-doing +did not prevent Christians from living there.' + +He had some feeling too for a distant view. He wrote of Samaria: 'The +site was very beautiful; the view stretched right to the Sea of Joppa +and to Antipatris and Caesarea of Palestine, and over the whole +mountain of Ephraim down to Ramathaym and Sophim and to Carmel near +Accon by the sea. And it is rich in fountains and gardens and olive +groves, and all the good things this world desires.' But it would be +going too far to conclude from the following words that he +appreciated the contrast between simple and sublime scenery: 'It must +be noticed too, that the river, from the source of Jordan at the foot +of Lebanon as far as the Desert of Pharan, has broad and pleasant +plains on both sides, and beyond these the fields are surrounded by +very high mountains as far as the Red Sea.' + +In dealing with Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, religious +enthusiasm suppresses any reference to scenery. + +These descriptions shew that the wealth and fertility of the country +were praised before its beauty, and that this was only referred to in +short, meagre phrases, which tell less about it than any raptures +without special knowledge. + +It was much the same with Phokas, who visited the Holy Land in +1135.[2] + +He was greatly impressed by the position of Antioch, 'with its +meadows and fruitful gardens, and the murmur of waters as the river, +fed by the torrents of the Castalian spring, flows quietly round the +town and besprinkles its towers with its gentle waves ... but most to +be admired of all is the mountain between town and sea, a noble and +remarkable sight--indeed, a delight to the beholder's eye ... the +Orontes flows with countless windings at the foot of it, and +discharges itself into the sea.' + +He thought Lebanon very beautiful and worthy its praise in Holy +Scripture: 'The sun lies like white hair upon its head; its valleys +are crowned with pines, cedars, and cypresses; streams, beautiful to +look at and quite cold, flow from the ravines and valleys down to the +sea, and the freshly melted snow gives the flowing water its crystal +clearness.' + +Tyre, too, was praised for its beauty: 'Strangers were particularly +delighted with one spring, which ran through meadows; and if one +stands on the tower, one can see the dense growth of plants, the +movement of the leaves in the glow of noon.' + +The plain of Nazareth, too, was 'a heaven on earth, the delight of +the soul.' + +But recollections of the sacred story were dearer to Phokas than the +scenery, and elsewhere he limited himself to noting the rich fruit +gardens, shady groups of trees, and streams and rivers with pleasant +banks. + +Epiphanius Monachus Hagiopolitae, in his _Enarratio Syriae_, was a very +dry pioneer; so, too, the _Anonymus de locis Hierosolymitanis_; +Perdiccas, in his _Hierosolyma_, describes Sion thus: 'It stands on +an eminence so as to strike the eye, and is beautiful to behold, +owing to a number of vines and flower gardens and pleasant spots.' + +It must be admitted then, that, beside utilitarian admiration of a +Paradise of fruitfulness, there is some record of simple, even +enthusiastic delight in its beauty; but only as to its general +features, and in the most meagre terms. The country was more +interesting to the Crusaders as the scene of the Christian story than +as a place in which to rest and dream and admire Nature for her own +sake. + +The accounts of German pilgrimages[3] of the fourteenth and fifteenth +centuries only contain dry notices, such as those of Jacob von Bern +(1346-47), Pfintzing (1436-40), and Ulrich Leman (1472-80). The +last-mentioned praises Damascus in this clumsy fashion: 'The town is +very gay, quite surrounded by orchards, with many brooks and springs +flowing inside and out, and an inexpressible number of people in it,' +etc. Dietrich von Schachten describes Venice in this way: 'Venice +lies in the sea, and is built neither on land nor on mountain, but on +wooden piles, which is unbelievable to one who has not seen it'; and +Candia: 'Candia is a beautiful town in the sea, well built; also a +very fruitful island, with all sorts of things that men need for +living.' He describes a ride through Southern Italy: 'Saturday we +rode from Trepalda, but the same day through chestnut and hazel +woods; were told that these woods paid the king 16,000 gulden every +year. After that we rode a German mile through a wood, where each +tree had its vine--many trees carried 3 ohms of wine, which is +pleasant to see--and came to Nola.' + +He called Naples 'very pretty and big,' and on: 'Then the king took +us to the sea and shewed us the ports, which are pretty and strong +with bulwarks and gates; we saw many beautiful ships too,' etc. One +does not know which is the more wonderful here, the poverty of the +description or the utter lack of personal observation: what the wood +produced, and how one was protected from the sea, was more important +to the writer than wood and sea themselves, and this, even in +speaking of the Bay of Naples, perhaps the most beautiful spot in +Europe. But instances like these are typical of German descriptions +at the time, and their Alpine travels fared no better.[4] + +Geographical knowledge of the Alps advanced very slowly; there was as +yet no aesthetic enjoyment of their beauty. The Frankish historians +(Gregory of Tours, Fredegar) chronicled special events in the Alps, +but very briefly. Fredegar, for instance, knew of the sudden +appearance of a hot spring in the Lake of Thun, and Gregory of Tours +notes that the land-slip in 563 at the foot of the Dent du Midi, +above the point where the Rhine enters the Lake of Geneva, was a +dreadful event. Not only was the Castle of Tauretunum overwhelmed, +but the blocking of the Rhine caused a deluge felt as far as Geneva. +The pious prince of the Church explained this as a portent of another +catastrophe, the pest, which ravaged Gaul soon after. + +There was much fabling at that time in the legends of saints, about +great mines of iron, gold, and silver, and about chamois and buck, +cattle-breeding and Alpine husbandry in the 'regio montana'; for +example, in von Aribo's _Vita S. Emmerani_. When the Alps became more +frequented, especially when, through Charlemagne, a political bridge +came to unite Italy and Germany, new roads were made and the whole +region was better known--in fact, early in mediaeval times, not only +political, but ecclesiastical and mercantile life spread its threads +over a great part of the known world, and began to bind the lives of +nations together, so that the Alps no longer remained _terra +incognita_ to dwellers far and near. + +We have accounts of Alpine journeys by the Abbe Majolus v. Clugny +(970), Bernard v. Hildesheim (1101), Aribert v. Mailand, Anno v. +Coeln[5], but without a trace of orography. They scarcely refer to +the snow and glacier regions from the side of physical geography, or +even of aesthetic feeling; and do not mention the mountain monarchs so +familiar to-day--Mt. Blanc, the Jungfrau, Ortner, Glockner, +etc.--which were of no value to their life, practical or scientific. +These writers record nothing but names of places and their own +troubles and dangers in travelling, especially in winter. And even at +the end of the fifteenth century, German travels across the Alps were +written in the same strain--for example, the account of the voyage of +the Elector-Palatine Alexander v. Zweibruecken and Count Joh. Ludwig +zu Nassau (1495-96) from Zurich Rapperschwyl and Wesen to Wallensee: +'This is the real Switzerland; has few villages, just a house here +and a house there, but beautiful meadows, much cattle, and very high +mountains, on which snow lies, which falls before Christmas, and is +as hard as any rock.' As an exception to this we have a vivid and +poetic description of the famous Verona Pass in Latin verse by +Guntherus Ligurinus. + +Guenther's description of this notorious ravine, between sky-high +Alps, with the torrent rushing at the bottom and a passage so narrow +that men could only move forward one by one, sounds like a personal +experience. This twelfth-century poem comes to us, in fact, like a +belated echo of Fortunatus. + +We must now enquire whether the chief representatives of German +literature at this time shewed any of the national love of Nature, +whether the influence of the Crusades was visible in them, how far +scenery took a place in epic and song, and whether, as moderns have +so often stated, mediaeval Germany stood high above antiquity in this +respect. Gervinus, a classic example on the last point, in the +section of his history of German poetry which treats of the +difference between the German fables about animals on the one hand, +and Esop's and the Oriental on the other, said: + + The way in which animals are handled in the fables demanded a far + slighter familiarity between them and men; so exact a knowledge + as we see in the German fables, often involving knowledge of + their natural history, such insight into the 'privacy of the + animal world,' belonged to quite another kind of men. Antiquity + did not delight in Nature, and delight in Nature is the very + foundation of these poems. Remote antiquity neither knew nor + sought to know any natural history; but only wondered at Nature. + The art of hunting and the passion for it, often carried to + excess in the Middle Ages, was unknown to it. It is a bold remark + of Grimm's that he could smell the old smell of the woods in the + German animal poems, but it is one whose truth every one will + feel, who turns to this simple poetry with an open mind, who + cares for Nature and life in the open. + +This is a very tangle of empty phrases and misstatements. No people +stood in more heartfelt and naive relation to Nature, especially to +the animal world, than the Hindoos and Persians. In earlier +enquiries[6] we have reviewed the naive feeling displayed in Homer +and the sentimental in Hellenism, and have seen that the taste for +hunting increased knowledge of Nature in the open in Hellenic days +far more than in the Middle Ages. We shall see now that the level of +feeling reached in those and imperial Roman days was not regained in +European literature until long after the fall of Latin poetry, and +that it was the fertilizing influence of that classic spirit, and +that alone, which enabled the inborn German taste for Nature, and for +hunting, and plant and animal life, to find artistic expression. It +was a too superficial knowledge of classic literature, and an +inclination to synthesis, and clever _a priori_ argument (a style +impressed upon his day by Hegel's method, and fortunately fast +disappearing), which led Gervinus to exalt the Middle Ages at the +expense of antiquity. It sounds like a weak concession when he says +elsewhere: + + Joy in Nature, which is peculiar to modern times, in contrast to + antiquity, which is seen in the earliest mediaeval poems, and in + which, moreover, expiring antiquity came to meet the German--this + joy in Nature, in dwelling on plant and animal life, is the very + soul of this (animal) poetry. As in its plastic art, so in all + its poetry, antiquity only concerned itself with gods and heroes; + its glance was always turned upwards. + +But, as a fact, no one has ever stood with feet more firmly planted +on this earth than the Greek, enjoying life and undeterred by much +scruple or concern as to the powers above; and centuries of +development passed before German literature equalled Greek in love of +Nature and expressive representation of her beauty. + +To rank the two national epics of Germany, the _Nibelungenlied_ and +_Gudrun_, side by side with the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ is to +exaggerate their value. And here, as ever, overstraining the +comparison is mischievous. + +The _Nibelungenlied_ is undeniably charming with its laconic and yet +plastic descriptions, its vigorous heroes, and the tragic course of +their fate; so is _Gudrun_, that melodious poem of the North Sea. But +they never, either in composition, method of representation, or +descriptive epithets, reach the perfect art of the Greek epics. What +moral beauty and plastic force there is in Homer's comparisons and in +his descriptions of times and seasons! what a clear eye and warm +heart he has for Nature in all her moods! and what raw and scanty +beginnings of such things we have in the _Nibelungenlied_! It is true +Homer had not attained to the degree of sympathy which finds in +Nature a friend, a sharer of one's joys and sorrows; she is pictured +objectively in the form of epic comparisons; but how faithfully, and +with what range and variety! + +There can scarcely be another epic in the world so poor in +descriptions of time and place as the _Nibelungenlied_; it cannot be +used to prove German feeling for Nature! + +India, Persia, and Greece made natural phenomena the counterparts of +human life, weaving into the tale, by way of comparison or +environment, charming genre pictures of plant and animal life, each +complete in itself; in the _Nibelungenlied_ Nature plays no part at +all, not even as framework. + +Time is indicated as sparsely as possible: + +'Upon the 7th day at Worms on the Rhine shore, the gallant horsemen +arrived.' + +'On a Whitsun morning we saw them all go by'; or 'When it grew +towards even, and near the sun's last ray, seeing the air was +cooler'; or 'He must hang, till light morning threw its glow through +the window.' The last is the most poetic; elsewhere it is 'Day was +over, night fell.' + +Terseness can be both a beauty and a force; but, in comparison with +Greece, how very little feeling for Nature these expressions contain! + +It is no better with descriptions of place: + +'From the Rhine they rode through Hesse, their warriors as well, +towards the Saxon country, where they to fighting fell.' + +'He found a fortress placed upon a mountain.' + +'Into a wide-roomed palace of fashion excellent, for there, beneath +it rushing, one saw the Danube's flood.' + +Even the story of the hunt and the murder of Siegfried is quite +matter-of-fact and sparse as to scenery: 'By a cold spring he soon +lost his life ... then they rode from there into a deep wood ... +there they encamped by the green wood, where they would hunt on the +broad mead ... one heard mountain and tree echo.' + +'The spring of water was pure and cool and good.' ... + +'There fell Chriemhild's husband among the flowers ... all round +about the flowers were wetted with his blood.' + +One thinks instinctively of Indian and Greek poetry, of Adonis and +the death of Baldur in the Northern Saga. But even here, where the +subject almost suggests it, there is no trace of Nature's sympathy +with man. + +References to the animal world too--Chriemhild's dreams of the +falcons seized by two eagles, and the two wild boars which attacked +Siegfried, the game hunted in the forests by the heroes who run like +panthers--all show it to be of no importance. + +Even such phrases as rosy-red, snow-white, etc., are rare--'Her +lovely face became all rosy-red with pleasure'; but there is a +certain tenderness in the comparisons of Chriemhild: + +'Then came the lovely maiden, even as morning red from sombre clouds +outbreaking,' and, 'just as the moon in brightness excels the +brightest stars, and suddenly outshining, athwart the clouds +appears,' so she excelled all other women. + +It has been said that one can hear the sighing of the north wind and +the roar of the North Sea in _Gudrun_, but this is scarcely more than +a pretty phrase. The 'dark tempestuous' sea, 'wild unfathomable' +waves, the shore 'wet from the blood of the slain,' are indeed +mentioned, but that is all. + +Wat of Sturmland says to the young warriors: 'The air is still and +the moon shines clear ... when the red star yonder in the south dips +his head in the brine, I shall blow on my great horn that all the +hosts shall hear'; but it is hope of morning, not delight in the +starry sky, that he is expressing. + +Indications of place too are of the briefest, just 'It was a broad +neck of land, called the Wuelpensand,' or, 'In a few hours they saw +the shores where they would land, a little harbour lay in sight +enfolded by low hills clothed with dark fir trees.' + +The first trace of sympathy with Nature occurs in the account of the +effect of Horand's song. + +Like Orpheus, he charms the little birds and other creatures: 'He +sang with such a splendid voice, that the little birds ceased their +song.' + +'And as he began to sing again, all the birds in the copse round +ceased their sweet songs.' + +'The very cattle left their green pastures to hearken, the little +gold beetles stopped running among the grass, the fishes ceased to +shoot about in the brooks. He sang long hours, and it seemed but a +brief moment. The very church bells sounded sweet no longer; the folk +left the choir songs of the priests and ran to hear him. All who +heard his voice were heart-sick after the singer, so grand and sweet +was the strain.' + +Indications of time are rarely found more short and concise than +here: + + When night ended and day began. + On the 12th day they quitted the country. + In Maytime. On a cool morning. + +This is a little richer: + + It was the time when leaves spring up delightfully and birds of + all sorts sing their best in the woods. + +Much more definite and distinct is: + + It was about that time of the year when departing winter sheds + his last terrors upon the earth; a sharp breeze was blowing and + the sea was covered with broken up ice; but there were gleams of + sunshine upon the hills, and the little birds began to tune their + throats tremulously, that they might be ready to sing their lay + when the March weather was past. + + Gudrun trembled with cold; her wet garment clung close to her + white limbs; the wind dashed her golden hair about her face. + +And later, when the morning of Gudrun's deliverance breaks, the +indications of time, though short, are plastic enough: + + After the space of an hour the red star went down upon the edge + of the sea, and Wat of Sturmland, standing upon the hill, blew a + great blast on his horn, which was heard in the land for miles + round.... The sound of Wat's horn ... wakened a young maid, who, + stealing on tiptoe to the window, looked over the bay and beheld + the glimmering of spears and helms upon the sands.... 'Awake, + mistress,' she cried, 'the host of the Hegelings is at hand.' + +Companions are few; + + He sprang like a wild lion. + +The shower of stones flung down upon Wat 'is but an April shower.' + +Images are few too: + + This flower of hope, to find repose here on the shore, Hartmouth + and his friends did not bring to blossom. + +Wilhelm Grimm rightly observes: + + At this epoch the poetry of the Fatherland gave no separate + descriptions of Nature--descriptions, that is, whose only object + was to paint the impression of the landscape in glowing colours + upon the mind. The old German masters certainly did not lack + feeling for Nature, but they have left us no other expression of + it than such as its connection with historical events demanded. + +And further: + + The question, whether contact with Southern Italy, or, through + the Crusades, with Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, did not + enrich German poetry with new pictures of Nature, can only, as a + general rule, be answered in the negative. + +In the courtly epics of chivalry, the place of real Nature was taken +by a fabulous wonderworld, full of the most fantastic and romantic +scenery, in which wood, field, plants, and animals were all +distorted. For instance, in the Alexander saga (of Pfaffen Lamprecht) +Alexander the Great describes to his teacher Aristotle the wonders he +has seen, and how one day he came with his army to a dark forest, +where the interlacing boughs of tall trees completely shut out the +sunlight. Clear, cool streams ran through it down to the valley, and +birds' songs echoed in the shade. The ground was covered by an +enormous quantity of flower buds of wondrous size, which looked like +great balls, snow-white and rose-coloured, closely folded up. +Presently, the fragrant goblets opened, and out of all these +wonder-flowers stepped lovely maidens, rosy as dawn and white as day, +and about twelve years old. All these thousands of charming beings +raised their voices together and competed with the birds in song, +swaying up and down in charming lines, singing and laughing in the +cool shade. They were dressed in red and white, like the flowers from +which they were born; but if sun rays fell on them, they would fade +and die. They were only children of the woodland shade and the +summer, and lived no longer than the flowers, which May brings to +life and Autumn kills. In this wood Alexander and his host pitched +their tents, and lived through the summer with the little maids. But +their happiness only lasted three months and twelve days: + + When the time came to an end, our joy passed away too; the + flowers faded, and the pretty girls died; trees lost their + leaves, springs their flow, and the birds their song; all + pleasure passed away. Discomfort began to touch my heart with + many sorrows, as day by day I saw the beautiful maidens die, the + flowers fade: with a heavy heart, I departed with my men. + +This fairy-like tale, with its blending of human and plant life, is +very poetically conceived; but it is only a play of fancy, one of the +early steps towards the modern feeling. + +The battle scenes, as well as other scenes in this poem, are bold and +exaggerated. Armies meet like roaring seas; missiles fly from both +sides as thick as snow; after the dreadful bath of blood, sun and +moon veil their light and turn away from the murder committed there. + +Hartmann von der Aue, too, did not draw real Nature, but only one of +his own invention. + +For example, the wild forest with the magic spring in _Iwein_: + + I turned to the wilds next morning, and found an extensive + clearing, hidden in the forest, solitary and without husbandmen. + There, to my distress, I descried a sad delight of the + eyes--beasts of every kind that I know the names of, attacking + each other.... this spring is cold and very pure; neither rain, + sun, or wind reach it; it is screened by a most beautiful lime + tree. The tree is excessively tall and thick, so that neither sun + nor rain can penetrate its foliage, winter does not injure it, + nor lessen its beauty by one hair; 'tis green and blossoming the + whole year round.... Over the spring there is a wonderfully fine + stone ... the tree was so covered with birds that I could + scarcely see the branches, and even the foliage almost + disappeared. The sweet songs were pleasant and resounded through + the forest, which re-echoed them.... + + As I poured water upon the ruby, the sun, which had just come + out, disappeared, the birds' song round about ceased, a black + storm approached, dark heavy storm-clouds came from all four + quarters of the vault of heaven. It seemed no longer bright day + ... soon a thousand flashes of lightning played round me in the + forest ... there came storm, rain, and hail ... the storm became + so great that the forest broke down. + +He never shews a real love for Nature even in his lyrics, for the +wish for flowers in _Winter Complaint_ can hardly be said to imply +that: + + He who cares for flowers must lament much at this heavy, dismal + time; a wife helps to shorten the long nights. In this way I will + shorten long winter without the birds' song. + +Wolfram von Eschenbach, too, is very sparing of references to Nature: +time is given by such phrases as 'when twilight began,' or 'as the +day broke,' 'at the bright glow of morning' ... 'as day already +turned to evening.' + +His interest in real things was driven into the background by +love-making and adventures--_Arthur's Round Table_ and the _Holy +Grail_; all the romance of knighthood. When he described a forest or +a garden, he always decked it out lavishly. + +For instance, the garden in Orgeluse: + + A garden surrounding a mountain, planted with noble trees where + pomegranates, figs, olives, vines, and other fruits grew richly + ... a spring poured from the rock, and (for all this would have + been nothing to him without a fair lady) there he found what did + not displease him--a lady so beautiful and fair that he was + charmed at the sight, the flower of womanly beauty. + +Comparisons are few and not very poetic. In _Songs of the Heart_-- + + The lady of the land watered herself with her heart's tears. + + Her eyes rained upon the child. + + Her joy was drowned in lamentation. + +Gawan and Orgeluse, + + Spite their outer sweetness, as disagreeable as a shower of rain + in sunshine. + + There were many fair flowers, but their colours could not compare + with that of Orgeluse. + +His heroes are specially fond of birds. Young Parzival + + Felt little care while the little birds sang round him; it made + his heart swell, he ran weeping into the house. + +and Gawan + + Found a door open into a garden; he stept in to look round and + enjoy the air and the singing of the birds. + +So we see that in the _Nibelungenlied_ scarcely a plant grew, and +Hartmann and Wolfram's gardens belonged almost entirely to an unreal +region; there are no traces of a very deep feeling for Nature in all +this. + +But Gottfried von Strassburg, with his vivid, sensuous imagination +and keen eye for beauty, shewed a distinct advance both in taste and +achievement. He, too, notes time briefly: 'And as it drew towards +evening,' 'Now day had broke.' He repeats his comparisons: fair +ladies are 'the wonder rose of May,' 'the longing white rose.' The +two Isolts are sun and dawn. Brangaene is the full moon. The terrified +girl is thus described: + + Her rosy mouth paled; the fair colour, which was her ornament, + died out of her skin; her bright eyes grew dim like night after + day. + +Another comparison is: + + Like the siren's song, drawing a bark to the reef as by a magnet, + so the sweet young queen attracted many hearts. + +Love is a usurious plant, whose sun never goes down; a romance +sweetens the mood as May dew sweetens the blood. + +Constant friendship is one which takes the pleasure with the pain, +the thorn with the rose. The last comparisons shew more thought, and +still more is seen in the beginning of the poem, _Riwalin and +Blancheflur_, which has a charming description of Spring. + + Now the festival was agreed upon and arranged + For the four flowering weeks + When sweet May attracts, till he flies off again. + At Tinkapol upon a green plain + High up on a wonderful meadow with spring colour + Such as no eye has seen before or since. Soft sweet May + Had dressed it with his own charming extravagance. + There were little wood birds, a joy to the ear, + Flowers and grass and green plants and summer meads + That were a delight to eye and heart. + One found there whatever one would, whatever May should bring-- + Shade from the sun, limes by the brook, + A gentle breeze which brought the prattle + Of Mark's court people. May's friend, the green turf, + Had made herself a charming costume of flowers, + In which she shone back at the guests with a festival of her own; + The blossoming trees smiled so sweetly at every one, + That heart and mind smiled back again. + The pure notes of the birds, blessed and beautiful, + Touched heart and senses, filling hill and dale with joy. + The dear nightingale, + Sweet bird, may it ever be blessed! + Sang so lustily upon the bough + That many a heart was filled with joy and good humour. + There the company pitched itself + With great delight on the green grass. + The limes gave enough shade, + And many covered their tent roofs with green boughs. + +There is a heartfelt ring in this. We see that even this early period +of German mediaeval poetry was not entirely lacking in clear voices to +sing of Nature with real sympathy. + +The description of the Minne grotto is famous, with its magical +accessories, its limes and other trees, birds, songs, and flowers, so +that 'eye and ear alike found solace'; but the romantic love episode, +interwoven as it is by the poet with the life of Nature, is more +interesting for our purpose. + + They had a court, they had a council which brought them nought + but joy. Their courtiers were the green trees, the shade and the + sunlight, the streamlet and the spring; flowers, grass, leaf, and + blossom, which refreshed their eyes. Their service was the song + of the birds, the little brown nightingales, the throstlets and + the merles and other wood birds. The siskin and the ringdove vied + with each other to do them pleasure, all day long their music + rejoiced ear and soul. Their love was their high feast.... The + man was with the woman, and the woman with the man; they had the + fellowship they most desired, and were where they fain would + be.... + + In the dewy morning they gat them forth to the meadow where grass + and flowers alike had been refreshed. The glade was their + pleasure-ground; they wandered hither and thither hearkening each + other's speech, and waking the song of the birds by their + footsteps. Then they turned them to where the cool clear spring + rippled forth, and sat beside its stream and watched its flow + till the sun grew high in the heaven, and they felt its shade. + Then they betook them to the linden, its branches offered them a + welcome shelter, the breezes were sweet and soft beneath its + shade, and the couch at its feet was decked with the fairest + grass and flowers. + +With these lovers, love of Nature is only second to love of each +other. So in the following: + + That same morning had Tristan and his lady-love stolen forth hand + in hand and come full early, through the morning dew, to the + flowery meadow and the lovely vale. Dove and nightingale saluted + them sweetly, greeting their friends Tristan and Iseult. The wild + wood birds bade them welcome in their own tongue ... it was as if + they had conspired among themselves to give the lovers a morning + greeting. They sang from the leafy branches in changeful wise, + answering each other in song and refrain. The spring that charmed + their eye and ear whispered a welcome, even as did the linden + with its rustling leaves. The blossoming trees, the fair meadow, + the flowers, and the green grass--all that bloomed laughed at + their coming; the dew which cooled their feet and refreshed their + heart offered a silent greeting. + +The amorous passion was the soil in which, in its early narrow +stages, sympathy for Nature grew up. Was it the thirteenth-century +lyrics, the love-songs of the Minnesingers, which unfolded the germ? +For the lyric is the form in which the deepest expression can be +given to feeling for Nature, and in which she either appears as +background, frame, or ornament, or, by borrowing a soul or +symbolizing thought and feeling, blends with the inner life. + +As the German court epics took their material from France, so the +German love-songs were inspired by the Provencal troubadours. The +national differences stand out clear to view: the vivid glowing +Provencal is fresher, more vehement, and mettlesome; the dreamy +German more monotonous, tame, and melancholy. The one is given to +proud daring, wooing, battle, and the triumph of victory; the other +to musing, loving, and brooding enthusiasm. The stamp of the +occasional, of improvisation, is upon all Provencal work; while with +the German Minnesingers, everything--Nature as well as love--tends to +be stereotyped, monotonous. + +The scanty remains of Troubadour songs[7] often shew mind and Nature +very strikingly brought together, either in harmony or contrast. For +example, Bernard von Ventadour (1195): + + It may annoy others to see the foliage fall from the trees, but + it pleases me greatly; one cannot fancy I should long for leaves + and flowers when she, my dear one, is haughty to me. + + Cold and snow become flowers and greenery under her charming + glance. + + As I slumber at night, I am waked by the sweet song of the + nightingale; nothing but love in my mind quite thrilled by + shudders of delight. + + God! could I be a swallow and sweep through the air, I would go + at midnight to her little chamber. + + When I behold the lark up spring + To meet the bright sun joyfully, + How he forgets to poise his wing + In his gay spirit's revelry. + Alas! that mournful thoughts should spring + E'en from that happy songster's glee! + Strange that such gladdening sight should bring + Not joy but pining care to me. + +A very modern thought which calls to mind Theodore Storm's touching +lines after the death of his wife: + + But this I cannot endure, that the sun smiles as before, clocks + strike and bells ring as in thy lifetime, and day and night still + follow each other. + +He connects spring with love: + + When grass grows green and fresh leaves spring + And flowers are budding on the plain, + When nightingales so sweetly sing + And through the greenwood swells the strain, + Then joy I in the song and in the flower, + Joy in myself but in my lady more; + All objects round my spirit turns to joy, + But most from her my rapture rises high. + +Arnold von Mareuil (about 1200) sings in the same way: + + O! how sweet the breeze of April + Breathing soft, as May draws near, + While through nights serene and gentle + Songs of gladness meet the ear. + Every bird his well-known language + Warbling in the morning's pride, + Revelling on in joy and gladness + By his happy partner's side.... + With such sounds of bliss around me, + Who could wear a saddened heart? + +He calls his lady-love + + The fairest creature which Nature has produced here below, fairer + than I can express and faker than a beautiful May day, than + sunshine in March, shade in summer, than May roses, April rain, + the flower of beauty, mirror of love, the key of Fame. + +Bertran de Born too sings: + + The beautiful spring delights me well + When flowers and leaves are growing, + And it pleases my heart to hear the swell + Of the bird's sweet chorus flowing + In the echoing wood, etc. + +The Greek lyrists up to Alexandrian times contented themselves with +implying indirectly that nothing delighted them so much as May and +its delights; but these singers implicitly state it. The German +Minnesingers too[8] are loud in praise of spring, as in that +anonymous song: + + I think nothing so good nor worthy of praise + As a fair rose and my good man's love; + The song of the little birds in the woods is clear to many a heart. + +and summer is greeted with: + + The good are glad that summer comes. See what a benefit it is to + many hearts. + +The Troubadour motive is here too: + + Winter and snow seem as beautiful flowers and clover to me, when + I have embraced her. + +and Kuerenberg makes a lady sing: + + When I stand there alone in my shift and think of thee, noble + knight, I blush like a rose on its thorn. + +Delight in summer, complaint of winter--this is the fundamental chord +struck again and again; there is scarcely any trace of blending the +feelings of the lover with those of Nature. It is a monotonous +repetition of a few themes, of flowers and little birds as messengers +of love, and lady-loves who are brighter than the sun, whose presence +brings spring in winter or cheers a grey and snowy day. + +Deitmar von Eist greets spring with: + + Ah! now the time of the little birds' singing is coming for us, + the great lime is greening, the long winter is past, one sees + well-shaped flowers spread their glory over the heath. 'Tis a joy + to many hearts, and a comfort too to mine. + +In another song the birds and roses remind him of a happy past and of +the lady of his heart. + + A little bird sang on the lime o'erhead, + Its song resounded through the wood + And turned my heart back to another place; + And once again I saw the roses blow, + And they brought back the many thoughts + I cherish of a lady. + +A lady says to a falcon: + + You happy falcon you! You fly whither you will! + And choose the tree you like in the wood. + I have done the same. I chose a husband + For myself, whom my eyes chose. + So 'tis fitting for beautiful women. + +In winter he complains: + + Alas for summer delight! The birds' song has disappeared with the + leaves of the lime. Time has changed, the nightingales are dumb. + They have given up their sweet song and the wood has faded from + above. + +Uhland's beautiful motive in _Spring Faith_, that light and hope will +come back to the oppressed heart with the flowers and the green, is +given, though stiffly and dimly, by Heinrich von Veldegge: + + I have some delightful news; the flowers are sprouting on the + heath, the birds singing in the wood. Where snow lay before, + there is now green clover, bedewed in the morning. Who will may + enjoy it. No one forces me to, I am not free from cares. + +and elsewhere: + + At the time when flowers and grass come to us, all that made my + heart sad will be made good again. + +The loss of the beauty of summer makes him sad: + + Since the bright sunlight has changed to cold, and the little + birds have left off singing their song, and cold nights have + faded the foliage of the lime, my heart is sad. + +Ulrich von Guotenberg makes a pretty comparison: + + She is my summer joy, she sows flowers and clover + In my heart's meadow, whence I, whate'er befall, + Must teem with richer bliss: the light of her eyes + Makes me bloom, as the hot sun the dripping trees.... + Her fair salute, her mild command + Softly inclining, make May rain drop down into my heart. + +Heinrich von Rugge laments winter: + + The dear nightingale too has forgotten how beautifully she sang + ... the birds are mourning everywhere. + +and longs for summer: + + I always craved blissful days.... I liked to hear the little + birds' delightful songs. Winter cannot but be hard and + immeasurably long. I should be glad if it would pass away. + +Heinrich von Morungen: + + How did you get into my heart? + It must ever be the same with me. + As the noon receives her light from the sun, + So the glance of your bright eyes, when you leave me, + Sinks into my heart. + +He calls his love his light of May, his Easter Day: + + She is my sweetheart, a sweet May + Bringing delights, a sunshine without cloud. + +and says, in promising fidelity: 'My steady mind is not like the +wind.' + +Reinmar says: + + When winter is over + I saw the heath with the red flowers, delightful there.... + The long winter is past away; when I saw the green leaves + I gave up much of my sorrow. + +In a time of trouble he cried: + + To me it must always be winter. + +So we see that Troubadour references to Nature were drawn from a very +limited area. Individual grasp of scenery was entirely lacking, it +did not occur to them to seek Nature for her own sake. Their +comparisons were monotonous, and their scenes bare, stereotyped +arabesques, not woven into the tissue of lyric feeling. Their ruling +motives were joy in spring and complaint of winter. Wood, flowers, +clover, the bright sun, the moon (once), roses, lilies, and woodland +birds, especially the nightingale, served them as elementary or +landscape figures. + +Wilhelm Grimm says: + + The Minnesingers talk often enough of mild May, the nightingale's + song, the dew shining on the flowers of the heath, but always in + relation only to their own feelings reflected in them. To + indicate sad moods they used faded leaves, silent birds, seed + buried in snow. + +and Humboldt: + + The question, whether contact with Southern Italy, or the + Crusades in Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, have enriched the + art of poetry in Germany with new natural pictures, can only + generally be answered by the negative. It is not remarked that + the acquaintance with the East gave any new direction to the + songs of the minstrels. The Crusaders came little into actual + contact with the Saracens; they even lived in a state of great + restraint with other nations who fought in the same cause. One of + the oldest lyric poets was Friedrich of Hausen. He perished in + the army of Barbarossa. His songs contain many views of the + Crusades; but they chiefly express religious sentiments on the + pain of being separated from his dear friends. He found no + occasion to say anything concerning the country or any of those + who took part in the wars, as Reinmar the Elder, Rubin, Neidhart, + and Ulrich of Lichtenstein. Reinmar came a pilgrim to Syria, as + it appears, in the train of Leopold the 6th, Duke of Austria. He + complains that the recollections of his country always haunted + him, and drew away his thoughts from God. The date tree has here + been mentioned sometimes, when they speak of the palm branches + which pious pilgrims bore upon their shoulders. I do not remember + that the splendid scenery in Italy has excited the fancy of the + minstrels who crossed the Alps. Walther, who had wandered about, + had only seen the river Po; but Friedank was at Rome. He merely + remarked that grass grew in the palaces of those who formerly + bore sway there. + +As a fact, even the greatest Minnesinger, Walther, the master lyrist +of the thirteenth century, was not ahead of his contemporaries in +this matter. His _Spring Longing_ begins: + + Winter has wrought us harm everywhere, + Forest and field are dreary and bare + Where the sweet voices of summer once were, + Yet by the road where I see maiden fair + Tossing the ball, the birds' song is there. + +and _Spring and Women_: + + When flowers through the grass begin to spring + As though to greet with smiles the sun's bright rays, + On some May morning, and in joyous measure, + Small songbirds make the dewy forest ring + With a sweet chorus of sweet roundelays, + Hath life in all its store a purer pleasure? + 'Tis half a Paradise on earth. + Yet ask me what I hold of equal worth, + And I will tell what better still + Ofttimes before hath pleased mine eyes, + And, while I see it, ever will. + When a noble maiden, fair and pure, + With raiment rich and tresses deftly braided, + Mingles, for pleasure's sake, in company, + High bred, with eyes that, laughingly demure, + Glance round at times and make all else seem faded, + As, when the sun shines, all the stars must die. + Let May bud forth in all its splendour; + What sight so sweet can he engender + As with this picture to compare? + Unheeded leave we buds and blooms, + And gaze upon the lovely fair! + +The grace in this rendering of a familiar motive, and the +individuality in the following _Complaint of Winter_, were both +unusual at the time: + + Erewhile the world shone red and blue + And green in wood and upland too, + And birdlets sang on the bough. + But now it's grown grey and lost its glow, + And there's only the croak of the winter crow, + Whence--many a ruffled brow! + +Elsewhere he says that his lady's favour turns his winter to spring, +and adds: + + Cold winter 'twas no more for me, + Though others felt it bitterly; + To me it was mid May. + +He has many pictures of Nature and pretty comparisons, but the +stereotyped style predominates--heath, flowers, grass, and +nightingales. The pearl of the collection is the naive song which +touches sensuous feeling, like the _Song of Solomon_, with the magic +light of innocence: + + Under the lime on the heath where I sat with my love, + There you would find + The grass and the flowers all crushed-- + Sweetly the nightingale sang in the vale by the wood. + Tandaradei! + When I came up to the meadow my lover was waiting me there. + Ah! what a greeting I had! Gracious Mary, 'tis bliss to me still! + Tandaradei! Did he kiss me, you ask? Look at the red of my lips! + Of sweet flowers of all sorts he made us a bed, + I wager who passes now smiles at the sight, + The roses would still show just where my head lay. + Tandaradei! + But how he caressed me, that any but one + Should know that, God forbid! I were shamed if they did; + Only he and I know it, + And one little birdie who never will tell. + +So we see that interest in Nature in the literature of the Crusaders +very seldom went beyond the utilitarian bounds of pleasure and +admiration in fertility and pleasantness; and the German national +epics rarely alluded to her traits even by way of comparison. The +court epics shewed some advance, and sympathy was distinctly +traceable in Gottfried, and even attained to artistic expression in +his lyrics, where his own feelings chimed with Nature. + +For the rest, the Minnesingers' descriptions were all alike. The +charm of Nature apart from other considerations, delight in her for +her own sake alone, was unknown to the time. + +Hitherto we have only spoken of literature. + +Feeling for Nature reveals itself in plastic art also, especially in +painting; and since the mind of a people is one united organism, the +relation between poetry and painting is not one of opposition and +mutual exclusion--they rather enlarge and explain, or condition each +other. + +As concerns feeling for Nature, it may be taken as a universal rule +that landscape-painting only develops when Nature is sought for her +own sake, and that so long as scenery merely serves the purpose of +ornament in literature, so long it merely serves as accessory and +background in painting; whereas, when Nature takes a wider space in +prose and poetry, and becomes an end of representation in herself, +the moment for the birth of landscape-painting has come. We will +follow the stages of the development of painting very briefly, from +Woltmann and Woermann's excellent book,[9] which, if it throws no +fresh light upon our subject, illustrates what has just been said in +a striking manner. + +In the first centuries _Anno Domini_, painting was wholly proscribed +by Christendom. Its technique did not differ from that of antiquity; +but Christendom took up an attitude of antagonism. The picture +worship of the old religions was opposed to its very origin and +essence, and was only gradually introduced into the Christian cult +through heathen influences. It is a fact too, easy to explain, +especially through its Jewish origin, that Christianity at first felt +no need of art, and that this one-sidedness only ceased when the +specifically Jewish element in it had died out, and Christendom +passed to cultivated Greeks and Romans. In the cemeteries and +catacombs of the first three centuries, we find purely decorative +work, light vines with Cupids, but also remains of landscapes; for +instance, in the oldest part of the cemetery of Domitilla at Rome, +where the ceiling decoration consists of shepherds, fishers, and +biblical scenes. The ceiling picture in St Lucina (second century) +has apparently the Good Shepherd in the middle, and round it +alternate pictures of Him and of the praying Madonna; whilst in the +middle it has also charming divisions with fields, branches with +leaves and flowers, birds, masks, and floating genii. + +In Byzantine painting too, the influence of antiquity was still +visible, especially in a Psaltery with a Commentary and fourteen +large pictures. David appears here as a shepherd; a beautiful woman's +form, exhibiting the melody, is leaning with her left arm upon his +shoulder; a nymph's head peeps out of the foliage; and in front we +have Bethlehem, and the mountain god resting in a bold position under +a rock; sheep, goats, and water are close by, and a landscape with +classic buildings, streams, and mountains forms the background; it is +very poetically conceived. Elsewhere, too, personifications recur, in +which classic beauty is still visible, mixed with severe Christian +forms. + +At the end of the tenth century began the Romantic period, which +closed in the thirteenth. + +The brilliant progress made by architecture paved the way for the +other arts; minds trained in its laws began to look for law in +organic Nature too, and were no longer content with the old uncertain +and arbitrary shapes. But as no independent feeling for Nature, in +the widest sense of the term, existed, mediaeval art treated her, not +according to her own laws, but to those of architecture. With the +development of the Gothic style, from the thirteenth century on, art +became a citizen's craft, a branch of industry. Heretofore it had +possessed but one means of expression--religious festival or +ceremony, severely ecclesiastical. This limit was now removed. The +artist lived a wide life, open to impressions from Nature, his +imagination fed by poetry with new ideas and feelings, and constantly +stimulated by the love of pleasure, which was so vehement among all +classes that it turned every civil and ecclesiastical event to +histrionic purposes, and even made its influence felt upon the +clergy. The strong religious feeling which pervaded the Middle Ages +still ruled, and even rose to greater enthusiasm, in accordance with +the spirit of the day; but it was no longer a matter of blind +submission of the will, but of conscious acceptance. + +It is true that knowledge of the external world was as yet very +limited; the painter had not explored and mastered it, but only used +it as a means to represent a certain realm of feeling, studying it +just so far as this demanded. We have seen the same in the case of +poetry. The beginnings of realistic painting were visible, although, +as, for example, in representing animals, no individuality was +reached. + +From the middle of the fourteenth century a new French school sprang +up. The external world was more keenly and accurately studied, +especially on its graceful side. It was only at the end of that +period that painting felt the need to develop the background, and +indicate actual surroundings by blue sky, hills, Gothic buildings, +and conventional trees. These were given in linear perspective; of +aerial perspective there was none. The earlier taste still ruled in +initialling and border decorations; but little flowers were added by +degrees to the thorn-leaf pattern, and birds, sometimes angels, +introduced. + +The altar-piece at Cologne, at the end of the fourteenth century, is +more subjective in conception, and full of lyric feeling. Poetic +feeling came into favour, especially in Madonna pictures of purely +idyllic character, which were painted with most charming +surroundings. Instead of a throne and worshipping figures, Mary was +placed sitting comfortably with the Child on flowery turf, and saints +around her; and although the background might be golden instead of +landscape, yet all the stems and blossoms in the grass were naturally +and accurately treated. In a little picture in the town museum at +Frankfort, the Madonna is seated in a rose garden under fruit trees +gay with birds, and reading a book; a table with food and drinks +stands close by, and a battlemented wall surrounds the garden. She is +absorbed in contemplation; three female saints are attending to +mundane business close by, one drawing water from a brook, another +picking cherries, the third teaching the child Christ to play the +zither. There is real feeling in the whole picture, and the landscape +is worked in with distinct reference to the chief idea. + +Hence, although there were many isolated attempts to shew that realistic +and individual study of Nature had begun, landscape-painting had not +advanced beyond the position of a background, treated in a way more or +less suited to the main subject of the picture; and trees, rocks, +meadows, flowers, were still only framework, ornament, as in the poetry +of the Minnesingers.[10] + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +INDIVIDUALISM AND SENTIMENTAL FEELING +AT THE RENAISSANCE + + +In a certain sense all times are transitional to those who live in +them, since what is old is always in process of being destroyed and +giving way to the new. But there are landmarks in the general +development of culture, which mark off definite periods and divide +what has been from what is beginning. Hellenism was such a landmark +in antiquity, the Renaissance in the Middle Ages. + +Without overlooking the differences between Greek and Italian, +classic and modern, which are relative and not absolute, it is +instructive to note the great likeness between these two epochs. The +limits of their culture will stand out more clearly, if, by the aid +of Helbig's researches and Burckhardt's masterly account of the +Renaissance, we range the chief points of that likeness side by side. + +They were epochs in which an icy crust, which had been lying over +human thought and feeling, melted as if before a spring breeze. It is +true that the theory of life which now began to prevail was not +absolutely new; the stages of growth in a nation's culture are never +isolated; it was the result of the enlargement of various factors +already present, and their fusion with a flood of incoming ones. + +The Ionic-Doric Greek kingdom widened out in Alexander's time to a +Hellenic-Asiatic one, and the barriers of the Romano-Germanic Middle +Ages fell with the Crusades and the great voyages of discovery. +Hellenism and the Renaissance brought about the transition from +antiquity and the mediaeval to the specifically modern; the Roman +Empire inherited Hellenism, the Reformation the Renaissance. Both had +their roots in the past, both made new growth which blossomed at a +later time. In Hellenism, Oriental elements were mixed with the +Greek; in the Renaissance, it was a mixture of Germanic with the +native Italian which caused the revival of classic antiquity and new +culture. Burckhardt says[1]: + + Elsewhere in Europe men deliberately and with reflection borrowed + this or the other element of classical civilization; in Italy, + the sympathies both of the learned and of the people were + naturally engaged on the side of antiquity as a whole, which + stood to them as a symbol of past greatness. The Latin language + too was easy to an Italian, and the numerous monuments and + documents in which the country abounded facilitated a return to + the past. With this tendency, other elements--the popular + character which time had now greatly modified, the political + institutions imported by the Lombards from Germany, chivalry and + northern forms of civilization, and the influence of religion and + the Church--combined to produce the modern Italian spirit, which + was destined to serve as the model and ideal for the whole + western world. + +The distance between the works of the Greek artists and +poets--between Homer, Sophocles, and Phidias on the one hand, and the +Alexandrian Theocritus and Kallimachos and the Pergamos sculptures on +the other--is greater than lies between the _Nibelungenlied_ and the +Minnesingers, and Dante and Petrarch. In both cases one finds oneself +in a new world of thought and feeling, where each and all bears the +stamp of change, in matters political and social as well as artistic. +If, for example, by the aid of Von Helbig's researches,[2] we conjure +up a picture of the chief points in the history of Greek culture, we +are astonished to see how almost every point recurred at the +Renaissance, as described by Burckhardt. + +The chief mark of both epochs was individualism, the discovery of the +individual. In Hellenism it was the barriers of race and position +which fell; in the Renaissance, the veil, woven of mysticism and +delusion, which had obscured mediaeval faith, thought, and feeling. +Every man recognized himself to be an independent unit of church, +state, people, corporation--of all those bodies in which in the +Middle Ages he had been entirely merged. + +Monarchical institutions arose in Hellenism; but the individual was +no longer content to serve them only as one among many; he must needs +develop his own powers. Private affairs began to preponderate over +public; the very physiognomy of the race shewed an individual stamp. + + After the time of Alexander the Great, portrait shewed most + marked individuality. Those of the previous period had a certain + uniform expression; one would have looked in vain among them for + the diversities in contemporary types shewn by comparing + Alexander's vivid face full of stormy energy, Menander's with its + peculiar look of irony, and the elaborate savant-physiognomy of + Aristotle. (HELBIG.) + +And Burckhardt says: + + At the close of the thirteenth century Italy began to swarm with + individuality; the charm laid upon human personality was + dissolved, and a thousand figures meet us each in its own special + shape and dress.... Despotism, as we have already seen, fostered + in the highest degree the individuality, not only of the tyrant + or Condottiere himself, but also of the men whom he protected or + used as his tools--the secretary, minister, poet, or companion. + +Political indifference brought about a high degree of +cosmopolitanism, especially among those who were banished. 'My +country is the whole world,' said Dante; and Ghiberti: 'Only he who +has learned everything is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune +and without friends, he is yet a citizen of every country, and can +fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.' + +In both Hellenism and the Renaissance, an effort was made in art and +science to see things as they really were. In art, detail was +industriously cultivated; but its naturalism, especially as to +undraped figures, was due to a sensuous refinement of gallantry and +erotic feeling. The sensuous flourished no less in Greek times than +in those of Boccaccio; but the most characteristic peculiarity of +Hellenism was its intentional revelling in feeling--its +sentimentality. There was a trace of melancholy upon many faces of +the time, and unhappy love in endless variations was the poet's main +theme. Petrarch's lyre was tuned to the same key; a melancholy +delight in grief was the constant burden of his song. + +In Greece the sight of foreign lands had furthered the natural +sciences, especially geography, astronomy, zoology, and botany; and +the striving for universality at the Renaissance, which was as much a +part of its individualism as its passion for fame, was aided by the +widening of the physical and mental horizons through the Crusades and +voyages of discovery. Dante was not only the greatest poet of his +time, but an astronomer; Petrarch was geographer and cartographer, +and, at the end of the fifteenth century, with Paolo Toscanelli, +Lucca Baccioli, and Leonardo da Vinci, Italy was beyond all +comparison the first nation in Europe in mathematics and natural +science. + + A significant proof of the wide-spread interest in natural + history is found in the zeal which shewed itself at an early + period for the collection and comparative study of plants and + animals. Italy claims to be the first creator of botanical + gardens.... princes and wealthy men, in laying out their pleasure + gardens, instinctively made a point of collecting the greatest + possible number of different plants in all their species and + varieties. (BURCKHARDT.) + +Leon Battista Alberti, a man of wide theoretical knowledge as well as +technical and artistic facility of all sorts, entered into the whole +life around him with a sympathetic intensity that might almost be +called nervous. + + At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears + ... more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful + landscape cured him. (BURCKHARDT.) + +He defined a beautiful landscape as one in which one could see in its +different parts, sea, mountain, lake or spring, dry rocks or plains, +wood and valley. Therefore he cared for variety; and, what is more +striking, in contrast to level country, he admired mountains and +rocks! + +In Hellenism, hunting, to which only the Macedonians had been +addicted before, became a fashion, and was enjoyed with Oriental pomp +in the _paradeisoi_. Writers drew most of their comparisons from it. +In the Renaissance, Petrarch did the same, and animals often served +as emblems of state--their condition ominous of good or evil--and +were fostered with superstitious veneration, as, for example, the +lions at Florence. + +Thus the growth of the natural sciences increased interest in the +external world, and sensitiveness brought about a sentimental +attitude towards Nature in Hellenism and in the Renaissance. + +Both discovered in Nature a source of purest pleasure; the +Renaissance feeling was, in fact, the extension and enhancement of +the Hellenic. Burckhardt overlooked the fact that beautiful scenery +was appreciated and described for its own sake in Hellenism, but he +says very justly; + + The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the + outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful.... By the + year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine hearty + enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found + lively expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which + gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena + of Nature--spring with its flowers, the green fields and the + woods. But these pictures are all foreground without perspective. + +Among the Minnesingers there were traces of feeling for Nature; but +only for certain stereotyped phases. Of the individuality of a +landscape, its characteristic colour, form, and light, not a word was +said. + +Even the Carmina Burana were not much ahead of the Minnesingers in +this respect, although they deserve a closer examination. + +These Latin poems of wandering clerks probably belong to the twelfth +century, and though no doubt a product in which the whole of Europe +had a share, their best pieces must be ascribed to a French hand. +Latin poetry lives again in them, with a freshness the Carlovingian +Renaissance never reached; they are mediaeval in form, but full of a +frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, which hardly any +northerner of that day possessed. Often enough this degenerated into +frivolity; but the stir of national awakening after the long sleep of +the Middle Ages is felt like a spring breeze through them all. + +It is a far cry from the view of Nature we saw in the Carlovingian +monks, to these highly-coloured verses. The dim light of churches and +bare cell walls may have doubled the monks' appreciation of blue +skies and open-air life; but they were fettered by the constant fight +with the senses; Nature to them must needs be less a work of God for +man's delight, than a dangerous means of seduction. 'They wandered +through Nature with timid misgiving, and their anxious fantasy +depicted forms of terror or marvellous rescues.[3] The idyllic +pleasure in the simple charms of Nature, especially in the monastery +garden of the Carlovingian time, contrasts strikingly with the tone +of these very mundane _vagantes clerici_, for whom Nature had not +only long been absorbed and freed from all demoniac influence, but +peopled by the charming forms of the old mythic poems, and made for +the joy and profit of men, in the widest and naivest sense of the +words. + +Spring songs, as with the Minnesingers, take up most of the space; +but the theme is treated with greater variety. Enjoyment of life and +Nature breathes through them all. + +One runs thus: + + Spring cometh, and the earth is decked and studded with vernal + flowers. The harmony of the birds' returning song rouses the + heart to be glad. It is the time of joy. + +Songs 98 to 118 rejoice that winter is gone; for instance: + + Now in the mild springtime Flora opens the lap which the cold + frost had locked in cruel time of winter; the zephyr with gentle + murmur cometh with the spring; the grove is clad in leaves. The + nightingale is singing, the fields are gay with divers hues. It + is sweet to walk in the wooded glens, it is sweeter to pluck the + lily with the rose, it is sweetest of all to sport with a lovely + maiden. + +Another makes a similar confession, for Nature and amorous passion +are the two strings of these lyres: + + Beneath the pleasant foliage of a tree 'tis sweet to rest, while + the nightingale sings her plaintive song; sweeter still, to sport + in the grass with a fair maiden.... O, to what changeful moods is + the heart of the lover prone! As the vessel that wanders o'er the + waves without an anchor, so doth Love's uncertain warfare toss + 'twixt fear and hope. + +The beauties of Nature are drawn upon to describe the fair maiden; +her eyes are compared to stars, her colour to lilies and snow, her +mouth to a rose, her kiss 'doth rend in sunder all the clouds of +care.' + + In the flowery season I sat beneath a shady tree while the birds + sang in the groves ... and listened to my Thisbe's talk, the talk + I love and long for; and we spoke of the sweet interchange of + love, and in the doubtful balance of the mind wanton love and + chastity were wavering. + + I have seen the bright green of flowers, I have seen the flower + of flowers, I have seen the rose of May; I have seen the star + that is brighter than all other, that is glorious and fair above + all other, through whom may I ever spend my life in love. + +On such a theme the poet rings endless changes. The most charming is +the poem _Phyllis and Flora_. Actual landscape is not given, but +details are treated with freshness and care: + + In the flowery season of the year, under a sky serene, while the + earth's lap was painted with many colours, when the messenger of + Aurora had put to flight the stars, sleep left the eyes of + Phyllis and of Flora, two maidens whose beauty answered to the + morning light. The breeze of spring was gently whispering, the + place was green and gay with grass, and in the grass itself there + flowed a living brook that played and babbled as it went. And + that the sun's heat might not harm the maidens, near the stream + there was a spreading pine, decked with leaves and spreading far + its interweaving branches, nor could the heat penetrate from + without. The maidens sat, the grass supplied the seat.... They + intend to go to Love's Paradise: at the entrance of the grove a + rivulet murmurs; the breeze is fragrant with myrrh and balsam; + they hear the music of a hundred timbrels and lutes. All the + notes of the birds resound in all their fulness; they hear the + sweet and pleasant song of the blackbird, the garrulous lark, the + turtle and the nightingale, etc.... He who stayed there would + become immortal; every tree there rejoices in its own fruit; the + ways are scented with myrrh and cinnamon and amomum; the master + could be forced out of his house. + +The first to shew proof of a deepening effect of Nature on the human +spirit was Dante. + +Dante and Petrarch elaborated the Hellenistic feeling for Nature; +hence the further course of the Renaissance displayed all its +elements, but with increased subjectivity and individuality. + +No one, since the days of Hellenism, had climbed mountains for the +sake of the view--Dante was the first to do it. And although, in +ranging heaven, earth, hell, and paradise in the _Divina Commedia_, +he rarely described real Nature, and then mostly in comparisons; yet, +as Humboldt pointed out, how incomparably in a few vigorous lines he +wakens the sense of the morning airs and the light on the distant sea +in the first canto of Purgatorio: + + The dawn was vanquishing the matin hour, + Which fled before it,-so that from afar + I recognized the trembling of the sea. + +And how vivid this is: + + The air + Impregnate changed to water. Fell the rain: + And to the fosses came all that the land + Contain'd not, and, as mightiest streams are wont, + To the great river with such headlong sweep + Rush'd, that naught stayed its course. + + Through that celestial forest, whose thick shade + With lively greenness the new-springing day + Attempered, eager now to roam and search + Its limits round, forthwith I left the bank; + Along the champaign leisurely my way + Pursuing, o'er the ground that on all sides + Delicious odour breathed. A pleasant air, + That intermitted never, never veered, + Smote on my temples gently, as a wind + Of softest influence, at which the sprays, + Obedient all, lean'd trembling to that part + Where first the holy mountain casts his shade; + Yet were not so disordered; but that still + Upon their top the feather'd quiristers + Applied their wonted art, and with full joy + Welcomed those hours of prime, and warbled shrill + Amid the leaves, that to their jocund lays + Kept tenour; even as from branch to branch + Along the piny forests on the shore + Of Chiassi rolls the gathering melody, + When Eolus hath from his cavern loosed + The dripping south. Already had my steps, + Tho' slow, so far into that ancient wood + Transported me, I could not ken the place + Where I had enter'd; when behold! my path + Was bounded by a rill, which to the left + With little rippling waters bent the grass + That issued from its brink. + +and this of the heavenly Paradise: + + I looked, + And, in the likeness of a river, saw + Light flowing, from whose amber-seeming waves + Flash'd up effulgence, as they glided on + 'Twixt banks, on either side, painted with spring, + Incredible how fair; and, from the tide, + There, ever and anon outstarting, flew + Sparkles instinct with life; and in the flowers + Did set them, like to rubies chased in gold; + Then, as if drunk with odours, plunged again + Into the wondrous flood, from which, as one + Re-entered, still another rose. + +His numerous comparisons conjure up whole scenes, perfect in truth to +Nature, and shewing a keen and widely ranging eye. For example: + + Bellowing, there groaned + A noise, as of a sea in tempest torn + By warring winds. + (Inferno.) + + O'er better waves to steer her rapid course + The light bark of my genius lifts the sail, + Well pleased to leave so cruel sea behind. + (Purgatorio.) + + All ye, who in small bark have following sail'd, + Eager to listen on the adventurous track + Of my proud keel, that singing cuts her way. + (Paradiso.) + + As sails full spread and bellying with the wind + Drop suddenly collapsed, if the mast split, + So to the ground down dropp'd the cruel fiend. + (Inferno.) + + As, near upon the hour of dawn, + Through the thick vapours Mars with fiery beam + Glares down in west, over the ocean floor. + (Purgatorio.) + + As 'fore the sun + That weighs our vision down, and veils his form + In light transcendent, thus my virtue fail'd + Unequal. (Purgatorio.) + + As sunshine cheers + Limbs numb'd by nightly cold, e'en thus my look + Unloosed her tongue. + + And now there came o'er the perturbed waves, + Loud crashing, terrible, a sound that made + Either shore tremble, as if of a wind + Impetuous, from conflicting vapours sprung, + That, 'gainst some forest driving all his might, + Plucks off the branches, beats them down, and hurls + Afar; then, onward pressing, proudly sweeps + His whirlwind rage, while beasts and shepherds fly. + (Inferno.) + + As florets, by the frosty air of night + Bent down and closed, when day has blanch'd their leaves + Rise all unfolded on their spiry stems, + So was my fainting vigour new restored. + (Inferno.) + + As fall off the light autumnal leaves, + One still another following, till the bough + Strews all its honours on the earth beneath. + (Inferno.) + +Bees, dolphins, rays of sunlight, snow, starlings, doves, frogs, a +bull, falcons, fishes, larks, and rooks are all used, generally with +characteristic touches of detail. + +Specially tender is this: + + E'en as the bird, who 'mid the leafy bower + Has, in her nest, sat darkling through the night + With her sweet brood; impatient to descry + Their wished looks, and to bring home their food, + In the fond quest, unconscious of her toil; + + She, of the time prevenient, on the spray + That overhangs their couch, with wakeful gaze + Expects the sun, nor, ever, till the dawn + Removeth from the east her eager ken, + So stood the dame erect. + +The most important forward step was made by Petrarch, and it is +strange that this escaped Humboldt in his famous sketch in the second +volume of _Cosmos_, as well as his commentator Schaller, and +Friedlander. + +For when we turn from Hellenism to Petrarch, it does not seem as if +many centuries lay between; but rather as if notes first struck in +the one had just blended into distinct harmony in the other. + +The modern spirit arose from a union of the genius of the Italian +people of the thirteenth century with antiquity, and the feeling for +Nature had a share in the wider culture, both as to sentimentality +and grasp of scenery. Classic and modern joined hands in Petrarch. +Many Hellenic motives handed on by Roman poets reappear in his +poetry, but always with that something in addition of which antiquity +shewed but a trace--the modern subjectivity and individuality. It was +the change from early bud to full blossom. He was one of the first to +deserve the name of modern--modern, that is, in his whole feeling and +mode of thought, in his sentimentality and his melancholy, and in the +fact that 'more than most before and after him, he tried to know +himself and to hand on to others what he knew.' (Geiger.) It is an +appropriate remark of Hettner's, that the phrase, 'he has discovered +his heart,' might serve as a motto for Petrarch's songs and sonnets. +He knew that he had that sentimental disorder which he called +'acedia,' and wished to be rid of it. This word has a history of its +own. To the Greeks, to Apollonius, for instance,[4] it meant +carelessness, indifference; and, joined with the genitive [Greek: +nooio]--that is, of the mind--it meant, according to the scholiasts, +as much as [Greek: lype] (Betruebnis)--that is, distress or grief. In +the Middle Ages it became 'dislike of intellect so far as that is a +divine gift'--that disease of the cloister which a monkish chronicler +defined as 'a sadness or loathing and an immoderate distress of mind, +caused by mental confusion, through which happiness of mind was +destroyed, and the mind thrown back upon itself as from an abyss of +despair.' + +To Dante it meant the state-- + + Sad + In the sweet air, made gladsome by the sun, + +distaste for the good and beautiful. + +The modern meaning which it took with Petrarch is well defined by +Geiger as being neither ecclesiastic nor secular sin,[5] but + + Entirely human and peculiar to the cleverest--the battle between + reality and seeming, the attempt to people the arid wastes of the + commonplace with philosophic thought--the unhappiness and despair + that arise from comparing the unconcern of the majority with + one's own painful unrest, from the knowledge that the results of + striving do not express the effort made--that human life is but a + ceaseless and unworthy rotation, in which the bad are always to + the fore, and the good fall behind ... as pessimism, melancholy, + world pain (Weltschmerz)--that tormenting feeling which mocks all + attempt at definition, and is too vitally connected with erring + and striving human nature to be curable--that longing at once for + human fellowship and solitude, for active work and a life of + contemplation. + +Petrarch knew too the pleasure of sadness, what Goethe called 'Wonne +der Wehmuth,' the _dolendi voluptas._ + + Lo, what new pleasure human wits devise! + For oftentimes one loves + Whatever new thing moves + The sighs, that will in closest order go; + And I'm of those whom sorrowing behoves; + And that with some success + I labour, you may guess, + When eyes with tears, and heart is brimmed with woe. + +In Sonnet 190: + + My chiefest pleasure now is making moan. + + Oh world, oh fruitless thought, + Oh luck, my luck, who'st led me thus for spite!... + For loving well, with pain I'm rent.... + Nor can I yet repent, + My heart o'erflowed with deadly pleasantness. + Now wait I from no less + A foe than dealt me my first blow, my last. + And were I slain full fast, + 'Twould seem a sort of mercy to my mind.... + My ode, I shall i' the field + Stand firm; to perish flinching were a shame, + In fact, myself I blame + For such laments; my portion is so sweet. + Tears, sighs, and death I greet. + O reader that of death the servant art, + Earth can no weal, to match my woes, impart. + +His poems are full of scenes and comparisons from Nature; for the +sympathy for her which goes with this modern and sentimental tone is +a deep one: + + In that sweet season of my age's prime + Which saw the sprout and, as it were, green blade + Of the wild passion.... + + Changed me + From living man into green laurel whose + Array by winter's cold no leaf can lose. + (Ode 1.) + +Love is that by which + + My darknesses were made as bright + As clearest noonday light. (Ode 4.) + +Elsewhere it is the light of heaven breaking in his heart, and +springtime which brings the flowers. + +In Sonnet 44 he plays with impossibilities, like the Greek and Roman +poets: + + Ah me! the sea will have no waves, the snow + Will warm and darken, fish on Alps will dwell, + And suns droop yonder, where from common cell + + The springs of Tigris and Euphrates flow, + Or ever I shall here have truce or peace + Or love.... + +and uses the same comparisons, Sestina 7: + + So many creatures throng not ocean's wave, + So many, above the circle of the moon, + Of stars were never yet beheld by night; + So many birds reside not in the groves; + So many herbs hath neither field nor shore, + But my heart's thoughts outnumber them each eve. + +Many of his poems witness to the truth that the love-passion is the +best interpreter of Nature, especially in its woes. The woes of love +are his constant theme, and far more eloquently expressed than its +bliss: + + So fair I have not seen the sun arise, + When heaven was clearest of all cloudy stain-- + The welkin-bow I have not after rain + Seen varied with so many shifting dyes, + But that her aspect in more splendid guise + Upon the day when I took up Love's chain + Diversely glowed, for nothing mortal vies + Therewith.... (Sonnet 112.) + + From each fair eyelid's tranquil firmament + So brightly shine my stars untreacherous, + That none, whose love thoughts are magnanimous, + Would from aught else choose warmth or guidance lent. + Oh, 'tis miraculous, when on the grass + She sits, a very flower, or when she lays + Upon its greenness down her bosom white. + (Sonnet 127.) + + Oh blithe and happy flowers, oh favoured sod, + That by my lady in passive mood are pressed, + Lawn, which her sweet words hear'st and treasurest, + Faint traces, where her shapely foot hath trod, + Smooth boughs, green leaves, which now raw juices load, + Pale darling violets, and woods which rest + In shadow, till that sun's beam you attest, + From which hath all your pride and grandeur flowed; + Oh land delightsome, oh thou river pure + Which bathest her fair face and brilliant eyes + And winn'st a virtue from their living light, + I envy you each clear and comely guise + In which she moves. (Sonnet 129.) + +These recall Nais in Theocritus: + + When she crept or trembling footsteps laid, + Green bright and soft she made + Wood, water, earth, and stone; yea, with conceit + The grasses freshened 'neath her palms and feet. + And her fair eyes the fields around her dressed + With flowers, and the winds and storms she stilled + With utterance unskilled + As from a tongue that seeketh yet the breast, + (Sonnet 25.) + + As oft as yon white foot on fresh green sod + Comelily sets the gentle step, a dower + Of grace, that opens and revives each flower, + Seems by the delicate palm to be bestowed. + (Sonnet 132.) + + I seem to hear her, hearing airs and sprays, + And leaves, and plaintive bird notes, and the brook + That steals and murmurs through the sedges green. + Such pleasure in lone silence and the maze + Of eerie shadowy woods I never took, + Though too much tow'r'd my sun they intervene. + (Sonnet 143.) + +and like Goethe's: + + I think of thee when the bright sunlight shimmers + Across the sea; + When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers + I think of thee.... + + I hear thee, when the tossing waves' low rumbling + Creeps up the hill; + I go to the lone wood and listen trembling + When all is still.... + +So Petrarch sings in Ode 15: + + Now therefore, when in youthful guise I see + The world attire itself in soft green hue, + I think that in this age unripe I view + That lovely girl, who's now a lady's mien. + Then, when the sun ariseth all aglow, + I trace the wonted show + Of amorous fire, in some fine heart made queen... + When leaves or boughs or violets on earth + I see, what time the winter's cold decays, + And when the kindly stars are gathering might, + Mine eye that violet and green portrays + (And nothing else) which, at my warfare's birth, + Armed Love so well that yet he worsts me quite. + I see the delicate fine tissue light + In which our little damsel's limbs are dressed.... + Oft on the hills a feeble snow-streak lies, + Which the sun smiteth in sequestered place. + Let sun rule snow! Thou, Love, my ruler art, + When on that fair and more than human face + I muse, which from afar makes soft my eyes.... + I never yet saw after mighty rain + The roving stars in the calm welkin glide + And glitter back between the frost and dew, + But straight those lovely eyes are at my side.... + If ever yet, on roses white and red, + My eyes have fallen, where in bowl of gold + They were set down, fresh culled by virgin hands, + There have I seemed her aspect to behold.... + But when the year has flecked + Some deal with white and yellow flowers the braes, + I forthwith recollect + That day and place in which I first admired + Laura's gold hair outspread, and straight was fired.... + That I could number all the stars anon + And shut the waters in a tiny glass + Belike I thought, when in this narrow sheet + I got a fancy to record, alas, + How many ways this Beauty's paragon + Hath spread her light, while standing self-complete, + So that from her I never could retreat.... + She's closed for me all paths in earth and sky. + +The reflective modern mind is clear in this, despite its loquacity. +He was yet more eloquent and intense, more fertile in comparisons, +when his happiest days were over. + +In Ode 24, standing at a window he watches the strange forms his +imagination conjures up--a wild creature torn in pieces by two dogs, +a ship wrecked by a storm, a laurel shattered by lightning: + + Within this wood, out of a rock did rise + A spring of water, mildly rumbling down, + Whereto approached not in any wise + The homely shepherd nor the ruder clown, + But many muses and the nymphs withal.... + But while herein I took my chief delight, + I saw (alas!) the gaping earth devour + The spring, the place, and all clean out of sight-- + Which yet aggrieves my heart unto this hour.... + At last, so fair a lady did I spy, + That thinking yet on her I burn and quake, + On herbs and flowers she walked pensively.... + A stinging serpent by the heel her caught, + Wherewith she languished as the gathered flower. + + Now Zephyrus the blither days brings on, + With flowers and leaves, his gallant retinue, + And Progne's chiding, Philomela's moan, + And maiden spring all white and pink of hue; + Now laugh the meadows, heaven is radiant grown, + And blithely now doth Love his daughter view; + Air, water, earth, now breathe of love alone, + And every creature plans again to woo. + Ah me! but now return the heaviest sighs, + Which my heart from its last resources yields + To her that bore its keys to heaven away. + And songs of little birds and blooming fields + And gracious acts of ladies, fair and wise, + Are desert land and uncouth beasts of prey. + (Sonnet 269.) + + The nightingale, who maketh moan so sweet + Over his brood belike or nest-mate dear, + So deft and tender are his notes to hear, + That fields and skies are with delight replete; + And all night long he seems with me to treat, + And my hard lot recall unto my ear. + (Sonnet 270.) + + In every dell + The sands of my deep sighs are circumfused. + (Ode 1.) + + Oh banks, oh dales, oh woods, oh streams, oh fields + Ye vouchers of my life's o'erburdened cause, + How often Death you've heard me supplicate. + (Ode 8.) + + Whereso my foot may pass, + A balmy rapture wakes + When I think, here that darling light hath played. + If flower I cull or grass, + I ponder that it takes + Root in that soil, where wontedly she strayed + Betwixt the stream and glade, + And found at times a seat + Green, fresh, and flower-embossed. (Ode 13.) + + Whenever plaintive warblings, or the note + Of leaves by summer breezes gently stirred, + Or baffled murmur of bright waves I've heard + Along the green and flowery shore to float, + Where meditating love I sat and wrote, + Then her whom earth conceals, whom heaven conferred, + I hear and see, and know with living word + She answereth my sighs, though so remote. + 'Ah, why art thou,' she pityingly says, + 'Pining away before thy hour?' + (Sonnet 238.) + + The waters and the branches and the shore, + Birds, fishes, flowers, grasses, talk of love, + And me to love for ever all invite. + (Sonnet 239.) + + Thou'st left the world, oh Death, without a sun.... + Her mourners should be earth and sea and air. + (Sonnet 294.) + +Here we have happiness and misery felt in the modern way, and Nature +in the modern way drawn into the circle of thought and feeling, and +personified. + +Petrarch was the first, since the days of Hellenism, to enjoy the +pleasures of solitude quite consciously. + + How often to my darling place of rest, + Fleeing from all, could I myself but flee, + I walk and wet with tears my path and breast. + (Sonnet 240.) + +He shared Schiller's thought: + + Oh Nature is perfect, wherever we stray, + 'Tis man that deforms it with care. + + As love from thought to thought, from hill to hill, + Directs me, when all ways that people tread + Seem to the quiet of my being, foes, + If some lone shore, or fountain-head, or rill + Or shady glen, between two slopes outspread, + I find--my daunted soul doth there repose.... + On mountain heights, in briary woods, I find + Some rest; but every dwelling place on earth + Appeareth to my eyes a deadly bane.... + Where some tall pine or hillock spreads a shade, + I sometimes halt, and on the nearest brink + Her lovely face I picture from my mind.... + Oft hath her living likeness met my sight, + (Oh who'll believe the word?) in waters clear, + On beechen stems, on some green lawny space, + Or in white cloud.... + Her loveliest portrait there my fancy draws, + And when Truth overawes + That sweet delusion, frozen to the core, + I then sit down, on living rock, dead stone, + And seem to muse, and weep and write thereon.... + Then touch my thoughts and sense + Those widths of air which hence her beauty part, + Which always is so near, yet far away.... + Beyond that Alp, my Ode, + Where heaven above is gladdest and most clear, + Again thou'lt meet me where the streamlet flows + And thrilling airs disclose + The fresh and scented laurel thicket near, + There is my heart and she that stealeth it. + (Ode 17.) + +It is the same idea as Goethe's in _Knowest thou the Land_? Again: + + Alone, engrossed, the least frequented strands + I traverse with my footsteps faint and slow, + And often wary glances round me throw, + To flee, should human trace imprint the sands. + (Sonnet 28.) + + A life of solitude I've ever sought, + This many a field and forest knows, and will. + (Sonnet 221.) + +Love of solitude and feeling for Nature limit or increase each other; +and Petrarch; like Dante, took scientific interest in her, and found +her a stimulant to mental work. + +Burckhardt says: 'The enjoyment of Nature is for him the favourite +accompaniment of intellectual pursuits; it was to combine the two +that he lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that +he from time to time fled from the world and from his age.' + +He wrote a book _On a Life of Solitude (De Vita Solitaria)_ by the +little river Sorgue, and said in a letter from Vaucluse: 'O if you +could imagine the delight with which I breathe here, free and far +from the world, with forests and mountains, rivers and springs, and +the books of clever men.' + +Purely objective descriptions, such as his picture of the Gulf of +Spezzia and Porto Venere at the end of the sixth book of the +_Africa_, were rare with him; but, as we have already seen, he +admired mountain scenery. He refers to the hills on the Riviera di +Levante as 'hills distinguished by most pleasant wildness and +wonderful fertility.'[6] + +The scenery of Reggio moved him, as he said,[7] to compose a poem. He +described the storm at Naples in 1343, and the earthquake at Basle. +As we have seen from one of his odes, he delighted in the wide view +from mountain heights, and the freedom from the oppression of the air +lower down. In this respect he was one of Rousseau's forerunners, +though his 'romantic' feeling was restrained within characteristic +limits. In a letter of April 26, 1335, interesting both as to the +period and the personality of the writer, he described to Dionisius +da Borgo San Sepolchro the ascent of Mt. Ventoux near Avignon which +he made when he was thirty-two, and greatly enjoyed, though those who +were with him did not understand his enjoyment. When they had +laboured through the difficulties of the climb, and saw the clouds +below them, he was immensely impressed. It was in accordance with his +love of solitude that lonely mountain tops should attract him, and +the letter shows that he fully appreciated both climb and view. + +'It was a long day, the air fine. We enjoyed the advantages of vigour +of mind, and strength and agility of body, and everything else +essential to those engaged in such an undertaking, and so had no +other difficulties to face than those of the region itself.' ... 'At +first, owing to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of +the great sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like one dazed. +I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and +Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things +from a mountain of less fame. I turned my eyes towards Italy, whither +my heart most inclined. The Alps, rugged and snow-capped, seemed to +rise close by, although they were really at a great distance.... The +Bay of Marseilles, the Rhone itself, lay in sight.' + +It was a very modern effect of the wide view that 'his whole past +life with all its follies rose before his mind; he remembered that +ten years ago, that day, he had quitted Bologna a young man, and +turned a longing gaze towards his native country: he opened a book +which was then his constant companion, _The Confessions of St +Augustine_, and his eye fell on the passage in the tenth chapter: + + And men go about and admire lofty mountains and broad seas, and + roaring torrents and the ocean, and the course of the stars, and + forget their own selves while doing so. + +His brother, to whom he read these words, could not understand why he +closed the book and said no more. His feeling had suddenly changed. + +He knew, when he began the climb, that he was doing something very +unusual, even unheard of among his contemporaries, and justified +himself by the example of Philip V. of Macedon, arguing that a young +man of private station might surely be excused for what was not +thought blamable in a grey-haired king. Then on the mountain top, +lost in the view, the passage in St Augustine suddenly occurred to +him, and he started blaming himself for admiring earthly things so +much. 'I was amazed ... angry with myself for marvelling but now at +earthly things, when I ought to have learnt long ago that nothing +save the soul was marvellous, and that to the greatness of the soul +nought else was great'; and he closed with an explanation flavoured +with theology to the taste of his confessor, to whom he was writing. +The mixture of thoroughly modern delight in Nature[8] with ascetic +dogma in this letter, gives us a glimpse into the divided feelings of +one who stood upon the threshold between two eras, mediaeval and +modern, into the reaction of the mediaeval mind against the budding +modern feeling. + +This is, at any rate, the first mountain ascent for pleasure since +Hellenic days, of which we have detailed information. From Greece +before Alexander we have nothing; but the Persian King Darius, in his +expedition against the Scythians in the region of Chalcedon, ascended +the mountain on which stood the Urios temple to Zeus, and there +'sitting in the temple, he took a view of the Euxine Sea, which is +worthy of admiration.' (Herodotus.) + +Philip V. of Macedon ascended the Haemus B.C. 181, and Apollonios +Rhodios describes the panorama spread out before the Argonauts as +they ascended the Dindymon, and elsewhere recalls the view from Mt. +Olympus. These are the oldest descriptions of distant views conceived +as landscape in the classic literature preserved to us. Petrarch's +ascent comes next in order. + +This sentimental and subjective feeling for Nature, half-idyllic, +half-romantic, which seemed to arise suddenly and spontaneously in +Petrarch, is not to be wholly explained by a marked individuality, +nourished by the tendencies of the period; the influence of Roman +literature, the re-birth of the classic, must also be taken into +account. For the Renaissance attitude towards Nature was closely +allied to the Roman, and therefore to the Hellenic; and the fact that +the first modern man arose on Italian soil was due to the revival of +antiquity plus its union with the genius of the Italian people. Many +direct analogies can be traced between Petrarch and the Roman poets; +it was in their school that his eyes opened to the wonders of Nature, +and he learnt to blend the inner with the outer life. + +Boccaccio does not lead us much further. There is idyllic quality in +his description of a wood in the _Ameto_,[9] and especially in +_Fiammetta_, in which he praises country life and describes the +spring games of the Florentine youth. + +This is the description of a valley in the _Decameron_: 'After a walk +of nearly a mile, they came to the Ladies' Valley, which they entered +by a straight path, whence there issued forth a fine crystal current, +and they found it so extremely beautiful and pleasant, especially at +that sultry season, that nothing could exceed it, and, as some of +them told me afterwards, the plain in the valley was so exact a +circle, as if it had been described by a pair of compasses, though it +seemed rather the work of Nature than of art, and was about half a +mile in circumference, surrounded by six hills of moderate height, on +each of which was a palace built in the form of a little castle.... +The part that looks toward the south was planted as thick as they +could stand together with vines, olives, almonds, cherries, figs, and +most other kinds of fruit trees, and on the northern side were fine +plantations of oak, ash, etc., so tall and regular that nothing could +be more beautiful. The vale, which had only that one entrance, was +full of firs, cypress trees, laurels, and pines, all placed in such +order as if it had been done by the direction of some exquisite +artist, and through which little or no sun could penetrate to the +ground, which was covered with a thousand different flowers.... But +what gave no less delight than any of the rest was a rivulet that +came through a valley which divided two of the mountains, and running +through the vein of a rock, made a most agreeable murmur with its +fall, appealing, as it was dashed and sprinkled into drops, like so +much quicksilver.' + +Description of scenery for its own sake is scarcely more than +attempted here, nor do Petrarch's lyrics, with their free thought of +passion and overpowering consciousness of the joys and sorrows of +love, reach the level of Hellenism in this respect. Yet it advanced +with the Renaissance. Pope Pius II. (AEneas Sylvius) was the first to +describe actual landscape (Italian), not merely in a few subjective +lines, but with genuine modern enjoyment. He was one of those figures +in the world's history in whom all the intellectual life and feeling +of a time come to a focus. + +He had a heart for everything, and an all-round enthusiasm for Nature +unique in his day. Antiquity and Nature were his two passions, and +the most beautiful descriptions of Nature before Rousseau and Goethe +are contained in his _Commentaries_. + +Writing of the country round his home, he says: + +'The sweet spring time had begun, and round about Siena the smiling +hills were clothed with leaves and flowers, and the crops were rising +in plenty in the fields. Even the pasture land quite close to the +town affords an unspeakably lovely view; gently sloping hills, either +planted with homely trees or vines, or ploughed for corn, look down +on pleasant valleys in which grow crops, or green fields are to be +seen, and brooks are even flowing. There are, too, many plantations, +either natural or artificial, in which the birds sing with wondrous +sweetness. Nor is there a mound on which the citizens have not built +a magnificent estate; they are thus a little way out of the town. +Through this district the Pope walked with joyous head.' + +Again and again love of Nature drew him away even in old age from +town life and the circle of courtiers and flatterers; he was for ever +finding new reasons to prolong his _villeggiatura_, despite the +grumbling of his court, which had to put up with wretched inns or +monasteries overrun by mice, where the rain came through the roofs +and the necessaries of life were scanty.[10] + +His taste for these beautifully-situated monastic solitudes was a +riddle to those around him. He wrote of his summer residence in +Tibur: + +'On all sides round the town in summer there are most lovely +plantations, to which the Pope with his cardinals often retired for +relaxation, sitting sometimes on some green sward beneath the olives, +sometimes in a green meadow on the bank of the river Aino, whence he +could see the clear waters. There are some meadows in a retired glen, +watered by many streams; Pius often rested in these meadows near the +luxuriant streams and the shady trees. He lived at Tibur with the +Minorites on an elevation whence he could see the town and the course +of the Aino as it flowed into the plain beneath him and through the +quiet gardens, nor did anything else give him pleasure. + +'When the summer was over, he had his bedroom in the house +overlooking the Aino; from there the most beautiful view was to be +seen, and also from a neighbouring mountain on the other side of the +river, still covered with a green and leafy grove ... he completed a +great part of his journey with the greatest enjoyment.' + +In May 1462 he went to the baths at Viterbo, and, old man as he was, +gives this appreciative description of spring beauties by the way: + +'The road by which he made for Sorianum was at that time of the year +delightful; there was a tremendous quantity of genista, so that a +great part of the field seemed a mass of flowering yellow, while the +rest, covered as it was by shrubs and various grasses, brought purple +and white and a thousand different colours before the eyes. It was +the month of May, and everything was green. On one side were the +smiling fields, on the other the smiling woods, in which the birds +made sweet harmony. At early dawn he used to walk into the fields to +catch the exquisite breeze before the day should grow hot, and gaze +at the green crops and the flowering flax, which then, emulating +heaven's own blue, gave the greatest joy to all beholders.... Now the +crows are holding vigil, and the ringdoves; and the owl at times +utters lament with funeral note. The place is most lovely; the view +in the direction of Siena stretches as far as Amiata, and in the west +reaches Mt. Argentarius.' + +In the plains the plague was raging; the sight of the people +appealing to him as to a god, moved him to tears as he thought how +few of the children would survive in the heat. He travelled to a +castle charmingly placed on the lake of Bolsena, where 'there is a +shady circular walk in the vineyard under the big grapes; stone steps +shaded by the vine leaves lead down to the bank, where ilex oaks, +alive with the songs of blackbirds, stand among the crags.' Halfway +up the mountain, in the monastery of San Salvatore, he and his court +took up their quarters. + +'The most lovely scenery met the eye. As you look to the west from +the higher houses, the view reaches beyond Ilcinum and Siena as far +as the Pistorian Alps. To the north a variety of hills and the +pleasant green of woods presents itself, stretching a distance of +five miles; if your sight is good, your eye will travel as far as the +Apennine range and can see Cortona.' + +There he passed the time, shooting birds, fishing, and rowing. + +'In the cool air of the hills, among the old oaks and chestnuts, on +the green meadows where there were no thorns to wound the feet, and +no snakes or insects to hurt or annoy, the Pope passed days of +unclouded happiness.' + +This is thoroughly modern: 'Silvarum amator,' as he calls himself, he +includes both the details of the near and the general effect of the +far-distant landscape. + +And with age his appreciation of it only seemed to increase; for +instance, he says of Todi: + +'A most lovely view meets the eye wherever you turn; you can see +Perusia and all the valley that lies between, full of wide--spreading +forts and fertile fields, and honoured by the river Tiber, which, +drawing its coils along like a snake, divides Tuscia from Umbria, +and, close to the city itself, enters many a mountain, passing +through which it descends to the plain, murmuring as it goes, as +though constrained against its will.' + +This is his description of a lake storm, during an excursion to the +Albanian Mountains: + +As far as Ostia 'he had a delightful voyage; at night the sea began +to be most unwontedly troubled, and a severe storm arose. The east +wind rolled up the waters from their lowest depths, huge waves beat +the shore; you could have heard the sea, as it were, groaning and +wailing. So great was the force of the winds, that nothing seemed +able to resist it; they raged and alternately fled and put one +another to rout, they overturned woods and anything that withstood +them. The air glittered with frequent lightning, the sky thundered, +and terrific thunder-bolts fell from the clouds.... The night was +pitch dark, though the flashes of lightning were continuous.' + +And of a lake at rest he says: + +'The beauty of that lake is remarkable; everywhere it is surrounded +by high rocks, the water is transparently clear. Nature, so far +superior to art, provided a most pleasant journey. The Nemorian lake, +with its crystal-clear waters, reflects the faces of those that look +into it, and fills a deep basin. The descent from the top to the +bottom is wooded. The poetic genius would never be awakened if it +slept here; you would say it was the dwelling-place of the Muses, the +home of the Nymphs, and, if there is any truth in legends, the +hiding-place of Diana.' + +He visited the lakes among the mountains, climbing and resting under +the trees; the view from Monte Cavo was his favourite, from which he +could see Terracina, the lakes of Nemi and Albano, etc. He noted +their extent and formation, and added: + +'The genista, however, was especially delightful, covering, as it did +with its flowers, the greater part of the plains. Then, moreover, +Rome presented itself fully to the eyes, together with Soracte and +the Sabine Land, and the Apennine range white with snow, and Tibur +and Praeneste.' + +It is clear that it was a thoroughly modern enthusiasm which +attracted AEneas Sylvius to the country and gave him this ready pen +for everything in Nature--everything, that is, except bare mountain +summits. + +It is difficult to attribute this faculty for enjoying and describing +scenery to the influence of antiquity alone, for, save the younger +Pliny, I know of no Roman under the Empire who possessed it, and, +besides, we do not know how far Pius II. was acquainted with Roman +literature. We know that the re-awakening of classic literature +exerted an influence upon the direction of the feeling for Nature in +general, and, for the rest, very various elements coalesced. Like +times produce like streams of tendency, and Hellenism, the Roman +Empire, and the Renaissance were alike to some extent in the +conditions of their existence and the results that flowed from them; +the causal nexus between them is undeniable, and makes them the chief +stepping-stones on the way to the modern. + +Theocritus, Meleager, Petrarch, and AEneas Sylvius may serve as +representatives of the development of the feeling for Nature from +classic to modern; they are the ancestors of our enthusiasm, the +links in the chain which leads up to Rousseau, Goethe, Byron, and +Shelley. + +From the autobiography of AEneas Sylvius and the lyrics of Petrarch we +gain a far truer picture of the feeling of the period up to the +sixteenth century than from any poetry in other countries. Even the +epic had a more modern tone in Italy; Ariosto's descriptions were far +ahead of any German epic. + +Humboldt pointed out very clearly the difference between the epic of +the people and the epic of art--between Homer and Ariosto. Both, he +said, are true painters of the world and Nature; but Ariosto pleases +more by his brilliance and wealth of colour, Homer by purity of form +and beauty of composition. Ariosto achieves through general effect, +Homer through perfection of form. Nature is more naive in Homer, the +subject is paramount, and the singer disappears; in Ariosto, Nature +is sentimental, and the poet always remains in view upon the stage. +In Homer all is closely knit, while Ariosto's threads are loosely +spun, and he breaks them himself in play. Homer almost never +describes, Ariosto always does. + +Ariosto's scenes and comparisons from Nature, being calculated for +effect, are more subjective, and far more highly-coloured than +Homer's. But they shew a sympathetic grasp. + +The modern bloom, so difficult to define, lies over them--something +at once sensuous, sentimental, and chivalrous. He is given to +describing lonely woodland scenery, fit places for trysts and lovers' +rendezvous. + +In the 1st Canto of _Mad Orlando_: + + With flowery thorns, vermilion roses near + Her, she upon a lovely bush doth meet, + That mirrored doth in the bright waves appear, + Shut out by lofty oaks from the sun's heat. + + Amidst the thickest shades there is a clear + Space in the middle for a cool retreat; + So mixed the leaves and boughs are, through them none + Can see; they are impervious to the sun. + +In the 6th Canto the Hippogriff carries Roger into a country: + + Nor could he, had he searched the whole world through, + Than this a more delightful country see.... + Soft meads, clear streams, and banks affording shade, + Hillocks and plains, by culture fertile made. + Fair thickets of the cedar, palm and no + Less pleasant myrtle, of the laurel sweet, + Of orange trees, where fruit and flow'rs did grow, + And which in various forms, all lovely, meet + With their thick shades against the fervid glow + Of summer days, afforded a retreat; + And nightingales, devoid of fear, among + Those branches fluttered, pouring forth their song. + Amid the lilies white and roses red, + Ever more freshened by the tepid air, + The stag was seen, with his proud lofty head, + And feeling safe, the rabbit and the hare.... + Sapphires and rubies, topazes, pearls, gold, + Hyacinths, chrysolites, and diamonds were + Like the night flow'rs, which did their leaves unfold + There on those glad plains, painted by the air + So green the grass, that if we did behold + It here, no emeralds could therewith compare; + As fair the foliage of the trees was, which + With fruit and flow'r eternally were rich. + Amid the boughs, sing yellow, white, and blue, + And red and green small feathered creatures gay; + The crystals less limpidity of hue + Than the still lakes or murmuring brooks display. + A gentle breeze, that seemeth still to woo + And never change from its accustomed way, + Made all around so tremulous the air + That no annoyance was the day's hot glare. + (Canto 34.) + +Descriptions of time are short: + + From the hard face of earth the sun's bright hue + Not yet its veil obscure and dark did rend; + The Lycaonian offspring scarcely through + The furrows of the sky his plough did send. + (Canto 80.) + +Comparisons, especially about the beauty of women, are very artistic, +recalling Sappho and Catullus: + + The tender maid is like unto the rose + In the fair garden on its native thorn; + Whilst it alone and safely doth repose, + Nor flock nor shepherd crops it; dewy morn, + Water and earth, the breeze that sweetly blows, + Are gracious to it; lovely dames adorn + With it their bosoms and their beautiful + Brows; it enamoured youths delight to cull. + (Canto 1.) + + Only, Alcina fairest was by far + As is the sun more fair than every star.... + Milk is the bosom, of luxuriant size, + And the fair neck is round and snowy white; + Two unripe ivory apples fall and rise + Like waves upon the sea-beach when a slight + Breeze stirs the ocean. (Canto 7.) + + Now in a gulf of bliss up to the eyes + And of fair things, to swim he doth begin. + (Canto 7.) + + So closely doth the ivy not enlace + The tree where firmly rooted it doth stand, + As clasp each other in their warm embrace + These lovers, by each other's sweet breath fanned. + Sweet flower, of which on India's shore no trace + Is, or on the Sabaean odorous sand. + (Canto 7.) + + Her fair face the appearance did maintain + That sometimes shewn is by the sky in spring, + When at the very time that falls the rain, + The sun aside his cloudy veil doth fling. + And as the nightingale its pleasant strain + Then on the boughs of the green trees doth sing, + Thus Love doth bathe his pinions at those bright + But tearful eyes, enjoying the clear light. + (Canto 11.) + + But as more fickle than the leaf was she, + When it in autumn doth more sapless grow, + And the old wind doth strip it from the tree, + And doth before it in its fury grow. + (Canto 21.) + +He uses the sea: + + As when a bark doth the deep ocean plough, + That two winds strike with an alternate blast, + 'Tis now sent forward by the one, and now + Back by the other in its first place cast, + And whirled from prow to poop, from poop to prow, + But urged by the most potent wind at last + Philander thus irresolute between + The two thoughts, did to the least wicked lean. + (Canto 21.) + + As comes the wave upon the salt sea shore + Which the smooth wind at first in thought hath fanned; + Greater the second is than that before + It, and the third more fiercely follows, and + Each time the humour more abounds, and more + Doth it extend its scourge upon the land: + Against Orlando thus from vales below + And hills above, doth the vile rabble grow. + (Canto 24.) + +These comparisons not only shew faithful and personal observation, +but are far more subjective and subtle than, for instance, Dante's. +The same holds good of Tasso. How beautiful in detail, and how +sentimental too, is this from _Jerusalem Delivered_: + + Behold how lovely blooms the vernal rose + When scarce the leaves her early bud disclose, + When, half unwrapt, and half to view revealed, + She gives new pleasure from her charms concealed. + But when she shews her bosom wide displayed, + How soon her sweets exhale, her beauties fade! + No more she seems the flower so lately loved, + By virgins cherished and by youths approved. + So swiftly fleeting with the transient day + Passes the flower of mortal life away. + +Not less subjective is: + + Like a ray of light on water + A smile of soft desire played in her liquid eyes. + (Sonnet 18.) + +The most famous lines in this poem are those which describe a +romantic garden so vividly that Humboldt says 'it reminds one of the +charming scenery of Sorrento.' It certainly proves that even epic +poetry tried to describe Nature for her own sake: + + The garden then unfolds a beauteous scene, + With flowers adorned and ever living green; + There silver lakes reflect the beaming day, + Here crystal streams in gurgling fountains play. + Cool vales descend and sunny hills arise, + And groves and caves and grottos strike the eyes. + Art showed her utmost power; but art concealed + With greater charm the pleased attention held. + It seemed as Nature played a sportive part + And strove to mock the mimic works of art: + By powerful magic breathes the vernal air, + And fragrant trees eternal blossoms bear: + Eternal fruits on every branch endure, + Those swelling from their buds, and these mature: + The joyous birds, concealed in every grove, + With gentle strife prolong the notes of love. + Soft zephyrs breathe on woods and waters round, + The woods and waters yield a murmuring sound; + When cease the tuneful choir, the wind replies, + But, when they sing, in gentle whisper dies; + By turns they sink, by turns their music raise + And blend, with equal skill, harmonious lays. + +But even here the scene is surrounded by an imaginary atmosphere; +flowers, fruit, creatures, and atmosphere all lie under a magic +charm. Tasso's importance for our subject lies far more in his +much-imitated pastorals. + +The _Arcadia_ of Jacopo Sannazaro, which appeared in 1504, a work of +poetic beauty and still greater literary importance,[11] paved the +way for pastoral poetry, which, like the sonnet, was interwoven with +prose. The shepherd's occupations are described with care, though +many of the songs and terms of expression rather fit the man of +culture than the child of Nature, and he had that genuine enthusiasm +for the rural which begets a convincing eloquence. ''Tis you,' he +says at the end, addressing the Muse, 'who first woke the sleeping +woods, and taught the shepherds how to strike up their lost songs.' + +Bembo wrote this inscription for his grave: + + Strew flowers o'er the sacred ashes, here lies Sannazaro; + With thee, gentle Virgil, he shares Muse and grave. + +Virgil too was industriously imitated in the didactic poetry of his +country. + +Giovanni Rucellai (born 1475) wrote a didactic poem, _The Bees_, +which begins: + +'O chaste virgins, winged visitants of flowery banks, whilst I +prepared to sing your praise in lofty verse, at peep of day I was +o'ercome by sleep, and then appeared a chorus of your tiny folk, and +from their rich mellifluous haunts, in a clear voice these words +flowed forth.... And I will sing how liquid and serene the air +distils sweet honey, heavenly gilt, on flowerets and on grass, and +how the bees, chaste and industrious, gather it, and thereof with +care and skill make perfumed wax to grace the altars of our God.' + +And a didactic poem by Luigi Alamanni (born 1495), called +_Husbandry_, has: 'O blessed is he who dwells in peace, the actual +tiller of his joyous fields, to whom, in his remoteness, the most +righteous earth brings food, and secure in well-being, he rejoices in +his heart. If thou art not surrounded by society rich with purple and +gems, nor with houses adorned with costly woods, statues, and +gold;... at least, secure in the humble dwelling of wood from the +copse hard by, and common stones collected close at hand, which thine +own hand has founded and built, whenever thou awakenest at the +approach of dawn, thou dost not find outside those who bring news of +a thousand events contrary to thy desires.... Thou wanderest at will, +now quickly, now slowly, across the green meadow, through the wood, +over the grassy hill, or by the stream. Now here, now there ... thou +handlest the hatchet, axe, scythe, or hoe.... To enjoy in sober +comfort at almost all seasons, with thy dear children, the fruits of +thine own tree, the tree planted by thyself, this brings a sweetness +sweet beyond all others.' + +These didactic writings, inspired by Virgilian Georgics, show a +distinct preference for the idyllic. + +Sannazaro's _Arcadia_ went through sixty editions in the sixteenth +century alone. Tasso reckoned with the prevalent taste of his day in +_Aminta_, which improved the then method of dramatizing a romantic +idyll. The whole poem bears the stamp of an idealizing and romantic +imagination, and embodies in lyric form his sentimental idea of the +Golden Age and an ideal world of Nature. Even down to its details +_Aminta_ recalls the pastorals of Longos; and Daphne's words (Act I. +Scene 1) suggest the most feeling outpourings of Kallimachos and +Nonnos: + + And callest thou sweet spring-time + The time of rage and enmity, + Which breathing now and smiling, + Reminds the whole creation, + The animal, the human, + Of loving! Dost thou see not + How all things are enamoured + Of this enamourer, rich with joy and health? + Observe that turtle-dove, + How, toying with his dulcet murmuring, + He kisses his companion. Hear that nightingale + Who goes from bough to bough + Singing with his loud heart, 'I love!' 'I love!'... + + The very trees + Are loving. See with what affection there, + And in how many a clinging turn and twine, + The vine holds fast its husband. Fir loves fir, + The pine the pine, and ash and willow and beech + Each towards the other yearns, and sighs and trembles. + That oak tree which appears + So rustic and so rough, + Even that has something warm in its sound heart; + And hadst thou but a spirit and sense of love, + Thou hadst found out a meaning for its whispers. + Now tell me, would thou be + Less than the very plants and have no love? + +One seems to hear Sakuntala and her friends talking, or Akontios +complaining. So, too, when the unhappy lover laments (Aminta): + + In my lamentings I have found + A very pity in the pebbly waters, + And I have found the trees + Return them a kind voice: + But never have I found, + Nor ever hope to find, + Compassion in this hard and beautiful + What shall I call her? + +Aminta describes to Tirsis how his love grew from boyhood up: + + There grew by little and little in my heart, + I knew not from what root, + But just as the grass grows that sows itself, + An unknown something which continually + Made me feel anxious to be with her. + +Sylvia kisses him: + + Never did bee from flower + Suck sugar so divine + As was the honey that I gathered then + From those twin roses fresh. + +In Act II. Scene 1, the rejected Satyr, like the rejected Polyphemus +or Amaryllis in Theocritus, complains in antitheses which recall +Longos: + + The woods hide serpents, lions, and bears under their green + shade, and in your bosom hatred, disdain, and cruelty dwell.... + Alas, when I bring the earliest flowers, you refuse them + obstinately, perhaps because lovelier ones bloom on your own + face; if I offer beautiful apples, you reject them angrily, + perhaps because your beautiful bosom swells with lovelier + ones.... and yet I am not to be despised, for I saw myself lately + in the clear water, when winds were still and there were no + waves. + +This is the sentimental pastoral poetry of Hellenism reborn and +intensified. + +So with the elegiac motive so loved by Alexandrian and Roman poets, +praise of a happy past time; the chorus sings in _Aminta_: + + O lovely age of gold, + Not that the rivers rolled + With milk, or that the woods wept honeydew; + Not that the ready ground + Produced without a wound, + Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew.... + But solely that.... the law of gold, + That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted, + Which Nature's own hand wrote--What pleases is permitted!... + Go! let us love, the daylight dies, is born; + But unto us the light + Dies once for all, and sleep brings on eternal night. + +Over thirty pastoral plays can be ascribed to Italy in the last third +of the sixteenth century. The most successful imitator of Tasso was +Giovanni Battista Guarini (born 1537) in _The True Shepherd (II +Pastor Fido)_. One quotation will shew how he outvied _Aminta_. In +Act I, Scene 1, Linko says: + + Look round thee, Sylvia; behold + All in the world that's amiable and fair + Is love's sweet work: heaven loves, the earth, the sea, + Are full of love and own his mighty sway. + Love through the woods + The fiercest beasts; love through the waves attends + Swift gliding dolphins and the sluggish whales. + That little bird which sings.... + Oh, had he human sense, + 'I burn with love,' he'd cry, 'I burn with love,' + And in his heart he truly burns, + And in his warble speaks + A language, well by his dear mate conceived, + Who answering cries, 'And I too burn with love.' + +He praises woodland solitude: + + Dear happy groves! + And them all silent, solitary gloom, + True residence of peace and of repose! + How willingly, how willingly my steps + To you return, and oh! if but my stars + Benightly had decreed + My life for solitude, and as my wish + Would naturally prompt to pass my days-- + No, not the Elysian fields, + Those happy gardens of the demi-gods, + Would I exchange for yon enchanting shades. + +The love lyrics of the later Renaissance are remarkably rich in vivid +pictures of Nature combined with much personal sentiment. Petrarch's +are the model; he inspired Vittoria Colonna, and she too revelled in +sad feelings and memories, especially about the death of her +husband:[12] + +'When I see the earth adorned and beautiful with a thousand lovely +and sweet flowers, and how in the heavens every star is resplendent +with varied colours; when I see that every solitary and lively +creature is moved by natural instinct to come out of the forests and +ancient caverns to seek its fellow by day and by night; and when I +see the plains adorned again with glorious flowers and new leaves, +and hear every babbling brook with grateful murmurs bathing its +flowery banks, so that Nature, in love with herself, delights to gaze +on the beauty of her works, I say to myself, reflecting: "How brief +is this our miserable mortal life!" Yesterday this plain was covered +with snow, to-day it is green and flowery. And again in a moment the +beauty of the heavens is overclouded by a fierce wind, and the happy +loving creatures remain hidden amidst the mountains and the woods; +nor can the sweet songs of the tender plants and happy birds be +heard, for these cruel storms have dried up the flowers on the +ground; the birds are mute, the most rapid streams and smallest +rivulets are checked by frost, and what was one hour so beautiful and +joyous, is, for a season, miserable and dead.' + +Here the two pictures in the inner and outer life are equally vivid +to the poetess; it is the real 'pleasure of sorrow,' and she lingers +over them with delight. + +Bojardo, too, reminds us of Petrarch; for example, in Sonnet 89:[13] + + Thou shady wood, inured my griefs to hear, + So oft expressed in quick and broken sighs; + Thou glorious sun, unused to set or rise + But as the witness of my daily fear; + + Ye wandering birds, ye flocks and ranging deer, + Exempt from my consuming agonies; + Thou sunny stream to whom my sorrow flies + 'Mid savage rocks and wilds, no human traces near. + + O witnesses eternal, how I live! + My sufferings hear, and win to their relief + That scornful beauty--tell her how I grieve! + + But little 'tis to her to hear my grief. + To her, who sees the pangs which I receive, + And seeing, deigns them not the least relief. + +Lorenzo de Medici's idylls were particularly rich in descriptions of +Nature and full of feeling. 'Here too that delight in pain, in +telling of their unhappiness and renunciation; here too those +wonderful tones which distinguish the sonnets of the fourteenth and +fifteenth centuries so favourably from those of a later time.' +(Geiger.) + +There is a delicate compliment in this sonnet: + + O violets, sweet and fresh and pure indeed, + Culled by that hand beyond all others fair! + What rain or what pure air has striven to bear + Flowers far excelling those 'tis wont to yield? + What pearly dew, what sun, or sooth what earth + Did you with all these subtle charms adorn; + And whence is this sweet scent by Nature drawn, + Or heaven who deigns to grant it to such worth? + O, my dear violets, the hand which chose + You from all others, that has made you fair, + 'Twas that adorned you with such charm and worth; + Sweet hand! which took my heart altho' it knows + Its lowliness, with that you may compare. + To that give thanks, and to none else on earth. + +Thus we see that the Italians of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and +fifteenth centuries were penetrated through and through by the modern +spirit--were, indeed, its pioneers. They recognized their own +individuality, pondered their own inner life, delighted in the charms +of Nature, and described them in prose and poetry, both as +counterparts to feeling and for her own sake. + +Over all the literature we have been considering--whether poetic +comparison and personification, or sentimental descriptions of +pastoral life and a golden age, of blended inner and outer life, or +of the finest details of scenery--there lies that bloom of the +modern, that breath of subjective personality, so hard to define. The +rest of contemporary Europe had no such culture of heart and mind, no +such marked individuality, to shew. + +The further growth of the Renaissance feeling, itself a rebirth of +Hellenic and Roman feeling, was long delayed. + +Let us turn next to Spain and Portugal--the countries chiefly +affected by the great voyages of discovery, not only socially and +economically, but artistically--and see the effect of the new scenery +upon their imagination. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +ENTHUSIASM FOR NATURE AMONG THE DISCOVERERS +AND CATHOLIC MYSTICS + + +The great achievement of the Italian Renaissance was the discovery of +the world within, of the whole deep contents of the human spirit. +Burckhart, praising this achievement, says: + + If we were to collect the pearls from the courtly and knightly + poetry of all the countries of the West during the two preceding + centuries, we should have a mass of wonderful divinations and + single pictures of the inward life, which at first sight would + seem to rival the poetry of the Italians. Leaving lyrical poetry + out of account, Godfrey of Strassburg gives us, in his _Tristram + and Isolt_, a representation of human passion, some features of + which are immortal. But these pearls lie scattered in the ocean + of artificial convention, and they are altogether something very + different from a complete objective picture of the inward man and + his spiritual wealth. + +The discovery of the beauty of scenery followed as a necessary +corollary of this awakening of individualism, this fathoming of the +depths of human personality. For only to fully-developed man does +Nature fully disclose herself. + +This had already been stated by one of the most philosophic minds of +the time, Pico della Mirandola, in his speech on the dignity of man. +God, he tells us, made man at the close of creation to know the laws +of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire its greatness. He +bound him to no fixed place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no +iron necessity; but gave him freedom to will and to move. + +'I have set thee,' said the Creator to Adam, 'in the midst of the +world, that thou mayest the more easily behold and see all that is +therein. I created thee a being neither heavenly nor earthly, neither +mortal nor immortal, only that thou mightest be free to shape and to +overcome thyself. Thou mayest sink into a beast, and be born again to +the Divine likeness. The brutes bring with them from their mothers' +body what they will carry with them as long as they live; the higher +spirits are from the beginning, or soon after, what they will be for +ever. To thee alone is given a growth and a development depending on +thine own free will. Thou bearest in thee the germs of a universal +life.' + +The best men of the Renaissance realized this ideal of an all-round +development, and it was the glory of Italy in the fourteenth and +fifteenth centuries, that she found a new realm in the inner man at +the very time that her discoveries across the seas were enlarging the +boundaries of the external world, and her science was studying it. +Mixed as the motives of the discoverers must have been, like those of +the crusaders before them, and probably, for the most part, +self-interested, it is easy to imagine the surprise they must have +felt at seeing ignorant people, who, to quote Peter Martyr (de rebus +oceanicis):[1] + + Naked, without weights or measures or death-dealing money, live + in a Golden Age without laws, without slanderous judges, without + the scales of the balance. Contented with Nature, they spend + their lives utterly untroubled for the future.... Theirs is a + Golden Age; they do not enclose their farms with trench or wall + or hurdle; their gardens are open. Without laws, without the + scales of the balance, without judges, they guard the right by + Nature's light. + +And their wonder at the novelties in climate and vegetation, the +strange forests, brilliant birds, and splendid stars of the tropics, +must have been no less. + +Yet it is one thing to feel, and another to find words to convey the +feeling to others; and the explorers often expressed regret for their +lack of skill in this respect. + +Also, and this is more important in criticizing what they wrote, +these seamen were mostly simple, unlettered folk, to whom a country's +wealth in natural products and their practical value made the +strongest appeal, and whose admiration of bays, harbours, trees, +fields of grain, etc., was measured by the same standard of utility. +Even such unskilled reporters did not entirely fail to refer to the +beauty of Nature; but had it not been for the original and powerful +mind of Christopher Columbus, we should have had little more in the +way of description than 'pleasant,' 'pretty,' and such words. + +Marco Polo described his journey to the coast of Cormos[2] in very +matter-of-fact fashion, but not without a touch of satisfaction at +the peculiarities of the place: + + You then approach the very beautiful plain of Formosa, watered by + fine rivers, with plantations of the date palms, and having the + air filled with francolins, parrots, and other birds unknown to + our climate. You ride two days to it, and then arrive at the + ocean, on which there is a city and a fort named Cormos. The + ships of India bring thither all kinds of spiceries, precious + stones, and pearls, cloths of silk and gold, elephants' teeth, + and many other articles.... They sow wheat, barley, and other + kinds of grain in the month of November, and reap them in March, + when they become ripe and perfect; but none except the date will + endure till May, being dried up by the extreme heat. + +Elsewhere he wrote of scenery in the same strain: of the Persian +deserts, and the green table-lands and wild gorges of Badachshan, +Japan with its golden roofed palaces, paradisaical Sunda Islands with +their 'abundance of treasure and costly spices,' Java the less with +its eight kingdoms, etc.; but naturally his chief interest was given +to the manners and customs of the various races, and the fertility +and uses of their countries. + +In Bishop Osorio's _History of Emmanuel, King of Portugal_, we see +some pleasure in the beauties of Nature peeping through the +matter-of-fact tone of the day. + +Thus, speaking of the companions of Vasco da Gama, he says that they +admired the far coast of Africa: + + They descried some little islands, which appeared extremely + pleasant; the trees were lofty, the meadows of a beautiful + verdure, and great numbers of cattle frisked about everywhere; + they could see the inhabitants walking upon the shore in vast + numbers.... + +Of Mozambique he says: + + The palm trees are of a great height, covered with long prickly + leaves; broad-spreading boughs afford an agreeable shade, and + bear nuts of a great size, called cocoes. + +Of Melinda: + + The city stands in a beautiful plain, surrounded with a variety + of fine gardens; these are stocked with all sorts of trees, + especially the orange, the flowers of which yield a most graceful + diffusive smell. The country is rich and plentiful, abounding not + only with tame and domestic cattle, but with game of all kinds, + which the natives hunt down or take with nets. + +Of Zanzibar: + + The soil of this place is rich and fertile, and it abounds with + springs of the most excellent water; the whole island is covered + with beautiful woods, which are extremely fragrant from the many + wild citrons growing there, which diffuse the most grateful + scent. + +Of Brazil, which is 'extremely pleasant and the soil fruitful': + + Clothed with a beautiful verdure, covered with tall trees, + abounding with plenty of excellent water ... and so healthy that + the inhabitants make no use of medicines, for almost all who die + here are not cut off by any distemper, but worn out by age. Here + are many large rivers, besides a vast number of delightful + springs. The plains are large and spacious, and afford excellent + pasture.... In short, the whole country affords a most beautiful + prospect, being diversified with hills and valleys, and these + covered with thick shady woods stocked with great variety of + trees, many of which our people were quite strangers to: of these + there was one of a particular nature, the leaves of which, when + cut, sent forth a kind of balsam. The trees used in dyeing + scarlet grow here in great plenty and to a great height. The soil + likewise produces the most useful plants. + +Of Ormuz, near Arabia: + + The name of the island seems to be taken from the ancient city of + Armuza in Caramania ... the place is sandy and barren, and the + soil so very poor that it produces nothing fit for human + sustenance, neither by nature nor by the most laborious + cultivation ... yet here you might see greater plenty of these, + as well as all luxurious superfluities, than in most other + countries of a richer and more fertile soil, for the place, poor + in itself, having become the great mart for the commodities of + India, Persia, and Arabia, was thus abundantly stocked with the + produce of all these countries. + +Peter Martyr's[3] point of view was much the same. He was full of +surprise at the splendour round him, and the advantages such +fertility offered to husbandry: + + Thus after a few days with cheerful hearts they espied the land + long looked for.... + + As they coasted along by the shore of certain of these islands, + they heard nightingales sing in the thick woods in the month of + November. + + They found also great rivers of fresh water and natural havens of + capacity to harbour great navies of ships.... They found there + wild geese, turtle-doves, and ducks, much greater than ours, and + as white as swans, with heads of purple colour. Also popinjays, + of the which some are green, some yellow, and having their + feathers intermingled with green, yellow, and purple, which + varieties delighted the sense not a little.... They entered into + a main large sea, having in it innumerable islands, marvellously + differing one from another; for some of them were very fruitful, + full of herbs and trees, other some very dry, barren, and rough, + with high rocky mountains of stone, whereof some were of bright + blue, or azurine colour, and other glistening white. + +He filled a whole page with descriptions of the wonderful wealth of +flowers, fruit, and vegetables of all kinds, which the ground yields +even in February. The richness of the prairie grass, the charm of the +rivers, the wealth of fruit, the enormous size of the trees (with a +view to native houses), the various kinds of pines, palms, and +chestnuts, and their uses, the immense downfall of water carried to +the sea by the rivers--all this he noted with admiration; but +industrial interest outweighed the aesthetic, even when he called +Spain happier than Italy. There is no trace of any real feeling for +scenery, any grasp of landscape as a whole; he did not advance beyond +scattered details, which attracted his eye chiefly for their material +uses. + +But there is real delight in Nature in the account of a journey to +the Cape Verde Islands, undertaken on the suggestion of Henry the +Navigator by Aloise da Mosto,[4] an intelligent Venetian nobleman: + + Cape de Verde is so called because the Portuguese, who had + discovered it about a year before, found it covered with trees, + which continue green all the year round. This is a high and + beautiful Cape, which runs a good length into the sea, and has + two hills or little mountains at the point thereof. There are + several villages of negroes from Senega, on and about the + promontory, who dwell in thatched houses close to the shore, and + in sight of those who sail by.... The coast is all low and full + of fine large trees, which are constantly green; that is, they + never wither as those in Europe do, for the new leaves grow + before the old ones fall off. These trees are so near the shore + that they seem to drink out of the sea. It is a most beautiful + coast to behold, and the author, who had sailed both in the East + and West, never saw any comparable with it. + +As Ruge says: + + The delight of this solid and prudent citizen of Strasburg in the + beauty of the tropics is lost in translation, but very evident in + the original account.[5] + +After reading it, we cannot quite say with Humboldt that Columbus was +the very first to give fluent expression to Nature's beauty on the +shores of the New World; none the less, and apart from his importance +in other respects, he remains the chief representative of his time in +the matter. Humboldt noted this in his critical examination of the +history of geography in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in +which he pointed out his deep feeling for Nature, and also, what only +those who know the difficulties of language at the time can +appreciate, the beauty and simplicity of his expression of it.[6] + +Columbus is a striking example of the fact that a man's openness to +Nature increases with his general inner growth. No one doubts that +uneducated sailors, like other unlettered people, are vividly +impressed by fine scenery, especially when it is new to them, if they +possess a spark of mental refinement. They have the feeling, but are +unable to express it in words. But, as Humboldt says, feeling +improves speech; with increased culture, the power of expression +increases. + +We owe a debt of gratitude to Fernandez de Navarrete[7] for the Diary +in which we can trace Columbus' love for Nature increasing to 'a deep +and poetic feeling for the majesty of creation.' + +He wrote, October 8th, 1492, in his diary: + + 'Thanks be to God,' says the Admiral, 'the air is very soft like + the April at Seville, and it is a pleasure to be there, so balmy + are the breezes.' + +And Humboldt says: + + The physiognomy and forms of the vegetation, the impenetrable + thickets of the forests, in which one can scarcely distinguish + the stems to which the several blossoms and leaves belong, the + wild luxuriance of the flowering soil along the humid shores, and + the rose-coloured flamingoes which, fishing at early morning at + the mouth of the rivers, impart animation to the scenery,--all in + turn arrested the attention of the old mariner as he sailed along + the shores of Cuba, between the small Lucayan Islands and the + Jardinillos. + +Each new country seemed to him more beautiful than the last; he +complained that he could not find new words in which to give the +Queen an impression of the beauty of the Cuban coast. + +It will repay us to examine the Diary more closely, since Humboldt +only treated it shortly and in scattered extracts, and it has been +partly falsified, unintentionally, by attempts to modernize the +language instead of adhering to literal translation. What Peschel +says, for instance, is pretty but distinctly exaggerated: + + Columbus was never weary of listening to the nightingales, + comparing the genial Indian climate with the Andalusian spring, + and admiring the luxuriant wilderness on these humid shores, with + their dense vegetation and forests so rich in all kinds of + plants, and alive with swarms of parrots ... with an open eye for + all the beauties of Nature and all the wonders of creation, he + looked at the splendour of the tropics very much as a tender + father looks into the bright eyes of his child.[8] + +The Diary of November 3rd says: + + He could see nothing, owing to the dense foliage of the trees, + which were very fresh and odoriferous; so that he felt no doubt + that there were aromatic herbs among them. He said that all he + saw was so beautiful that his eyes could never tire of gazing + upon such loveliness, nor his ears of listening to the songs of + birds. + +November 14th: + + He saw so many islands that he could not count them all, with + very high land covered with trees of many kinds and an infinite + number of palms. He was much astonished to see so many lofty + islands, and assured the Sovereigns that the mountains and + islands he had seen since yesterday seemed to him to be second to + none in the world, so high and clear of clouds and snow, with the + sea at their bases so deep. + +November 25th: + + He saw a large stream of beautiful water falling from the + mountains above, with a loud noise.... Just then the sailor boys + called out that they had found large pines. The Admiral looked up + the hill and saw that they were so wonderfully large, that he + could not exaggerate their height and straightness, like stout + yet fine spindles. He perceived that here there was material for + great store of planks and masts for the largest ships in Spain + ... the mountains are very high, whence descend many limpid + streams, and all the hills are covered with pines, and an + infinity of diverse and beautiful trees. + +November 27th: + + The freshness and beauty of the trees, the clearness of the water + and the birds, made it all so delightful that he wished never to + leave them. He said to the men who were with him that to give a + true relation to the Sovereigns of the things they had seen, a + thousand tongues would not suffice, nor his hand to write it, for + that it was like a scene of enchantment. + +December 13th: + + The nine men well armed, whom he sent to explore a certain place, + said, with regard to the beauty of the land they saw, that the + best land in Castille could not be compared with it. The Admiral + also said that there was no comparison between them, nor did the + Plain of Cordova come near them, the difference being as great as + between night and day. They said that all these lands were + cultivated, and that a very wide and large river passed through + the centre of the valley and could irrigate all the fields. All + the trees were green and full of fruit, and the plants tall and + covered with flowers. The roads were broad and good. The climate + was like April in Castille; the nightingale and other birds sang + as they do in Spain during that month, and it was the most + pleasant place in the world. Some birds sing sweetly at night, + the crickets and frogs are heard a good deal. + +All this shews a naive and spontaneous delight in Nature, as free +from sentimentality as from any grasp of landscape as a distinct +entity. + +In a letter about Cuba, which Humboldt gives, he says: + + The lands are high, and there are many very lofty mountains ... + all most beautiful, of a thousand different shapes, accessible + and covered with trees of a thousand kinds of such great height + that they seemed to reach the skies. I am told that the trees + never lose their foliage, and I can well believe it, for I + observed that they were as green and luxuriant as in Spain in the + month of May. Some were in bloom, others bearing fruit, and + others otherwise according to their nature. There were palm trees + of six or eight kinds, wonderful in their beautiful variety; but + this is the case with all the other trees; fruits and grasses, + trees, plants and fruits filled us with admiration. It contains + extraordinary pine groves and very extensive plains. + +Humboldt here comments that these often-repeated expressions of +admiration prove a strong feeling for the beauty of Nature, since +they are concerned with foliage and shade, not with precious metals. +The next letter shews the growing power of description: + + Reaching the harbour of Bastimentos, I put in.... The storm and a + rapid current kept me in for fourteen days, when I again set + sail, but not with favourable weather.... I had already made four + leagues when the storm recommenced and wearied me to such a + degree that I absolutely knew not what to do; my wound re-opened, + and for nine days my life was despaired of. Never was the sea + seen so high, so terrific, and so covered with foam; not only did + the wind oppose our proceeding onward, but it also rendered it + highly dangerous to run in for any headland, and kept me in that + sea, which seemed to me a sea of blood, seething like a cauldron + on a mighty fire. Never did the sky look more fearful; during one + day and one night it burned like a furnace, and emitted flashes + in such fashion that each time I looked to see if my masts and my + sails were not destroyed; these flashes came with such alarming + fury that we all thought the ship must have been consumed. All + this time the waters from heaven never ceased, not to say that it + rained, for it was like a repetition of the Deluge. The men were + at this time so crushed in spirit, that they longed for death as + a deliverance from so many martyrdoms. Twice already had the + ships suffered loss in boats, anchors, and rigging, and were now + lying bare without sails. + +These extracts shew how feeling for Nature in unlettered minds could +develop into an enthusiasm which begot to some extent its own power +of expression. Columbus was entirely deficient in all previous +knowledge of natural history; but he was gifted with deep feeling +(the account of the nocturnal visions in the _Lettera Rarissima_ is +proof of this)[9], mental energy, and a capacity for exact +observation which many of the other explorers did not possess, and +these faculties made up for what he lacked in education. + + In Cuba alone, he distinguishes seven or eight + different species of palm more beautiful and taller than + the date tree; he informs his learned friend Anghiera + that he has seen pines and palms wonderfully associated + together in one and the same plain, and he even + so acutely observed the vegetation around him, that he + was the first to notice that there were pines in the + mountains of Cibao, whose fruits are not fir cones but + berries like the olives of the Axarafe de Sevilla. + + (_Cosmos._) + +Most of Vespucci's narratives of travel, especially his letters to +the Medici, only contain adventures and descriptions of manners and +customs. He lacked the originality and enthusiasm which gave the +power of the wing to Columbus. + +That imposing Portuguese poem, the _Lusiad_ of Camoens, is full of +jubilation over the discovery of the New World. Camoens made his +notes of foreign places at first hand; he had served as a soldier, +fought at the foot of Atlas in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, had +doubled the Cape twice, and, inspired by a deep love for Nature, had +spent sixteen years in examining the phenomena of the ocean on the +Indian and Chinese shores. He was a great sea painter. His poetic and +inventive power remind one at times of Dante--for instance, in the +description of the Dream Face; and he pictures foreign lands with the +clearness and detail of the discoverers and later travellers. Here +and there his poetry is like the Diary of Columbus translated into +verse--epic verse. + +He had the same fiery spirit, nerve, and fresh insight, with the +poet's gift added. + +(None the less, the classic apparatus of deities in Thetys' _Apology_ +is no adornment.) + +Comparisons from Nature and animals are few but detailed: + + E'en as the prudent ants which towards their nest + Bearing the apportioned heavy burden go, + Exercise all their forces at their best, + Hostile to hostile winter's frost and snow; + There, all their toils and labours stand confessed, + There, never looked-for energy they show; + So, from the Lusitanians to avert + Their horrid Fate, the nymphs their power exert. + + Thus, as in some sequestered sylvan mere + The frogs (the Lycian people formerly), + If that by chance some person should appear + While out of water they incautious be, + Awake the pool by hopping here and there, + To fly the danger which they deem they see, + And gathering to some safe retreat they know, + Only their heads above the water show--So fly the Moors. + + E'en as when o'er the parching flame there glows + A flame, which may from some chance cause ignite, + (All while the whistling, puffing Boreas blows), + Fanned by the wind sets all the growth alight, + The shepherd's group, lying in their repose + Of quiet sleep, aroused in wild afright + At crackling flames that spread both wide and high, + Gather their goods and to the village fly; + So doth the Moor. + + E'en as the daisy which once brightly smiled, + Plucked by unruly hands before its hour, + And harshly treated by the careless child, + All in her chaplet tied with artless power. + Droops, of its colour and its scent despoiled, + So seems this pale and lifeless damsel flower; + The roses of her lips are dry and dead, + With her sweet life the mingled white and red. + +The following simile reminds us of the far-fetched comparison of +Apollonios Rhodios[11]: + + As the reflected lustre from the bright + Steel mirror, or of beauteous crystal fine, + Which, being stricken by the solar light, + Strikes back and on some other part doth shine; + And when, to please the child's vain curious sight, + Moved o'er the house, as may his hand incline, + Dances on walls and roof and everywhere, + Restless and tremulous, now here now there, + So did the wandering judgment fluctuate. + +He says of Diana: + + And, as confronted on her way she pressed, + So beautiful her form and bearing were, + That everything that saw her love confessed, + The stars, the heaven, and the surrounding air. + +The Indus and Ganges are personified in stanza xiv. 74, the Cape in +v. 50. + +His time references are mostly mixed up with ancient mythology: + + As soon, however, as the enamelled morn + O'er the calm heaven her lovely looks outspread, + Opening to bright Hyperion, new-born, + Her purple portals as he raised his head, + Then the whole fleet their ships with flags adorn. + +and: + + So soon, however, as great Sol has spread + His rays o'er earth, whom instantly to meet, + Her purple brow Aurora rising shews, + And rudely life around the horizon throws. + +He is at his best in writing of the sea. + +He says of the explorers on first setting sail: + + Now were they sailing o'er wide ocean bright, + The restless waves dividing as they flew; + The winds were breathing prosperous and light, + The vessels' hollow sails were filled to view; + The seas were covered o'er with foaming white + Where the advancing prows were cutting through + The consecrated waters of the deep.... + Thus went we forth these unknown seas to explore, + Which by no people yet explored had been; + Seeing new isles and climes which long before + Great Henry, first discoverer, had seen. + + Now did the moon in purest lustre rise + On Neptune's silvery waves her beams to pour, + With stars attendant glittered all the skies, + E'en like a meadow daisy-spangled o'er; + The fury of the winds all peaceful lies + In the dark caverns close along the shore, + But still the night-watch constant vigils keep, + As long had been their custom on the deep. + + To tell thee of the dangers of the sea + At length, which human understanding scare, + Thunder-storms, sudden, dreadful in degree, + Lightnings, which seem to set on fire the air, + Dark floods of rain, nights of obscurity, + Rollings of thunder which the world would tear, + Were not less labour than a great mistake, + E'en if I had an iron voice to speak. + +He describes the electric fires of St Elmo and the gradual +development of the waterspout: + + I saw, and clearly saw, the living light + Which sailors everywhere as sacred hold + In time of storm and crossing winds that fight, + Of tempest dark and desperation cold; + Nor less it was to all a marvel quite, + And matter surely to alarm the bold, + To observe the sea-clouds, with a tube immense, + Suck water up from Ocean's deep expanse.... + A fume or vapour thin and subtle rose, + And by the wind begin revolving there; + Thence to the topmost clouds a tube it throws, + But of a substance so exceeding rare.... + But when it was quite gorged it then withdrew + The foot that on the sea beneath had grown, + And o'er the heavens in fine it raining flew, + The jacent waters watering with its own. + +The storm at sea reminds us of AEschylus in splendour: + + The winds were such, that scarcely could they shew + With greater force or greater rage around, + Than if it were this purpose then to blow + The mighty tower of Babel to the ground.... + Now rising to the clouds they seem to go + O'er the wild waves of Neptune borne on end; + Now to the bowels of the deep below; + It seems to all their senses, they descend; + Notus and Auster, Boreas, Aquila, + The very world's machinery would rend; + While flashings fire the black and ugly night + And shed from pole to pole a dazzling light.... + But now the star of love beamed forth its ray, + Before the sun, upon the horizon clear, + And visited, as messenger of day, + The earth and spreading sea, with brow to cheer.... + +And, as it subsides: + + The mountains that we saw at first appeared, + In the far view, like clouds and nothing more. + +Off the coast of India: + + Now o'er the hills broke forth the morning light + Where Ganges' stream is murmuring heard to flow, + Free from the storm and from the first sea's fight, + Vain terror from their hearts is banished now. + +His magic island, the Ilha of Venus, could only have been imagined by +a poet who had travelled widely. All the delights of the New World +are there, with the vegetation of Southern Europe added. It is a +poet's triumphant rendering of impressions which the discoverers so +often felt their inability to convey: + + From far they saw the island fresh and fair, + Which Venus o'er the waters guiding drove + (E'en as the wind the canvas white doth bear).... + Where the coast forms a bay for resting-place, + Curved and all quiet, and whose shining sand + Is painted with red shells by Venus' hand.... + Three beauteous mounts rise nobly to the view, + Lifting with graceful pride their sweeling head, + O'er which enamelled grass adorning grew. + In this delightful lovely island glad, + Bright limpid streams their rushing waters threw + From heights with rich luxuriant verdure clad, + 'Midst the white rocks above, their source derive, + The streams sonorous, sweet, and fugitive.... + A thousand trees toward heaven their summits raise, + With fruits odoriferous and fair; + The orange in its produce bright displays + The tint that Daphne carried in her hair; + The citron on the ground its branches lays, + Laden with yellow weights it cannot bear; + The beauteous melons, which the whole perfume + The virgin bosom in their form assume. + The forest trees, which on the hills combine + To ennoble them with leafy hair o'ergrown, + Are poplars of Alcides; laurels shine, + The which the shining God loved as his own; + Myrtles of Cytherea with the pine + Of Cybele, by other love o'erthrown; + The spreading cypress tree points out where lies + The seat of the ethereal paradise.... + Pomegranates rubicund break forth and shine, + A tint whereby thou, ruby, losest sheen. + 'Twixt the elm branches hangs the jocund vine, + With branches some of red and some of green.... + Then the refined and splendid tapestry, + Covering the rustic ground beneath the feet, + Makes that of Achemeina dull to be, + But makes the shady valley far more sweet. + Cephisian flowers with head inclined we see + About the calm and lucid lake's retreat.... + 'Twas difficult to fancy which was true, + Seeing on heaven and earth all tints the same, + If fair Aurora gave the flowers their time, + Or from the lovely flowers to her it came; + Flora and Zephyr there in painting drew + The violets tinted, as of lovers' flame, + The iris, and the rose all fair and fresh + E'en as it doth on cheek of maiden blush.... + Along the water sings the snow-white swan, + While from the branch respondeth Philomel.... + Here, in its bill, to the dear nest, with care, + The rapid little bird the food doth bear. + +Subjective feeling for Nature is better displayed in the lyric than +the epic. + +The Spaniard, Fray Luis de Leon, was a typical example of a +sixteenth-century lyrist; full of mild enthusiasm for Nature, the +theosophico-mystical attitude of the Catholic. + +A most fervid feeling for Nature from the religious side breathed in +St Francis of Assisi--the feeling which inspired his hymn to Brother +Sun (_Cantico del Sole_), and led his brother Egidio, intoxicated +with love to his Creator, to kiss trees and rocks and weep over +them[12]: + + Praised by His creatures all, + Praised be the Lord my God + By Messer Sun, my brother above all, + Who by his rays lights us and lights the day-- + Radiant is she, with his great splendour stored, + Thy glory, Lord, confessing. + By Sister Moon and Stars my Lord is praised, + Where clear and fair they in the heavens are raised + By Brother Wind, etc.... + +His follower, Bonaventura, too, in his verses counted-- + + The smallest creatures his brothers and sisters, and called upon + crops, vineyards, trees, flowers, and stars to praise God. + +Bernard von Clairvaux made it a principle 'to learn from the earth, +trees, corn, flowers, and grass'; and he wrote in his letter to +Heinrich Murdach (Letter 106): + + Believe me, I have proved it; you will find more in the woods + than in books; trees and stones will teach you what no other + teacher can. + +He looked upon all natural objects as 'rays of the Godhead,' copies +of a great original. + +His contemporary, Hugo von St Victor, wrote: + + The whole visible world is like a book written by the finger of + God. It is created by divine power, and all human beings are + figures placed in it, not to shew the free-will of man, but as a + revelation and visible sign, by divine will, of God's invisible + wisdom. But as one who only glances at an open book sees marks on + it, but does not read the letters, so the wicked and sensual man, + in whom the spirit of God is not, sees only the outer surface of + visible beings and not their deeper parts. + +German mystics wrote in the same strain; for instance, the popular +Franciscan preacher, Berthold von Regensburg (1272), + + Whose sermons on fields and meadows drew many thousands of + hearers, and moved them partly by the unusual freshness and + vitality of his pious feeling for Nature, + +in spite of many florid symbolical accessories, such as we find again +in Ekkehart and other fifteenth-century mystics, and especially in +Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek. + +The northern prophetess and foundress of an Order Birgitta (1373) +held that the breath of the Creator was in all visible things: 'We +feel it pervading us in her visions,' says Hammerich,[13] + + Whether by gurgling brook or snow-covered firs. It is with us + when the prophetess leads us along the ridges of the Swedish + coast with their surging waves or down the shaft of a mine, or to + wander in the quiet of evening through vineyards between roses + and lilies, while the dew is falling and the bells ring out the + Ave Maria. + +Vincentius von Beauvais (1264) in his _Speculum Naturae_ demonstrates +the value of studying Nature from a religious and moral point of +view; and the Carthusian general, Dionysius von Rickel (1471), in his +paper _On the beauty of the world and the glory of God (De venustate +mundi et de pulchritudine Dei)_ says in Chapter xxii.: 'All the +beauty of the animal world is nothing but the reflection and out-flow +of the original beauty of God,' and gives as special examples: + + Roses, lilies, and other beautiful and fragrant + flowers, shady woods, pine trees, pleasant meadows, + high, mountains, springs, streams and rivers, and the + broad arm of the immeasurable sea ... and above + all shine the stars, completing their course in the + clear sky in wonderful splendour and majestic order. + +Raymundus von Sabieude, a Spaniard, who studied medicine and +philosophy at Toulouse, and wrote his _Theologia Naturalis_ in 1436, +considered Nature, like Thomas Aquinas, from a mystical and +scholastic point of view, as made up of living beings in a graduated +scale from the lowest to the highest; and he lauded her in terms +which even Pope Clement VII. thought exaggerated. Piety in him went +hand in hand with a natural philosophy like Bacon's, and his interest +in Nature was rather a matter of intellect than feeling. + + God has given us two books--the book of all living beings, or + Nature, and the Holy Scriptures. The first was given to man from + the beginning when all things were created, for each living being + is but a letter of the alphabet written by the finger of God, and + the book is composed of them all together as a book is of letters + ... man is the capital letter of this book. This book is not like + the other, falsified and spoilt, but familiar and intelligible; + it makes man joyous and humble and obedient, a hater of evil and + a lover of virtue. + +Among the savants of the Renaissance who applied the inductive method +to Nature before Bacon,[14] we must include the thoughtful and pious +Spaniard Luis Vives (1540), who wrote concerning the useless +speculations of alchemists and astrologers about occult things: 'It +is not arguing that is needed here, but silent observation of +Nature.' Knowledge of Nature, he said, would serve both body and +soul. + +The tender religious lyrics of the mystic, Luis de Leon, followed +next.[15] His life (1521-1591) brings us up to the days of the +Inquisition. He himself, an excellent teacher and man of science, was +imprisoned for years for opinions too openly expressed in his +writings; but with all his varied fortunes he never lost his innate +manliness and tenderness. His biographer tells us, that as soon as +the holidays began, he would hurry away from the gloomy lecture rooms +and the noisy students at Salamanca, to the country, where he had +taken an estate belonging to a monastery at the foot of a hill by a +river, with a little island close by. + +It had a large uncultivated garden, made beautiful by fine old trees, +with paths among the vines and a stream running through it to the +river, and a long avenue of poplars whose rustle blended with the +noise of the mill-wheel. Beyond was a view of fields. Leon would sit +for hours here undisturbed, dipping his feet in the brook under a +poplar--the tree which was reputed to flourish on sand alone and give +shelter to all the birds under heaven--while the rustle of the leaves +sang his melancholy to sleep. His biographer goes on to say that he +had the Spaniard's special delight in Nature, and understood her +language and her secrets; and the veiled splendour of her tones, +colours, and forms could move him to tears. As he sat there gazing at +the clouds, he felt lifted up in heart by the insignificance of all +things in comparison with the spirit of man. + +In the pitching and tossing of his 'ships of thought' he never lost +the consciousness of Nature's beauty, and would pray the clouds to +carry his sighs with them in their tranquil course through heaven. He +loved the sunrise, birds, flowers, bees, fishes; nothing was +meaningless to him; all things were letters in a divine alphabet, +which might bring him a message from above. Nature was symbolic; the +glow of dawn meant the glow of divine love; a wide view, true +freedom; rays of sunshine, rays of divine glory; the setting sun, +eternal light; stars, flowers of light in an everlasting spring. + +His love for the country, especially for its peacefulness, was free +from the folly and excess of the pastoral poetry of his day. He did +not paint Nature entirely for her own sake; man was always her +master[16] in his poems, and he sometimes, very finely, introduced +himself and his affairs at the close, and represented Nature as +addressing himself. + +His descriptions are short, and he often tries to represent sounds +onomato-poetically. + +This is from his ode, _Quiet Life_[17]: + + O happy he who flies + Far from the noisy world away-- + Who with the worthy and the wise + Hath chosen the narrow way. + The silence of the secret road + That leads the soul to virtue and to God!... + O streams, and shades, and hills on high, + Unto the stillness of your breast + My wounded spirit longs to fly-- + To fly and be at rest. + Thus from the world's tempestuous sea, + O gentle Nature, do I turn to thee.... + A garden by the mountain side + Is mine, whose flowery blossoming + Shews, even in spring's luxuriant pride, + What Autumn's suns shall bring: + And from mountain's lofty crown + A clear and sparkling rill comes tumbling down; + Then, pausing in its downward force + The venerable trees among, + It gurgles on its winding course; + And, as it glides along, + Gives freshness to the day and pranks + With ever changing flowers its mossy banks. + The whisper of the balmy breeze + Scatters a thousand sweets around, + And sweeps in music through the trees + With an enchanting sound + That laps the soul in calm delight + Where crowns and kingdoms are forgotten quite. + +The poem, _The Starry Sky_,[18] is full of lofty enthusiasm for +Nature and piety: + + When yonder glorious sky + Lighted with million lamps I contemplate, + And turn my dazzled eye + To this vain mortal state + All mean and visionary, mean and desolate, + A mingled joy and grief + Fills all my soul with dark solicitude.... + List to the concert pure + Of yon harmonious countless worlds of light. + See, in his orbit sure + Each takes his journey bright, + Led by an unseen hand through the vast maze of night. + See how the pale moon rolls + Her silver wheel.... + See Saturn, father of the golden hours, + While round him, bright and blest, + The whole empyrean showers + Its glorious streams of light on this low world of ours. + But who to these can turn + And weigh them 'gainst a weeping world like this, + Nor feel his spirit burn + To grasp so sweet a bliss + And mourn that exile hard which here his portion is? + For there, and there alone, + Are peace and joy and never dying love: + Day that shall never cease, + No night there threatening, + No winter there to chill joy's ever-during spring. + Ye fields of changeless green + Covered with living streams and fadeless flowers; + Thou paradise serene, + Eternal joyful hours + Thy disembodied soul shall welcome in thy towers! + +It was chiefly in Spanish literature at this time that Nature was +used allegorically. Tieck[19] says: 'In Calderon's poetry, and that +of his contemporaries, we often find, in romances and song-like +metres, most charming descriptions of the sea, mountains, gardens, +and woody valleys, but almost always used allegorically, and with an +artistic polish which ends by giving us, not so much a real +impression of Nature, as one of clever description in musical verse, +repeated again and again with slight variations.' This is true of +Leon, but far more of Calderon, since it belongs to the very essence +of drama. But, despite his passion for description and his Catholic +and conventional tone, there is inexhaustible fancy, splendid colour, +and a modern element of individuality in his poems. His heroes are +conscious of their own ego, feel themselves to be 'a miniature +world,' and search out their own feelings 'in the wild waves of +emotion' (as Aurelian, for example, in _Zenobia_). + +Fernando says in _The Constant Prince_: + + These flowers awoke in beauty and delight + At early dawn, when stars began to set; + At eve they leave us but a fond regret, + Locked in the cold embraces of the night. + These shades that shame the rainbow's arch of light. + Where gold and snow in purple pomp are met, + All give a warning man should not forget, + When one brief day can darken things so bright. + 'Tis but to wither that the roses bloom-- + 'Tis to grow old they bear their beauteous flowers, + One crimson bud their cradle and their tomb. + Such are man's fortunes in this world of ours; + They live, they die; one day doth end their doom, + For ages past but seem to us like hours. + +The warning which Zenobia gives her captor in his hour of triumph to +beware of sudden reverses of fortune is finely conceived: + + Morn comes forth with rays to crown her, + While the sun afar is spreading + Golden cloths most finely woven + All to dry her tear-drops purely. + Up to noon he climbs, then straightway + Sinks, and then dark night makes ready + For the burial of the sea + Canopies of black outstretching-- + Tall ships fly on linen pinions, + On with speed the breezes send it, + Small the wide seas seem and straitened, + To its quick flight onward tending. + Yet one moment, yet one instant, + And the tempest roars, uprearing + Waves that might the stars extinguish, + Lifted for that ship's o'erwhelming. + Day, with fear, looks ever nightwards, + Calms must storm await with trembling; + Close behind the back of pleasure + Evermore stalks sadness dreary. + +In _Life's a Dream_ Prince Sigismund, chained in a dark prison, says: + + What sinned I more herein + Than others, who were also born? + Born the bird was, yet with gay + Gala vesture, beauty's dower, + Scarcely 'tis a winged flower + Or a richly plumaged spray, + Ere the aerial halls of day + It divideth rapidly, + And no more will debtor be + To the nest it hates to quit; + But, with more of soul than it, + I am grudged its liberty. + And the beast was born, whose skin + Scarce those beauteous spots and bars, + Like to constellated stars, + Doth from its greater painter win + Ere the instinct doth begin: + Of its fierceness and its pride, + And its lair on every side, + It has measured far and nigh; + While, with better instinct, I + Am its liberty denied. + Born the mute fish was also, + Child of ooze and ocean weed; + Scarce a finny bark of speed + To the surface brought, and lo! + In vast circuits to and fro + Measures it on every side + Its illimitable home; + While, with greater will to roam, + I that freedom am denied. + Born the streamlet was, a snake + Which unwinds the flowers among, + Silver serpent, that not long + May to them sweet music make, + Ere it quits the flowery brake, + Onward hastening to the sea + With majestic course and free, + Which the open plains supply; + While, with more life gifted, I + Am denied its liberty. + +In Act II. Clotardo tells how he has talked to the young prince, +brought up in solitude and confinement: + + There I spoke with him awhile + Of the human arts and letters, + Which the still and silent aspect + Of the mountains and the heavens + Him have taught--that school divine + Where he has been long a learner, + And the voices of the birds + And the beasts has apprehended. + +Descriptions of time and place are very rich in colour. + + One morning on the ocean, + When the half-awakened sun, + Trampling down the lingering shadows + Of the western vapours dun, + Spread its ruby-tinted tresses + Over jessamine and rose, + Dried with cloths of gold Aurora's + Tears of mingled fire and snows + Which to pearl his glance converted. + + Since these gardens cannot steal + Away your oft returning woes, + Though to beauteous spring they build + Snow-white jasmine temples filled + With radiant statues of the rose; + Come into the sea and make + Thy bark the chariot of the sun, + And when the golden splendours run + Athwart the waves, along thy wake + The garden to the sea will say + (By melancholy fears deprest)-- + 'The sun already gilds the west, + How very short has been this day.' + +There is a striking remark about a garden; Menon says: + + A beautiful garden surrounded by wild forest + Is the more beautiful the nearer it approaches its opposite. + +Splendour of colour was everything with Calderon, but it was +splendour of so stiff and formal a kind, that, like the whole of his +intensely severe, even inquisitorial outlook, it leaves us cold. + +We must turn to Shakespeare to learn how strongly the pulse of +sympathy for Nature could beat in contemporary drama. Goethe said: +'In Calderon you have the wine as the last artificial result of the +grape, but expressed into the goblet, highly spiced and sweetened, +and so given you to drink; but in Shakespeare you have the whole +natural process of its ripening besides, and the grapes themselves +one by one, for your enjoyment, if you will.' + +In _Worship at the Cross_ there is pious feeling for Nature and +mystical feeling side by side with an obnoxious fanaticism, +superstition, and other objectionable traits[20]; and mystical +confessions of the same sort may be gathered in numbers from the +works of contemporary monks and nuns. Even of such a fanatic and +self-tormentor as the Spanish Franciscan Petrus von Alcantara (1562), +his biographer says that despite his strict renunciation of the +world, he retained a most warm and deep feeling for Nature. + +'Whatever he saw of the outer world increased his devotion and gave +it wings. The starry sky seen through his little monastery window, +often kept him rapt in deep meditation for hours; often he was as if +beside himself, so strong was his pious feeling when he saw the power +and glory of God reflected in charming flowers and plants.' + +When Gregorio Lopez (1596), a man who had studied many sides of +Nature, was asked if so much knowledge confused him, he answered: 'I +find God in all things, great and small.' Similar remarks are +attributed to many others. + +Next to Leon, as a poet in enthusiasm and mysticism, came St Teresa +von Avila. She was especially notable for the ravishingly pretty +pictures and comparisons she drew from Nature to explain the soul +life of the Christian.[21] + +In all these outpourings of mystic feeling for Nature, there was no +interest in her entirely for her own sake; they were all more or less +dictated by religious feeling. It was in the later German and Italian +mystics--for example, Bruno, Campanella, and Jacob Boehme--that a +more subjective and individual point of view was attained through +Pantheism and Protestantism. + +The Protestant free-speaking Shakespeare shewed a far more intense +feeling for Nature than the Catholic Calderon. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +SHAKESPEARE'S SYMPATHY FOR NATURE + + +The poetry of India may serve as a measure of the part which Nature +can play in drama; it is full of comparisons and personifications, +and eloquent expressions of intimate sympathy with plants and +animals. In Greek tragedy, Nature stepped into the background; +metaphors, comparisons, and personifications are rarer; it was only +by degrees, especially in Sophocles and Euripides, in the choruses +and monologues, that man's interest in her appeared, and he began to +greet the light or the sky, land or sea, to attribute love, pity, or +hate to her, or find comfort in her lonely places. During the Middle +Ages, drama lay fallow, and the blossoming period of French tragedy, +educated to the pathos of Seneca, only produced cold declamation, +frosty rhetoric; of any real sympathy between man and Nature there +was no question. + +Over this mediaeval void Calderon was the bridge to Shakespeare. + +Shakespeare reached the Greek standpoint and advanced far beyond it. +He was not only the greatest dramatist of modern times as to human +action, suffering, and character, but also a genius in the +interpretation of Nature.[1] + +In place of the narrow limits of the old dramatists, he had the wider +and maturer modern vision, and, despite his mastery of language, he +was free both from the exaggeration and redundance of Oriental drama, +and from the mere passion for describing, which so often carried +Calderon away. + +In him too, the subjectivity, which the Renaissance brought into +modern art, was still more fully developed. His metaphors and +comparisons shew this, and, most of all, the very perfect art with +which he assigns Nature a part in the play, and makes her not only +form the appropriate background, dark or bright as required, but +exert a distinct influence upon human fate. + +As Carriere points out: + + At a period which had painting for its leading art, and was + turning its attention to music, his mental accord produced + effects in his works to which antiquity was a stranger. + +Herder had already noted that Shakespeare gives colour and atmosphere +where the Greek only gave outline. And although Shakespeare's +outlines are drawn with more regard to fidelity than to actual +beauty, yet, like a great painter, he brings all Nature into sympathy +with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night in +_Hamlet_, breathe the bracing Highland air in _Macbeth_, the air of +the woods in _As You Like It_; the storm on the heath roars through +Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the pomegranate outside +Julia's window. + +'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,' when Love solves all +differences in the _Merchant of Venice_! On the other hand, when +Macbeth is meditating the murder of Duncan, the wolf howls, the owl +hoots, and the cricket cries. And since Shakespeare's characters +often act out of part, so that intelligible motive fails, while it is +important to the poet that each scene be raised to dramatic level and +viewed in a special light, Goethe's words apply: + + Here everything which in a great world event passes secretly + through the air, everything which at the very moment of a + terrible occurrence men hide away in their hearts, is expressed; + that which they carefully shut up and lock away in their minds is + here freely and eloquently brought to light; we recognize the + truth to life, but know not how it is achieved. + +Amorous passion in his hands is an interpreter of Nature; in one of +his sonnets he compares it to an ocean which cannot quench thirst. + +In Sonnet 130 he says: + + My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; + Coral is far more red than her lips' red; + If snow be white, why then her breasts are dim; + If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. + I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, + But no such roses see I in her cheeks; + And in some perfumes is there more delight + Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.... + And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare + As any she belied by false compare. + +His lady-love is a mirror in which the whole world is reflected: + + Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind.... + For if it see the rudest or gentlest sight, + The most sweet favour or deformed'st creature, + The mountain or the sea, the day or night, + The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature. + (Sonnet 113.) + + When she leaves him it seems winter even in spring: + 'For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, + And thou away, the very birds are mute.' + (Sonnet 97.) + +Here, as in the dramas,[2] contrasts in Nature are often used to +point contrasts in life: + + How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame + Which like a canker in the fragrant rose + Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! + O in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose! + (Sonnet 95.) + +and + + No more be grieved at that which thou hast done; + Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud; + Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, + And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. + (Sonnet 35.) + +In an opposite sense is Sonnet 70: + + The ornament of beauty is suspect + A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air, + For canker vice the sweetest buds did love, + And thou presentest a pure unstained prime. + +Sonnet 7 has: + + Lo! in the orient when the gracious light + Lifts up his burning head, each under eye + Doth homage to his new-appearing sight, + Serving with looks his sacred majesty. + +Sonnet 18: + + Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? + Thou art more lovely and more temperate, + Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, + And summer's lease hath all too short a date-- + But thy eternal summer shall not fade, + Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; + Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade, + When in eternal lines to time thou growest: + So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, + So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. + +Sonnet 60: + + Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, + So do our minutes hasten to their end; + Each changing place with that which goes before, + In sequent toil all forwards do contend. + +Sonnet 73: + + That time of life thou mayst in me behold, + When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang + Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, + Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang + In me thou see'st the twilight of such day + As after sunset fadeth in the west, + Which by-and-by black night doth take away, + Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. + In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire + That on the ashes of his youth doth lie + As the death-bed whereon it must expire, + Consumed with that which it was nourished by. + This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong + To love that well which thou must leave ere long. + +There are no better similes for the oncoming of age and death, than +the sere leaf trembling in the wind, the twilight of the setting sun, +the expiring flame. + +Almost all the comparisons from Nature in his plays are original, and +rather keen and lightning-like than elaborate, often with the +terseness of proverbs; + + The strawberry grows underneath the nettle. + (_Henry V._) + + Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep. + (_Henry VI._) + + The waters swell before a boisterous storm. + (_Richard III._) + +Sometimes they are heaped up, like Calderon's, 'making it' (true +love) + + Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, + Brief as the lightning in the collied night + That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth, + And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' + The jaws of darkness do devour it up. + (_Midsummer Night's Dream._) + +Compared with Homer's they are very bold, and shew an astonishing +play of imagination; in place of the naive simplicity and naturalness +of antiquity, this modern genius gives us a dazzling display of wit +and thought. To quote only short examples[3]: + + 'Open as day,' 'deaf as the sea,' 'poor as winter,' + 'chaste as unsunn'd snow.' + +He ranges all Nature. These are characteristic +examples: + + King Richard doth himself appear + As doth the blushing discontented sun + From out the fiery portal of the east, + When he perceives the envious clouds are bent + To dim his glory and to stain the track + Of his bright passage to the occident. + (_Richard II._) + + Since the more fair crystal is the sky, + The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly. + As when the golden sun salutes the morn, + And, having gilt the ocean with his beams, + Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach + And overlooks the highest peering hills, + So Tamora. (_Titus Andronicus._) + + As all the world is cheered by the sun, + So I by that; it is my day, my life. + (_Richard III._) + + So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not + To those fresh morning drops upon the rose, + As thy eye-beams, when their fresh rays have smote + The night of dew that on my cheek down flows; + Nor shines the silver moon one half so bright + Through the transparent bosom of the deep. + As doth thy face through tears of mine give light; + Thou shinest on every tear that I do weep. + (_Love's Labour's Lost._) + +This is modern down to its finest detail, and much richer in +individuality than the most famous comparisons of the same kind in +antiquity. + +Sea and stream are used: + + Like an unseasonable stormy day + Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores + As if the world were all dissolved to tears, + So high above his limits swells the rage + Of Bolingbroke. (_Richard II._) + + The current that with gentle murmur glides, + Thou know'st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage; + But when his fair course is not hindered, + He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones, + Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge + He overtaketh on his pilgrimage; + And so by many winding nooks he strays + With willing sport to the wild ocean. + Then let me go, and hinder not my course. + (_Two Gentlemen of Verona._) + + Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought. + You are the fount that makes small brooks to flow. + And what is Edward but a ruthless sea? + (_Henry VI._) + + If there were reason for these miseries, + Then into limits could I bind my woes; + When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'er-flow? + If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, + Threatening the welkin with his big-swoln face? + And wilt thou have a reason for this coil? + I am the sea: hark, how her sighs do blow! + She is the weeping welkin, I the earth; + Then must my sea be moved with her sighs; + Then must my earth with her continual tears + Become a deluge, overflow'd and drowned. + (_Titus Andronicus._) + + This battle fares like to the morning's war + When dying clouds contend with growing light, + What time the shepherd blowing of his nails + Can neither call it perfect day nor night. + Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea + Forced by the tide to combat with the wind; + Now sways it that way, like the self-same sea + Forced to retire by fury of the wind. + Sometime the flood prevails and then the wind: + Now one the better, then another best; + Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast, + Yet neither conqueror nor conquered. + So is the equal poise of this fell war. + (_Henry VI._) + +In the last five examples the epic treatment and the personifications +are noteworthy. + +Comparisons from animal life are forcible and striking: + + How like a deer, stricken by many princes, + Dost thou lie here! (_Julius Caesar._) + +Richard III. is called: + + The wretched bloody and usurping boar + That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines, + Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his trough + In your embowell'd bosoms; this foul swine + Lies now even in the centre of this isle. + The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind. + (_Richard III._) + +The smallest objects are noted: + + As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; + They kill us for their sport. (_King Lear._) + + _Marcus_: Alas! my lord, I have but kill'd a fly. + + _Titus_: But how if that fly had a father and a mother? + How would he hang his slender gilded wings, + And buzz lamenting doings in the air! + Poor harmless fly! + That, with his pretty buzzing melody, + Came here to make us merry! and thou + Hast kill'd him! + (_Titus Andronicus._) + +Shakespeare has abundance of this idyllic miniature painting, for +which all the literature of the day shewed a marked taste. + +Tamora says: + + My lovely Aaron, wherefore look'st thou sad, + When everything doth make a gleeful boast? + The birds chant melody on every bush, + The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun, + The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind + And make a chequer'd shadow on the ground. + (_Titus Andronicus._) + +And Valentine in _Two Gentlemen of Verona_: + + This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods, + I better brook than flourishing peopled towns; + Here can I sit alone, unseen of any, + And to the nightingale's complaining notes + Tune my distresses and record my woes. + +Like this, in elegiac sentimentality, is Romeo: + + Before the worshipp'd sun + Peer'd forth the golden window of the east.... + Many a morning hath he there been seen + With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew. + +_Cymbeline, Winter's Tale_, and _As You Like It_ are particularly +rich in idyllic traits; the artificiality of court life is contrasted +with life in the open; there are songs, too, in praise of woodland +joys: + + Under the greenwood tree + Who loves to lie with me, + And tune his merry note + Unto the sweet bird's throat, + Come hither, come hither, come hither! + Here shall he see + No enemy + But winter and rough weather. + (_As You Like It._) + + Blow, blow, thou winter wind, + Thou art not so unkind + As man's ingratitude. + Thy tooth is not so keen, + Because thou art not seen + Altho' thy breath be rude. + Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho unto the green holly! + Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly![4] + (_As You Like It._) + +Turning again to comparisons, we find birds used abundantly: + + More pity that the eagle should be mewed + While kites and buzzards prey at liberty. + (_Richard III._) + + True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings. + (_Richard III._) + + As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye, + Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort + Rising and cawing at the gun's report + Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky, + So at his sight away his fellows fly. + (_Midsummer Night's Dream._) + +And plant life is touched with special tenderness: + + All the bystanders had wet their cheeks + Like trees bedashed with rain. + (_Richard III._) + + Why grow the branches when the root is gone? + Why wither not the leaves that want their sap? + (_Richard III._) + + Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, + Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other. + (_Richard III._) + + Ah! my tender babes! + My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets. + (_Richard III._) + +Romeo is + + To himself so secret and so close ... + As is the bud bit with an envious worm, + Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air + Or dedicate his beauty to the sun. + +It is astonishing to see how Shakespeare noted the smallest and most +fragile things, and found the most poetic expression for them without +any sacrifice of truth to Nature. + +Juliet is 'the sweetest flower of all the field.' Laertes says to +Ophelia: + + For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour + Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, + A violet in the youth of primy nature, + Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting, + The perfume and suppliance of a moment. + The canker galls the infants of the spring + Too oft before their buttons be disclosed; + And in the morn and liquid dew of youth + Contagious blastments are most imminent. + (_Hamlet._) + +Hamlet soliloquizes: + + How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable + Seems to me all the uses of this world. + Fie on't, O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden + That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature + Possess it merely. + + Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly + frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most + excellent canopy the air, look you--this brave o'erhanging + firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it + appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent + congregation of vapours. + +But the great advance which he made is seen far more in the +sympathetic way in which he drew Nature into the action of the play. + +He established perfect harmony between human fate and the natural +phenomena around it. + +There are moonlight nights for Romeo and Juliet's brief dream, when +all Nature, moon, stars, garden, seemed steeped in love together. + +He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet + + In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day + is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned + like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.) + +What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature in _Macbeth_! And in _Lear_, as +Jacobi says: + + What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and + unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither + and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and + there a lightning flash from God--a flash of Providence, rending + the clouds. + +One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to +justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies +at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms +one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry, +especially in Shakespeare. + +With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained +before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical +to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the +Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by +dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and +illuminated all and everything. + +Hense says[5]; + + The personification is plastic when AEschylus calls the heights + the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks + of hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are + foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive + army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who + enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of + Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls + laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his + back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did + not, and could not, exist in antiquity. + +The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his +feelings, the more he can see in Nature. + +Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors, +new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were +for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination. + +The motive of amorous passion, for instance, was a very divining-rod +in his hands, revealing the most delicate relations between Nature +and the soul. Ibykos had pointed the contrast between the gay spring +time and his own unhappy heart in which Eros raged like 'the Thracian +blast.' Theocritus had painted the pretty shepherdess drawing all +Nature under the spell of her charms; Akontios (Kallimachos) had +declared that if trees felt the pangs and longings of love, they +would lose their leaves; all such ideas, modern in their way, had +been expressed in antiquity. + +This is Shakespeare's treatment of them: + + How like a winter hath my absence been + From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! + What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! + What old December's bareness everywhere! + And yet this time removed was summer time, + The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ... + For summer and his pleasures wait on thee. + And thou away the very birds are mute, + Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer + That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near, + (Sonnet 97.) + + From you have I been absent in the spring, + When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim + Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, + That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. + Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell + Of different flowers in odour and in hue + Could make me any summer's story tell.... + Yet seem'd it winter still.... (Sonnet 98.) + +Or compare again the cypresses in Theocritus sole witnesses of secret +love; or Walther's + + One little birdie who never will tell, + +with + + These blue-veined violets whereon we lean + Never can blab, nor know not what we mean. + (_Venus and Adonis._) + +Comparisons of ladies' lips to roses, and hands to lilies, are common +with the old poets. How much more modern is: + + The forward violet thus did I chide; + Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells + If not from my love's breath?... + The lily I condemned for thy hand, + And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair; + The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, + One blushing shame, another white despair.... + More flowers I noted, yet I none could see + But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee. + (Sonnet 99.) + +And how fine the personification in Sonnet 33: + + Full many a glorious morning have I seen + Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, + Kissing with golden face the meadows green, + Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; + Anon permit the basest clouds to ride + With ugly rack on his celestial face, + And from the forlorn world his visage hide, + Stealing unseen to West with this disgrace: + Even so my sun one early morn did shine + With all triumphant splendour on my brow; + But out, alack! he was but one hour mine; + The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now. + Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; + Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth. + +This is night in _Venus and Adonis_: + + Look! the world's comforter with weary gait + His day's hot task hath ended in the West; + The owl, night's herald, shrieks 'tis very late; + The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest + And coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light, + Do summon us to part and bid good-night. + +And this morning, in _Romeo and Juliet_: + + The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night, + Checkering the Eastern clouds with streaks of light. + And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels + From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels; + Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye, + The day to cheer, and night's dank dew to dry ... + +Such wealth and brilliance of personification was not found again +until Goethe, Byron, and Shelley. + +He is unusually rich in descriptive phrases: + + The weary sun hath made a golden set, + And by the bright track of his golden car + Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow. + + The worshipp'd Sun + Peered forth the golden window of the East. + + The all-cheering sun + Should in the farthest East begin to draw + The shady curtains from Aurora's bed. + +The moon: + + Like to a silver bow + New bent in heaven. + +Titania says: + + I will wind thee in my arms.... + So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle + Gently entwist; the female ivy so + Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. + O how I love thee! + + That same dew, which sometime on the buds + Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls, + Stood now within the pretty flow'rets' eyes + Like tears. + (_Midsummer Night's Dream._) + + Daffodils + That come before the swallow dares, and take + The winds of March with beauty. + (_Winter's Tale._) + + Pale primroses + That die unmarried, ere they can behold + Bright Phoebus in his strength. + (_Winter's Tale._) + +Goethe calls winds and waves lovers. In _Troilus and Cressida_ we +have: + + The sea being smooth, + How many shallow bauble boats dare sail + Upon her patient breast, making their way + With those of nobler bulk! + But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage + The gentle Thetis, and anon behold + The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut, + Bounding between two moist elements + Like Perseus' horse. + +And further on in the same scene: + + What raging of the sea! shaking of earth! + Commotion in the winds! + ... the bounded waters + Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores. + +The personification of the river in _Henry IV._ is half mythical: + + When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank + In single opposition, hand to hand, + He did confound the best part of an hour + In changing hardiment with great Glendower; + Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink, + Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood; + Who, then affrighted with their bloody looks, + Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds, + And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank, + Blood-stained with these valiant combatants. + +Striking instances of personification from _Antony and Cleopatra_ +are: + + The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne + Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold; + Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that + The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver, + Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made + The water which they beat to follow faster + As amorous of their strokes. + +And Antony, enthron'd in the market-place, sat alone + + Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy + Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too + And made a gap in nature. + +Instead of accumulating further instances of these very modern and +individual (and sometimes far-fetched) personifications, it is of +more interest to see how Shakespeare used Nature, not only as +background and colouring, but to act a part of her own in the play, +so producing the grandest of all personifications. + +At the beginning of Act III. in _King Lear_, Kent asks: + + Who's there beside foul weather? + + _Gentleman_: One minded like the weather, most unquietly. + + _Kent_: Where's the King? + + _Gent_: Contending with the fretful elements. + Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea, + Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main, + That things might change or cease; tears his white hair, + Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage + Catch in their fury and make nothing of; + Strives in his little world of men to outscorn + The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain. + +In the stormy night on the wild heath the poor old man hears the echo +of his own feelings in the elements; his daughters' ingratitude, +hardness, and cruelty produce a moral disturbance like the +disturbance in Nature; he breaks out: + + Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow! + You cataracts and hurricanes, spout + Till you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks! + You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, + Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts, + Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, + Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! + Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once + That make ungrateful man.... + Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain! + + Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters, + I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness; + I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children, + You owe me no subscription; then, let fall + Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave, + A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man: + But yet I call you servile ministers, + That will with two pernicious daughters join + Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head + So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul! + +How closely here animate and inanimate Nature are woven together, the +reasoning with the unreasoning. The poet makes the storm, rain, +thunder, and lightning live, and at the same time endues his human +figures with a strength of feeling and passion which gives them +kinship to the elements. In _Othello_, too, there _is_ uproar in +Nature: + + Do but stand upon the foaming shore, + The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds.... + I never did like molestation view + On the enchafed flood. + +but even the unruly elements spare Desdemona: + + Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds, + The gather'd rocks and congregated sands. + Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel-- + As having sense of beauty, do omit + Their mortal natures, letting go safely by + The divine Desdemona. + +Cassio lays stress upon 'the great contention of the sea and skies'; +but when Othello meets Desdemona, he cries: + + O my soul's joy! + If after every tempest come such calms, + May the winds blow till they have wakened death! + And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas + Olympus-high, and duck again as low + As hell's from heaven. If it were now to die, + 'Twere now to be most happy. + +Iago calls the elements to witness his truthfulness: + + Witness, you ever-burning lights above, + You elements that clip us round about, + Witness, that here Iago doth give up + The execution of his wit, hands, heart, + To wrong'd Othello's service. + +Nature is disgusted at Othello's jealousy: + + Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks; + The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets, + Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth + And will not hear it. + +In terrible mental confusion he cries: + + O insupportable, O heavy hour! + Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse + Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe + Should yawn at alteration. + +Unhappy Desdemona sings: + + The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, + Sing all a green willow; + Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee, + Sing willow, willow, willow; + The fresh streams ran by her and murmur'd her moans, + Sing willow, willow, willow. + +A song in _Cymbeline_ contains a beautiful personification of +flowers: + + Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, + And Phoebus 'gins arise, + His steeds to water at those springs + On chalic'd flowers that lies; + And winking Mary-buds begin + To ope their golden eyes; + With everything that pretty is, + My lady sweet, arise; + Arise! Arise! + +The clearest expression of sympathy for Nature is in _Macbeth_. + +Repeatedly we meet the idea that Nature shudders before the crime, +and gives signs of coming disaster. + +Macbeth himself says: + + Stars, hide your fires! + Let not light see my black and deep desires; + The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be + Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see. + +and Lady Macbeth: + + ... The raven himself is hoarse + That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan + Under my battlements.... Come, thick night, + And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, + That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, + Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark + To cry 'Hold! hold!'... + +The peaceful castle to which Duncan comes all unsuspectingly, is in +most striking contrast to the fateful tone which pervades the +tragedy. Duncan says: + + This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air + Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself + Unto our gentle senses. + +and Banquo: + + This guest of summer, + The temple-haunting martlet, does approve + By his loved masonry, that the heaven's breath + Smells wooingly here; no jetty, frieze, + Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this bird + Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle; + Where they most breed and haunt I have observ'd + The air is delicate. + +Perhaps the familiar swallow has never been treated with more +discrimination; and at this point of the tale of horror it has the +effect of a ray of sunshine in a sky dark with storm clouds. + +In Act II. Macbeth describes his own horror and Nature's: + + Now o'er the one half world + Nature seems dead.... Thou sure and firm-set earth, + Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear + Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts. + +Lady Macbeth says: + + It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman + Which gives the stern'st good-night. + +Lenox describes this night: + + The night has been unruly: where we lay + Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say, + Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death + And prophesying, with accents terrible, + Of dire combustion and confus'd events, + New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird + Clamour'd the live-long night: some say, the earth + Was feverish and did shake. + +and later on, an old man says: + + Three score and ten I can remember well; + Within the volume of which time I have seen + Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night + Hath trifled former knowings. + +Rosse answers him: + + Ah, good father, + Thou see'st the heavens, as troubled with man's act, + Threaten his bloody stage; by the clock 'tis day, + And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. + Is't night's predominance or the day's shame + That darkness does the-face of earth entomb + When living light should kiss it? + +The whole play is a thrilling expression of the sympathy for Nature +which attributes its own feelings to her--a human shudder in presence +of the wicked--a human horror of crime, most thrilling of all in +Macbeth's words: + + Come, seeling night, + Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, + And with thy bloody and invisible hand + Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond + Which keeps me pale. + +In _Hamlet_, too, Nature is shocked at man's mis-deeds: + + ... Such an act (the queen's) + That blurs the grace and blush of modesty + ... Heaven's face doth glow, + Yea, this solidity and compound mass + With tristful visage, as against the doom, + Is thought-sick at the act. + +But there are other personifications in this most wonderful of all +tragedies, such as the magnificent one: + + But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad. + Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill. + +The first player declaims: + + But, as we often see, against some storm + A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still, + The bold winds speechless, and the orb below + As hush as death.... + +Ophelia dies: + + When down her weedy trophies and herself + Fell in the weeping brook. + +and Laertes commands: + + Lay her i' the earth, + And from her fair and unpolluted flesh + May violets spring. + +Thus Shakespeare's great imagination gave life and soul to every +detail of Nature, and he obtained the right background for his +dramas, not only through choice of scenery, but by making Nature a +sharer of human impulse, happy with the happy, shuddering in the +presence of wickedness. + +He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which +stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy +with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so +closely allied to mythology. And this holds good not only in dealing +with the great elementary forces--storms, thunder, lightning, +etc.--but with flowers, streams, the glow of sunlight. Always and +everywhere the grasp of Nature was intenser, more individual, and +subjective, than any we have met hitherto. + +Idyllic feeling for Nature became sympathetic in his hands. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +THE DISCOVERY OF THE BEAUTY OF LANDSCAPE +IN PAINTING + + +The indispensable condition of landscape-painting--painting, that is, +which raises the representation of Nature to the level of its main +subject and paints her entirely for her own sake--is the power to +compose separate studies into a whole and imbue that with an artistic +idea. It was therefore impossible among people like the Hebrews,[1] +whose eyes were always fixed on distance and only noted what lay +between in a cursory way, and among those who considered detail +without relation to a whole, as we have seen in mediaeval poetry until +the Renaissance. But just as study of the laws of aerial and linear +perspective demands a trained and keen eye, and therefore implies +interest in Nature, so the artistic idea, the soul of the picture, +depends directly upon the degree of the artist's feeling for her +Literature and painting are equal witnesses to the feeling for +Nature, and so long as scenery was only background in poetry, it had +no greater importance in painting. Landscape painting could only +arise in the period which produced complete pictures of scenery in +poetry--the sentimental idyllic period. + +We have seen how in the Italian Renaissance the fetters of dogma, +tradition, and mediaeval custom were removed, and servility and +visionariness gave place to healthy individuality and realism; how +man and the world were discovered anew; and further, how among the +other Romanic nations a lively feeling for Nature grew up, partly +idyllic, partly mystic; and finally, how this feeling found dramatic +expression in Shakespeare. + +Natural philosophy also, in the course of its search for truth, as it +threw off both one-sided Christian ideas and ancient traditions, came +gradually to feel an interest in Nature; not only her laws, but her +beauty, became an object of enthusiastic study. By a very long +process of development the Hellenic feeling for Nature was reached +again in the Renaissance; but it always remained, despite its +sentimental and pantheistic elements, sensual, superficial, and +naive, in comparison with Christian feeling, which a warmer heart and +a mind trained in scholastic wisdom had rendered more profound and +abstract. Hence Nature was sometimes an object of attention in +detail, sometimes in mass.[2] + +As we come to the first landscape painters and their birthplace in +the Netherlands, we see how steady and orderly is the development of +the human mind, and how factors that seem isolated are really links +in one chain. + +In the Middle Ages, landscape was only background with more or less +fitness to the subject. By the fifteenth century it was richer in +detail, as we see in Pisanello and the Florentines Gozzoli and +Mantegna. The poetry of earth had been discovered; the gold grounds +gave way to field, wood, hill, and dale, and the blue behind the +heads became a dome of sky. In the sixteenth century, Giorgione +shewed the value of effects of light, and Correggio's backgrounds +were in harmony with his tender, cheerful scenes. Titian loved to +paint autumn; the sunny days of October with blue grapes, golden +oranges, and melons; and evening with deep harmonies of colour over +the sleeping earth. He was a great pioneer in the realm of landscape. +With Michael Angelo not a blade of grass grew; his problem was man +alone. Raphael's backgrounds, on the other hand, are life-like in +detail: his little birds could fly out of the picture, the stems of +his plants seem to curve and bend towards us, and we look deep into +the flower they hold out.[3] + +In the German Renaissance too, the great masters limited themselves +to charming framework and ingenious arabesques for their Madonnas and +Holy Families. But, as Luebke says,[4] one soon sees that Duerer +depended on architecture for borders and backgrounds far less than +Holbein; he preferred landscape. + +'The charm of this background is so great, the inwardness of German +feeling for Nature so strongly expressed in it, that it has a special +value of its own, and the master through it has become the father of +landscape painting.'[5] + +This must be taken with a grain of salt; but, at all events, it is +true that Duerer combined 'keen and devoted study of Nature (in the +widest sense of the word) with a penetration which aimed at tracing +her facts up to their source.'[6] It is interesting to see how these +qualities overcame his theoretical views on Nature and art.[7] +Duerer's deep respect for Nature proved him a child of the new era. +Melanchthon relates that he often regretted that he had been too much +attracted in his younger days by variety and the fantastic, and had +only understood Nature's simple truth and beauty later in life. + +His riper judgment preferred her to all other models. Nature, in his +remarks on the theory of art, includes the animate and the inanimate, +living creatures as well as scenery, and it is interesting to observe +that his admiration of her as a divine thing was due to deep +religious feeling. In his work on Proportion[8] he says: + +'Certainly art is hidden in Nature, and he who is able to separate it +by force from Nature, he possesses it. Never imagine that you can or +will surpass Nature's achievements; human effort cannot compare with +the ability which her Creator has given her. Therefore no man can +ever make a picture which excels Nature's; and when, through much +copying, he has seized her spirit, it cannot be called original work, +it is rather something received and learnt, whose seeds grow and bear +fruit of their own kind. Thereby the gathered treasure of the heart, +and the new creature which takes shape and form there, comes to light +in the artist's work.' + +Elsewhere Duerer says 'a good painter's mind is full of figures,' and +he repeatedly remarks upon the superabundant beauty of all living +things which human intelligence rarely succeeds in reproducing. + +The first modern landscapes in which man was only accessory were +produced in the Netherlands. Quiet, absorbed musing on the external +world was characteristic of the nation; they studied the smallest and +most trifling objects with care, and set a high value on minutiae. + +The still-life work of their prime was only possible to such an +easy-going, life-loving people; the delightful animal pictures of +Paul Potter and Adrian van de Velde could only have been painted in +the land of Reineke Fuchs. Carriere says about these masters of genre +painting[9]: 'Through the emphasis laid upon single objects, they not +only revealed the national characteristics, but penetrated far into +the soul of Nature and mirrored their own feelings there, so +producing works of art of a kind unknown to antiquity. That divine +element, which the Greek saw in the human form, the Germanic race +divined in all the visible forms of Nature, and so felt at one with +them and able to reveal itself through them. + +'Nature was studied more for her own sake than in her relation to +man, and scenery became no longer mere background, but the actual +object of the picture. Animals, and even men, whether bathing in the +river, lying under trees, or hunting in the forest, were nothing but +accessories; inorganic Nature was the essential element. The greatest +Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and +stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible +crevasses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or +tropical luxuriance, but to common objects of everyday life. But +these they grasped with a precision and depth of feeling which gave +charm to the most trifling--it was the life of the universe divined +in its minutiae. In its treatment of landscape their genre painting +displayed the very characteristics which had brought it into +being.'[10] + +The physical characters of the country favoured landscape painting +too. No doubt the moist atmosphere and its silvery sheen, which add +such freshness and brilliance to the colouring, influenced the +development of the colour sense, as much as the absence of sharp +contrasts in contour, the suggestive skies, and abundance of streams, +woods, meadows, and dales. + +But it was in devotional pictures that the Netherlanders first tried +their wings; landscape and scenes from human life did not free +themselves permanently from religion and take independent place for +more than a century later. The fourteenth-century miniatures shew the +first signs of the northern feeling for Nature in illustrations of +the seasons in the calendar pictures of religious manuscripts. +Beginnings of landscape can be clearly seen in that threshold picture +of Netherland art, the altar-piece at Ghent by the brothers Van Eyck, +which was finished in 1432. It shews the most accurate observation: +all the plants, grasses, flowers, rose bushes, vines, and palms, are +correctly drawn; and the luxuriant valley in which the Christian +soldiers and the knights are riding, with its rocky walls covered by +undergrowth jutting stiffly forward, is very like the valley of the +Maas. + +One sees that the charm of landscape has dawned upon the painters. + +Their skies are no longer golden, but blue, and flecked with +cloudlets and alive with birds; wood and meadow shine in sappy green; +fantastic rocks lie about, and the plains are bounded by low hills. +They are drinking deep draughts from a newly-opened spring, and they +can scarcely have enough of it. They would like to paint all the +leaves and fruit on the trees, all the flowers on the grass, even all +the dewdrops. The effect of distance too has been discovered, for +there are blue hill-tops beyond the nearer green ones, and a +foreground scene opens back on a distant plain (in the Ghent +altar-piece, the scene with the pilgrims); but they still possess +very few tones, and their overcrowded detail is almost all, from +foreground to furthest distance, painted in the same luminous strong +dark-green, as if in insatiable delight at the beauty of their own +colour. The progress made by Jan van Eyck in landscape was immense. + +To the old masters Nature had been an unintelligible chaos of detail, +but beauty, through ecclesiastical tradition, an abstract attribute +of the Holy Family and the Saints, and they had used their best +powers of imagination in accordance with this view. Hence they placed +the Madonna upon a background of one colour, generally gilded. But +now the great discovery was made that Nature was a distinct entity, a +revelation and reflection of the divine in herself. And Jan van Eyck +introduced a great variety of landscapes behind his Madonnas. One +looks, for instance, through an open window to a wide stretch of +country with fields and fortresses, and towns with streets full of +people, all backed by mountains. And whether the scene itself, or +only its background, lies in the open, the landscape is of the +widest, enlivened by countless forms and adorned by splendid +buildings. + +Molanus, the savant of Loewen, proclaimed Dierick Bouts, born like his +predecessor Ouwater at Haarlem, to be the inventor of landscape +painting (claruit inventor in describendo rare); but the van Eycks +were certainly before him, though he increased the significance of +landscape painting and shewed knowledge of aerial perspective and +gradations of tone. Landscape was a distinct entity to him, and could +excite the mood that suited his subject, as, for instance, in the +side picture of the Last Supper, where the foreground is drawn with +such exactness that every plant and even the tiny creatures crawling +on the grass can be identified. + +The scenery of Roger van der Weyden of Brabant--river valleys +surrounded by jagged rocks and mountains, isolated trees, and meadows +bright with sappy green--is clearly the result of direct Nature +study; it has a uniform transparent atmosphere, and a clear green +shimmer lies over the foreground and gradually passes into blue haze +further back. + +His pupil, Memling, shews the same fine gradations of tone. The +composition of his richest picture, 'The Marriage of St Catherine,' +did not allow space for an unbroken landscape, but the lines of wood +and field converge to a vista in such a way that the general effect +is one of unity. + +Joachim de Patenir, who appeared in 1515, was called a landscape +painter by his contemporaries, because he reduced his sacred figures +to a modest size, enlarged his landscape, and handled it with extreme +care. He was very far from grasping it as a whole, but his method was +synthetical; his river valleys, with masses of tree and bush and +romantic rocks, fantastic and picturesque, with fortresses on the +river banks, all shew this. + +Kerry de Bles was like him, but less accurate; with all the rest of +the sixteenth-century painters of Brabant and Flanders, he did not +rise to the idea of landscape as a whole. + +The most minute attention was given to the accurate painting of +single objects, especially plants; the Flemings caring more for +perfect truth to life, the Dutch for beauty. The Flemings generally +sought to improve their landscape by embellishing its lines, while +the Dutch gave its spirit, but adhered simply and strictly to Nature. +The landscapes of Peter Brueghel the elder, with their dancing +peasants surrounded by rocks, mills, groups of trees, are painful in +their thoroughness; and Jan Brueghel carried imitation of Nature so +far that his minutise required a magnifying-glass--it was veritable +miniature work. He introduced fruit and flower painting as a new +feature of art. + +Rubens and Brueghel often painted on each other's canvas, Brueghel +supplying landscape backgrounds for Rubens' pictures, and Rubens the +figures for Brueghel's landscapes. Yet Rubens himself was the best +landscapist of the Flemish school. He was more than that. For +Brueghel and his followers, with all their patience and industry, +their blue-green landscape with imaginary trees, boundless distance +and endless detail, were very far from a true grasp of Nature. It was +Rubens and his school who really made landscape a legitimate +independent branch of art. They studied it in all its aspects, quiet +and homely, wild and romantic, some taking one and some the other: +Rubens himself, in his large way, grasping the whole without losing +sight of its parts. They all lifted the veil from Nature and saw her +as she was (Falke). + +Brueghel put off the execution of a picture for which he had a +commission from winter to spring, that he might study the flowers for +it from Nature when they came out, and did not grudge a journey to +Brussels now and then to paint flowers not to be had at Antwerp. +There is a characteristic letter which he sent to the Archbishop of +Milan with a picture: + +'I send your Reverence the picture with the flowers, which are all +painted from Nature. I have painted in as many as possible. I believe +so many rare and different flowers have never been painted before nor +so industriously. It will give a beautiful effect in winter; some of +the colours almost equal Nature. I have painted an ornament under the +flowers with artistic medallions and curiosities from the sea. I +leave it to your reverence to judge whether the flowers do not far +exceed gold and jewels in colour.' + +He also painted landscapes in which people were only accessory, sunny +valleys with leafage, golden cornfields, meadows with rows of dancing +country folk or reapers in the wheat. + +Rubens, though he felt the influence of southern light and sunshine +as much as his fellows who had been in Italy, took his backgrounds +from his native land, from parts round Antwerp, Mechlin, and +Brussels. Foliage, water, and undulating ground were indispensable to +him--were, to a certain extent, the actual bearers of the impression +he wished to convey. + +Brueghel always kept a childlike attitude, delighting in details, and +proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the point of +deception. Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold +subjective way. He opened the book of Nature, so to speak, not to +spell out the words syllable by syllable, but to master her secret, +to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he +found there--in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape +painter. The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the +whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic +excitement and tension. Take, for instance, the evening scene with +the rainbow in the Louvre, marvellous in its delicate gradations of +atmospheric tone, and the equally marvellous thunderstorm in the +Belvedere at Vienna, where a rain-cloud bursts under sulphur +lightning, and a mountain stream, swollen to a torrent and lashed by +the hurricane, carries all before it--trees, rocks, animals, and men. + +In France, scarcely a flower had been seen in literature since the +Troubadour days, not even in the classical poetry of Corneille and +Racine. There were idyllic features in Fenelon's _Telemachus_, and +Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry +which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain. + +Honore d'Urfe's famous _Astree_ was much translated; but both his +shepherds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of +courts and carpet knights was over the whole, with a certain trace of +sadness. + +The case was different with French painting. After the Netherlands, +it was France, by her mediaeval illustrated manuscripts, who chiefly +aided in opening the world's eyes to landscape. Both the Poussins +penetrated below the surface of Nature. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) +painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of trees in the +foreground, a hill with a classic building in the middle, and a chain +of mountains in the distance, and laid more stress on drawing than +colour. There was greater life in the pictures of his brother-in-law, +Caspar Doughet, also called Poussin; his grass is more succulent, his +winds sigh in the trees, his storm bends the boughs and scatters the +clouds. + +It was Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) who brought the ideal style to its +perfection. He inspired the very elements with mind and feeling; his +valleys, woods, and seas were just a veil through which divinity was +visible. All that was ugly, painful, and confused was purified and +transfigured in his hands. There is no sadness or dejection in his +pictures, but a spirit of serene beauty, free from ostentation, +far-fetched contrast, or artificial glitter. Light breezes blow in +his splendid trees, golden light quivers through them, drawing the +eye to a bright misty horizon; we say with Uhland, 'The sky is +solemn, as if it would say "this is the day of the Lord."' + +Artistic feeling for Nature became a worship with Claude Lorraine. + +The Netherlands recorded all Nature's phases in noble emulation with +ever-increasing delight. + +The poetry of air, cloudland, light, the cool freshness of morning, +the hazy sultriness of noon, the warm light of evening, it all lives +and moves in Cuyp's pictures and Wynant's, while Aart van der Meer +painted moonlight and winter snow, and Jan van Goyen the melancholy +of mist shot by sunlight. He, too--Jan van Goyen--was very clever in +producing effect with very small means, with a few trees reflected in +water, or a sand-heap--the art in which Ruysdael excelled all others. +The whole poetry of Nature--that secret magic which lies like a spell +over quiet wood, murmuring sea, still pool, and lonely pasture--took +form and colour under his hands; so little sufficed to enchant, to +rouse thought and feeling, and lead them whither he would. Northern +seriousness and sadness brood over most of his work; the dark trees +are overhung by heavy clouds and rain, mist and dusky shadows move +among his ruins. He had painted, says Carriere, the peace of woodland +solitude long before Tieck found the word for it. + +Beechwoods reflected in a stream, misty cloud masses lighted by the +rising sun; he moves us with such things as with a morning hymn, and +his picture of a swollen torrent forcing its way between graves which +catch the last rays of the sun, while a cloud of rain shrouds the +ruins of a church in the background, is an elegy which has taken +shape and colour. + +Ruysdael marks the culminating point of this period of development, +which had led from mere backgrounds and single traits of Nature--even +a flower stem or a blade of grass, up to elaborate compositions +imbued by a single motive, a single idea. + +To conjure up with slight material a complete little world of its +own, and waken responsive feeling, is not this the secret of the +charm in the pictures of his school--in the wooded hill or peasant's +courtyard by Hobbema, the Norwegian mountain scene of Albert van +Everdingen, the dusky fig-trees, rugged crags, and foaming cataract, +or the half-sullen, half-smiling sea-pieces of Bakhuysen and Van der +Velde? + +All these great Netherlander far outstripped the poetry of their +time; it was a hundred years later before mountain and sea found +their painter in words, and a complete landscape picture was not born +in German poetry until the end of the eighteenth century. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +HUMANISM, ROCOCO, AND PIGTAIL + + +Many decades passed before German feeling for Nature reached the +heights attained by the Italian Renaissance and the Netherland +landscapists. In the Middle Ages, Germany was engrossed with +ecclesiastical dogma--man's relation, not only to God, but to the one +saving Church--and had little interest for Science and Art; and the +great achievement of the fifteenth century, the Reformation, called +for word and deed to reckon with a thousand years of old traditions +and the slavery of intellectual despotism. The new time was born amid +bitter throes. The questions at issue--religious and ecclesiastical +questions concerned with the liberty of the Christian--were of the +most absorbing kind, and though Germany produced minds of individual +stamp such as she had never known before, characters of original and +marked physiognomy, it was no time for the quiet contemplation of +Nature. Mental life was stimulated by the new current of ideas and +new delight in life awakened: yet there is scarcely a trace of the +intense feeling for Nature which we have seen in Petrarch and AEneas +Sylvius. + +Largely as it was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, it is +certainly a mistake to reckon the Humanist movement in Germany, as +Geiger does,[1] as a 'merely imported culture, entirely lacking +independence.' The germ of this great movement towards mental freedom +was contained in the general trend of the time, which was striving to +free itself from the fetters of the Middle Ages in customs and +education as well as dogma. It was chiefly a polemical movement, a +fight between contentious savants. The writings of the Humanists at +this naively sensuous period were full of the joy of life and love of +pleasure; but scarcely any simple feeling for Nature can be found in +them, and there was neither poet nor poem fit to be compared with +Petrarch and his sonnets. + +Natural philosophy, too, was proscribed by scholastic wisdom; the +real Aristotle was only gradually shelled out from under mediaeval +accretions. The natural philosopher, Conrad Summenhart[2] (1450-1501) +was quite unable to disbelieve the foolish legend, that the +appearance of a comet foretold four certain events--heat, wind, war, +and the death of princes. At the same time, not being superstitious, +he held aloof from the crazy science of astrology and all the fraud +connected with it. Indeed, as an observer of Nature, and still more +as a follower and furtherer of the scholastic Aristotelian natural +philosophy, he shewed a leaning towards the theory of development, +for, according to him, the more highly organized structures proceed +from those of lower organization, and these again form the inorganic +under the influence of meteors and stars. The poet laureate Conrad +Celtes (_b_. 1459), a singer of love and composer of four books about +it, was a true poet. His incessant wandering, for he was always +moving from place to place, was due in part to love of Nature and of +novelty, but still more to a desire to spread his own fame. He lacked +the naivete and openness to impressions of the true child of Nature; +his songs in praise of spring, etc., scatter a colourless general +praise, which is evidently the result of arduous thought rather than +of direct impressions from without; and his many references to +ancient deities shew that he borrowed more than his phrases. + +Though geography was then closely bound up with the writing of +history, as represented by Beatus Rhenanus (1485-1547) and Johann +Aventinus, and patriotism and the accounts of new lands led men to +wish to describe the beauties and advantages of their own, the +imposing discoveries across the seas did not make so forcible an +impression upon the German humanist as upon savants elsewhere, +especially in Italy and Spain. A mystico-theosophical feeling for +Nature, or rather a magical knowledge of her, flourished in Germany +at this time among the learned, both among Protestants and those who +were partially true to Catholicism. One of the strangest exponents of +such ideas was Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Cologne[3] (1535). +His system of the world abounded in such fantastic caprices as these: +everything depends on harmony and sympathy; when one of Nature's +strings is struck, the others sound with it: the analogical +correspondences are at the same time magical: symbolic relations +between natural objects are sympathetic also: a true love-bond exists +between the elm and vine: the sun bestows life on man; the moon, +growth; Mercury, imagination; Venus, love, etc. God is reflected in +the macrocosm, gives light in all directions through all creatures, +is adumbrated in man microcosmically, and so forth. + +Among others, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus +von Hohenheim (1541), ranked Nature and the Bible, like Agrippa, as +the best books about God and the only ones without falsehood. + +'One must study the elements, follow Nature from land to land, since +each single country is only one leaf in the book of creation. The +eyes that find pleasure in this true experience are the true +professors, and more reliable than all learned writings.' + +He held man to be less God's very image than a microcosmic copy of +Nature--the quintessence of the whole world. Other enthusiasts made +similar statements. Sebastian Frank of Donauwoerth (1543) looked upon +the whole world as an open book and living Bible, in which to study +the power and art of God and learn His will: everything was His +image, all creatures are 'a reflection, imprint, and expression of +God, through knowledge of which man may come to know the true Mover +and Cause of all things.' + +He shewed warm feeling for Nature in many similes and descriptions[4]-- +in fact, much of his pithy drastic writing sounds pantheistic. But he +was very far from the standpoint of the great Italian philosophers, +Giordano Bruno and Campanella. Bruno, a poet as well as thinker, +distinguished Nature in her self-development--matter, soul, and +mind--as being stages and phases of the One. + + The material of all things issues from the original womb, + For Nature works with a master hand in her own inner depths; + She is art, alive and gifted with a splendid mind. + Which fashions its own material, not that of others, + And does not falter or doubt, but all by itself + Lightly and surely, as fire burns and sparkles. + Easily and widely, as light spreads everywhere, + Never scattering its forces, but stable, quiet, and at one, + Orders and disposes of everything together. + +Campanella, even in a revolting prison, sang in praise of the wisdom +and love of God, and His image in Nature. He personified everything +in her; nothing was without feeling; the very movements of the stars +depended on sympathy and antipathy; harmony was the central soul of +all things. + +The most extraordinary of all German thinkers was the King of +Mystics, Jacob Boehme. Theist and pantheist at once, his mind was a +ferment of different systems of thought. It is very difficult to +unriddle his _Aurora_, but love of Nature, as well as love of God, is +clear in its mystical utterances: + + God is the heart or source of Nature. + Nature is the body of God. + +'As man's mind rules his whole body in every vein and fills his whole +being, so the Holy Ghost fills all Nature, and is its heart and rules +in the good qualities of all things.' + +'But now heaven is a delightful chamber of pleasure, in which are all +the powers, as in all Nature the sky is the heart of the waters.' + +In another place he calls God the vital power in the tree of life, +the creatures His branches, and Nature the perfection and +self-begotten of God. + +Nature's powers are explained as passion, will, and love, often in +lofty and beautiful comparisons: + +'As earth always bears beautiful flowers, plants, and trees, as well +as metals and animate beings, and these finer, stronger, and more +beautiful at one time than another; and as one springs into being as +another dies, causing constant use and work, so it is in still +greater degree with the begetting of the holy mysteries[5] ... +creation is nothing else than a revelation of the all-pervading +superficial godhead ... and is like the music of many flutes combined +into one great harmony.' + +But the most representative man, both of the fifteenth century and, +in a sense, of the German race, was Luther. That maxim of Goethe's +for teaching and ethics,' Cheerfulness is the mother of all virtues, +might well serve as a motto for Luther; + +The two men had much in common. + +The one, standing half in the Middle Ages, had to free himself from +mental slavery by strength of will and courage of belief. + +The other, as the prophet of the nineteenth century, the incarnation +of the modern man, had to shake off the artificiality and weak +sentimentality of the eighteenth. + +To both alike a healthy joy in existence was the root of being. +Luther was always open to the influence of Nature, and, +characteristically, the Psalter was his favourite book. 'Lord, how +manifold are Thy works, in wisdom hast Thou made them all!' + +True to his German character, he could be profoundly sad; but his +disposition was delightfully cheerful and healthy, and we see from +his letters and table-talk, that after wife and child, it was in +'God's dear world' that he took the greatest pleasure. He could not +have enough of the wonders of creation, great or small. 'By God's +mercy we begin to see the splendour of His works and wonders in the +little flowers, as we consider how kind and almighty He is; therefore +we praise and thank Him. In His creatures we see the power of His +word--how great it is. In a peach stone, too, for hard as the shell +is, the very soft kernel within causes it to open at the right +time.'[6] Again, 'So God is present in all creatures, even the +smallest leaves and poppy seeds.' + +All that he saw of Nature inspired him with confidence in the +fatherly goodness of God. He wrote, August 5th, 1530, to Chancellor +Brneck: + + I have lately seen two wonderful things: the first, looking from + the window at the stars and God's whole beautiful sky dome, I saw + never a pillar to support it, and yet it did not fall, and is + still firm in its place. Now, there are some who search for such + pillars and are very anxious to seize them and feel them, and + because they cannot, fidget and tremble as if the skies would + certainly fall ... the other, I also saw great thick clouds sweep + over our heads, so heavy that they might be compared to a great + sea, and yet I saw no ground on which they rested, and no vats in + which they were contained, yet they did not fall on us, but + greeted us with a frown and flew away. When they had gone, the + rainbow lighted both the ground and the roof which had held them. + +Luther often used very forcible images from Nature. 'It is only for +the sake of winter that we lie and rot in the earth; when our summer +comes, our grain will spring up--rain, sun, and wind prepare us for +it--that is, the Word, the Sacraments, and the Holy Ghost.' + +His Bible was an orchard of all sorts of fruit trees; in the +introduction to the Psalter, he says of the thanksgiving psalms: +'There one looks into the hearts of the saints as into bright and +beautiful gardens--nay, as into heaven itself, where pure and happy +thoughts of God and His goodness are the lovely flowers.' + +His description of heaven for his little son John is full of simple +reverent delight in Nature, quite free from platonic and mystical +speculation as to God's relation to His universe; and Protestant +divines kept this tone up to the following century, until the days of +rationalism and pietism. + +Of such spontaneous hearty joy in Nature as this, the national songs +of a nation are always the medium. They were so now; for, while a +like feeling was nowhere else to be found, the Volkslieder expressed +the simple familiar relationship of the child of Nature to wood, +tree, and flower in touching words and a half-mythical, +half-allegorical tone which often revealed their old Germanic origin. + +There is a fourteenth-century song, probably from the Lower Rhine,[7] +which suggests the poems of the eighth and ninth centuries, about a +great quarrel between Spring, crowned with flowers, and hoary-headed +Winter, in which one praises and the other blames the cuckoo for +announcing Spring. + +In this song, Summer complains to mankind and other friends that a +mighty master is going to drive him away; this mighty master, Winter, +then takes up the word, and menaces Spring with the approach of +frost, who will slight and imprison him, and then kill him; ice and +hail agree with Winter, and storm, rain, snow, and bitter winds are +called his vassals, etc. + +There are naive verses in praise of Spring and Summer: + + When that the breezes blow in May, + And snow melts from the wood away, + Blue violets lift their heads on high, + And when the little wood-birds sing, + And flow'rets from the ground up-spring, + Then everybody's glad. + +Others complaining of Winter, who must have leave of absence, and the +wrongs it has wrought are poured out to Summer. The little birds are +very human; the owlet complains: + + Poor little owlet me! + I have to fly all alone through the wood to-night; + The branch I want to perch on is broken, + The leaves are all faded, + My heart is full of grief. + +The cuckoo is either praised for bringing good news, or made fun of +as the 'Gutzgauch.' + + A cuckoo will fly to his heart's treasure, etc. + +The fable songs[8] of animal weddings are full of humour. The fox +makes arrangements for his wedding: 'Up with you now, little birds! I +am going to take a bride. The starling shall saddle the horses, for +he has a grey mantle; the beaver with the cap of marten fur must be +driver, the hare with his light foot shall be outrider; the +nightingale with his clear voice shall sing the songs, the magpie +with his steady hop must lead the dances,' etc. + +The nightingale, with her rich tones, is beloved and honoured before +all the winged things; she is called 'the very dear nightingale,' and +addressed as a lady. + +'Thou art a little woodbird, and flyest in and out the green wood; +fair Nightingale, thou little woodbird, thou shalt be my messenger.' + +It is she who warns the girl against false love, or is the silent +witness of caresses. + +There were a great many wishing songs: 'Were I a little bird and had +two wings, I would fly to thee,' or 'Were I a wild falcon, I would +take flight and fly down before a rich citizen's house--a little maid +is there,' etc. 'And were my love a brooklet cold, and sprang out of +a stone, little should I grieve if I were but a green wood; green is +the wood, the brooklet is cold, my love is shapely.' The betrayed +maiden cries: 'Would God I were a white swan! I would fly away over +mountain and deep valley o'er the wide sea, so that my father and +mother should not know where I was.' + +Flowers were used symbolically in many ways; roses are always the +flowers of love. 'Pretty girls should be kissed, roses should be +gathered,' was a common saying; and 'Gather roses by night, for then +all the leaves are covered with cooling dew.' 'The roses are ready to +be gathered, so gather them to-day. He who does not gather in summer, +will not gather in winter.' There is tenderness in this: 'I only know +a little blue flower, the colour of the sky; it grows in the green +meadow, 'tis called forget-me-not.' + +These are sadder: + + There is a lime tree in this valley, + O God! what does it there? + It will help me to grieve + That I have no lover. + +'Alas! you mountains and deep valleys, is this the last time I shall +see my beloved? Sun, moon, and the whole sky must grieve with me till +my death.' + +Where lovers embrace, flowers spring out of the grass, roses and +other flowers and grasses laugh, the trees creak and birds sing;[9] +where lovers part, grass and leaves fade.[10] + +Most touching of all is the idea, common to the national songs of all +nations, that out of the grave of two lovers, lilies and roses spring +up, or climbing plants, love thus outliving death. + +We look in vain among the master singers of the fifteenth and +sixteenth centuries for such fresh heartfelt tones as these, although +honest Hans Sachs shews joy in Nature here and there; most charmingly +in the famous comparison of 'the Wittenberg Nightingale, which every +one hears everywhere now,' in praise of Luther: + +'Wake up, the dawn is nigh! I hear a joyous nightingale singing in +the green hedge, it fills the hills and valleys with its voice. The +night is stooping to the west, the day is rising from the east, the +morning red is leaping from the clouds, the sun looks through. The +moon quenches her light; now she is pale and wan, but erewhile with +false glamours she dazzled all the sheep and turned them from their +pasture lands and pastor....' + +Fischart too, in his quaint description of a voyage on the Rhine in +_Glueckhaft Schiff_, shews little feeling for Nature; but in +_Simplicissimus_, on the other hand, that monument of literature +which reflected contemporary culture to a unique degree, it is very +marked; the more so since it appeared when Germany lay crushed by the +Thirty Years' War. + +When the hero as a boy was driven from his village home and fled into +the forest, he came upon a hermit who took care of him, and waking at +midnight, he heard the old man sing: + + Come, nightingale, comfort of the night, + Let your voice rise in a song of joy, come praise the Creator, + While other birds are sound asleep and cannot sing!... + The stars are shining in the sky in honour of God.... + My dearest little bird, we will not be the laziest of all + And lie asleep; we will beguile the time with praise + Till dawn refreshes the desolate woods. + +_Simplicissimus_ goes on: 'During this song, methinks, it was as if +nightingale, owl, and echo had combined in song, and if ever I had +been able to hear the morning star, or to try to imitate the melody +on my bagpipe, I should have slipt away out of the hut to join in the +melody, so beautiful it seemed; but I was asleep.' + +What was the general feeling for Nature in other countries during the +latter half of the seventeenth century? In Italy and Spain it had +assumed a form partly bucolic and idyllic, partly theosophically +mystical; Shakespeare's plays had brought sympathy to maturity in +England; the Netherlands had given birth to landscape painting, and +France had the splendid poetic landscapes of Claude Lorraine. But the +idealism thus reached soon degenerated into mannerism and +artificiality, the hatching of empty effect. + +The aberrations of taste which found expression in the periwig style +of Louis XIV., and in the pigtails of the eighteenth century, +affected the feeling for Nature too. The histories of taste in +general, and of feeling for Nature, have this in common, that their +line of progress is not uniformly straightforward, but liable to +zigzags. This is best seen in reviewing the different civilized races +together. Moreover, new ideas, however forcible and original, even +epoch-making, do not win acceptance at once, but rather trickle +slowly through resisting layers; it is long before any new gain in +culture becomes the common property of the educated, and hence +opposite extremes are often found side by side--taste for what is +natural with taste for what is artificial. Garden style is always a +delicate test of feeling for Nature, shewing, as it does, whether we +respect her ways or wish to impose our own. The impulse towards the +modern French gardening came from Italy. Ancient and modern times +both had to do with it. At the Renaissance there was a return to +Pliny's style,[11] which the Cinque cento gardens copied. In this +style laurel and box-hedges were clipt, and marble statues placed +against them, 'to break the uniformity of the dark green with +pleasant silhouettes. One looks almost in vain for flowers and turf; +even trees were exiled to a special wilderness at the edge of the +garden; but the great ornament of the whole was never missing, the +wide view over sunny plains and dome-capt towns, or over the distant +shimmering sea, which had gladdened the eyes of Roman rulers in +classic days.'[12] + +The old French garden as Maitre Lenotre laid it out in Louis XIV.'s +time at Versailles, St Germain, and St Cloud, was architectural in +design, and directly connected, like Pliny's, with various parts of +the house, by open halls, pavilions, and colonnades. Every part of +it--from neat turf parterres bordered by box in front of the terrace, +designs worked out in flowers or coloured stones, and double rows of +orange spaliers, to groups of statues and fountains--belonged to one +symmetrical plan, the focus of which was the house, standing free +from trees, and visible from every point. Farther off, radiating +avenues led the eye in the same direction, and every little +intersecting alley, true to the same principle, ran to a definite +object--obelisk, temple, or what not. There was no lack of bowers, +giant shrubberies, and water-courses running canal-wise through the +park, but they all fell into straight lines; every path was ruled by +a ruler, the eye could follow it to its very end. Artifice was the +governing spirit. As Falke says: 'Nature dared not speak but only +supply material; she had to sacrifice her own inventive power to this +taste and this art. Hills and woods were only hindrances; the +straight lines of trees and hedges, with their medley of statues and +"cabinets de verdure," demanded level ground, and the landscape eye +of the period only tolerated woods as a finish to its cut and clipt +artificialities.'[13] + +Trees and branches were not allowed to grow at their own sweet will; +they were cut into cubes, balls, pyramids, even into shapes of +animals, as the gardener's fancy or his principles decreed; cypresses +were made into pillars or hearts with the apex above or below; and +the art of topiary even achieved complete hunting scenes, with +hunters, stags, dogs, and hares in full chase on a hedge. Of such a +garden one could say with honest Claudius, ''Tis but a tailor's joke, +and shews the traces of the scissors; it has nothing of the great +heart of Nature.' + +It was Nature in bondage: 'green architecture,' with all its parts, +walls, windows, roofs, galleries cut out of leafage, and theatres +with stage and wings in which silk and velvet marquises with +full-bottomed wigs and lace jabots, and ladies in hooped petticoats +and hair in towers, played at private theatricals. + +Where water was available, water devices were added. And in the midst +of all this unnaturalness Greek mythology was introduced: the story +of Daphne and Apollo appeared in one alley, Meleager and Atalanta in +another, all Olympus was set in motion to fill up the walls and +niches. And the people were like their gardens both in dress and +manners; imposing style was everything. + +Then came the Rococo period of Louis XV. The great periwig shrivelled +to a pigtail, and petty flourish took the place of Lenotre's +grandezza. + +'The unnatural remained, the imposing disappeared and caprice took +its place,' says Falke. Coquetry too. All the artistic output of the +time bears this stamp, painting included. Watteau's scenery and +people were unnatural and affected--mere inventions to suit the +gallant _fetes_. But he knew and loved Nature, though he saw her with +the intoxicated eye of a lover who forgets the individual but keeps a +glorified impression of her beauty, whereas Boucher's rosy-blue +landscapes look as if he had never seen their originals. His world +had nothing in common with Nature, and with reality only this, that +its sensuousness, gaiety, falsity, and coquetry were true to the +period. But in both Watteau and Boucher there was a faint glimmer of +the idyllic--witness the dash of melancholy in Watteau's brightest +pictures. Feeling for Nature was seeking its lost path--the path it +was to follow with such increased fervour. + +German literature too, in the seventeenth century, stood under the +sign manual of the Pigtail and Periwig; it was baroque, stilted, +bombastic, affected, feeling and form alike were forced, not +spontaneous. Verses were turned out by machinery and glued together. +Martin Opitz,[14] the recognized leader and king of poets, had +travelled far, but there is no distinct feeling for Nature in his +poetry. His words to a mountain: + +'Nature has so arranged pleasure here, that he who takes the trouble +to climb thee is repaid by delight,' scarcely admit the inference +that he understood the charm of distance in the modern sense. He took +warmer interest in the bucolic side of country life; rhyming about +the delightful places, dwellings of peace, with their myrtles, +mountains, valleys, stones, and flowers, where he longed to be; and +his _Spring Song_, an obvious imitation of the classics (Horace's +_Beatus ille_ was his model for _Zlatna_), has this conventional +contrast between his heart and Nature. + +'The frosty ice must melt; snow cannot last any longer, Favonius; the +gentle breeze is on the, fields again. Seed is growing vigorously, +grass greening in all its splendour, trees are budding, flowers +growing ...thou, too my heart, put off thy grief.' + +There is more nostalgia than feeling for Nature in this: + +'Ye birches and tall limes, waste places, woods and fields, farewell +to you! + +'My comfort and my better dwelling-place is elsewhere!' + +But (and this Winter, strange to say, ignores) his pastorals have all +the sentimental elegiac style of the Pigtail period. + +There had been German adaptations of foreign pastorals, such as +Montreux, _Schaferei von der schoenen Juliana_, since 1595; Urfe's +_Astree_ and Montemayor's _Diana_ appeared in 1619, and Sidney's +_Arcadia_ ten years later. + +Opitz tried to widen the propaganda for this kind of poetry, and +hence wrote, not to mention little pastorals such as _Daphne, +Galatea, Corydon,_ and _Asteria_, his _Schaferei von der 'Nymphen +Hercinie.'_ + +His references to Nature in this are as exaggerated as everything +else in the poem. He tells how he did not wake 'until night, the +mother of the stars, had gone mad, and the beautiful light of dawn +began to shew herself and everything with her.... + +'I sprang up and greeted the sweet rays of the sun, which looked down +from the tops of the mountains and seemed at the same time to comfort +me.' + +He came to a spring 'which fell from a crag with charming murmur and +rustle,' cut a long poem in the fir bark, and conversed with three +shepherds on virtue, love, and travelling, till the nymph Hercynia +appeared and shewed him the source of the Silesian stream. One of the +shepherds, Buchner, was particularly enthusiastic about water: 'Kind +Nature, handmaid of the Highest, has shewn her best handiwork in sea, +river, and spring.' + +Fleming too, who already stood much higher as a lyrist and had +travelled widely, lacked the power of describing scenery, and must +needs call Oreads, Dryads, Castor and Pollux to his aid. He rarely +reached the simple purity of his fine sonnet _An Sich,_ or the +feeling in this: 'Dense wild wood, where even the Titan's brightest +rays give no light, pity my sufferings. In my sick soul 'tis as dark +as in thy black hollow.' + +In this time of decline the hymns of the Evangelical Church (to which +Fleming contributed) were full of feeling, and brought the national +songs to mind as nothing else did. + +A few lines of Paul Gerhardt's seem to me to out-weigh whole volumes +of contemporary rhymes--lines of such beauty as the _Evening Song_: + + Now all the woods are sleeping, + And night and stillness creeping + O'er field and city, man and beast; + The last faint beam is going, + The golden stars are glowing + In yonder dark-blue deep. + +And after him, and more like him than any one else, came Andreas +Gryphius. + +There was much rhyming about Nature in the poet schools of Hamburg, +Koenigsberg, and Nuremberg; but, for the most part, it was an idle +tinkle of words without feeling, empty artificial stuff with +high-flown titles, as in Philipp von Zesen's _Pleasure of Spring_, +and _Poetic Valley of Roses and Lilies_. + +'Up, my thoughts, be glad of heart, in this joyous pleasant March; +ah! see spring is reviving, earth opens her treasury,' etc. + +His romances were more noteworthy if not more interesting. He +certainly aimed high, striving for simplicity and clearness of +expressions in opposition to the Silesian poets, and hating foreign +words. + +His feeling for Nature was clear; he loved to take his reader into +the garden, and was enthusiastic about cool shady walks, beds of +tulips, birds' songs, and echoes. Idyllic pastoral life was the +fashion--people of distinction gave themselves up to country life and +wore shepherd costume--and he introduced a pastoral episode into his +romance, _Die adriatische Rosemund._[15] + +Rosemund, whose father places arbitrary conditions in the way of her +marriage with Markhold, becomes a shepherdess. + + Not far off was a delightful spot where limes and alders made + shade on hot summer days for the shepherds and shepherdesses who + dwelt around. The shady trees, the meadows, and the streams which + ran round it, and through it, made it look beautiful ... the + celestial Rosemund had taken up her abode in a little shepherd + hut on the slope of a little hill by a water-course, and shaded + by some lime trees, in which the birds paid her homage morning + and evening.... Such a place and such solitude refreshed the more + than human Rosemund, and in such peace she was able to unravel + her confused thoughts. + +She thought continually of Markhold, and spent her time cutting his +name in the trees. The following description of a walk with her +sister Stillmuth and her lover Markhold, gives some idea of the +formal affected style of the time. + + The day was fine, the sky blue, the weather everywhere warm. The + sun shone down on the globe with her pleasant lukewarm beams so + pleasantly, that one scarcely cared to stay indoors. They went + into the garden, where the roses had opened in the warmth of the + sun, and first sat down by the stream, then went to the grottos, + where Markhold particularly admired the shell decorations. When + this charming party had had enough of both, they finally betook + themselves to a leafy walk, where Rosemund introduced pleasant + conversation on many topics. She talked first about the many + colours of tulips, and remarked that even a painter could not + produce a greater variety of tints nor finer pictures than these, + etc. + +In describing physical beauty, he used comparisons from Nature; for +instance, in _Simson_[16]: + + The sun at its brightest never shone so brightly as her two eyes + ... no flower at its best can shew such red as blooms in the + meadow of her cheeks, no civet rose is so milk-white, no lily so + delicate and spotless, no snow fresh-fallen and untrodden is so + white, as the heaven of her brows, the stronghold of her mind. + +H. Anselm von Ziegler und Klipphausen also waxes eloquent in his +famous _Asiatischen Banise_: 'The suns of her eyes played with +lightnings; her curly hair, like waves round her head, was somewhat +darker than white; her cheeks were a pleasant Paradise where rose and +lily bloomed together in beauty--yea, love itself seemed to pasture +there.' Elsewhere too this writer, so highly esteemed by the second +Silesian school of poets, indulged in showy description and inflated +rhetoric. Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel tried more +elaborate descriptions of scenery; so that Chovelius says: + + The Duke's German character shews pleasantly in his delight in + Nature. The story often takes one into woods and fields; already + griefs and cares were carried to the running brook and mossy + stone, and happy lovers listened to the nightingale. + +His language is barely intelligible, but there is a pleasant breadth +about his drawing--for example, of the king's meadow and the grotto +in _Aramena_: + + Very cold crystal streams flowed through the fields and ran + softly over the stony ground, making a pleasant murmur. Whilst + the ear was thus contented, a distant landscape delighted the + eye. No more delightful place, possessing all this at once, could + have been found, etc. + + Looking through the numerous air-holes, the eye lost itself in a + deep valley, surrounded by nothing but mountains, where the + shepherds tended their flocks, and one heard their flutes + multiplied by the echo in the most delightful way. + +Mawkish shepherd play is mixed here with such verses as (Rahel): + + Thou, Chabras, thou art the dear stream, where Jacob's mouth gave + me the first kiss. Thou, clear brook, often bearest away the + passionate words of my son of Isaac ... on many a bit of wounded + bark, the writing of my wounds is to be found. + +The most insipid pastoral nonsense of the time was produced by the +Nuremberg poets, the Pegnitz shepherds Klaj and Harsdoerfer. Their +strength lay in imitating the sounds of Nature, and they were much +admired. What is still more astonishing, Lohenstein's writings were +the model for thirty years, and it was the fashion for any one who +wrote more simply to apologize for being unable to reach the level of +so great a master! To us the bombast, artificiality, and hidden +sensuality of his poetry and Hoffmannswaldan's, are equally +repulsive. + +What dreary, manufactured stuff this is from Lohenstein's _Praise of +Roses sung by the Sun_[17]: + + This is the queen of flowers and plants, + The bride of heaven, world's treasure, child of stars! + For whom love sighs, and I myself, the sun, do pant, + Because her crown is golden, and her leaves are velvet, + Her foot and stylus emerald, her brilliance shames the ruby. + + Other beings possess only single beauties, + Nature has made the rose beautiful with all at once. + She is ashamed, and blushes + Because she sees all the other flowers stand ashamed before her. + +In _Rose Love_ he finds the reflection of love in everything: + + In whom does not Love's spirit plant his flame? + One sees the oil of love burn in the starry lamps, + That pleasant light can nothing be but love, + For which the dew from Phoebus' veil doth fall. + Heaven loves the beauteous globe of earth, + And gazes down on her by night with thousand eyes; + While earth to please the heaven + Doth clover, lilies, tulips in her green hair twine, + The elm and vine stock intertwine, + The ivy circles round the almond trees, + And weeps salt tears when they are forced apart. + And where the flowers burn with glow of Love, + It is the rose that shews the brightest flame, + For is the rose not of all flowers the queen, + The wondrous beauty child of sun and earth? + +Artificiality and bombast reached its highest pitch in these poets, +and feeling for Nature was entirely absent. + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +SYMPTOMS OF A RETURN TO NATURE + + +It is refreshing to find, side by side with these mummified +productions, the traces of a pure national poetry flowing clear as +ever, 'breaking forth from the very heart of the people, ever +renewing its youth, and not misled by the fashion of the day.'[1] + +The traces prove that simple primitive love for Nature was not quite +dead. For instance, this of the Virgin Mary: 'Mary, she went across +the heath, grass and flowers wept for grief, she did not find her +son.' And the lines in which the youth forced into the cloister asks +Nature to lament with him: 'I greet you all, hill and dale, do not +drive me away--grass and foliage and all the green things in the wild +forest. O tree! lose your green ornaments, complain, die with +me--'tis your duty.' + +Then the Spring greetings: + + Now we go into the wide, wide world, + With joy and delight we go; + The woods are dressing, the meadows greening, + The flowers beginning to blow. + Listen here! and look there! We can scarce trust our eyes, + For the singing and soaring, the joy and life everywhere. + +And: + + What is sweeter than to wander in the early days of Spring + From one place to another in sheer delight and glee; + While the sun is shining brightly, and the birds exult around + Fair Nightingale, the foremost of them all? + +This has the pulse of true and naive feeling (the hunter is starting +for the hunt in the early morning): + + When I come into the forest, still and silent everywhere, + There's a look of slumber in it, but the air is fresh and cool. + Now Aurora paints the fir tops at their very tips with gold, + And the little finch sits up there launching forth his song of praise, + Thanking for the night that's over, for the day that's just awake + Gently blows the breeze of morning, rocking in the topmost twigs, + And it bends them down like children, like good children when they pray; + And the dew is an oblation as it drops from their green hair. + O what beauties in the forest he that we may see and know! + One could melt away one's heart before its wonders manifold! + +The sixth line in the original has a melody that reminds one of +Goethe's early work. + +But even amidst the artificial poetry then in vogue, there were a few +side streams which turned away from the main current of the great +poet schools, from the unnaturalness and bombast affected especially +by the Silesians. As Winter says, even the satirists Moscherosch and +Logau were indirectly of use in paving the way for a healthier +condition, through their severe criticisms of the corruption of the +language; and Logau's one epigram on May, 'This month is a kiss which +heaven gives to earth, that she may be a bride now, a mother +by-and-by,' outweighs all Harsdoerfer's and Zesen's poetry about +Nature. + +But even by the side of Opitz and Fleming there was at least one poet +of real feeling, Friedrich von Spee.[2] With all his mystic and +pietist Christianity, he kept an open eye for Nature. His poems are +full of disdain of the world and joy in Nature,[3] longings for death +and lamentations over sin; he delighted in personifications of +abstract ideas, childish playing with words and feelings, and +sentimental enthusiasm. But mawkish and canting as he was apt to be, +he often shewed a fine appreciation of detail. He was even--a rare +thing then--fascinated by the sea. + + Now rages and roars the wild, wild sea, + Now in soft curves lies quietly; + Sweetly the light of the sun's bright glow + Mirrors itself in the water below. + + Sad winter's past--the stork is here, + Birds are singing and nests appear; + Bowery homes steal into the day, + Flow'rets present their full array; + Like little snakes and woods about, + The streams go wandering in and out. + +His motives, like his diminutives, are constantly recurring. He uses +many bold and poetic personifications; the sun 'combs her golden +hair,' the moon is a good shepherd who leads his sheep the stars +across the blue heath, blowing upon a soft pipe; the sun adorns +herself in spring with a crown and a girdle of roses, fills her +quiver with arrows, and sends her horses to gallop for miles across +the smooth sky; the wind flies about, stopping for breath from time +to time; shakes its wings and withdraws into its house when it is +tired; the brook of Cedron sits, leaning on a bucket in a hollow, +combing his bulrush hair, his shoulders covered by grass and water; +he sings a cradle song to his little brooks, or drives them before +him, etc. + +But the most gifted poet of the set, and the most doughty opponent of +Lohenstein's bombast, was the unhappy Christian Guenther.[4] + +He vents his feelings in verse because he must. There is a foretaste +of Goethe in his lyrics, poured put to free the soul from a burden, +and melodious as if by accident. As we turn over the leaves of his +book of songs, we find deep feeling for Nature mingled with his love +and sorrows.[5] + + Bethink you, flowers and trees and shades, + Of the sweet evenings here with Flavia! + 'Twas here her head upon my shoulder pressed; + Conceal, ye limes, what else I dare not say. + 'Twas here she clover threw and thyme at me, + And here I filled her lap with freshest flowers. + Ah! that was a good time! + I care more for moon and starlight than the pleasantest of days, + And with eyes and heart uplifted from my chamber often gaze + With an awe that grows apace till it scarcely findeth space. + +To his lady-love he writes: + + Here where I am writing now + 'Tis lonely, shady, cool, and green; + And by the slender fig I hear + The gentle wind blow towards Schweidnitz. + And all the time most ardently + I give it thousand kisses for thee. + +And at Schweidnitz: + + A thousand greetings, bushes, fields, and trees, + You know him well whose many rhymes + And songs you've heard, whose kisses seen; + Remember the joy of those fine summer nights. + +To Eleanora: + + Spring is not far away. Walk in green solitude + Between your alder rows, and think ... + As in the oft-repeated lesson + The young birds' cry shall bear my longing; + And when the west wind plays with cheek and dress be sure + He tells me of thy longing, and kisses thee a thousand times for me. + +In a time of despair, he wrote: + + Storm, rage and tear! winds of misfortune, shew all your tyranny! + Twist and split bark and twig, + And break the tree of hope in two + Stem and leaves are struck by this hail and thunder, + The root remains till storm and rain have laid their wrath. + +Again: + + The woods I'll wander through, + From men I'll flee away, + With lonely doves I'll coo, + And with the wild things stay. + When life's the prey of misery, + And all my powers depart, + A leafy grave will be + Far kinder than thy heart. + +True lyrist, he gave Nature her full right in his feelings, and found +comfort in return; but, as Goethe said of him, gifted but unsteady as +he was, 'He did not know how to restrain himself, and so his life and +poetry melted away.' + +Among those who made use of better material than the Silesian poets, +H. Barthold Brockes stood first. Nature was his one and only subject; +but in this he was not original, he was influenced by England. While +France was dictating a taste like the baroque, and Germany +enthusiastically adopting it (every petty prince in the land copied +the gardens at Versailles, Schwetzingen more closely than the rest), +a revolution which affected all Europe was brought about by England. +The order of the following dates is significant: William Kent, the +famous garden artist, died in 1748, James Thomson in the same year, +Brockes a year earlier; and about the same time the imitations of +Robinson Crusoe sprang up like mushrooms. + +We have considered Shakespeare's plays; English lyrists too of the +fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shewed deep feeling for Nature, and +invested scenery with their own feelings in a very delicate way. + +G. Chaucer (1400) praises the nightingale s song in _From the Floure +and Leafe_: + + So was I with the song + Thorow ravished, that till late and long + Ne wist I in what place I was ne where; ... + And at the last, I gan full well aspie + Where she sat in a fresh grene laurer tree + On the further side, even right by me, + That gave so passing a delicious smell + According to the eglentere full well.... + + On the sote grass + I sat me downe, for, as for mine entent, + The birddes song was more convenient, + And more pleasant to me by many fold + Than meat or drink or any other thing. + +Thomas Wyatt (1542) says of his lady-love: + + The rocks do not so cruelly + Repulse the waves continually, + As she my suit and affection + So that I am past remedy. + +Robert Southwell (1595), in _Love's Servile Lott_, compares love to +April: + + May never was the month for love, + For May is full of floures, + But rather Aprill, wett by kinde, + For love is full of showers.... + Like winter rose and summer yce, + Her joyes are still untymelye; + Before her hope, behind remorse, + Fayre first, in fyne unseemely. + +Edmund Spenser (1598) describes a garden in _The Faerie Queene_: + + There the most daintie Paradise on ground + It selfe did offer to his sober eye, + In which all pleasures plenteously abownd, + And none does others' happinesse envye; + The painted flowres, the trees upshooting hye, + The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space, + The trembling groves, the christall running by, + And, that which all fair workes doth most aggrace, + The art which all that wrought appeared in no place. + +Mountain scenery was seldom visited or described. + +Michael Drayton (1731) wrote an ode on the Peak, in Derbyshire: + + Though on the utmost Peak + A while we do remain, + Amongst the mountains bleak + Exposed to sleet and rain, + No sport our hours shall break + To exercise our vein. + +It is clear that he preferred his comfort to everything, for he goes +on: + + Yet many rivers clear + Here glide in silver swathes, + And what of all most dear + Buxton's delicious baths, + Strong ale and noble chear + T' assuage breem winter's scathes. + +Thomas Carew (1639) sings: + + Ask me no more where Jove bestows, + When June is past, the fading rose, + For in your beauties' orient deep + These flowers, as in their causes, sleep. + Ask me no more whither do stray + The golden atoms of the day, + For in pure love Heaven did prepare + Those powders to enrich your hair. + Ask me no more whither doth haste + The nightingale, when May is past, + For in your sweet dividing throat + She winters and keeps warm her note. + Ask me no more where these stars shine + That downwards fall in dead of night, + For in your eyes they sit, and there + Fixed become, as in their sphere. + Ask me no more if east or west + The phoenix builds her spicy nest, + For unto you at last she flies + And in your fragrant bosom dies. + +William Drummond (1746) avowed a taste which he knew to be very +unfashionable: + + Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove, + Far from the clamorous world, doth live his own + Though solitary, who is not alone, + But doth converse with that eternal love. + O how more sweet is birds' harmonious moan + Or the soft sobbings of the widow'd dove, + Than those smooth whisp'rings near a prince's throne.... + O how more sweet is zephyr's wholesome breath + And sighs perfum'd, which new-born flowers unfold. + +Another sonnet, to a nightingale, says: + + Sweet bird, that sing'st away the early hours + Of winters past or coming void of care, + Well pleased with delights which present are, + Fair seasons, budding sprays, sweet-smelling flowers; + To rocks, to springs, to rills, from leafy bowers + Thou thy Creator's goodness dost declare, + And what dear gifts on thee He did not spare, + A stain to human sense in sin that lowers, + What soul can be so sick which by thy songs + Attir'd in sweetness, sweetly is not driven + Quite to forget earth's turmoils, spites, and wrongs? + +He greets Spring: + + Sweet Spring, thou turn'st with all thy goodly train + Thy head with flames, thy mantle bright with flowers; + The zephyrs curl the green locks of the plain, + The clouds for joy in pearls weep down their showers. + +Robert Blair (1746) sings in _The Grave_: + + Oh, when my friend and I + In some thick wood have wander'd heedless on, + Hid from the vulgar eye, and sat us down + Upon the sloping cowslip-cover'd bank, + Where the pure limpid stream has slid along + In grateful errors through the underwood, + Sweet murmuring; methought the shrill-tongu'd + thrush + Mended his song of love, the sooty blackbird + Mellowed his pipe and soften'd every note, + The eglantine smell'd sweeter and the rose + Assum'd a dye more deep, whilst ev'ry flower + Vied with its fellow plant in luxury + Of dress. Oh! then the longest summer's day + Seem'd too, too much in haste, still the full heart + Had not imparted half; half was happiness + Too exquisite to last--Of joys departed + Not to return, how painful the remembrance! + +The great painter of Nature among the poets was James Thomson. He was +not original, but followed Pope, who had lighted up the seasons in a +dry, dogmatic way in _Windsor Forest_, and pastoral poems, and after +the publication of his _Winter_ the taste of the day carried him on. +His deep and sentimental affection for Nature was mixed up with piety +and moralizing. He said in a letter to his friend Paterson: + + Retirement and Nature are more and more my passion every day; and + now, even now, the charming time comes on; Heaven is just on the + point, or rather in the very act, of giving earth a green gown. + The voice of the nightingale is heard in our lane. You must know + that I have enlarged my rural domain ... walled, no, no! paled in + about as much as my garden consisted of before, so that the walk + runs round the hedge, where you may figure me walking any time of + day, and sometimes of the night.... May your health continue till + you have scraped together enough to return home and live in some + snug corner, as happy as the Corycius senex in Virgil's fourth + Georgic, whom I recommend both to you and myself as a perfect + model of the truest happy life. + +It is a fact that Solitude and Nature became a passion with him. He +would wander about the country for weeks at a time, noting every +sight and sound, down to the smallest, and finding beauty and divine +goodness in all. His _Seasons_ were the result. + +There is faithful portraiture in these landscapes in verse; some have +charm and delicacy, but, for the most part, they are only catalogues +of the external world, wholly lacking in links with the inner life. + +Scene after scene is described without pause, or only interrupted by +sermonizing; it is as monotonous as a gallery of landscape paintings. + +The human beings introduced are mere accessories, they do not live, +and the undercurrent of all is praise of the Highest. His +predilection is for still life in wood and field, but he does not +neglect grander scenery; his muse + + "Sees Caledonia, in romantic view: + Her airy mountains, from the waving main + Invested with a keen diffusive sky, + Breathing the soul acute; her forests huge, + Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature's hand + Planted of old; her azure lakes between, + Poured out extensive and of watery wealth + Full; winding, deep and green, her fertile vales, + With many a cool translucent brimming flood + Washed lovely...." + +And in _A Hymn_ we read: + + Ye headlong torrents rapid and profound, + Ye softer floods that lead the humid maze + Along the vale; and thou, majestic main, + A secret world of wonders in thyself. + +It is the lack of human life, the didactic tone, and the wearisome +detail which destroys interest in the _Seasons_--the lack of happy +moments of invention. Yet it had great influence on his +contemporaries in rousing love for Nature, and it contains many +beautiful passages. For example: + + Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come, + And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, + While music wakes around, veiled in a shower + Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend. + +His most artistic poem is Winter: + + When from the pallid sky the sun descends + With many a spot, that o'er his glaring orb + Uncertain wanders, stained; red fiery streaks + Begin to flush around. The reeling clouds + Stagger with dizzy poise, as doubting yet + Which master to obey; while rising slow, + Blank in the leaden-coloured east, the moon + Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns. + Seen through the turbid fluctuating air, + The stars obtuse emit a shivering ray; + Or frequent seem to shoot, athwart the gloom, + And long behind them trail the whitening blaze. + Snatched in short eddies plays the withered leaf, + And on the flood the dancing feather floats. + With broadened nostrils to the sky upturned, + The conscious heifer snuffs the stormy gale.... + Retiring from the downs, where all day long + They picked their scanty fare, a blackening train + Of clamorous rooks thick urge their weary flight + And seek the closing shelter of the grove, + Assiduous, in his bower, the wailing owl + Plies his sad song. The cormorant on high + Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land. + Loud shrieks the soaring heron, and with wild wing + The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky skies. + Ocean, unequal pressed, with broken tide + And blind commotion heaves, while from the shore, + Eat into caverns by the restless wave + And forest-rustling mountains, comes a voice + That solemn-sounding bids the world prepare. + +The elaboration of detail in such painting is certain evidence, not +only of a keen, but an enthusiastic eye for Nature. As he says in +Winter: + + Nature, great parent! whose unceasing hand + Rolls round the seasons of the changeful year! + How mighty, how majestic, are thy works! + With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul + That sees astonish'd, and astonish'd sings! + +Brockes was directly influenced by Pope and Thomson, and translated +the _Seasons_, when he had finished his _Irdisches Vergnuegen in +Gott_. This unwieldy work, insipid and prosaic as it is, was still a +literary achievement, thanks to the dignity of the subject and the +high seriousness of its aim, at a time when frivolity was the fashion +in poetry. Its long pious descriptions of natural phenomena have none +of the imposing flow of Thomson's strophes. It treats of fire in 138 +verses of eight lines each, of air in 79, water in 78, earth in 74, +while flowers and fruit are dissected and analyzed at great length; +and all this rhymed botany and physics is loosely strung together, +but it shews a warm feeling for Nature of a moralizing and devotional +sort. He says himself[7] that he took up the study of poetry first as +an amusement, but later more seriously, and chose Nature as his +theme, not only because her beauty moved him, but as a means 'whereby +man might enjoy a permissible pleasure and be edified at the same +time.' + + So I resolved to sing the praises of the Creator to the best of + my powers, and felt the more bound to do it, because I held that + such great and almost inexcusable neglect and ingratitude was a + wrong to the Creator, and unbecoming in Christendom. I therefore + composed different pieces, chiefly in Spring, and tried my best + to describe the beauties of Nature, in order, through my own + pleasure, to rekindle the praise of the wise Creator in myself + and others, and this led at last to the first part of my + _Irdisches Vergnuegen_. (1721.) + +His evidence from animal and plant life for the teleological argument +is very laughable; take, for example, the often-quoted chamois: + + The fat is good for phthisis, the gall for the face, chamois + flesh is good to eat, and its blood cures vertigo--the skin is no + less useful. Doth not the love as well as the wisdom and + almightiness of the Creator shine forth from this animal? + +For the rest, the following lines from _Irdisches Vergnuegen in Gott_ +will serve to give an idea of his style; they certainly do honour to +his laborious attempt to miss none of the charms of the wood: + + Lately as I sat on the green grass + Shaded by a lime tree, and read, + I raised my eyes by chance and saw + Different trees here and there, some far, some near, + Some half, some all in light, and some in shade, + Their boughs bowed down by leaves. + I saw how beautifully both air and flowery mead + Were crowned and adorned. + To describe the green grace + And the landscape it makes so sweet, + And at the same time prolong my pleasure, + I took pencil and paper + And tried to describe the beautiful trees in rhyme, + To the glory of God their Creator. + Of all the beauty the world lays before our eyes, + There certainly is none which does not pale + Beside green boughs, + Nothing to compare for pure beauty with a wood. + The green roofing overhead + Makes me feel young again; + It hangs there, a living tapestry, + To the glory of God and our delight.... + Beyond many trees that lay in shade + I often saw one in full light; + A human eye would scarce believe + How sweetly twilight, light and darkness + Meet side by side in leafy trees. + Peering through the leaves with joy + We notice, as we see the leaves + Lighted from one side only, + That we can almost see the sun + Mixing gold with the tender green, etc. + +and so on for another twenty lines. + +Yet this rich Burgomaster of Hamburg, for all that he dealt chiefly +in rhymed prose, had his moments of rare elevation of thought and +mystical rapture about Nature; for instance, in the introduction to +_Ueber das Firmament_: + + As lately in the sapphire depths, + Not bound by earth nor water, aim nor end, + In the unplumbed aerial sea I gazed, + And my absorbed glance, now here, now there, + But ever deeper sank--horror came over me, + My eye grew dizzy and my soul aghast. + That infinite vast vault, + True picture of Eternity, + Since without birth or end + From God alone it comes.... + It overwhelmed my soul. + The mighty dome of deep dark light, + Bright darkness without birth or bound, + Swallowed the very world--burying thought. + My being dwindled to an atom, to a nought; + I lost myself, + So suddenly it beat me down, + And threatened with despair. + But in that salutary nothingness, that blessed loss, + All present God! in Thee--I found myself again. + +While English poetry and its German imitations were shewing these +signs of reaction from the artificiality of the time, and science and +philosophy often lauded Nature to the skies, as, for instance, +Shaftesbury[8] (1671-1713), a return to Nature became the principle +of English garden-craft in the first half of the eighteenth +century.[9] The line of progress here, as in taste generally, did not +run straightforward, but fluctuated. From the geometric gardens of +Lenotre, England passed to the opposite extreme; in the full tide of +periwig and hoop petticoat, minuets, beauty-patches and rouge, +Addison and Pope were banishing everything that was not strictly +natural from the garden. Addison would even have everything grow wild +in its own way, and Pope wrote: + + To build, to plant, whatever you intend, + To rear the column, or the arch to bend, + To swell the terrace or to sink the grot, + In all let Nature never be forgot. + +William Kent made allowance for this idea; but, as a painter, and +looking at his native scenery with a painter's eye, he noted its +characteristic features--the gentle undulations, the freshness of the +green, the wealth of trees--and based his garden-craft on these. + +The straight line was banished; in its place came wide spaces of lawn +and scattered groups of trees of different sorts--dark fir and alder +here, silver birch and grey poplar there; and flowery fields with +streams running through them stood out in relief against dark +woodland. + +Stiff walls, balustrades, terraces, statues, and so forth, +disappeared; the garden was not to contrast with the surrounding +landscape, but to merge into it--to be not Art, but a bit of Nature. +It was, in fact, to be a number of such bits, each distinct from the +rest--waterfall, sheltered sunny nook, dark wood, light glade. Kent +himself soon began to vary this mosaic of separate scenes by adding +ruins and pavilions; but it was Chambers the architect who developed +the idea of variety by his writings on the dwellings and manners of +the Chinese.[10] + +The fundamental idea that the garden ought to be a sample of the +landscape was common both to Kent and the Chinese; but, as China is +far richer than England in varieties of scenery, her gardens included +mountains, rocks, swamps, and deserts, as well as sunny fields and +plains, while English gardens were comparatively monotonous. When the +fashion for the Chinese style came in, as unluckily it did just when +we were trying to oust the Rococo, so that one pigtail superseded the +other, variety was achieved by groups of buildings in all sorts of +styles. Stables, ice-houses, gardeners' cottages took the form of +pavilions, pagodas, kiosks, and temples. + +Meanwhile, as a reaction against the Rococo, enthusiasm for Nature +increased, and feeling was set free from restraint by the growing +sentimentality. Richardson's novels fed the taste for the pleasures +of weeping sensibility, and garden-craft fell under its sway. In all +periods the insignificant and non-essential is unable to resist the +general stamp, if that only shews a little originality. + +These gardens, with temples to friendship and love, melancholy, +virtue, re-union, and death, and so forth, were suitable backgrounds +for the sentimental scenes described in the English novels, and for +the idyllic poets and moonshine singers of Germany. Here it was the +fashion to wander, tenderly intertwined, shedding floods of tears and +exchanging kisses, and pausing at various places to read the +inscriptions which directed them what to feel. At one spot they were +to laugh, at another to weep, at a third to be fired with devotion. + +Hermitages sprang up everywhere, with hermits, real or dummy. Any +good house near a wood, or in a shady position, was called a +hermitage, and dedicated to arcadian life, free from care and +ceremony. Classic and romantic styles competed for favour in +architecture; at one moment everything must needs be purely classic, +each temple Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric; at another Gothic, with the +ruins and fortresses of mediaeval romance. And not only English +gardens, but those of Europe generally, though to a less degree, +passed through these stages of development, for no disease is so +infectious as fashion. + +It was not till the end of the eighteenth century that a healthy +reaction set in in England, when Repton turned back to Kent's +fundamental principle and freed it from its unnatural excrescences, +with the formula: the garden should be an artistic representation of +the landscape, a work of art whose materials are provided by Nature +herself, whether grass, flowers, bushes, trees, water, or whatever it +may be that she has to offer. Thus began our modern landscape +gardening. + +In another region too, a change was brought about from the Rococo to +a more natural style. It is true that Nature plays no direct _role_ +in _Robinson Crusoe_, and wins as little notice there as in its +numberless imitations; yet the book roused a longing for healthier, +more natural conditions in thousands of minds. It led the idyllic +tendency of the day back to its source, and by shewing all the +stages, from the raw state of Nature up to the culture of the +community, in the life of one man, it brought out the contrast +between the far-off age of innocence and the perverted present. + +The German _Simplicissimus_ closed with a Robinsonade, in which the +hero, after long wandering, found rest and peace on an island in the +ocean of the world, alone with himself and Nature. The readers of +_Robinson Crusoe_ were in much the same position. Defoe was not only +a true artist, but a man of noble, patient character, and his romance +proved a healing medicine to many sick minds, pointing the way back +to Nature and a natural fife, and creating a longing for the lost +innocence of man. + +Rousseau, who was also a zealous advocate of the English gardens, and +disgusted by the French Pigtail style, was more impressed by +_Robinson Crusoe_ than by any other book. It was the first book his +Emilia gave him, as a gospel of Nature and unspoilt taste. + + + + +CHAPTER X + +THE SENSITIVENESS AND EXAGGERATION OF +THE ELEGIAC IDYLLIC FEELING + + +This longing to return to the lost paradise of Nature gradually +produced a state of melancholy hyper-sensitiveness, an epidemic of +world pain, quite as unnatural as the Rococo. + +The heart came into its rights again and laid claim to absolute +dominion in its kingdom, and regret that it had lain so long deprived +of its own, gave rise to a tearful pensiveness, which added zest to +restitution. It was convalescence, but followed at once by another +complaint. Feeling swung from one extreme to the other. + +German feeling in the first half of the eighteenth century was +chiefly influenced, on the one hand, by Richardson's novels, which +left no room for Nature, and by the poetry of Young and Thomson; on +the other, by the pastoral idylls interspersed with anacreontic +love-passages, affected by the French. At first description and +moralizing preponderated. + +In 1729 Haller's _Alps_ appeared. It had the merit of drawing the +eyes of Europe to Alpine beauty and the moral worth of the Swiss, but +shewed little eye for romantic scenery. It is full of descriptive +painting, but not of a kind that appeals: scene follows scene with +considerable pathos, especially in dealing with the people; but +landscape is looked at almost entirely from the moralizing or +utilitarian standpoint. + +'Here, where the majestic Mount Gothard elevates its summit above the +clouds, and where the earth itself seems to approach the sun, Nature +has assembled in one spot all the choicest treasure of the globe. The +deserts of Libya, indeed, afford us greater novelties, and its sandy +plains are more fertile in monsters: but thou, favoured region, art +adorned with useful productions only, productions which can satisfy +all the wants of man. Even those heaps of ice, those frowning rocks +in appearance so sterile, contribute largely to the general good, for +they supply inexhaustible fountains to fertilize the land. What a +magnificent picture does Nature spread before the eye, when the sun, +gilding the top of the Alps, scatters the sea of vapours which +undulates below! Through the receding vale the theatre of a whole +world rises to the view! Rocks, valleys, lakes, mountains, and +forests fill the immeasurable space, and are lost in the wide +horizon. We take in at a single glance the confines of divers states, +nations of various characters, languages, and manners, till the eyes, +overcome by such extent of vision, drop their weary lids, and we ask +of the enchanted fancy a continuance of the scene. + +'When the first emotion of astonishment has subsided, how delightful +is it to observe each several part which makes up this sublime whole! +That mass of hills, which presents its graceful declivity covered +with flocks of sheep whose bleatings resound through the meadows; +that large clear lake, which reflects from its level surface sunbeams +gently curved; those valleys, rich in verdure, which compose by their +various outlines points of perspective which contract in the distance +of the landscape! Here rises a bare steep mountain laden with the +accumulated snow of ages; its icy head rests among the clouds, +repelling the genial rays of the moon and the fervid heat of the +dog-star: there a chain of cultivated hills spreads before the +delighted eye; their green pastures are enlivened by flocks, and +their golden corn waves in the wind: yet climates so different as +those are only separated by a cool, narrow valley. Behold that +foaming torrent rushing from a perpendicular height! Its rapid waves +dash among the rocks, and shoot even beyond their limits. Divided by +the rapidity of its course and the depth of the abyss where it falls, +it changes into a grey moving veil; and, at length scattered into +humid atoms, it shines with the tints of the rainbow, and, suspended +over the valley, refreshes it with plenteous dew. The traveller +beholds with astonishment rivers flowing towards the sky, and issuing +from one cloud, hide themselves in the grey veil of another. + +'Those desert places uncheered by the rays of the sun, those frozen +abysses deprived of all verdure, hide beneath their sterile sands +invaluable treasures, which defy the rigour of the seasons and all +the injuries of time! 'Tis in dark and marshy recesses, upon the damp +grottos, that crystal rocks are formed. Thus splendour is diffused +through their melancholy vaults, and their shadowy depths gutter with +the colours of the rainbow. O Nature, how various are thy operations, +how infinite thy fertility!' + +We cannot agree with Frey[1] that 'these few strophes may serve as +sufficient proof that Haller's poetry is still, even among the mass +of Alpine poetry, unsurpassed for intense power of direct vision, and +easily makes one forget its partial lack of flexibility of diction.' + +The truth is, flexibility is entirely lacking; but the lines do +express the taste for open-air life among the great sublimities and +with simple people. The poem is not romantic but idyllic, with a +touch of the elegiac. It is the same with the poem _On the Origin of +Evil_ (Book I.): + + On those still heights whence constant springs flow down, + I paused within a copse, lured by the evening breeze; + Wide country lay spread out beneath my feet, + Bounded by its own size alone.... + Green woods covered the hills, through which the pale tints of the fields + Shone pleasantly. + Abundance and repose held sway far as the eye could reach.... + And yonder wood, what left it to desire + With the red tints upon the half-bare beeches + And the rich pine's green shade o'er whitened moss? + While many a sun-ray through the interstices + A quivering light upon the darkness shed, + Blending in varying hues green night with golden day + How pleasant is the quiet of the copse! ... + Yea, all I see is given by Providence, + The world itself is for its burgher's joy; + Nature's inspired with the general weal, + The highest goodness shews its trace in all. + +Friedrich von Hagedorn, too, praises country pleasures in _The +Feeling of Spring_: + + Enamelled meadows! freshly decked in green, + I sing your praises constantly; + Nature and Spring have decked you out.... + Delightful quiet, stimulant of joy, + How enviable thou art! + +This idyllic taste for country life was common at the time, +especially among the so-called 'anacreontists.' Gleim, for instance, +in his _Praise of Country Life_: 'Thank God that I have fled from the +bustle of the world and am myself again under the open sky.' + +And in _The Countryman_: + + How happy is he who, free from cares, ploughs his father's + fields; every morning the sun shines on the grass in which he + lies. + +And Joh. Friedrich von Cronegk: + + Fly from sordid cares and the proud tumult of cities ... here in + the peaceful valley shy wisdom sports at ease, where the smiling + Muse crowns herself with dewy roses. + +With this idyllic tone it is not surprising to find the religious +feeling of many hymn writers; for instance, Gleim in _The Goodness of +God_: + + For whom did Thy goodness create the world so beautiful, O God? + For whom are the flowers on hill and dale? ... Thou gavest us + power to perceive the beauty. + +And above all, honest Gellert: + + The skies, the globe, the seas, praise the eternal glory. O my + Creator, when I consider Thy might and the wisdom of Thy ways.... + Sunshine and storm preach Thee, and the sands of the sea. + +Ewald von Kleist excelled Haller as much as Haller had excelled +Brockes. + +Julian Schmidt says[3]: 'Later on, descriptive poetry, like didactic, +fell into disgrace; but at that time this dwelling upon the minutiae +of Nature served to enrich the imagination; Kleist's descriptions are +thoughtful and interesting.' It is easy to see that his longer poems +cost him much labour; they were not the pure songs of feeling that +gush out spontaneously like a spring from the rock. But in eloquence +and keenness of observation he excelled his contemporaries, although +he, too, followed the fashion of eighteenth-century literature, and +coquetted with Greek nymphs and deities, and the names of winds and +maidens. + +The tendency to depression, increased by his failure to adapt himself +to military life, made him incline more and more to solitude. + +_To Doris_ begins: + + Now spring doth warm the flakeless air, + And in the brook the sky reflects her blue, + Shepherds in fragrant flowers find delight ... + The corn lifts high its golden head, + And Zephyr moves in waves across the grain, + Her robe the field embroiders; the young rush + Adorns the border of each silver stream, + Love seeks the green night of the forest shade, + And air and sea and earth and heaven smile. + +_Sighs for Rest_: + + O silver brook, my leisure's early soother, + When wilt thou murmur lullabies again? + When shall I trace thy sliding smooth and smoother, + While kingfishers along thy reeds complain; + Afar from thee with care and toil opprest, + Thy image still can calm my troubled breast. + + O ye fair groves and odorous violet valleys, + Girt with a garland blue of hills around, + Thou quiet lake, where, when Aurora sallies, + Her golden tresses seem to sweep the ground: + Soft mossy turf, on which I wont to stray, + For me no longer bloom thy flow'rets gay. + As when the chilly nights of March arise + And whirl the howling dust in eddies swift, + The sunbeams wither in the dimmer skies, + O'er the young ears the sand and pebbles drift: + So the war rages, and the furious forces + The air with smoke bespread, the field with corses. + + The vineyard bleeds, and trampled is the com, + Orchards but heat the kettles of the camp.... + + As when a lake which gushing rains invade + Breaks down its dams, and fields are overflowed. + So floods of fire across the region spread, + And standing corn by crackling flames is mowed: + Bellowing the cattle fly; the forests burn, + And their own ashes the old stems in-urn. + + He too, who fain would live in purity, + Feels nature treacherous, hears examples urge, + As one who, falling overboard at sea, + Beats with his arms and feet the buoyant surge, + And climbs at length against some rocky brink, + Only beneath exhausted strength to sink. + + My cheek bedewed with holy tears in vain, + To love and heaven I vowed a spotless truth: + Too soon the noble tear exhaled again, + Example conquered, and the glow of youth + To live as live one's comrades seems allowed; + He who would be a man, must quit the crowd. + +He, too, wrote with hymn-like swing in praise of the Creator: 'Great +is the Lord! the unnumbered heavens are the chambers of his fortress, +storm and thunder-clouds his chariot.' + +The most famous of his poems, and the one most admired in his own +day, was _Spring_. This is full of love for Nature. It describes a +country walk after the muggy air of town, and conveys a vivid +impression of fresh germinating spring, though it is overlaid by +monotonous detail: + + Receive me, hallowed shades! Ye dwellings of sweet buss! + Umbrageous arches full of sleeping dark delights ... + Receive me! Fill my soul with longing and with rest ... + And you, ye laughing fields, + Valleys of roses, labyrinths of streams, + I will inhale an ecstasy with your balsamic breath, + And, lying in the shade, on strings of gold + Sing your indwelling joys.... + On rosy clouds, with rose and tulip crowned, + Spring has come down from heaven.... + The air grew softer, fields took varied hues, + The shades were leafy, and soft notes awoke + And flew and warbled round the wood in twilight greenery. + Brooks took a silver tint, sweet odours filled the air, + The early shepherd's pipe was heard by Echo in the dale.... + Most dear abode! Ah, were I but allowed + Down in the shade by yon loquacious brook + Henceforth to live! O sky! thou sea of love, + Eternal spring of health, will not thy waters succour me? + Must, my life's blossom wither, stifled by the weeds? + +Johann Peter Uz, who was undervalued because of his sickly style, +wrote many little songs full of feeling for Nature, though within +narrow limits. Their titles shew the pastoral taste[4]:--_Spring_, +_Morning, Shepherd's Morning Song, The Muse with the Shepherds, The +Meadow in the Country, Vintage, Evening, May, The Rose, Summer and +Wine, Winter Night, Longing for Spring_, etc. + +Many are fresh and full of warm feeling, especially the Spring Songs: + + See the blossoming of Spring! + Will't not taste the joys it showers? + Dost not feel its impulse thrill? + Friends! away our cares we'll fling! + In the joyous time of flowers, + Love and Bacchus have their will. + +and + + O forest, O green shady paths, + Dear place of spring's display! + My good luck from the thronging town + Has brought me here away. + + O what a fresh breeze flows + Down from the wooded hill, + How pleasantly the west wind flies + With rustling dewy wing + Across the vale, + Where all is green and blossoming. + +The personification is more marked in this: + + Thou hast sent us the Spring in his gleaming robe + With roses round his head. Smiling he comes, O God! + The hours conduct him to his flowery throne + Into the groves he enters and they bloom; fresh green is on the plain, + The forest shade returns, the west wind lovingly unfurls + Its dewy plumes, and happy birds begin to sing. + The face of Nature Thou hast deckt with beauty that enchants, + O Thou rich source of all the beautiful ... + My heart is lifted up to Thee in purest love. + +His feeling for Nature was warm enough, although most of his writing +was so artificial and tedious from much repetition of a few ideas, +that Kleist could write to Gleim[5]: 'The odes please me more the +more I read them. With a few exceptions, they have only one fault, +too many laurel woods; cut them down a little. Take away the marjoram +too, it is better in a good sausage than in a beautiful poem.' + +Joh. Georg Jacobi also belonged to the circle of poets gathered round +Gleim; but in many respects he was above it. He imitated the French +style[6] far less than the others--than Hagedorn, for example; and +though the Anacreontic element was strong in him, he overcame it, and +aimed at pure lyrical feeling. From his Life, written by a devoted +friend, we see that he had all the sentimentality of the day,[7] but +with much that was healthy and amiable in addition, and he touched +Nature with peculiar freshness and genuineness. + +In a poem to his brother, about the Saale valley near Halle, he +wrote: + + Lie down in early spring on yon green moss, + By yon still brook where heart with heart we spoke, + My brother.... + Will't see the little garden and the pleasant heights above, + So quiet and unspoilt? O friend, 'tis Nature speaks + In distant wood, near plain and careless glade, + Here on my little hill and in the clover.... + Dost hear the rustle of the streamlet through the wood? + +Jacobi was one whose heart, as he said of Gleim, took a warm interest +in all that breathed, even a violet, and sought sympathy and +companionship in the whole range of creation. + +This is from his _Morning Song_: + + See how the wood awakes, how from the lighted heights + With the soft waving breeze + The morning glory smiles in the fresh green.... + Here by the rippling brook and quivering flower, + We catch Love's rustle as she gently sweeps + Like Spring's own breath athwart the plains. + +Another song is; + + Tell me, where's the violet fled. + Late so gayly blowing. + Springing 'neath fair Flora's tread, + Choicest sweets bestowing? + Swain, the vernal scene is o'er, + And the violet blooms no more. + + Say, where hides the blushing rose, + Pride of fragrant morning, + Garland meet for beauty's brows, + Hill and dale adorning? + Gentle maid, the summer's fled, + And the hapless rose is dead. + + Bear me then to yonder rill, + Late so freely flowing, + Watering many a daffodil + On its margin glowing. + Sun and wind exhaust its store, + Yonder rivulet glides no more. + + Lead me to the bowery shade, + Late with roses flaunting, + Loved resort of youth and maid, + Amorous ditties chanting. + Hail and wind with fury shower, + Leafless mourns the rifled bower! + + Say, where bides the village maid, + Late yon cot adorning? + Oft I've met her in the glade + Fair and fresh as morning. + Swain, how short is beauty's bloom, + Seek her in her grassy tomb. + + Whither roves the tuneful swain + Who, of rural pleasures, + Rose and violet, rill and plain, + Sang in deftest measures? + Maiden, swift life's vision flies, + Death has closed the poet's eyes. + +_To Nature_ runs thus: + + Leaves are falling, mists are twining, and to winter sleep inclining + Are the trees upon the plain, + In the hush of stillness ere the snowflakes hide them, + Friendly Nature, speak to me again! + Thou art echo and reflection of our striving, + Thou art painter of our hopes and of our fears, + Thou art singer of our joys and of our sorrows, + Of our consolations and our groans.... + +While feeling for Nature was all of this character, idyllic, +sensitive, sympathetic, but within very narrow bounds, and the poets +generally were wandering among Greek and Latin bucolics and playing +with Damon, Myrtil, Chloe, and Daphnis, Salomon Gessner made a +speciality of elegiac pastoral poetry. He was a better landscapist +than poet, and his drawings to illustrate his idylls were better than +the poems themselves. The forest, for instance, and the felling of +the tree, are well drawn; whereas the sickly sweet Rococo verse in +imitation of the French, and reminding one more of Longos than +Theocritus, is lifeless. His rhapsody about Nature is uncongenial to +modern readers, but his love was real. + +The introduction 'to the Reader'[8] is characteristic: + + These Idylls are the fruits of some of my happiest hours; of + those hours when imagination and tranquillity shed their sweetest + influence over me, and, excluding all which belongs to the period + in which we live, recalled all the charms and delights of the + Golden Age. A noble and well-regulated mind dwells with pleasure + on these images of calm tranquillity and uninterrupted happiness, + and the scenes in which the poet delineates the simple beauties + of uncorrupted nature are endeared to us by the resemblance we + fancy we perceive in them to the most blissful moments that we + nave ourselves enjoyed. Often do I fly from the city and seek the + deepest solitudes; there, the beauties of the landscape soothe + and console my heart, and gradually disperse those impressions of + solicitude and disgust which accompanied me from the town; + enraptured, I give up my whole soul to the contemplation of + Nature, and feel, at such moments, richer than an Utopian + monarch, and happier than a shepherd of the Golden Age. + +This is a true picture of the time! Man knew that he was sick, and +fled from town and his fellows into solitude, there to dream himself +back to a happier past, and revel in the purity and innocence, the +healing breath, of forest and field. + +The magic of moonlight began to be felt. Mirtilla + + perceived his old father slumbering in the moonbeams.... Mirtilla + stood long contemplating him, and his eyes rested fondly on the + old man except when he raised them toward heaven through the + glistening leaves of the vine, and tears of filial love and joy + bedewed his cheeks.... How beautiful! how beautiful is the + landscape! How bright, how clear appears the deep blue of heaven + through the broken clouds! They fly, they pass away, these + towering clouds; but strew a shadow as they pass over the sunny + landscape.... Oh, what joy overwhelms my soul! how beautiful, how + excellent is all around, what an inexhaustible source of rapture! + From the enlivening sun down to the little plant that his mild + influence nourishes, all is wonderful! What rapture overpowers me + when I stand on the high hill and look down on the wide-spread + landscape beneath me, when I lay stretched along the grass and + examine the various flowers and herbs and their little + inhabitants; when at the midnight hour I contemplate the starry + heavens!... Wrapt in each other's arms, let us contemplate the + approach of morning, the bright glow of sunset, or the soft beams + of moonlight; and as I press thee to my trembling heart, let us + breathe out in broken accents our praises and thanksgivings. Ah! + what inexpressible joy, when with such raptures are blended the + transports of the tenderest love. + +Many prosaic writings of a different kind shew how universally +feeling, in the middle of the eighteenth century, turned towards +Nature. + +The aesthetic writer Sulzer (1750) wrote _On the Beauty of Nature_. +Crugot's widely-read work of edification, _Christ in Solitude_ +(1761), shewed the same point of view among the mystical and pietist +clergy; and Spalding's _Human Vocation_[9] (written with a warmth +that reminds one of Gessner) among the rationalists, whom he headed. +He says: + + Nature contains numberless pleasures, which, through my great + sensitiveness, nourish my mind... I open eye and ear, and through + these openings pleasures flow into my soul from a thousand sides: + flowers painted by the hand of Nature, the rich music of the + forest, the bright daylight which pours life and light all round + me.... How indifferent, tasteless, and dead is all the fantastic + glamour of artificial splendour and luxuriance in comparison with + the living radiance of the real beautiful world of Nature, with + the joyousness, repose, and admiration I feel before a meadow in + blossom, a rustling stream, the pleasant awesomeness of night, or + of the majesty of innumerable worlds. Even the commonest and most + familiar things in Nature give me endless delight, when I feel + them with a heart attuned to joy and admiration.... I lose + myself, absorbed in delight, in the consideration of all this + general beauty, of which I hold myself to be a not disfigured + part. + +Klopstock, the torch-bearer of Germany's greatest poets, owed much of +his power of the wing to religion. He introduced that new epoch in +the literature of his country which culminated in Goethe. As so often +happens in mental development, the reaction against prevailing +conditions and the advance to higher ones, in the middle of the +eighteenth century, led first of all to the opposite extreme--balance +was only reached by degrees. What chiefly made Klopstock a literary +reformer was the glowing enthusiasm and powerful imagination which +compelled the stiff poetic forms, clumsy as they were, to new rhythm +and melodious cadence. And although his style degenerated into +mannerism in the _Messias_, for the youthful impetus which had +carried his Pegasus over the clouds to the stars could not keep it +there without artificial aid, the immense value of his influence +remained. He is one of the most interesting representatives, not only +of his own, but of all similar periods of exaggerated feelings and +ideals. Despite his loftiness of thought and speech, and his seraphic +raptures, he was not without a full share of sensuous development, +and women's eyes, or a girl's rosy lips, would draw him away from the +finest view in the world. + +A mind so intent upon the noble and beautiful was sure to be +enthusiastic about Nature; his correspondence is the best witness to +this, and at the same time throws side-lights upon the period. + +It is difficult to-day to understand the influence which the +_Messias_ had upon its readers; even Friedenkende spent happy hours +reading it with pious tears of delight, and young and old were of the +same opinion. + +There is a pretty letter from Gustchen Stolberg[10] to Klopstock, +which runs thus: + + UETERSEN, + 25 _April_ 1776. + + In the garden. Yes, in the garden, dearest Klopstock! I have just + been walking about, it was so beautiful: the little birds were + singing, violets and other flowers wafted their fragrance to me, + and I began thinking very warmly of all whom I dearly, dearly + love, and so very soon came to my dear Klopstock, who certainly + has no truer friend than I am, though perhaps others express it + better ... Thanks, thanks, for your very delightful little + letter--how dear to me I don't tell you--can't tell you. + +C. F. Cramer was his enthusiastic panegyrist. It is not only what he +says of the private life and special taste of his adored friend which +is noteworthy, but the way in which he does it--the tone in which, as +a cultivated man of the day, he judged him. 'He will paint and paint +Nature. For this he must be acquainted with her. This is why he loves +her so well. This is why he strays by the brook and weeps. This is +why in spring he goes out into the fields of blossoms, and his eyes +run over with tears. All creation fills him with yearning and +delight. He goes from mountain to valley like a man in a dream. When +he sees a stream, he follows its course; when a hill, he must climb +it; when a river--oh! if only he could rush with it to the sea! A +rock--oh! to look down from its crags to the land below! A hawk +hovers over him--oh! to have its wings and fly so much nearer to the +stars! He stands for hours looking at a flower or moss, throws +himself down on the grass and decks his hat with ivy and cornflowers. +He goes by moonlight to visit the graves and think of death, +immortality, and eternal life. Nothing hinders his meditations. He +sees everything in relation to something else. Every visible object +has an invisible companion, so ardently, so entirely, so closely does +he feel it all.' + +This, coming straight from life, tells us more than a volume of odes; +it contains the real feeling of the time, sensitive, dreamy, elegiac. + +His friend goes on: 'He walks often and likes it, but generally looks +for sunny places; he goes very slowly, which is fatal for me, for I +run when I walk ... Often he stands still and silent, as if there +were knots which he could not untie (in his thoughts). And truly +there are unknown depths of feeling as well as thought.' + +In another place: 'He went out and gloated over the great scene of +immeasurable Nature. Orion and the Pleiades moved over his head, the +dear moon was opposite. Looking intently into her friendly face, he +greeted her repeatedly: "Moon, Moon, friend of my thoughts; hurry not +away, dear Moon, but stay. What is thy name? Laura, Cynthia, Cyllene? +Or shall I call thee beautiful Betty of the Sky?" ... He loved +country walks; we made for lonely places, dark fearsome thickets, +lonely unfrequented paths, scrambled up all the hills, spied out +every bit of Nature, came to rest at last under a shady rock ... +Klopstock's life is one constant enjoyment. He gives himself up to +feeling, and revels in Nature's feast ... Winter is his favourite +time of year....[11] He preaches skating with the unction of a +missionary to the heathen, and not without working miracles, ... the +ice by moonlight is a feast of the Gods to him ... only one rule, we +do not leave the river till the moon has gone.' Klopstock described +this in his _Skating_: + + O youth, whose skill the ice-cothurn + Drives glowing now, and now restrains, + On city hearths let faggots burn, + But come with me to crystal plains. + The scene is filled with vapouring light, + As when the winter morning's prime + Looks on the lake. Above it night + Scatters, like stars, the glittering rime. + How still and white is all around! + How rings the track with new sparr'd frost! + Far off the metal's cymbal sound + Betrays thee, for a moment lost ... + +Cramer tells how Klopstock paid a long-remembered visit to Count +Bernstoff at Schloss Stintenburg: + + It has a most romantic situation in a bewitching part of + Mecklenburg; 'tis surrounded by forest full of delightful gloom, + and a large lake, with a charming little island in the centre, + which wakes echoes. Klopstock is very fond of echoes, and is + always trying to find them in his walks. + +This illustrates the lines in _Stintenburg_: + + Isle of pious solitude, + Loved playmate of the echo and the lake, etc. + +but in this ode, as in so many of his, simple personal feeling gives +way to the stilted mannerism of the bard poetry. + +He wrote of Soroe,[12] one of the loveliest places in the Island of +Zealand, as 'an uncommonly pleasant place'; where 'By a sacred tree, +on a raised grass plot two hundred paces from the great alley, and +from a view over the Friedensburg Lake towards a little wooded island +... Fanny appeared to him in the silver evening clouds over the +tree-tops.' + +The day on which he composed _The Lake of Zurich_ was one of the +pleasantest in his life. Cramer says: 'He has often told me and still +tells, with youthful fervour, about those delightful days and this +excursion: the boat full of people, mostly young, all in good +spirits; charming girls, his wife Herzel, a lovely May morning.' + +But, unlike St Preux, he 'seemed less impressed by our scenery than +by the beauty of our girls,[13] and his letters bear out the +remark.[14] Yet delight in Nature was always with him: Klopstock's +lofty morality pours forth all through it. Nature, love, fame, wine, +everything is looked at from an ennobling point of view.' + + Fair is the majesty of all thy works + On the green earth, O Mother Nature fair! + But fairer the glad face + Enraptured with their view. + Come from the vine banks of the glittering lake, + Or--hast thou climbed the smiling skies anew-- + Come on the roseate tip + Of evening's breezy wing, + And teach my song with glee of youth to glow, + Sweet joy, like thee--with glee of shouting youths, + Or feeling Fanny's laugh. + + Behind us far already Uto lay. + At whose feet Zurich in the quiet vale + Feeds her free sons: behind-- + Receding vine-clad hills. + Uncloud'd beamed the top of silver Alps, + And warmer beat the heart of gazing youths, + And warmer to their fair + Companions spoke its glow. + And Haller's Doris sang, the pride of song; + And Hirzel's Daphne, dear to Kleist and Gleim; + And we youths sang and felt + As each were--Hagedorn. + + Soon the green meadow took us to the cool + And shadowy forest, which becrowns the isle. + Then cam'st thou, Joy; thou cam'st + Down in full tide to us; + Yes, goddess Joy, thyself; we felt, we clasp'd, + Best sister of humanity, thyself, + With thy dear innocence + Accompanied, thyself. + + Sweet thy inspiring breath, O cheerful Spring; + When the meads cradle thee, and their soft airs + Into the hearts of youths + And hearts of virgins glide, + Thou makest feeling conqueror. Ah! through thee + Fuller, more tremulous, heaves each blooming breast; + With lips spell-freed by thee + Young love unfaltering pleads. + Fair gleams the wine, when to the social change + Of thought, or heart-felt pleasure, it invites, + And the 'Socratic' cup + With dewy roses bound, + Sheds through the bosom bliss, and wakes resolves, + Such as the drunkard knows not--proud resolves + Emboldening to despair + Whate'er the sage disowns. + + Delightful thrills against the panting heart + Fame's silver voice--and immortality + Is a great thought.... + But sweeter, fairer, more delightful, 'tis + On a friend's arm to know oneself a friend.... + O were ye here, who love me though afar ... + How would we build us huts of friendship, here + Together dwell for ever. + +This is of Fredensborg on an August day: + + Here, too, did Nature tarry, when her hand + Pour'd living beauty over dale and hill, + And to adorn this pleasant land + Long time she lingered and stood still.... + The lake how tranquil! From its level brim + The shore swells gently, wooded o'er with green, + And buries in its verdure dim + The lustre of the summer e'en.... + +The inner and outer life are closely blended in _The Early Grave_: + + Welcome, O silver moon, + Fair still companion of the night! + Friend of the pensive, flee not soon; + Thou stayest, and the clouds pass light. + + Young waking May alone + Is fair as summer's night so still, + When from his locks the dews drop down, + And, rosy, he ascends the hill. + + Ye noble souls and true, + Whose graves with sacred moss are strawn. + Blest were I, might I see with you + The glimmering night, the rosy dawn. + +This is true lyric feeling, spontaneous, not forced. Many of his +odes, and parts of the _Messias_, shew great love for Nature. There +is a fine flight of imagination in _The Festival of Spring_: + + Not into the ocean of all the worlds would I plunge--not hover + where the first created, the glad choirs of the sons of light, + adore, deeply adore and sunk in ecstasy. Only around the drop on + the bucket, only around the earth, would I hover and adore. + Hallelujah! hallelujah! the drop on the bucket flowed also out of + the hand of the Almighty. + + When out of the hand of the Almighty the greater earth flowed, + when the streams of light rushed, and the seven stars began to + be--then flowedst thou, drop, out of the hand of the Almighty. + + When a stream of light rushed, and our sun began to be, a + cataract of waves of light poured, as adown the rock a + storm-cloud, and girded Orion, then flowedst thou, drop, out of + the hand of the Almighty. Who are the thousandfold thousands, who + all the myriads that inhabit the drop?... + + But thou, worm of Spring, which, greenly golden, art fluttering + beside me, thou livest and art, perhaps, ah! not immortal.... + + The storm winds that carry the thunder, how they roar, how with + loud waves they stream athwart the forest! Now they hush, slow + wanders the black cloud.... + + Ah! already rushes heaven and earth with the gracious rain; now + is the earth refreshed.... + + Behold Jehovah comes no longer in storm; in gentle pleasant + murmurs comes Jehovah, and under him bends the bow of peace. + +In another ode, _The Worlds_, he calls the stars 'drops of the +ocean.' + +Again, in _Death_ he shews the sense of his own nothingness, in +presence of the overpowering greatness of the Creator: + + Ye starry hosts that glitter in the sky, + How ye exalt me! Trancing is the sight + Of all Thy glorious works, Most High. + How lofty art Thou in Thy wondrous might; + What joy to gaze upon these hosts, to one + Who feels himself so little, God so great, + Himself but dust, and the great God his own! + Oh, when I die, such rapture on me wait! + +As regards our subject, Klopstock performed this function--he tuned +the strings of feeling for Nature to a higher pitch, thereby +excelling all his contemporaries. His poetry always tended to +extravagance; but in thought, feeling, and language alike, he was +ahead of his time. + +The idyllic was now cultivated with increased fervour, especially by +the Goettingen Brotherhood of Poets. The artificial and conventional +began to wane, and Nature's own voice was heard again. The songs of +Claudius were like a breath of spring.[15] His peasant songs have the +genuine ring; they are hail-fellow-well-met with Nature. Hebel is the +only modern poet like him. + + EVENING SONG + + The lovely day-star's run its course.... + Come, mop my face, dear wife, + And then dish up.... + The silvery moon will look down from his place + And preside at our meal over dishes and grace. + +He hated artificiality: + + Simple joy in Nature, free from artifice, gives as great a + pleasure as an honest lover's kiss. + +His _Cradle Song to be sung by Moonlight_ is delightful in its naive +humour (the moon was his special favourite): + + Sleep then, little one. Why dost thou weep? + Moonlight so tender and quiet so deep, + Quickly and easily cometh thy sleep. + Fond of all little ones is the good moon; + Girls most of all, but he even loves boys. + Down from up there he sends beautiful toys.... + He's old as a raven, he goes everywhere; + Even when father was young, he was there. + +The pearl of his poems is the exquisite _Evening Song_: + + The moon hath risen on high, + And in the clear dark sky + The golden stars all brightly glow; + And black and hushed the woods, + While o'er the fields and floods + The white mists hover to and fro. + + How still the earth, how calm! + What dear and home-like charm + From gentle twilight doth she borrow! + Like to some quiet room, + Where, wrapt in still soft gloom, + We sleep away the daylight's sorrow. + +Boie's _Evening Song_ is in the same key. None of the moonshine poets +of his day expressed night-fall like this: + + How still it is! How soft + The breezes blow! + The lime leaves lisp in whisper and echo answers low; + Scarce audibly the rivulet running amid the flower + With murmuring ripple laps the edge of yonder mystic bower. + And ever darker grows the veil thou weavest o'er the land, + And ever quieter the hush--a hush as of the grave.... + Listen! 'tis Night! she comes, unlighted by a star, + And with the slow sweep of her heavy wing + Awes and revives the timid earth. + +Buerger sings in praise of idyllic comfort in _The Village_, and +Hoelty's mild enthusiasm, touched with melancholy, turned in the same +direction. + + My predilection is for rural poetry and melancholy enthusiasm; + all I ask is a hut, a forest, a meadow with a spring in it, and a + wife in my hut. + +The beginning of his _Country Life_ shews that moralizing was still +in the air: + + Happy the man who has the town escaped! + To him the whistling trees, the murmuring brooks, + The shining pebbles preach + Virtue's and wisdom's lore.... + The nightingale on him sings slumber down; + The nightingale rewakes him, fluting sweet, + When shines the lovely red + Of morning through the trees. + Then he admires Thee in the plain, O God! + In the ascending pomp of dawning day, + Thee in Thy glorious sun. + The worm--the budding branch-- + Where coolness gushes in the waving branch + Or o'er the flowers streams the fountain, rests, + Inhales the breadth of prime + The gentle airs of eve. + His straw-decked thatch, where doves bask in the sun, + And play, and hop, invites to sweeter rest + Than golden halls of state + Or beds of down afford. + To him the plumy people + Chatter and whistle on his + And from his quiet hand + Peck crumbs or peas or grains + +His _Winter Song_ runs: + + Summer joys are o'er, + Flow'rets bloom no more; + Wintry joys are sweeping, + Through the snow-drifts peeping; + Cheerful evergreen + Rarely now is seen. + + No more plumed throng + Charms the woods with song; + Ice-bound trees are glittering, + Merry snow-birds twittering, + Fondly strive to cheer + Scenes so cold and drear. + + Winter, still I see + Many charms in thee, + Love thy chilly greeting, + Snow-storms fiercely beating, + And the dear delights + Of the long, long nights. + +Hoeltz was the most sentimental of this group; Joh. Heinrich Voss was +more robust and cheerful. He put his strength into his longer poems; +the lyrics contain a great deal of nonsense. An extract from _Luise_ +will shew his idyllic taste: + + Wandering thus through blue fields of flax and acres of barley, + both paused on the hill-top, which commands such a view of the + whole lake, crisped with the soft breath of the zephyr and + sparkling in sunshine; fair were the forests of white barked + birch beyond, and the fir-trees, lovely the village at the foot + half hid by the wood. Lovely Luise had welcomed her parents and + shewn them a green mound under an old beech tree, where the + prospect was very inviting. 'There we propose,' said she, to + unpack and to spread the breakfast. Then we'll adjourn to the + boat and be rowed for a time on the water,' etc. + +We find the same taste, often expressed in a very original way, in +both the brothers Stolberg. In Christian Stolberg's _Elegy to +Hangwitz_, for instance, another poem has these lines: + + Thither, where 'mong the trees of life, + Where in celestial bowers + Under your fig-tree, bowed with fruit + And warranting repose, + Under your pine, inviting shady joy, + Unchanging blooms + Eternal Spring! + +Friedrich Stolberg was a very prophet of Nature; in his ode _Nature_ +he says: + + He who does not love Nature cannot be my friend. + +His prayer may serve as the motto of his day: + + Holy Nature, heavenly fair, + Lead me with thy parent care; + In thy footsteps let me tread + As a willing child is led. + When with care and grief opprest, + Soft I sink me on thy breast; + On thy peaceful bosom laid, + Grief shall cease, nor care invade. + O congenial power divine, + All my votive soul is thine. + Lead me with thy parent care, + Holy Nature, heavenly fair! + +He, too, sang the moon; but Klopstock's influence seems to have +carried him to higher flights than his contemporaries. He wrote in +fine language of wild scenery, even sea and mountains, which had +played no part in German poetry before. + + TO THE SEA + + Thou boundless, shining, glorious sea, + With ecstasy I gaze on thee; + Joy, joy to him whose early beam + Kisses thy lip, bright ocean stream. + Thanks for the thousand hours, old sea, + Of sweet communion held with thee; + Oft as I gazed, thy billowy roll + Woke the deep feelings of my soul. + +There are beautiful notes, reminding one of Goethe, in his +_Unsterbliche Juengling, Ode to a Mountain Torrent_. + + Immortal youth! + Thou streamest forth from rocky caves; + No mortal saw + The cradle of thy might, + No ear has heard + Thy infant stammering in the gushing Spring. + How lovely art thou in thy silver locks! + How dreadful thundering from the echoing crags! + At thy approach + The firwood quakes; + Thou easiest down, with root and branch, the fir + Thou seizest on the rock, + And roll'st it scornful like a pebble on. + Thee the sun clothes in dazzling beams of glory, + And paints with colours of the heavenly bow + The clouds that o'er thy dusky cataracts climb. + Why hasten so to the cerulean sea? + Is not the neighbourhood of heaven good? + Not grand thy temple of encircling rocks? + Not fair the forest hanging o'er thy bed? + Hasten not so to the cerulean sea; + Youth, thou art here, + Strong as a god, + Free as a god, + Though yonder beckon treacherous calms below, + The wavering lustre of the silent sea, + Now softly silvered by the swimming moon, + Now rosy golden in the western beam; + Youth, what is silken rest, + And what the smiling of the friendly moon, + Or gold or purple of the evening sun, + To him who feels himself in thraldom's bonds? + Here thou canst wildly stream + As bids thy heart; + Below are masters, ever-changeful minds, + Or the dead stillness of the servile main. + Hasten not so to the cerulean sea; + Youth, thou art here, + Strong as a god, + Free as a god. + +Here we have, with all Klopstock's pathos, a love for the wild and +grandiose in Nature, almost unique in Germany, in this time of +idyllic sentimentality. But the discovery of the beauty of romantic +mountain scenery had been made by Rousseau some time before, for +Rousseau, too, was a typical forerunner, and his romances fell like a +bomb-shell among all the idyllic pastoral fiction of the day. + + + + +CHAPTER XI + +THE AWAKENING OF FEELING FOR THE ROMANTIC + + +Rousseau was one of those rare men who bring about a complete change +in the culture of their time by their revolutionary originality. In +such beings the world's history, so to speak, begins again. Out of +touch with their own day, and opposed to its ruling taste and mode of +thought, they are a law unto themselves, and naturally tend to +measure all things by themselves, while their too great subjectivity +is apt to be increased by a morbid sophistry of passion and the +conviction of the prophet. + +Of this type, unchecked by a broad sense of humanity, full of +subversive wilfulness, and not only untrained in moderation, but +degenerating into crass exaggeration, Rousseau was the first example. + +Hellenism, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, had only produced +forerunners. What in Petrarch was a tendency, became an established +condition in Rousseau: the acedia reached its climax. All that went +on in his mind was so much grit for his own mill, subject-matter for +his observation, and therefore of the greatest value to him. He lived +in introspection, a spectator of his own struggles, his own waverings +between an ideal of simple duty and the imperious demands of a +selfish and sensuous ego. His passion for Nature partially atoned for +his unamiable and doubtful character; he was false in many ways; but +that feeling rang true--it was the best part of him, and of that +'idealism of the heart' whose right of rule he asserted in an age of +artificiality and petty formalism. Those were no empty words in his +third letter to Malesherbes: + +'Which time of my life do you suppose I recall most often and most +willingly in my dreams? Not the pleasures of youth; they were too +few, too much mixed with bitterness, and they are too far away now. +It is the time of my retreat, of my solitary walks--those fast-flying +delicious days that I passed all alone by myself, with my good and +simple Therese, my beloved dog, my old cat, with the wild birds and +the roes of the forest, with all Nature and her inconceivable Maker. + +'When I got up early to go and watch the sunrise from my garden, when +I saw a fine day begin, my first wish was that neither letters nor +visitors might come to break its charm.... + +'Then I would seek out some wild place in the forest, some desert +spot where there was nothing to shew the hand of man, and so tell of +servitude and rule--some refuge which I could fancy I was the first +to discover, and where no importunate third party came between Nature +and me.... + +'The gold broom and the purple heather touched my heart; the majestic +trees that shaded me, the delicate shrubs around, the astonishing +variety of plants and flowers that I trod under foot, kept me +alternately admiring and observing.' + +His writings shew that with him return to Nature was no mere theory, +but real earnest; they condemned the popular garden-craft and carpet +fashions, and set up in their place the rights of the heart, and free +enjoyment of Nature in her wild state, undisturbed by the hand of +man. + +It was Rousseau who first discovered that the Alps were beautiful. +But to see this fact in its true light, we must glance back at the +opinions of preceding periods.[1] + +Though the Alpine countries were the arena of all sorts of +enterprise, warlike and peaceful, in the fifteenth century, most of +the interest excited by foreign parts was absorbed by the great +voyages of discovery; the Alps themselves were almost entirely +omitted from the maps. + +To be just to the time, it must be conceded that security and comfort +in travelling are necessary preliminaries to our modern mountain +rapture, and in the Middle Ages these were non-existent. Roads and +inns were few; there was danger from robbers as well as weather, so +that the prevailing feelings on such journeys were misery and +anxiety, not pleasure. Knowledge of science, too, was only just +beginning; botany, geology, and geognosy were very slightly diffused; +glacier theories were undreamt of. The sight of a familiar scene near +the great snow-peaks roused men's admiration, because they were +surprised to find it there; this told especially in favour of the +idyllic mountain valleys. + +Felix Fabri, the preacher monk of Ulm, visited the East in 1480 and +1483, and gave a lifelike description of his journeys through the +Alps in his second account. He said[2]: + +'Although the Alps themselves seem dreadful and rigid from the cold +of the snow or the heat of the sun, and reach up to the clouds, the +valleys below them are pleasant, and as rich and fruitful in all +earthly delights as Paradise itself. Many people and animals inhabit +them, and almost every metal is dug out of the Alps, especially +silver. 'Mid such charms as these men live among the mountains, and +Nature blooms as if Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres reigned there. No one +who saw the Alps from afar would believe what a delicious Paradise is +to be found amid the eternal snow and mountains of perpetual winter +and never-melting ice.' + +Very limited praise only extended to the valleys! + +In the sixteenth century we have the records of those who crossed the +Alps with an army, such as Adam Reissner, the biographer of the +Frundsberg, and mention their 'awe' at sight of the valleys, and of +those who had travelled to Italy and the East, and congratulated +themselves that their troublesome wanderings through the Alps were +over. Savants were either very sparing of words about their travels, +or else made rugged verses which shewed no trace of mountain +inspiration. There were no outbursts of admiration at sight of the +great snow-peaks; 'horrible' and 'dreadful' were the current +epithets. The aesthetic sense was not sufficiently developed, and +discount as we will for the dangers and discomforts of the road, and, +as with the earlier travellers to the East, for some lack of power of +expression, the fact remains that mountains were not appreciated. The +prevalent notion of beautiful scenery was very narrow, and even among +cultured people only meant broad, level country. + +B. Kiechel[3] (1585) was enthusiastic about 'the beautiful level +scenery' of Lichfeld, and found it difficult to breathe among the +Alps. Schickhart wrote: 'We were delighted to get away from the +horrible tedious mountains,' and has nothing to say of the Brenner +Pass except this poor joke: 'It did not burn us much, for what with +the ice and very deep snow and horribly cold wind, we found no heat.' +The most enthusiastic description is of the Lake of Como, by Paulus +Jovius (1552), praising Bellagio,'[4] In the seventeenth century +there was some admiration for the colossal proportions of the Alps, +but only as a foil to the much admired valleys. + +J.J. Grasser wrote of Rhoetia[5]: 'There are marble masses +projecting, looking like walls and towers in imitation of all sorts +of wonderful architecture. The villages lie scattered in the valleys, +here and there the ground is most fruitful. There is luxuriance close +to barrenness, gracefulness close to dreadfulness, life close to +loneliness. The delight of the painter's eye is here, yet Nature +excels all the skill of art. The very ravines, tortuous foot-paths, +torrents, alternately raging and meagre, the arched bridges, waves on +the lakes, varied dress of the fields, the mighty trees, in short, +whatever heaven and earth grant to the sight, is an astonishment and +a pastime to the enraptured eye of the wanderer.' + +But this pastime depended upon the contrast between the charming +valleys and the dreadful mountains. + +Joseph Furttenbach (1591) writing about the same district of Thusis, +described 'the little bridges, under which one hears the Rhine +flowing with a great roar, and sees what a horrible cruel wilderness +the place is.' In Conrad Gessner's _De admiratione Montium_ (1541)[6] +a passage occurs which shews that even in Switzerland itself in the +sixteenth century one voice was found to praise Alpine scenery in a +very different way, anticipating Rousseau. 'I have resolved that so +long as God grants me life I will climb some mountains every year, or +at least one mountain, partly to learn the mountain flora, partly to +strengthen my body and refresh my soul. What a pleasure it is to see +the monstrous mountain masses, and lift one's head among the clouds. +How it stimulates worship, to be surrounded by the snowy domes, which +the Great Architect of the world built up in one long day of +creation! How empty is the life, how mean the striving of those who +only crawl about on the earth for gain and home-baked pleasures! The +earthly paradise is closed to them.' + +Yet, just as after Rousseau, and even in the nineteenth century, +travellers were to be found who thought the Alps 'dreadful' (I refer +to Chateaubriand's 'hideux'), so such praise as this found no echo in +its own day. + +But with the eighteenth century came a change. Travelling no longer +subserved the one practical end of making acquaintance with the +occupations, the morals, the affairs generally, of other peoples; a +new scientific interest arose, geologists and physicists ventured to +explore the glaciers and regions of perpetual snow, and first +admiration, and then love, supplanted the old feeling of horror. + +Modern methods began with Scheuchzer's (1672-1733) _Itinera Alpina_. +Every corner of the Alps was explored--the Splugen, Julier, Furka, +Gotthard, etc.--and glaciers, avalanches, ores, fossils, plants +examined. Haller, as his verses shew, was botanist as well as +theologian, historian, and poet; but he did not appreciate mountain +beauty. + +Brockes to some extent did. He described the Harz Mountains in the +Fourth Book of his _Earthly Pleasure in God (Irdisches Verguengen in +Gott)_; and in his _Observations on the Blankenburg Marble_ he said: +'In many parts the rough mountain heights were monstrously beautiful, +their size delights and appals us'; and wound up a discussion of wild +scenery in contrast to cultivated with: 'Ponder this with joy and +reverence, my soul. The mountain heights wild and beautiful shew us a +picture of earthly disorder.'[7] It was very long before expressions +of horror and fear entirely disappeared from descriptions of the +Alps. In Richardson's _Sir Charles Grandison_ we read: 'We bid adieu +to France and found ourselves in Savoy, equally noted for its poverty +and rocky mountains. We had left behind us a blooming Spring, which +enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we +passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers.... Every object +which here presents itself is excessively miserable.' Savoy is 'one +of the worst countries under Heaven.' + +Addison,[8] on the other hand, wrote of the Alps from Ripaille: 'It +was the pleasantest voyage in the world to follow the windings of +this river Inn through such a variety of pleasing scenes as the +course of it naturally led us. We had sometimes on each side of us a +vast extent of naked rocks and mountains, broken into a thousand +irregular steps and precipices ... but, as the materials of a fine +landscape are not always the most profitable to the owner of them, we +met with but little corn or pasturage,' etc. Lady Mary Wortley[9] +Montagu wrote from Lyons, Sept. 25, 1718: 'The prodigious aspect of +mountains covered with eternal snow, clouds hanging far below our +feet, and the vast cascades tumbling down the rocks with a confused +roaring, would have been solemnly entertaining to me, if I had +suffered less from the extreme cold that reigns here.' + +On the whole, Switzerland was little known at the beginning of the +eighteenth century. Many travellers still measured the value of +scenery entirely by fertility, like Keyssler,[10] who praised +garden-like level country such as that round Mantua, in contrast to +the useless wild Tyrolese mountains and the woods of Westphalia; and +Lueneburg or Moser,[11] who observed ironically to Abbt (1763), after +reading _Emilia_ and _La Nouvelle Heloise_: 'The far-famed Alps, +about which so much fuss has been made.' + +Rousseau was the real exponent of rapture for the high Alps and +romantic scenery in general. Isolated voices had expressed some +feeling before him, but it was he who deliberately proclaimed it, and +gave romantic scenery the first place among the beauties of Nature. +He did not, as so many would have it--Du Bois Reymond, for +example--discover our modern feeling for Nature; the great men of the +Renaissance, even the Hellenic poets, fore-ran him; but he directed +it, with feeling itself in general, into new channels.[12] + +In French literature he stood alone; the descriptions of landscape +before him were either borrowed blossoms of antiquity or sentimental +and erotic pastorals. He opened up again for his country the taste +for wood and field, sunshine and moonlight, for the idyllic, and, +above all, for the sublime, which had been lost under artificiality +and false taste. + +The primitive freshness, the genuine ring of his enthusiasm for +country life, was worth all the laboured pastorals and fables of +previous periods of literature. + +His _Confessions_ opened not only the eyes of France, but the heart. + +A Swiss by birth, and living in one of the most beautiful parts of +Europe, Rousseau was devotedly fond of his home on the Lake of +Geneva. As a boy he loved to leave the city and rove in the country. + +He describes how once on a Sunday in 1728 he wandered about, +forgetting the time. 'Before me were fields, trees, flowers; the +beautiful lake, the hill country, and high mountains unfolded +themselves majestically before my eyes. I gloated over the beautiful +spectacle while the sun was setting. At last, too late, I saw that +the city gates were shut.' + +From that time on he felt more drawn to Nature than to men. In the +Fourth Book of the _Confessions_ he says, speaking of 1732: + +'A view of the Lake of Geneva and its beautiful banks has had even in +my idea a particular attraction that I cannot describe, not arising +merely from the beauty of the prospect, but something, I know not +what, more interesting which affects and softens me. 'Every time I +have approached the Vaudois country, I have experienced an impression +composed of the remembrance of Mademoiselle de Warens, who was born +there; of my father, who lived there; of Mademoiselle de Wulson, who +had been my first love; and of several pleasant journeys I had made +there in my childhood, mingled with some nameless charm, more +powerfully attractive than all the rest. When that ardent desire for +a life of happiness and tranquillity (which ever follows me, and for +which I was born) inflames my mind, 'tis ever to the country of Vaud, +near the lake, on those charming plains, that imagination leads me. +An orchard on the banks of that lake, and no other, is absolutely +necessary; a firm friend, an amiable woman, a cow, and a little boat; +nor could I enjoy perfect happiness on earth without these +concomitants.... On my way to Vevey I gave myself up to the soft +melancholy ... I sighed and wept like a child.' + +He clung to Nature, and most of all when surrounded by human beings; +a morbid impulse to flee from them was always present as a negative +element in the background of his love for her. His Fifth Reverie, the +most beautiful one, shews this. + +He had gone to the Peter Island on the Lake of Bienne. So far as he +knew, no other traveller had paid any attention to the place; but +that did not disturb his confidence in his own taste. + +'The shores of the Lake of Bienne are wilder and more romantic than +those of the Lake of Geneva, because the rocks and woods come nearer +to the water; but they are not less radiant. With less cultivation +and fewer vineyards, towns, and houses, there are more green fields +and shady sheltered spots, more contrasts and irregularities. As +there are no good carriage roads on these happy shores, the district +is little frequented by travellers; but it is interesting for the +solitary contemplation of those who like to intoxicate themselves at +their leisure with Nature's charms, and to retire into a silence +unbroken by any sound but the eagle's cry, the intermittent warbling +of birds, and the roar of torrents falling from the mountains,' + +Here he had a delightful Robinson Crusoe existence. The only other +human beings were the Bernese manager with his family and labourers. +He counted his two months among the happiest of his life, and would +have liked to stay for ever. True to his character, he proceeded to +analyze the charm of the episode, and decided that it was made up of +the _dolce far niente_, solitude, absence of books and writing +materials, dealing with simple folk, healthy movement in the open +air, field labour, and, above all, intercourse with Nature, both in +admiring and studying her. He was seized with a passion for +botanizing, and planned a comprehensive Flora Petrinsularis, dividing +the whole island into quarters, so that no part might escape notice. + +'There is nothing more strange than the ravishment, the ecstasy, I +felt at each observation I made upon vegetable structure and +organization. + +'I would go by myself, throw myself into a boat when the water was +calm, and row to the middle of the lake, and then, lying full-length +in the boat with my eyes to the sky, I would let myself drift, +sometimes for hours, lost in a thousand confused but delicious +reveries.... Often when the sunset reminded me that it was time to +return, I found myself so far from the island that I was forced to +pull with all my strength to get back before night-fall. At other +times, instead of wandering about the lake, I amused myself by +skirting the green shores of the island where the limpid water and +cool shade often invited to a bathe.... When the lake was too rough +for rowing, I would spend the afternoon scouring the island, +botanizing right and left. I often sat down to dream at leisure in +sunny, lonely nooks, or on the terraces and hillocks, to gaze at the +superb ravishing panorama of the lake and its shores--one side +crowned by near mountains, the other spread out in rich and fertile +plains, across which the eye looked to the more distant boundary of +blue mountains.... When evening fell, I came down from the higher +parts of the mountains and sat by the shore in some hidden spot, and +there the sound of the waves and the movements of the water, making +me oblivious of all other distraction, would plunge me into delicious +reverie. The ebb and flow of the water, and the sound of it, +restrained and yet swelling at intervals, by striking eye and ear +without ceasing, came to the aid of those inner movements of the mind +which reverie destroys, and sufficed to make me pleasantly conscious +of existence without the trouble of thinking.... There is nothing +actual in all this to which the heart can attach itself; even in our +most intense enjoyment there is scarcely a moment of which the heart +can truly say "I should like it to stay for ever."' + +One thinks of Faust: 'O moment! tarry awhile, thou art so fair!' + +However, at the close of the Reverie he admits that he has often had +such moments--moments free from all earthly passion--on the lake and +on the island. His feeling was increased by botanical knowledge, and +later on in life the world of trees and plants became his one safe +refuge when pursued by delusions of persecution. + +The Seventh Reverie has a touching account of his pleasure in botany, +of the effect of 'earth in her wedding-dress, the only scene in the +world of which eyes and heart never weary,' the intoxicating sense +that he was part of a great system in which individual detail +disappears, and he only sees and hears the whole. + +'Shunning men, seeking solitude, no longer dreaming, still less +thinking, I began to concern myself with all my surroundings, giving +the preference to my favourites...brilliant flowers, emerald meadows, +fresh shade, streams, thickets, green turf, these purified my +imagination.... Attracted by the pleasant objects around, I note +them, study them, and finally learn to classify them, and so become +at one stroke as much of a botanist as one need be when one only +studies Nature to find ever new reasons for loving her. + +'The plants seem sown in profusion over the earth like the stars in +the sky, to invite man, through pleasure and curiosity, to study +them; but the stars are far off; they require preliminary knowledge +... while plants grow under our very feet--lie, so to speak, in our +very hands.' + +He had a peaceful sense of being free from his enemies when +he was pursuing his botany in the woods. He described one +never-to-be-forgotten ramble when he lost himself in a dense thicket +close to a dizzy precipice, where, save for some rare birds, he was +quite alone. He was just feeling the pride of a Columbus in the +discovery of new ground, when his eye fell upon a manufactory not far +off. His first feeling was a flash of delight at finding himself +again among men; but this gave way to the more lasting and painful +one, that even among the Alps there was no escape from his +tormentors. + +Years later, when he knew that he would never revisit the spot, the +leaves in his herbarium would carry him back to it in memory. + +So strong a personal attachment to Nature, solitude, and retirement +had not been known before; but it was thrown into this high relief by +the morbid dread of man and hatred of culture, which formed a +constant dark background to his mind. It was a state of mind which +naturally led to intense dislike of formal French gardens and open +admiration of the English park. He rejected all the garnish of +garden-craft, even grafted roses and fruit trees, and only admitted +indigenous plants which grew outdoors.[13] It is greatly due to his +feeling for English Park style that a healthier garden-craft gained +ground in Germany as well as France. The foremost maxim of his +philosophy and teaching, that everything is good as it comes from the +bosom of mother Nature, or rather from the hand of God, and that man +and his culture are responsible for all the evil, worked out in his +attitude towards Nature. + +He placed her upon a pedestal, worshipping her, and the Creator +through her, and this made him the first to recognize the fact that +study of Nature, especially of botany, should be an important factor +in the education of children. + +His _Confessions_, the truest photographs of a human character in +existence, shew at once the keenest introspection and intense love +for Nature. No one before Rousseau had been so aware of his own +individuality--that is, of himself, as a being--who in this +particular state only exists once, and has therefore not only +relative but absolute value. He gave this peculiarity its full value, +studying it as a thing outside himself, of which every detail was +important, watching with great interest his own change of moods, the +fluctuations of that double self which now lifted him to the ideal, +now cast him down to the lowest and commonest. His relation to Nature +was the best thing about him, and when he was happy, as he was for +the first time in the society of Mademoiselle de Warens, Nature +seemed lovelier than ever. + +The scattered passages about Nature in the _Confessions_ have a +youthful freshness: + +'The appearance of Aurora seemed so delightful one morning, that, +putting on my clothes, I hastened into the country to see the rising +of the sun. I enjoyed that pleasure to its utmost extent. It was one +week after midsummer: the earth was covered with verdure and flowers; +the nightingales, whose soft warblings were almost over, seemed to +vie with each other, and, in concert with birds of various kinds, to +bid adieu to spring and hail the approach of a beautiful summer's +day.' + +He loved rambling over hill and dale, even by night; thus, when he +was at Lyons: + +'It had been a very hot day, the evening was delightful, the dew +moistened the parched grass, no wind was stirring; the air was fresh +without chilliness, the setting sun had tinged the clouds with a +beautiful crimson, which was again reflected by the water, and the +trees bordering the terrace were filled with nightingales that were +constantly answering each other's songs. I walked along in a kind of +ecstasy, surrendering my heart and senses to the enjoyment of so many +delights, and sighing only from regret at enjoying them alone. +Absorbed in this pleasing reverie, I lengthened my walk till it grew +very late, without perceiving I was tired. At length I threw myself +on the steps of a kind of niche in a terrace wall. How charming was +that couch! The trees formed a stately canopy, a nightingale sat +directly over me, and with his soft notes lulled me to rest. How +delicious my repose! my awakening more so. It was broad day; on +opening my eyes, I saw the water, the verdure, and an adorable +landscape before me.' + +At the end of the Fourth Book he states his idea of beautiful +scenery: + +'I love to walk at my ease and stop at leisure ... travelling on foot +in a fine country with fine weather ... and having an agreeable +object to terminate my journey. It is already understood what I mean +by a fine country; never can a flat one, though ever so beautiful, +appear such to my eyes. I must have torrents, fir trees, black woods, +mountains to climb or descend, and rugged roads with precipices on +either side to alarm me. I experienced this pleasure to its utmost +extent as I approached Chambery, not far from a mountain road called +the Pas d'Echelle. Above the main road, hewn through the solid rock, +a small river runs and rushes into fearful chasms, which it appears +to have been millions of ages in forming. The road has been hedged by +a parapet to prevent accidents, and I was thus enabled to contemplate +the whole descent and gain vertigoes at pleasure, for a great part of +my amusement in these steep rocks lies in their causing a giddiness +and swimming in my head, which I am particularly fond of, provided I +am in safety. Leaning therefore on the parapet, I remained whole +hours, catching from time to time a glance of the froth and blue +water whose rushing caught my ear, mingled with the cries of ravens +and other birds of prey that flew from rock to rock and bush to bush +at 600 feet below me.' + +His preference was for the wild and sublime, and he was glad that +this was not a popular taste; but he could write glowing descriptions +of more idyllic scenery and of village life. + +He said of a day at the Charmettes, a property near Chambery, with +his beloved friend Madame de Warens, at the end of 1736: + +'I arose with the sun and was happy; I walked and was happy; I saw +Madame de Warens and was happy; I quitted her and still was happy. +Whether I rambled through the woods, over the hills, or strolled +along the valley; read, was idle, worked in the garden, or gathered +fruits, happiness continually accompanied me.' + +He offered his morning prayer from a hill-top, and in the evening, +before he left, stooped to kiss the ground and the trees, gazing till +they were out of sight at the places where he had been so happy. + +At the Hermitage with Therese there was a similar idyll. + +The most epoch--making event in European feeling for Nature was the +appearance of _La Nouvelle Heloise_ (1761). The book overflows with +Rousseau's raptures about the Lake of Geneva. St Preux says: + +'The nearer I drew to Switzerland, the greater were my emotions. That +instant in which I discovered the Lake of Geneva from the heights of +Jura, was a moment of ecstasy and rapture. The sight of my country, +my beloved country, where a deluge of pleasure had overflowed my +heart; the pure and wholesome air of the Alps, the gentle breeze of +the country, more sweet than the perfumes of the East; that rich and +fertile spot, that unrivalled landscape, the most beautiful that ever +struck the eye of man, that delightful abode, to which I found +nothing comparable in the vast tour of the globe; the mildness of the +season, the serenity of the climate, a thousand pleasing +recollections which recalled to my mind the pleasures I had +enjoyed;--all these circumstances together threw me into a kind of +transport which I cannot describe, and seemed to collect the +enjoyment of my whole life into one happy moment.' + +_La Nouvelle Heloise_ shewed the world three things in quite a new +light: the inner consciousness which was determined to give feeling +its rights again, though well aware that 'a feeling heart is an +unhappy gift from heaven'; the taste for solitude, 'all noble +passions are formed in solitude'; and closely bound up with these, +the love of romantic scenery, which it described for the first time +in glowing language. + +Such expressions as these of St Preux were unheard of at that time: +'I shall do my best to be free quickly, and able to wander at my ease +in the wild places that to my mind make the charm of this country.' +'I am of opinion that this unfrequented country deserves the +attention of speculative curiosity, and that it wants nothing to +excite admiration but a skilful spectator'; and 'Nature seems +desirous of hiding her real charms from the sight of men, because +they are too little sensible of them, and disfigure them when within +their reach; she flies from public places; it is on the tops of +mountains, in the midst of forests, on desert islands, that she +displays her most affecting charms.' + +Rousseau certainly announced his views with all the fervour of a +prophet proclaiming a newly-discovered truth. The sketch St Preux +gives of the country that 'deserved a year's study,' in the +twenty-third letter to Julia, is very poetic. He is ascending a rocky +path when a new view breaks upon him: + + One moment I beheld stupendous rocks hanging ruinous over my + head; the next, I was enveloped in a drizzling cloud, which arose + from a vast cascade that, dashing, thundered against the rocks + below my feet. On one side a perpetual torrent opened to my view + a yawning abyss, which my eyes could hardly fathom with safety; + sometimes I was lost in the obscurity of a hanging wood, and then + was greatly astonished with the sudden opening of a flowery + plain. + +He was always charmed by 'a surprising mixture of wild and cultivated +Nature': + + Here Nature seems to have a singular pleasure in acting + contradictory to herself, so different does she appear in the + same place in different aspects. Towards the east, the flowers of + spring; to the south, the flowers of autumn; and northwards, the + ice of winter. Add to that the illusions of vision, the tops of + the mountains variously illumined, the harmonious mixture of + light and shade.... + +After climbing, he reflects: + + Upon the top of mountains, the air being subtle and pure, we + respire with greater freedom, our bodies are more active, our + minds more serene, our pleasures less ardent, and our passions + much more moderate. Our meditations acquire a degree of sublimity + from the grandeur of the objects around us. It seems as if, being + lifted above all human society, we had left every low terrestrial + sentiment behind. + +He can find no words to express 'the amazing variety, magnitude, and +beauty of a thousand stupendous objects, the pleasure of gazing at an +entire new scene ... and beholding, as it were, another Nature and a +new world.' + +Earlier in the year he wrote his letters to Julia upon a block of +stone in his favourite wild spot, and the wintry landscape harmonized +with his feelings: + + I run to and fro, climb the rocks and explore my whole district, + and find everything as horrible without as I experienced it + within. There is no longer any verdure to be seen, the grass is + yellow and withered, the trees are stripped of their foliage, and + the north-east blast heaps snow and ice around me. In short, the + whole face of Nature appears as decayed to my outward senses as I + myself from within am dead to hope and joy. + +Julia, too, is enthusiastic about places, where 'no vestiges are seen +of human toil, no appearance of studied and laborious art; every +object presents only a view of the tender care of Nature, our common +mother.' + +When St Preux knows that she returns his love, his sympathy for +Nature overflows: + + I find the country more delightful, the verdure fresher and + livelier, the air more temperate, and the sky more serene than + ever I did before; even the feathered songsters seem to tune + their tender throats with more harmony and pleasure; the + murmuring rills invite to love-inspiring dalliance, while the + blossoms of the vine regale me from afar with the choicest + perfumes ... let us animate all Nature, which is absolutely dead + without the genial warmth of love. + +St Preux escorts his old love to the Meillerie, and it was with his +description of this that Rousseau unrolled the full charm of mountain +scenery, and opened the eyes of his readers to see it. + +They were climbing a mountain top on the Savoy side of the lake: + + This solitary spot formed a wild and desert nook, but full of + those sorts of beauties which are only agreeable to susceptible + minds, and appear horrible to others. A torrent, occasioned by + the melting of the snow, rolled in a muddy stream within twenty + paces of us, and carried dust, sand, and stones along with it, + not without considerable noise. Behind us, a chain of + inaccessible rocks divided the place where we stood from that + part of the Alps which they call the Ice house.... Forests of + gloomy fir trees afforded us a melancholy shade on the right, + while on the left was a large wood of oak, beyond which the + torrent issued; and beneath, that vast body of water which the + lake forms in the bay of the Alps, parted us from the rich coast + of the Pays de Vaud, crowning the whole landscape with the top of + the majestic Jura. + +Rousseau's influence upon feeling in general, and feeling for Nature +in particular, was an extraordinary one, widening and deepening at +once. + +By his strong personal impulse he impelled it into more natural +paths, and at the same time he discovered the power of the mountains. + +He brought to flower the germ which had lain dormant in Hellenism and +the Renaissance; and although his readers imbibed a sickly strain of +morbid sentimentality with this passion for the new region of +feeling, the total effect of his individuality and his idealism was +to intensify their love for Nature. His feelings woke the liveliest +echo, and it was not France alone who profited by the lessons he +taught. + +He was no mountaineer himself, but he pointed out the way, and others +soon followed it. Saussure began his climbing in 1760, exploring the +Alps with the indomitable spirit of the discoverer and the +scientist's craving for truth. He ascended Mont Blanc in 1787, and +only too soon the valleys of Chamounix filled with tourists and +speculators. One of the first results of Rousseau's imposing +descriptions of scenery was to rouse the most ardent of French +romance writers, Bernardin de St Pierre; and his writings, especially +his beautiful pictures of the Ile de France, followed hard in the +wake of _La Nouvelle Heloise_. + +In _Paul and Virginia_ vivid descriptions of Nature were interwoven +with an idyllic Robinson Crusoe romance: + + Within this enclosure reigns the most profound silence. The + waters, the air, all the elements are at peace. Scarcely does the + echo repeat the whispers of the palm trees spreading their broad + leaves, the long points of which are gently agitated by the + winds. A soft light illumines the bottom of this deep valley, on + which the sun shines only at noon. But even at break of day the + rays of light are thrown on the surrounding rocks, and their + sharp peaks, rising above the shadows of the mountain, appear + like tints of gold and purple gleaming upon the azure sky. + +Like Rousseau, St Pierre held that 'to take refuge in the wildest and +most desert places is an instinct common to all feeling and suffering +beings, as if rocks were ramparts against misfortune, and Nature's +calm could appease the sorrows of the soul'[14]; but he differed in +caring for Nature far more for her own sake, and not in opposition to +culture and a detested world. He wrote too, not as a philosopher +proclaiming a new gospel, but as a poet[15]; the poetry of Nature had +been revealed to French literature. + +St Pierre drew the beauty of the tropics in a poem, and George +Forster's _Voyage round the World_[16] shewed how quickly Rousseau's +influence told upon travels. It was a far cry from the Crusaders and +discoverers to the highly-cultured Forster, alive to everything that +was good and beautiful, and able to express it. He was the first to +describe countries and peoples from both the scientific and artistic +standpoint--a style of writing which Humboldt perfected, and some +later writers, Haeckel, for example, in _Indischen Briefen_, have +carried on with success. + +To quote Forster: + + The town of Santa Cruz in Madeira was abreast of us at six in the + afternoon. The mountains are here intersected by numerous deep + glens and valleys. On the sloping ground we observed several + country houses pleasantly situated amidst surrounding vineyards + and lofty cypresses, which gave the country altogether a romantic + appearance. Early on the 29th we were agreeably surprised with + the picturesque appearance of the city of Funchal.... + +In October 1772, off South Africa: + + The night was scarcely begun when the water all round us afforded + the most grand and astonishing sight that can be imagined. As far + as we could see, the whole ocean seemed to be in a blaze. Every + breaking wave had its summit illuminated by a light similar to + that of phosphorus, and the sides of the vessel, coming in + contact with the sea, were strongly marked by a luminous line.... + There was a singularity and a grandeur in the display of this + phenomenon which could not fail of giving occupation to the mind, + and striking it with a reverential awe, due to omnipotence. + + The ocean was covered to a great extent with myriads of + animalcules; these little beings, organized, alive, endowed with + locomotive power, a quality of shining whenever they please, of + illuminating every body with which they come in contact ... all + these ideas crowded upon us, and bade us admire the Creator, even + in His minutest works.... I hope I shall not have formed too + favourable an opinion of my readers, if I expect that the + generality will sympathize with me in these feelings. + +In Dusky Bay: + + We glided along by insensible degrees, wafted by light airs past + numerous rocky islands, each of which was covered with wood and + shrubberies, where numerous evergreens were sweetly contrasted + and mingled with the various shades of autumnal yellow. Flocks of + aquatic birds enlivened the rocky shores, and the whole country + resounded with the wild notes of the feathered tribe.... The view + of rude sceneries in the style of Rosa, of antediluvian forests + which clothed the rock, and of numerous rills of water which + everywhere rolled down the steep declivity, altogether conspired + to complete our joy. + +Cascade Cove in New Zealand: + + This waterfall at a distance of a mile and a half seems to be but + inconsiderable on account of its great elevation; but, after + climbing about 200 yards upwards, we ... found a view of great + beauty and grandeur before us. The first object which strikes the + beholder is a clear column of water eight or ten yards in + circumference, which is projected with great impetuosity from the + perpendicular rock at the height of 100 yards. Nearly at the + fourth part of the whole height this column meeting a part of the + same rock, which now acquires a little inclination, spreads on + its broad back into a limpid sheet of about twenty-five yards in + width. Here its surface is curled, and dashes upon every little + eminence in its rapid descent, till it is all collected in a fine + basin about sixty yards in circuit, included on three sides by + the natural walls of the rocky chasm, and in front by huge masses + of stone irregularly piled above each other. Between them the + stream finds its way, and runs foaming with the greatest rapidity + along the slope of the hill to the sea. The whole neighbourhood + of the cascade ... is filled with a steam or watery vapour.... We + ... were struck with the sight of a most beautiful rainbow of a + perfectly circular form, produced by the meridian rays of the sun + refracted in the vapour of the cascade. + + The scenery on the left consists of steep brown rocks fringed on + the summits with overhanging shrubs and trees; the enchanting + melody of various birds resounded on all sides, and completed the + beauty of this wild and romantic spot. + +He described: 'A waterspout, a phenomenon which carried so much +terrific majesty in it, and connected, as it were, the sea with the +clouds, made our oldest mariners uneasy and at a loss how to behave.' + +He begins his diary of August 1773 with O'Taheite: + + It was one of those beautiful mornings which the poets of all + nations have attempted to describe, when we saw the isle of + O'Taheite within two miles before us. The east wind, which had + carried us so far, was entirely vanished, and a faint breeze only + wafted a delicious perfume from the land, and curled the surface + of the sea. The mountains, clothed with forests, rose majestic in + various spiry forms, on which we already perceived the light of + the rising sun ... everything seemed as yet asleep; the morning + scarce dawned, and a peaceful shade still rested on the + landscape.... + + This spot was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and + could not fail of bringing to remembrance the most fanciful + descriptions of poets, which it eclipsed in beauty; we had a + prospect of the plain below us, and of the sea beyond it. In the + shade of trees, whose branches hung over the water, we enjoyed a + pleasant gale, which softened the heat of the day; and, amidst + the solemn uniform noise of the waterfall, which was but seldom + interrupted by the whistling of birds, we sat down.... + + We could have been well pleased to have passed the whole day in + this retirement ... however, feasting our eyes once more with the + romantic scenery, we returned to the plain. + +It was such descriptions as these which stimulated Humboldt. There is +a breath of poetry in his writings; his _Views of Nature_ and +_Cosmos_ give ample proof that love of Nature and knowledge of Nature +can condition and deepen each other. + +It is not surprising that in the flood of scientific 'Travels' which +followed, especially in imitation of Forster, there were some that +laid claim to a wonderful grade of feeling. For example, the +description of a day at the Equator by von Spix and v. Martius in +their Travels in Brazil in 1817 to 1820: + + In these seas the sun rises from the ocean with great splendour, + and gilds the clouds accumulated in the horizon, which in grand + and various groups seem to present to the eye of the spectator + continents with high mountains and valleys, with volcanoes and + seas, mythological and other strange creations of fancy. + + The lamp of day gradually rises in the transparent blue sky; the + damp grey fogs subside; the sea is calm or gently rises and + falls, with a surface smooth as a mirror, in a regular motion. At + noon a pale, faintly shining cloud rises, the herald of a sudden + tempest, which at once disturbs the tranquillity of the sea. + Thunder and lightning seem as if they would split our planet; but + a heavy rain of a salt taste, pouring down in the midst of + roaring whirlwinds, puts an end to the raging of the elements, + and several semi-circular rainbows, extended over the ocean like + gay triumphal arches, announce the peaceful termination of the + great natural phenomenon. As soon as the air and sea have + recovered their equilibrium, the sky again shews its transparent + azure.... As the sun gradually sinks in the clouded horizon, the + sea and sky assume a new dress, which is beyond description + sublime and magnificent. The most brilliant red, yellow, violet, + in infinite shades and contrasts, are poured out in profusion + over the azure of the firmament, and are reflected in still gayer + variety from the surface of the water. The day departs amid + continued lightning on the dusky horizon, while the moon in + silent majesty rises from the unbounded ocean into the cloudless + upper regions. Variable winds cool the atmosphere; numerous + falling stars, coming particularly from the south, shed a magic + light; the dark-blue firmament, reflected with the constellations + on the untroubled bosom of the water, represents the image of the + wholly starry hemisphere; and the ocean, agitated even by the + faintest breeze of the night, is changed into a sea of waving + fire.... The variety of the light and foliage of the trees, which + is seen in the forests, on the slopes of the mountains: the + blending of the most diverse colours, and the dark azure and + transparency of the sky, impart to the landscapes of the tropical + countries a charm to which even the pencil of a Salvator Rosa and + a Claude cannot do justice.... + + Except at noon, when all living creatures in the torrid zone seek + shade and repose, and when a solemn silence is diffused over the + scene, illumined by the dazzling beams of the sun, every hour of + the day calls into action another race of animals.... When the + sun goes down, most of the animals retire to rest ... myriads of + luminous beetles now begin to fly about like _ignes fatui_, and + the blood-sucking bats hover like phantoms in the profound + darkness of the night.... The traveller does not here meet with + the impressions of those sublime and rugged high Alps of Europe, + nor, on the other hand, those of a meaner nature; but the + character of these landscapes combines grandeur with simplicity + and softness.... + + He who has not personally experienced the enchantment of tranquil + moonlight nights in these happy latitudes can never be inspired, + even by the most faithful description, with those feelings which + scenes of such wondrous beauty excite in the mind of the + beholder. + + A delicate transparent mist hangs over the country, the moon + shines brightly amid heavy and singularly grouped clouds, the + outlines of the objects illuminated by it are clear and well + defined, while a magic twilight seems to remove from the eye + those which are in shade. Scarce a breath of air is stirring, and + the neighbouring mimosas, that have folded up their leaves to + sleep, stand motionless beside the dark crowns of the manga, the + jaca, and the ethereal jambos; or sometimes a sudden wind arises + and the juiceless leaves of the acaju rustle, the richly flowered + grumijama and pitanga let drop a fragrant shower of snow-white + blossoms; the crowns of the majestic palms wave slowly over the + silent roof which they overshade, like a symbol of peace and + tranquillity. + + Shrill cries of the cicada, the grasshopper, and tree frog make + an incessant hum, and produce by their monotony a pleasing + melancholy.... Every half-hour different balsamic odours fill the + air, and other flowers alternately unfold their leaves to the + night.... While the silent vegetable world, illuminated by scores + of fireflies as by a thousand moving stars, charms the night by + its delicate effluvia, brilliant lightnings play incessantly on + the horizon, and elevate the mind in joyful admiration to the + stars, which, glowing in solemn silence in the firmament above + the continent and ocean, fill the soul with a presentiment of + still sublimer wonders. + +Travels by sea were described at much greater length and with much +more effusion than travels by land; one might infer from the silence +of the people who moved about in Europe in the eighteenth century, +that no love of Nature existed. The extreme discomfort of the road up +to a hundred years ago may account for this silence within Germany. + +Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in 1716 of Saxon Switzerland: + + We passed by moonshine the frightful precipices that divide + Bohemia from Saxony, at the bottom of which runs the river Elbe + ... in many places the road is so narrow that I could not discern + an inch of space between the wheels and the precipice.... + +and her husband declared that + + he had passed the Alps five times in different places, without + having gone a road so dangerous. + +Scherr relates that in the late autumn of 1721 a citizen of +Schwabisch-Gmuend travelled to Ellwangen, a distance of eight hours' +posting. + +Before starting, he had a mass performed in St John's Church 'for the +safe conclusion of the coming journey.' He set off one Monday with +his wife and a maid in a two-horse vehicle called a small tilt waggon +(_Planwaegelchen_), but in less than an hour the wheels stuck in mud, +and the whole party had to get out and push the carriage, up to their +knees in filth. In the middle of the village of Boebingen the driver +inadvertently drove the front left wheel into a manure hole, the +carriage was overturned, and the lady of the party had her nose and +cheek badly grazed by the iron hoops. + +From Moeggelingen to Aalen they were obliged to use three horses, and +yet it took fully six hours, so that they were obliged to spend the +night there. Next morning they set off early, and reached the village +of Hofen by mid-day without accidents. Here for a time the travelling +ceased, for a hundred paces beyond the village the carriage fell into +a puddle, and they were all terribly soiled; the maid's right +shoulder was dislocated, and the manservant's hand injured. The axle +of one of the wheels was broken, and a horse completely lamed in the +left forefoot. They had to put up a second time for the night, leave +horses, carriage, man, and maid in Hofen, and hire a rack waggon, in +which at last, pitifully shaken, they reached the gates of Ellwangen +on Wednesday at vesper bells. + +When Eva Koenig, Lessing's _fiancee_, was on her way from Brunswick to +Nuremberg in 1772, she wrote to him from Rattelsdorf (two miles north +of Bamberg), on February 28th, as follows: + + You will certainly never in your life have heard of a village + called Rattelsdorf? We have been in it already twenty-four hours, + and who knows if we shall not have to stay four times as long! It + depends on the Maine, whether it falls or not; as it is now, one + could not cross it, even if one dared to. I have never in my life + met with so many hindrances, so many dangers and hardships, as on + this journey. I can hardly think of any misfortunes which we have + not already had. + +She goes on to describe that in thirty-eight hours two axles and two +poles had been broken, the horses had bolted with them, one horse had +fallen and died, and so on; on March 2nd they were still prisoners in +the wretched village. + +In 1750 a day's journey was still reckoned at five miles, two hours +to the mile; and when in July 1750 Klopstock travelled with Gleim +from Halberstadt to Magdeburg in a light carriage drawn by four +horses, at the rate of six miles in six hours, he thought this speed +remarkable enough to merit comparison with the racing in the Olympian +games. People of any pretensions shunned the discomforts of +travelling on foot--the bad roads, the insecurity, the dirty inns, +and the rough treatment in them; to walk abroad in good clothes and +admire the scenery was an unknown thing. (G. Freytag.) + +It was only after the widening of thoroughfares, the invention of +steamboats (the first was on the Weser 1827) and railways (1835), +that travelling became commoner and more popular, and feeling for +Nature was thereby increased. + +After the Swiss Alps had been discovered for them, people began to +feel interest in their native mountains; Zimmermann led the way with +his observations on a journey in the Harz 1775, and Gatterer in 1785 +published _A Guide to Travelling in the Harz_ in five volumes. + +In 1806 appeared Nicolas's _Guide to Switzerland_, in 1777 J.T. +Volkmar's _Journey to the Riesengebirge_, and before long each little +country and province, be it Weimar, Mecklenburg, or the Mark, had +discovered a Switzerland within its own boundaries, with mountains as +much like the Swiss Alps as a charming little girl is like a giant. + +It was the opening of men's eyes to the charms of romantic scenery at +home. + +The Isle of Ruegen too, Swedish at that time, with its striking +contrasts of deep blue bays and inlets, chalk rocks and beech woods, +came into fashion with lovers of Nature, especially after the road +from Sagard to Stubbenkamer had been improved[17]--so much so, in +fact, that in 1805 Gruembke was complaining that many people only went +there to feast, not to enjoy the scene: + + You know I am no foe to pleasure, and appreciate my food and + drink after physical exertion as much as any one; but it is + desecration to make that the main object here. In this dreadfully + beautiful wilderness, under these green corridors of beeches, on + the battlements of this great dazzling temple, before this huge + azure mirror of the sea, only high and serious thoughts should + find a place--the whole scene, stamped as it is with majesty and + mystery, seems designed to attract the mind to the hidden life of + the unending world around it. For this, solitude and rest are + necessary conditions, hence one must visit Stubbenkamer either + alone or with intimate and congenial friends. + + + + +CHAPTER XII + +THE UNIVERSAL PANTHEISTIC FEELING OF +MODERN TIMES + + +The eighteenth century, so proudly distinguished as the century of +Frederic the Great and Maria Theresa, Kant and Lessing, Rousseau and +Voltaire, the age of enlightenment, and, above all, of the +Revolution, was the most sentimental period in history. Its feeling +for Nature bore the same stamp. Many of the Anacreontists and +Goettingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but +their horizon was narrow, and though F. Stolberg sang of the sea and +his native mountains, most of them only rang the changes on moonlight +and starlight, pastoral idylls, the joys of spring, and winter +excursions on the ice. Even Rousseau, the prophet of high mountains, +was the child of the same sentimental, self-adoring time; a morbid +strain, call it misanthropy, melancholy, what you will, underlay all +his passion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which +lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful +souls, moonshine poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, and +_La Nouvelle Heloise_, ennobled and purified the tone of the day and +freed it from convention! + +It was by dint of his genius for expression, the gift of finding the +one right word, that he became the world's greatest lyrist: what he +felt became a poem, what he saw a picture. + +To see and to fashion into poetry were one with him, whereas his +predecessors had called out the whole artillery of Olympus--nymphs, +Oreads, Chloe, Phyllis, Damon, Aurora, Echo, and Zephyr--even the +still heavier ordnance of the old Teutonic gods and half-gods, only +to repeat stereotyped ideas, and produce descriptions of scenery, +without lyric thought and feeling. + +But Goethe's genius passed through very evident stages of +development, and found forerunners in Lessing and Herder. + +Lessing's mind was didactic and critical, not lyric, so that his +importance here is a negative one. In laying down the limits of +poetry and painting in _Laocoon_, he attacked the error of his day +which used poetry for pictures, debasing it to mere descriptions of +seasons, places, plants, etc. + +He was dealing with fundamental principles when he said: + + Simonides called painting dumb poetry, and poetry speaking + painting; but ... many modern critics have drawn the crudest + conclusions possible from this agreement between painting and + poetry. At one time they confine poetry within the narrow limits + of painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide + sphere of poetry.... This fault-finding criticism has partially + misled the virtuosos themselves. In poetry a fondness for + description, and in painting a fancy for allegory, has arisen + from the desire to make the one a speaking picture without really + knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem + without having considered in how far painting can express + universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and + degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.... Since the + artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing Nature, and + the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to + a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to + be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently + the most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect must be + chosen. Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the + imagination. The more we see, the more we must be able to + imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see. + +And against descriptive poetry he said: + + When a poetaster, says Horace, can do nothing else, he falls to + describing a grove, an altar, a brook winding through pleasant + meadows, a rushing river, or a rainbow. Pope expressly enjoined + upon every one who would not prove himself unworthy the name of + poet, to abandon as early as possible this fondness for + description. A merely descriptive poem he declared to be a feast + made up of sauces. + +Acute as his distinction was between poetry as the representative art +of actions in time, and painting as the representative art of bodies +in space, he did not give due value to lyric feeling or landscape +painting.[1] They belong to a region in which his sharp, critical +acumen was not at home. + +But his discussions established the position that external objects of +any sort, including Nature in all her various shapes, are not proper +subjects for poetry when taken as Thomson, Brockes, and Haller took +them, by themselves alone, but must first be imbued with human +feeling. And the same holds good of landscape painting. Goethe's +lyrics are the most perfect examples of this blending of the outer +and inner world. + +Lessing's criticisms had a salutary, emancipating effect upon +prevalent taste; but a more positive influence came into play through +Herder's warm predilection for the popular songs, which had been so +long neglected, and for all that rises, as in the Psalms, Homer, +Shakespeare, Ossian, from primitive sources of feeling, and finds +spontaneous expression in poetry. The effect of his pioneering was +marked, especially upon Goethe. Herder understood the revulsion of +feeling from the unnatural restraint of the Pigtail period, and while +holding up the mirror to his own day, he at the same time led its +taste and the expression of it towards what was simple and natural, +by disclosing the treasures which lay hidden in the poetry of the +people. The lyric was freed from the artificiality and convention +which had so long ruled it, and although he did not carry out his +plan of a history of poetry, his collections and his profound remarks +upon them were of great service, sowing a seed that bore fruit in +succeeding days. + +The popular songs to him were children of the same mother as the +plants and flowers. 'All the songs of such unlettered folk,'[2] he +said, 'weave a living world around existing objects, actions, and +events. How rich and manifold they all become! And the eye can +actually see them, the mind realize them; they are set in motion. The +different parts of the song are no more connected together than the +trees and bushes in a wood, the rocks in a desert, or the scenes +depicted.' In another place[3] he put the history of feeling for +Nature very tersely: 'There is no doubt that the spirit of man is +made gentler by studying Nature. What did the classics aim at in +their Georgics, but under various shapes to make man more humane and +raise him gradually to order, industry, and prosperity, and to the +power to observe Nature?...' Hence, when poetry revived in the Middle +Ages, she soon recollected the true land of her birth among the +plants and flowers. The Provencal and the romantic poets loved the +same descriptions. Spenser, for instance, has charming stanzas about +beautiful wilds with their streams and flowers; Cowley's six books on +plants, vegetables, and trees are written with extraordinary +affection and a superfluity of imagination; and of our old Brockes, +Gessner says: 'He observed Nature's many beauties down to their +finest minutiae, the smallest things move his tender feelings; a +dewdrop on a blade of grass in the sunshine inspires him. His scenes +are often too laboured, too wide in scope, but still his poems are a +storehouse of pictures direct from Nature. Haller's _Alps_, Kleist's +poems and Gessner's, Thomson's _Seasons_, speak for themselves.' + +He delighted in Shaftesbury's praises of Nature as the good and +beautiful in the _Moralists_, and translated it[4]; in fact, in +Herder we have already an aesthetic cult of the beauties of Nature. + +After the moral disquisitions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, etc., +Nature's influence on man, moral and aesthetic, became, as we have +already seen, a favourite theme in Germany too, both in pious and +rationalistic circles[5]; but there are few traces of any aesthetic +analysis. + +The most important one was Kant's, in his _Observations on the +Beautiful and Sublime_ in 1764. He distinguished, in the finer +feeling for Nature, a feeling for the sublime and a feeling for the +beautiful. + + Both touch us pleasantly, but in different ways. The sight of a + mountain with a snowy peak reaching above the clouds, the account + of a storm ... these excite pleasure, but mixed with awe; while + flowery meadows, valleys with winding streams and covered by + browsing herds, a description of Elysium ... also cause pleasant + feelings, but of a gay and radiant kind. To appreciate the first + sensations adequately, we must have a feeling for the sublime; to + appreciate the second, a feeling for the beautiful. + +He mentioned tall oaks, lonely shades in consecrated groves, and +night-time, as sublime; day, beds of flowers, low hedges, and trees +cut into shapes, as beautiful. + + Minds which possess the feeling for the sublime are inclined to + lofty thoughts of friendship, scorn of the world, eternity, by + the quiet stillness of a summer evening, when the twinkling + starlight breaks the darkness. The light of day impels to + activity and cheerfulness. The sublime soothes, the beautiful + stimulates. + +He goes on to subdivide the sublime: + + This feeling is sometimes accompanied by horror or by dejection, + sometimes merely by quiet admiration, at other times by a sense + of wide-spread beauty. I will call the first the terrible, the + second the noble, the third the splendid sublime. + + Profound solitude is sublime, but in a terrible way. This is why + great deserts, like the Desert of Gamo in Tartary, have always + been the supposed abode of fearful shades, hobgoblins, and + ghostly spectres. The sublime is always great and simple; the + beautiful may be small, elaborate, and ornamental. + +He tried, too, to define the romantic in Nature, though very vaguely: + + The dreadful variety of the sublime, when quite unnatural, is + adventurous. When sublimity or beauty is excessive, it is called + romantic. + +In his _Kalligone_, which appeared in 1800, Herder quoted Kant in +making one of the characters say, 'One calls day beautiful, night +sublime,' and tried to carry the idea a step further; 'The sublime +and beautiful are not opposed to each other, but stem and boughs of a +tree whose top is the most sublimely beautiful of all,' that is the +romantic. In the same book he attempted to analyze his impressions of +Nature, calling a rugged place odious, an insignificant one without +character tedious. 'In the presence of great mountains,' he says, +'the spirit is filled with bold aspirations, whereas in gentle +valleys it lies quiet.' Harmony in variety was his ideal, like the +sea in storm and calm. 'An ocean of beautiful forms in rest and +movement.' + +And in reference to the contrast between a place made 'dreadful and +horrible' by a torrent dashing over rocks and a quiet and charming +valley, he said: 'These changes follow unalterable laws, which are +recognized by our minds, and in harmony with our feelings.' He saw +the same order in variety among plants, from the highest to the +lowest, from palm tree to moss. In the second part of the book he +gave an enthusiastic description of the sublime in sky and sea. + +His beautiful words on the inspiration of Nature shew his insight +into her relation to the poet soul of the people: + + Everything in Nature must be inspired by life, or it does not + move me, I do not feel it. The cooling zephyr and the morning + sunbeam, the wind blowing through the trees, and the fragrant + carpet of flowers, must cool, warm, pervade us--then we feel + Nature. The poet does not say he feels her, unless he feels her + intensely, living, palpitating and pervading him, like the wild + Nature of Ossian, or the soft luxuriant Nature of Theocritus and + the Orientals. In Nature, the more varieties the better; for + instance, in a beautiful country I rustle with the wind and + become alive (and give life--inspire), I inhale fragrance and + exhale it with the flowers; I dissolve in water; I float in the + blue sky; I feel all these feelings. + +Herder touched the lyre himself with a skilful hand. Thought +predominated with him, but he could make Nature live in his song.[7] +'I greet thee, thou wing of heaven,' he sang to the lark; and to the +rainbow, 'Beautiful child of the sun, picture and hope over dark +clouds ... hopes are colours, are broken sun-rays and the children of +tears, truth is the sun.' + +In _By the Sea at Naples_ he wrote: + + A-weary of the summer's fiery brand, + I sat me down beside the cooling sea, + Where the waves heaving, rolled and kissed the strand + Of the grey shore, ... + And over me, high over in the air, + Of the blue skyey vault, rustled the tree ... + Queen of all trees, slender and beautiful, + The pine tree, lifting me to golden dreams. + +In _Recollections of Naples_: + + Yes! they are gone, those happy, happy hours + Joyous but short, by Posilippo's bay! + Sweet dream of sea and lake, of rock and hill, + Grotto and island, and the mirrored sun + In the blue water--thou hast passed away! + +and + + When the glow of evening softly fades + From the still sea, and with her gleaming host + The moon ascends the sky. + +_Night_ is very poetic: + + And comest thou again, + Thou Mother of the stars and heavenly thoughts? + Divine and quiet Mother, comest thou? + The earth awaits thee, from thy chalice cup + But one drop of thy heavenly dew to quaff, + Her flowers bend low their heads; + And with them, satiate with vision, droops + My overcharged soul.... + O starry goddess with the crown of gold, + Upon whose wide-spread sable mantle gleam + A thousand worlds ... + Silence divine, that filleth all the world, + Flowing so softly to the eternal shores + Of an eternal universe.... + +And in _St John's Night_, he exclaims: + + Infinite, ah! inexhaustible art thou, Mother Nature! + +Like the rest, Herder suffered from the over-sensitiveness of his +day. His correspondence with his _fiancee_ shews this[8]; one sees +Rousseau's influence: + + My pleasantest hours are when, quite alone, I walk in a charming + wood close to Bueckeburg, or lie upon a wall in the shade of my + garden, or lastly, for we have had capital moonlight for three + nights, and the last was the best of all, when I enjoy these + hours of sweetly sleeping night with all the songs of the + nightingale. + + I reckon no hours more delightful than those of green solitude. I + live so romantically alone, and among woods and churches, as only + poets, lovers, and philosophers can live. + +And his _fiancee_ wrote: + + 'Tis all joy within and around me since I have known thee, my + best beloved: every plant and flower, everything in Nature, seems + beautiful to me. + +and + + I went early to my little room; the moon was quite covered by + clouds, and the night so melancholy from the croaking of the + frogs, that I could not leave the window for a long time: my + whole soul was dark and cloudy; I thought of thee, my dear one, + and that thought, that sigh, reduced me to tears. + +and + + Do you like the ears of wheat so much? I never pass a cornfield + without stroking them. + +Goethe focussed all the rays of feeling for Nature which had found +lyrical expression before him, and purged taste, beginning with his +own, of its unnatural and sickly elements. So he became the +liberating genius of modern culture. Not only did German lyric poetry +reach its climax in him; but he was the most accurate, individual, +and universal interpreter of German feeling for Nature. + +His wide original mind kept open house for the most diverse elements +of feeling, and exercised an ennobling control upon each and all at +will; Homer's naivete, Shakespeare's sympathy, Rousseau's enthusiasm, +even Ossian's melancholy, found room there. + +While most love lyrics of his day were false in feeling, mere raving +extravagances, and therefore poor in those metaphors and comparisons +which prove sympathy between Nature and the inner life, it could be +said of him that 'Nature wished to know what she looked like, and so +she created Goethe.' He was the microcosm in which the macrocosm of +modern times was reflected. + +He was more modern and universal than any of his predecessors, and +his insight into Nature and love for her have been rarely equalled in +later days. He did not live, like so many of the elegiac and idyllic +poets of the eighteenth century, a mere dream-life of the +imagination: Goethe stood firmly rooted among the actualities; from +boyhood up, as he said in _Wahrheit und Dichtung_, he had 'a warm +feeling for all objective things.' + +No poet, Klopstock not excepted, was richer in verbal invention, and +many of the phrases and epithets which he coined form in themselves +very striking evidence (which is lost in translation) of his close +and original observation of Nature. + +He has many beautiful comparisons to Nature: + +His lady-love is 'brightly beautiful as morning clouds on yonder +height.' + +'I was wont to look at thee as one looks at the stars and moon, +delighting in thee without the most distant wish in my quiet breast +to possess thee.' + +'I give kisses as the spring gives flowers.' + +'My feeling for thee was like seed, which germinates slowly in +winter, but ripens quickly in summer.' + +The stars move 'with flower feet.' + +The graces are 'pure as the heart of the waters, as the marrow of +earth.' + +A delicate poem is a rainbow only existing against a dark ground. + +In _Stella_: + + Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to + return to thy breast from the sandy desert world. + + I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning. + +In _Faust_: + + The cataract bursting through the rocks is the image of human + effort; its coloured reflection the image of life. + +When Werther feels himself trembling between existence and +non-existence, everything around him sinking away, and the world +perishing with him: + + The past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the + future. + +These are among his still more numerous metaphors: + +A sea of folly, an ocean of fragrance, the waves of battle, the +stream of genius, the tiger claw of despair, the sun-ray of the past. +Iphigenia says to Orestes: + + O let the pure breath of love blow lightly on thy heart's flame + and cool it. + +and Eleonora complains about Tasso: + + Let him go! But what twilight falls round me now! Formerly the + stream carried us along upon the light waves without a rudder. + +In Goethe we see very clearly how the inner life, under the pressure +of its own intensity, will, so to speak, overflow into the outer +world, making that live in its turn; and how this is especially the +case when the amorous passion is present to add its impetus to +feeling, and attribute its own fervour to all around. + +_May Song_, _On the Lake_, _Ganymede_, are instances of this. + +_Ganymede_: + + Oh, what a glow + Around me in morning's + Blaze thou diffusest, + Beautiful spring! + With the rapture of love but intenser, + Intenser and deeper and sweeter, + Nestles and creeps to my heart + The sensation divine + Of thy fervour eternal, + Oh, thou unspeakably fair! + +Beautiful personifications abound: + +The sun is proudly throned in heaven. + +The glowing sun gazes at the rugged peak or charms it with fiery +love, + +Or bathes like the moon in the ocean. + +The parting glance of Mother Sun broods on the grapes. + +'Morning came frightening away light sleep with its footsteps.' + +'The young day arose with delight.' + +The moon: 'Thou spreadest thy glance soothingly over my abode.' + +On a cloudy night: 'Evening already rocked earth, and night hung on +the mountains; from a hill of clouds the moon looked mournfully out +of the mist.' + +'The lofty stars turn their clear eyes down to me.' + +Even the rock lives: 'The hard rock opens its bosom, not envying +earth its deep springs.' + +The stream: 'Thou hurriest on with joyful light mood; see the rock +spring bright with the glance of the stars, yet no shady valley, no +flowers make him tarry ... his course winds downwards to the plain, +then he scatters in delightful spray, in cloud waves ... foams +gloomily to the abyss.' + + With gradual step from out the far-off grey, + Self-heralded draws on the storm. + Birds on the wing fly low across the water, weighted down, + And seamen hasten to reef in the sail + Before its stubborn wrath. + +His flowers are alive: + + The beauteous snowdrops + Droop o'er the plain, + The crocus opens + Its glowing bud ... + With saucy gesture + Primroses flare, + And roguish violets + Hidden with care. + +But these are only examples. To obtain a clear idea of Goethe's +attitude, we must take a more general survey of his work, for his +poetic relationship to Nature, like his mental development in +general, passed through various stages of growth. That it was a warm +one even in youth is shewn by the letter in 1766 from Leipzig[9]: + + You live contented in M. I even so here. Lonely, lonely, + altogether lonely. Dearest Riese, this loneliness has impressed + my soul with a certain sadness. + + This solitary joy is mine, + When far apart from all mankind, + By shady brook-side to recline. + And keep my loved ones in my mind.... + +He goes on with these lines: + + Then is my heart with sorrow filled, + Sad is mine eye. + The flooded brook now rages by, + That heretofore so gently rilled. + No bird sings in the bushes now, + The tree so green is dry, + The zephyr which on me did blow + So cheering, now storms northerly, + And scattered blossoms bears on high. + +He was already in full sympathy with Nature. A few of his earlier +poems[10] shew prevalent taste, the allusions to Zephyr and Lima, for +instance, in _Night_; but they are followed by lines which are all +his own. + +He had an incomparable way of striking the chords of love and Nature +together. + +Where his lady-love dwells, 'there is love, and goodness is Nature.' +He thinks of her + + When the bright sunlight shimmers + Across the sea, + When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers. + + Thou art seductive and charming; flowers, + Sun, moon, and stars only worship thee. + +There is passionate feeling for Nature in the _May Song_ of his +Sesenheimer period: + + How gloriously gleameth + All Nature to me! + How bright the sun beameth, + How fresh is the lea! + White blossoms are bursting + The thickets among, + And all the gay greenwood + Is ringing with song! + There's radiance and rapture + That nought can destroy, + Oh earth, in thy sunshine, + Oh heart, in thy joy. + Oh love! thou enchanter + So golden and bright, + Like the red clouds of morning + That rest on yon height, + It is them that art clothing + The fields and the bowers, + And everywhere breathing + The incense of flowers. + +Looking back in old age to those happy days of youth, he saw in +memory not only Frederica but the scenery around her. He said +(_Wahrheit und Dichtung_): 'Her figure never looked more charming +than when she was moving along a raised footpath; the charm of her +bearing seemed to vie with the flowering ground, and the +indestructible cheerfulness of her face with the blue sky.' In Alsace +he wrote: + + One has only to abandon oneself to the present in order to enjoy + the charms of the sky, the glow of the rich earth, the mild + evenings, the warm nights, at the side of one's love, or near + her. + +and one of the poems to Frederica says: + + The world lies round me buried deep in mist, but + In one glance of thine lies sunshine and happiness. + +There is a strong pulse of life--life that overflows into Nature--in +_The Departure_: + + To horse! Away, o'er hill and steep, + Into the saddle blithe I spring; + The eve was cradling earth to sleep, + And night upon the mountains hung. + With robes of mist around him set, + The oak like some huge giant stood, + While, with its hundred eyes of jet, + Peer'd darkness from the tangled wood. + Amid a bank of clouds the moon + A sad and troubled glimmer shed; + The wind its chilly wings unclosed, + And whistled wildly round my head. + Night framed a thousand phantoms dire, + Yet did I never droop nor start; + Within my veins what living fire! + What quenchless glow within my heart! + +And very like it, though in a minor key, is the Elegy which begins, +'A tender, youthful trouble.' + +He tells in _Wahrheit und Dichtung_ how he found comfort for his love +troubles in Frankfort: + + They were accustomed to call me, on account of wandering about + the district, the 'wanderer.' In producing that calm for the + mind, which I felt under the open sky, in the valleys, on the + heights, in the fields, and in the woods, the situation of + Frankfort was serviceable.... On the setting in of winter a new + world was revealed to us, since I at once determined to skate.... + For this new joyous activity we were also indebted to Klopstock, + to his enthusiasm for this happy species of motion.... To pass a + splendid Sunday thus on the ice did not satisfy us, we continued + in movement late into the night.... The full moon rising from the + clouds, over the wide nocturnal meadows which were frozen into + fields of ice, the night breeze which rustled towards us on our + course, the solemn thunder of the ice which sunk as the water + decreased, the strange echo of our own movements, rendered the + scenes of Ossian just present to our minds. + +His attachment, to Lotte, stirred far deeper feelings than the +earlier ones to Frederica and Lilli: + + (If I, my own dear Lilli, loved thee not, How should I joy to + view this scene so fair! And yet if I, sweet Lilli, loved thee + not, Should I be happy here or anywhere?) + +and drew him correspondingly nearer to Nature. + +There is no book in any language which so lives and moves and has its +being in Nature as _Werther_.[11] In _Wahrheit und Dichtung_ Goethe +said of the 'strange element' in which _Werther_ was designed and +written: + + I sought to free myself internally from all that was foreign to + me, to regard the external with love, and to allow all beings, + from man downwards, as low as they were comprehensible, to act + upon me, each after its own kind. Thus arose a wonderful affinity + with the single objects of Nature, and a hearty concord, a + harmony with the whole, so that every change, whether of place or + region, or of the times of the day and year, or whatever else + could happen, affected me in the deepest manner. The glance of + the painter associated itself with that of the poet; the + beautiful rural landscape, animated by the pleasant river, + increased my love of solitude and favoured my silent observations + as they extended on all sides. + +The strong influence of _La Nouvelle Heloise_ upon _Werther_ was very +evident, but there was a marked difference between Goethe's feeling +for Nature and Rousseau's. Rousseau had the painter's eye, but not +the keen poetic vision. + +Goethe's romances are pervaded by the penetrating quality peculiar to +his nation, and by virtue of which in _Werther_, the outer world, the +scenery, was not used as framework, but was always interwoven with +the hero's mood. The contrast between culture and Nature is always +marked in Rousseau, and his religion was deism; Goethe resolves +Nature into feeling, and his religion was a growing pantheism. As a +work of art, _Werther_ is excellent, _La Nouvelle Heloise_ is not. +Goethe used his hero's bearing towards Nature with marvellous effect +to indicate the turns and changes of his moods, just as he indicated +the threatening calamity and the growing apprehension of it by +skilful stress laid upon some of her little traits--a faculty which +only Theodore Storm among later poets has caught from him. + +The growth of amorous passion is portrayed as an elementary force, +and the revolutionary element in the book really consists in the +strength of this passion and the assertion of its natural rights. +Everything artificial, forced, conventional, in thought, act, and +feeling--and what at that time was not?--was repugnant to Werther; +what he liked most of all was the simplicity of children and +uneducated people. + + Nothing distresses me more than to see men torment each other; + particularly when in the flower of their age, in the very season + of pleasure, they waste their few short days of sunshine in + quarrels and disputes, and only perceive their error when it is + too late to repair it. + +To such intense sympathy as this, all that had been sung ere now by +German poets had to give place. Nature, which hitherto had played no +_role_ at all in fiction, not even among the English, was Werther's +truest and most intimate friend. + +Werther is sensitive and sentimental, though in a single-hearted way, +with a sentimentality that reminds us more and more, as the story +proceeds, of the gloomy tone of Ossian and Young. He is a thoroughly +original character, who feels that he is right so to be; and although +he falls a prey to his melancholy, yet there is much more force and +thought in his outpourings than in all the moonshine tirades that +preceded him. It is the work of a true poet, in the best days of a +brilliant youth. + +Werther, like Rousseau, was happiest in solitude. Solitude, in the +'place like paradise,' was precious balm to his feeling heart, which +he considers 'like a sick child'; and the 'warm heavenly imagination +of the heart' illuminates Nature round him--his 'favourite valley,' +the 'sweet spring morning,' Nature's 'unspeakable beauty.' He was +absorbed in artistic feeling, though he could not draw; 'I could not +draw them, not a stroke, and have never been a greater artist than at +that moment.' His power lay in imbuing his whole subject with +feeling; he felt the heart of Nature beating, and its echo in his own +breast. + + When the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the + meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable + foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the + inner sanctuary, then I throw myself down in the tall grass by + the trickling stream; and as I lie close to the earth, a thousand + unknown plants discover themselves to me. When I hear the buzz of + the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the + countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I + feel the presence of the Almighty who formed us in His own image, + and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains + us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my + friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth + seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the idea of a + beloved mistress, then I often long and think: O that you could + describe these conceptions, that you could impress upon paper all + that lives so full and warm within you, that it might be the + mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite + God! + + O! my friend! but it is too much for my strength. I sink under + the weight of the grandeur of these visions. + +Werther could not express all his love for Nature, but the secret of +it lay in the power to bring his own world of thought and feeling +into communion with her, and so give her speech. He divined something +immortal in her akin to himself. 'The true feeling of Nature,' he +said, 'is love.' He poured 'the stream of his genius' over her, and +she became 'dear and familiar' to him.... The simple homely scenery +delighted him--the valley, the brook, the fine walnut trees. + + When I go out at sunrise in the morning to Walheim, and with my + own hands gather the peas in the garden, which are to serve for + my dinner; when I sit down to shell them and read my Homer during + the intervals, and then, selecting a saucepan from the kitchen, + fetch my own butter, put my mess on the fire, cover it up.... + Nothing fills me with a more pure and genuine sense of happiness + than those traits of patriarchal life, which, thank heaven, I can + imitate without affectation. + +With the growth of his love-passion his feeling for Nature increased; +on July 24th he wrote: + + I never felt happier, I never understood Nature better, even down + to the veriest stem or smallest blade of grass. + +Then Albert came on the scene, and love became a torment, and Nature +a tormentor: + + _August_ 18.--Must it ever be thus, that the source of our + happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and + ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of Nature, + overwhelming me with a torrent of delight, and which brought all + paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a + demon which perpetually pursues and harasses me. When in bye-gone + days I gazed from these rocks upon yonder mountains across the + river and upon the green flowery valley before me, and saw all + nature budding and bursting around--the hills clothed from foot + to peak with tall thick forest trees, the valleys in all their + varied windings shaded with the loveliest woods, and the soft + river gliding along amongst the lisping reeds, mirroring the + beautiful clouds which the soft evening breeze wafted across the + sky--when I heard the groves about me melodious with the music of + birds, and saw the million swarms of insects dancing in the last + golden beams of the sun, whose setting rays awoke the humming + beetles from their grassy beds, whilst the subdued tumult around + directed my attention to the ground, and I there observed the + arid rock compelled to yield nutriment to the dry moss, whilst + the heath flourished upon the barren sands below me--all this + displayed to me the inner warmth which animates all Nature, and + filled and glowed within my heart. I felt myself exalted by this + overflowing fulness to the perception of the Godhead, and the + glorious forms of an infinite universe became visible to my + soul.... From the inaccessible mountains across the desert, which + no mortal foot has trod, far as the confines of the unknown + ocean, breathes the spirit of the eternal Creator, and every atom + to which He has given existence finds favour in His sight. Ah! + how often at that time has the flight of a bird soaring above my + head inspired me with the desire of being transported to the + shores of the immeasurable waters, there to quaff the pleasure of + life from the foaming goblet of the infinite, and to partake, if + but for a moment, even with the confined powers of my soul, the + beatitude of the Creator, who accomplishes all things in himself + and through himself.... It is as if a curtain had been drawn from + before my eyes.... My heart is wasted by the thought of that + destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal + nature--Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself + and every object near it; so that, surrounded by earth, and air, + and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart, + and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring + its own offspring.... If in such moments I find no sympathy ... I + either wander through the country, climb some precipitous cliff, + or force a path through the trackless thicket, where I am + lacerated and torn by thorns and briars, and thence I find + relief. + +Then, as he was going away, he felt how sympathetic the place had +been to him: + + I was walking up and down the very avenue which was so dear to + me--a secret sympathy had frequently drawn me thither.... + +the moon rose from behind a hill, increasing his melancholy, and +Charlotte put his feeling into words, saying (like Klopstock): + + _September_ 10.--Whenever I walk by moonlight, it brings to my + remembrance all my beloved and departed friends, and I am filled + with thoughts of death and futurity. + +Even in his misery he realises the [Greek: charisgoon] of Euripides, +Petrarch's _dolendi voluptas_--the _Wonne der Wehmuth_. + +On September 4th he wrote: + + It is even so! As Nature puts on her autumn tints, it becomes + autumn with me and around me. My leaves are sere and yellow, and + the neighbouring trees are divested of their foliage. + +It was due to this autumn feeling that he could say: + + Ossian has superseded Homer in my heart. To what a world does the + illustrious bard carry me! To wander over pathless wilds, + surrounded by impetuous whirlwinds, where, by the feeble light of + the moon, we see the spirits of our ancestors; to hear from the + mountain tops, 'mid the roar of torrents, their plaintive sounds + issuing from deep caverns.... And this heart is now dead; no + sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry, and my senses, no more + refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my + brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life, + that active sacred power which created worlds around me, and it + is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills and + behold the morning sun breaking through the mists and + illuminating the country round it which is still wrapt in + silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows + which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all + her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are + ineffectual to attract one tear of joy from my withered heart.... + +On November 30th he wrote: 'About dinner-time I went to walk by the +river side, for I had no appetite,' and goes on in the tone of +Ossian: + + Everything around me seemed gloomy: a cold and damp easterly wind + blew from the mountains, and black heavy clouds spread over the + plain. + +and in the dreadful night of the flood: + + Upon the stroke of twelve I hastened forth. I beheld a fearful + sight. The foaming torrents rolled from the mountains in the + moonlight; fields and meadows, trees and hedges, were confounded + together, and the entire valley was converted into a deep lake + which was agitated by the roaring wind. And when the moon shone + forth and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous + torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand + impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of awe and + delight. With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss, + and cried 'Plunge!' For a moment my senses forsook me, in the + intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a + plunge into that gulf. + +To his farewell letter he adds: + + Yes, Nature! put on mourning. Your child, your friend, your + lover, draws near his end. + +The genuine poetic pantheism, which, for all his melancholy and +sentimentality, was the spring of Werther's feeling, is seen in +loftier and more comprehensive form in the first part of _Faust_, +when Faust opens the book and sees the sign of macrocosmos: + + How all things live and work, and ever blending, + Weave one vast whole from Being's ample range! + How powers celestial, rising and descending, + Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange. + Their flight on rapture-breathing pinions winging, + From heaven to earth their genial influence bringing, + Through the wide whole their chimes melodious ringing. + +And the Earth spirit says: + + In the currents of life, in action's storm, + I float and I wave + With billowy motion,-- + Birth and the grave + A limitless ocean. + +Not only of knowledge of, but of feeling for, Nature, it is said: + + Inscrutable in broadest light, + To be unveiled by force she doth refuse. + +But Faust is in deep sympathy with her; witness: + + Thou full-orbed moon! Would thou wert gazing now + For the last time upon my troubled brow! + +and + + Loos'd from their icy fetters, streams and rills + In spring's effusive, quick'ning mildness flow, + Hope's budding promise every valley fills. + And winter, spent with age, and powerless now, + Draws off his forces to the savage hills. + +and the idyllic evening mood, which gives way to a burst of longing: + + In the rich sunset see how brightly glow + Yon cottage homes girt round with verdant green. + Slow sinks the orb, the day is now no more; + Yonder he hastens to diffuse new light. + Oh! for a pinion from the earth to soar, + And after, ever after him to strive! + Then should I see the world outspread below, + Illumined by the deathless evening beams, + The vales reposing, every height aglow, + The silver brooklets meeting golden streams.... + Alas! that when on Spirit wing we rise, + No wing material lifts our mortal clay. + But 'tis our inborn impulse, deep and strong, + To rush aloft, to struggle still towards heaven, + When far above us pours its thrilling song + The skylark lost amid the purple even, + When on extended pinion sweeps amain + The lordly eagle o'er the pine-crowned height. + And when, still striving towards its home, the crane + O'er moor and ocean wings its onward flight. + +But the most complete expression of Goethe's attitude, not only in +the period of _Werther_ and the first part of _Faust_, but generally, +is contained in the _Monologue_, which was probably written not +earlier than the spring of 1788: + + Spirit sublime! Thou gav'st me, gav'st me all + For which I prayed. Not vainly hast thou turn'd + To me thy countenance in flaming fire; + Thou gav'st me glorious Nature for my realm, + And also power to feel her and enjoy; + Not merely with a cold and wond'ring glance, + Thou didst permit me in her depths profound, + As in the bosom of a friend, to gaze; + Before me thou dost lead her living tribes, + And dost in silent grove, in air and stream, + Teach me to know my kindred.... + +His feeling was not admiration alone, nor reverence alone, but the +sympathy of _Childe Harold_: + + Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part + Of me and of my soul, as I of them? + Is not the love of these deep in my heart + With a pure passion? Should I not contemn + All objects, if compared with these? + +and the very confession of faith of such poetic pantheism is in +Faust's words: + + Him who dare name, + And yet proclaim, + Yes, I believe?... + The All-embracer, + All-sustainer, + Doth he not embrace, sustain + Thee, me, himself? + Lifts not the heaven its dome above? + Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us rise? + And beaming tenderly with looks of love, + Climb not the everlasting stars on high? + +The poems which date directly after the Wetzlar period are full of +this sympathetic pantheistic love for Nature--_Mahomet's Song_, for +example, with its splendid comparison of pioneering genius to a +mountain torrent: + + Ho! the spring that bursts + From the mountain height + Joyous and bright, + As the gleam of a star.... + Down in the vale below + Flowers bud beneath his tread ... + And woo him with fond eyes. + And the streamlets of the mountains + Shout to him, and cry out 'Brother'! + Brother! take thy brothers with thee, + With thee to thine ancient father, + To the eternal Ocean, + Who with outstretch'd arms awaits us.... + And so beareth he his brothers + To their primal sire expectant, + All his bosom throbbing, heaving, + With a wild, tumultuous joy. + +We see the same pathos--the pathos of Pindar and the Psalms--in the +comparison: + + Like water is the soul of man, + From heaven it comes, to heaven it goes, + And back again to earth in ceaseless change. + +in the incomparable _Wanderer_, in _Wanderer's Storm Song,_ and, +above all, in _Ganymede_, already given, of which Loeper remarks: + + The poem is, as it were, a rendering of that letter (Werther's of + May 10th) in rhythm. The underlying pantheism had already shewn + itself in the _Wanderer's Storm Song_. It was not the delight in + God of a Brockes, not the adoration of a Klopstock, not sesthetic + enjoyment of Nature, not, as in later years, scientific interest; + it was rather a being absorbed in, identified with, Nature, a + sympathy carried so far that the very ego was surrendered to the + elements. + +On the Lake of Zurich he wrote, June 15th, 1775: + + And here I drink new blood, fresh food, + From world so free, so blest; + How sweet is Nature and how good, + Who holds me to her breast. + +and Elmire sings in _Ermin and Elmire_: + + From thee, O Nature, with deep breath + I drink in painful pleasure. + +One of the gems among his Nature poems is _Autumn Feelings_ (it was +the autumn of his love for Lilli): + + Flourish greener as ye clamber, + O ye leaves, to seek my chamber; + Up the trellised vine on high + May ye swell, twin-berries tender, + Juicier far, and with more splendour + Ripen, and more speedily. + O'er ye broods the sun at even, + As he sinks to rest, and heaven + Softly breathes into your ear + All its fertilizing fulness, + While the moon's refreshing coolness, + Magic-laden, hovers near. + And alas! ye're watered ever + By a stream of tears that rill + From mine eyes--tears ceasing never, + Tears of love that nought can still. + +The lyrical effect here depends upon the blending of a single +impression of Nature with the passing mood--an occasional poem rare +even for Goethe. + +In a letter to Frau von Stein he admitted that he was greatly +influenced by Nature: + + I have slept well and am quite awake, only a quiet sadness lies + upon my soul.... The weather agrees exactly with my state of + mind, and I begin to believe that it is the weather around me + which has the most immediate effect upon me, and the great world + thrills my little one with her own mood. + +Again, _To the Moon_, in the spring 1778, expresses perfect communion +between Nature and feeling: + + Flooded are the brakes and dells + With thy phantom light, + And my soul receives the spell + Of thy mystic night. + To the meadow dost thou send + Something of thy grace, + Like the kind eye of a friend + Beaming on my face. + Echoes of departed times + Vibrate in mine ear, + Joyous, sad, like spirit chimes, + As I wander here. + Flow, flow on, thou little brook, + Ever onward go! + Trusted heart and tender look + Left me even so! + Richer treasure earth has none + Than I once possessed-- + Ah! so rich, that when 'twas gone + Worthless was the rest. + Little brook! adown the vale + Rush and take my song: + Give it passion, give it wail, + As thou leap'st along! + Sound it in the winter night + When thy streams are full, + Murmur it when skies are bright + Mirror'd in the pool. + Happiest he of all created + Who the world can shun, + Not in hate, and yet unhated, + Sharing thought with none, + Save one faithful friend, revealing + To his kindly ear + Thoughts like these, which o'er me stealing, + Make the night so drear. + +In January 1778, he wrote to Frau von Stein about the fate of the +unhappy Chr. von Lassberg, who had drowned himself in the Ilm: + + This inviting grief has something dangerously attractive about + it, like the water itself; and the reflections of the stars, + which gleam from above and below at once, are alluring. + +To the same year belongs _The Fisher_, which gave such melodious +voice to the magic effect of a shimmering expanse of water, 'the +moist yet radiant blue,' upon the mood; just as, later on, _The +Erlking_, with the grey of an autumn evening woven ghostlike round +tree and shrub, made the mind thrill with foreboding. + +Goethe was always an industrious traveller. In his seventieth year he +went to Frankfort, Strassburg, the Rhine, Thuringia, and the Harz +Mountains (Harzreise, 1777): 'We went up to the peaks, and down to +the depths of the earth, and hammered at all the rocks.' His love for +Nature increased with his science; but, at the same time, poetic +expression of it took a more objective form; the passionate +vehemence, the really revolutionary attitude of the _Werther_ period, +gave way to one equally spiritual and intellectual, but more +temperate. + +This transition is clearly seen in the Swiss letters. In his first +Swiss travels, 1775, he was only just free from _Werther_, and his +mind was too agitated for quiet observation: + + Hasten thee, Kronos!... + Over stock and stone let thy trot + Into life straightway lead.... + Wide, high, glorious the view + Gazing round upon life, + While from mount unto mount + Hovers the spirit eterne, + Life eternal foreboding.... + +Far more significant and ripe--in fact, mature--are the letters in +1779, shewing, as they do, the attitude of a man of profound mind, in +the prime of his life and time. He was the first German poet to fall +under the spell of the mountains--the strongest spell, as he held, +which Nature wields in our latitudes. 'These sublime, incomparable +scenes will remain for ever in my mind'; and of one view in +particular, over the mountains of Savoy and Valais, the Lake of +Geneva, and Mont Blanc, he said: 'The view was so great, man's eye +could not grasp it.' + +He wrote of his feelings with perfect openness to Frau von Stein, and +these letters extended farther back than those from Switzerland, and +were partly mixed with them. + +From Selz: + + An uncommonly fine day, a happy country--still all green, only + here and there a yellow beech or oak leaf. Meadows still in their + silver beauty--a soft welcome breeze everywhere. Grapes improving + with every step and every day. Every peasant's house has a vine + up to the roof, and every courtyard a great overhanging arbour. + The air of heaven soft, warm, and moist. The Rhine and the clear + mountains near at hand, the changing woods, meadows, fields like + gardens, do men good, and give me a kind of comfort which I have + long lacked. + +The pen remains as ever the pen of a poet, but he looks at +Switzerland now with a mature, settled taste, analyzing his +impressions, and studying mountains, glaciers, boulders, +scientifically. + +Of the Staubbach Fall, near Lauterbrunnen (Oct. 9th, 1779): + + The clouds broke in the upper air, and the blue sky came through. + Clouds clung to the steep sides of the rocks; even the top where + the Staubbach falls over, was lightly covered. It was a very + noble sight ... then the clouds came down into the valley and + covered all the foreground. The great wall over which the water + falls, still stood out on the right. Night came on.... In the + Munsterthal, through which we came, everything was lofty, but + more within the mind's power of comprehension than these. In + comparison with the immensities, one is, and must remain, too + small. + +And after visiting the Berne glacier from Thun (Oct. 14): + + It is difficult to write after all this ... the first glance from + the mountain is striking, the district is surprisingly extensive + and pleasant ... the road indescribably beautiful ... the view + from the Lake of Brienz towards the snow mountains at sunset is + great. + +More eloquent is the letter of October 3rd, from the Munsterthal: + + The passage through this defile roused in me a grand but calm + emotion. The sublime produces a beautiful calmness in the soul, + which, entirely possessed by it, feels as great as it ever can + feel. How glorious is such a pure feeling, when it rises to the + very highest without overflowing. My eye and my soul were both + able to take in the objects before me, and as I was preoccupied + by nothing, and had no false tastes to counteract their + impression, they had on me their full and natural effect. When we + compare such a feeling with that we are sensible of, when we + laboriously harass ourselves with some trifle, and strain every + nerve to gain as much as possible for it, and, as it were, to + patch it out, striving to furnish joy and aliment to the mind + from its own creation; we then feel sensibly what a poor + expedient, after all, the latter is.... + + When we see such objects as these for the first time, the + unaccustomed soul has to expand itself, and this gives rise to a + sort of painful joy, an overflowing of emotion which agitates the + mind and draws from us the most delicious tears.... If only + destiny had bidden me to dwell in the midst of some grand + scenery, then would I every morning have imbibed greatness from + its grandeur, as from a lonely valley I would extract patience + and repose. + + One guesses in the dark about the origin and existence of these + singular forms.... These masses must have been formed grandly and + simply by aggregation. Whatever revolutions may subsequently have + up-heaved, rent, and divided them ... the idea of such nightly + commotions gives one a deep feeling of the eternal stability of + the masses.... One feels deeply convinced that here there is + nothing accidental, that here there is working an eternal law + which, however slowly, yet surely governs the universe. + +By the Lake of Geneva, where he thought of Rousseau, he went up the +Dole: + + The whole of the Pays de Vaux and de Gex lay like a plan before + us ... we kept watching the mist, which gradually retired ... one + by one we distinctly saw Lausanne ... Vevey.... There are no + words to express the beauty and grandeur of this view ... the + line of glittering glaciers was continually drawing the eye back + again to the mountains. + +From Cluse he wrote: + + The air was as warm as it usually is at the beginning of + September, and the country we travelled through beautiful. Many + of the trees still green; most of them had assumed a + brownish-yellow tint, but only a few were quite bare. The crops + were rich and verdant, the mountains caught from the red sunset a + rosy hue blended with violet, and all these rich tints were + combined with grand, beautiful, and agreeable forms of the + landscape. + +At Chamouni, about effects of light: + + Here too again it seemed to us as if the sun had first of all + attracted the light mists which evaporated from the tops of the + glaciers, and then a gentle breeze had, as it were, combed the + fine vapours like a fleece of foam over the atmosphere. I never + remember at home, even in the height of summer, to have seen any + so transparent, for here it was a perfect web of light. + +At the Col de Baume: + + Whilst I am writing, a remarkable phenomenon is passing along the + sky. The mists, which are shifting about and breaking in some + places, allow you through their openings, as through skylights, + to catch a glimpse of the blue sky, while at the same time the + mountain peaks, rising above our roofs of vapour, are illuminated + by the sun's rays.... + +At Leukertad, at the foot of the Gemmi, he wrote (Nov. 9th): + + The clouds which gather here in this valley, at one time + completely hiding the immense rocks and absorbing them in a waste + impenetrable gloom, or at another letting a part of them be seen + like huge spectres, give to the people a cast of melancholy. In + the midst of such natural phenomena, the people are full of + presentiments and forebodings ... and the eternal and intrinsic + energy of his (man's) nature feels itself at every nerve moved to + forebode and to indulge in presentiments. + +On the way across the Rhine glacier to the Furka, he felt the +half-suggestive, half-distressing sense of mountain loneliness: + + It was a strange sight ... in the most desolate region of the + world, in a boundless monotonous wilderness of mountains + enveloped in snow, where for three leagues before and behind you + would not expect to meet a living soul, while on both sides you + had the deep hollows of a web of mountains, you might see a line + of men wending their way, treading each in the deep footsteps of + the one before him, and where, in the whole of the wide expanse + thus smoothed over, the eye could discern nothing but the track + they left behind them. The hollows, as we left them, lay behind + us grey and boundless in the mist. The changing clouds + continually passed over the pale disc of the sun, and spread over + the whole scene a perpetually moving veil. + +He sums up the impressions made on him with: + + The perception of such a long chain of Nature's wonders, excites + within me a secret and inexpressible feeling of enjoyment. + +The most profound change in his mental life was brought about by his +visit to Italy, 1786-87. The poetic expression of this refining +process, this striving towards the classic ideal, towards Sophrosyne, +was _Iphigenia_. + +Its effect upon his feeling for Nature appeared in a more +matter-of-fact tone; the man of feeling gave way to the scientific +observer. + +He had, as he said (Oct. 30th, 1887), lately 'acquired the habit of +looking only at things, and not, as formerly, seeing with and in the +things what actually was not there.' + +He no longer imputed his feelings to Nature, and studied her +influence on himself, but looked at her with impersonal interest. +Weather, cloud, mountain formation, the species of stone, landscape, +and social themes, were all treated almost systematically as so much +diary memoranda for future use. There was no artistic treatment in +such jottings; meteorology, botany, and geology weighed too heavily. + +The question, 'Is a place beautiful?' paled beside 'Is its soil +clay?' 'Are its rocks quartz, chalk, or mica schist?' The problem of +the archetypal plant was more absorbing than the finest groups of +trees. The years of practical life at Weimar, and, above all, the +ever-growing interest in science, were the chief factors in this +change, which led him, as he said in his _Treatise on Granite_, + + from observation and description of the human heart, that part of + creation which is the most youthful, varied, unstable, and + destructible, to observation of that Son of Nature, which is the + oldest, deepest, most stable, most indestructible. + +The enthusiastic subjective realism of stormy youth was replaced by +the measured objective realism of ripe manhood. Hence the difference +between his letters from Switzerland and those from Italy, where this +inner metamorphosis was completed; as he said, 'Between Weimar and +Palermo I have had many changes.' + +For all that, he revelled in the beauty of Italy. As he once said: + + It is natural to me to revere the great and beautiful willingly + and with pleasure; and to develop this predisposition day by day + and hour by hour by means of such glorious objects, is the most + delightful feeling. + +The sea made a great impression upon him: + + I set out for the Lido...landed, and walked straight across the + isthmus. I heard a loud hollow murmur--it was the sea! I soon saw + it; it crested high against the shore as it retired, it was about + noon and time of ebb. I have then at last seen the sea with my + own eyes, and followed it on its beautiful bed, just as it + quitted it. + +But further on he only remarks: 'The sea is a great sight.' +Elsewhere, too, it is only noticed very shortly. + +Rome stimulated his mind to increased productiveness, and, partly for +this reason, he could not assimilate all the new impressions which +poured in upon him from without, from ruins, paintings, churches, +palaces, the life of the people. He drew a great deal too; from +Frascati he wrote (Nov. 15th, 1786): + + The country around is very pleasant; the village lies on the side + of a hill, or rather of a mountain, and at every step the + draughtsman comes upon the most glorious objects. The prospect is + unbounded. Rome lies before you, and beyond it on the right is + the sea, the mountains of Tivoli, and so on. + +In Rome itself (Feb. 2nd, 1787): + + Of the beauty of a walk through Rome by moonlight it is + impossible to form a conception without having witnessed it. + +During Carnival (Feb. 21st): + + The sky, so infinitely fine and clear, looked down nobly and + innocently upon the mummeries. + +In the voyage to Sicily: + + At noon we went on board; the weather being extremely fine, we + enjoyed the most glorious of views. The corvette lay at anchor + near to the Mole. With an unclouded sun the atmosphere was hazy, + giving to the rocky walls of Sorrento, which were in the shade, a + tint of most beautiful blue. Naples with its living multitudes + lay in full sunshine, and glittered brilliantly with countless + tints. + +and on April 1st: + + With a cloudy sky, a bright but broken moonlight, the reflection + on the sea was infinitely beautiful. + +At first, Italy, and especially Rome, felt strange to him, in +scenery, sky, contour, and colour. It was only by degrees that he +felt at home there. + +He refers to this during his second visit to Rome in a notable +remark, which aptly expresses the faculty of apperception--the link +between us and the unfamiliar, which enables mental growth. + +June 16th, 1787: + + One remark more! Now for the first time do the trees, the rocks, + nay, Rome itself, grow dear to me; hitherto I have always felt + them as foreign, though, on the other hand, I took pleasure in + minor subjects having some resemblance to those I saw in youth. + +On August 18th, 1787, he wrote: + + Yesterday before sunrise I drove to Acqua Acetosa. Verily, one + might well lose his senses in contemplating the clearness, the + manifoldness, the dewy transparency, the heavenly hue of the + landscape, especially in the distance. + +In October, when he heard of the engagement of a beautiful Milanese +lady with whom he had fallen in love: + + I again turned me instantly to Nature, as a subject for + landscapes, a field I had been meanwhile neglecting, and + endeavoured to copy her in this respect with the utmost fidelity. + I was, however, more successful in mastering her with my eyes.... + All the sensual fulness which that region offers us in rocks and + trees, in acclivities and declivities, in peaceful lakes and + lively streams, all this was grasped by my eye more + appreciatively, if possible, than ever before, and I could hardly + resent the wound which had to such degree sharpened my inward and + outward sense. + +On leaving Rome, he wrote: + + Three nights before, the full moon shone in the clearest heaven, + and the enchantment shed over the vast town, though often felt + before, was never felt so keenly as now. The great masses of + light, clear as in mild daylight, the contrast of deep shades, + occasionally relieved by reflexions dimly portraying details, all + this transported us as if into another, a simpler and a greater, + world. + +The later diaries on his travels are sketchy throughout, and more +laconic and objective: for example, at Schaffhausen (Sept. 18th): + + Went out early, 7.30, to see the Falls of the Rhine; colour of + water, green--causes of this, the heights covered by mist--the + depths clear, and we saw the castle of Laufen half in mist; + thought of Ossian. Love mist when moved by deep feeling. + +At Brunnen: + + Green of the lake, steep banks, small size of boatman in + comparison to the enormous masses of rock. One saw precipices + grown over by trees, summits covered by clouds. Sunshine over the + scene, one felt the formless greatness of Nature. + +He was conscious of the great change in himself since his last visit +there, and wrote to Schiller (Oct. 14th, 1797): + + I remember the effect these things had upon me twenty years ago. + The total impression remained with me, but the details faded, and + I had a wonderful longing to repeat the whole experience and + correct my impressions. I had become another man, and therefore + it must needs appear different to me. + +In later years he travelled a great deal in the Harz Mountains, to +Carlsbad, Toplitz, the Maine, Marienbad, etc. After the death of his +great friends, Schiller and Carl August, he was more and more lonely, +and his whole outlook, with increasing years, grew more impersonal, +his attitude to Nature more abstract and scientific; the archetypal +plant was superseded by the theory of colours. But he kept fresh eyes +for natural beauty into ripe age; witness this letter from +Heidelberg, May 4th, 1808, to Frau von Stein: + + Yesterday evening, after finishing my work, I went alone to the + castle, and first scrambled about among the ruins, and then + betook myself to the great balcony from which one can overlook + the whole country. It was one of the loveliest of May evenings + and of sunsets. No! I have really never seen such a fine view! + Just imagine! One looked into the beautiful though narrow Neckar + valley, covered on both sides with woods and vineyards and fruit + trees just coming into flower. Further off the valley widened, + and one saw the setting sun reflected in the Rhine as it flowed + majestically through most beautiful country. On its further side + the horizon was bounded by the Vosges mountains, lit up by the + sun as if by a fire. The whole country was covered with fresh + green, and close to me were the enormous ruins of the old castle, + half in light and half in shade. You can easily fancy how it + fascinated me. I stood lost in the view quite half an hour, till + the rising moon woke me from my dreams. + +Goethe's true lyrical period was in the seventies, before his Italian +journeys; during and after that time he wrote more dramatic and epic +poetry, with ballads and the more narrative kind of epic. In sending +_Der Juengling und der Muehlbach_ to Schiller from Switzerland in 1797, +he wrote: 'I have discovered splendid material for idylls and +elegies, and whatever that sort of poetry is called.' + +Nature lyrics were few during his Italian travels, as in the journey +to Sicily, 1787; among them were _Calm at Sea_: + + Silence deep rules o'er the waters, + Calmly slumbering lies the main. + +and _Prosperous Voyage_: + + The mist is fast clearing, + And radiant is heaven, + Whilst AEolus loosens + Our anguish-fraught bond. + +The most perfect of all such short poems was the _Evening Song_, +written one September night of 1783 on the Gickelhahn, near Ilmenau. +He was writing at the same time to Frau von Stein: 'The sky is +perfectly clear, and I am going out to enjoy the sunset. The view is +great and simple--the sun down.' + + Every tree top is at peace. + E'en the rustling woods do cease + Every sound; + The small birds sleep on every bough. + Wait but a moment--soon wilt thou + Sleep in peace. + + The hush of evening, the stilling of desire in the silence of the + wood, the beautiful resolution of all discords in Nature's + perfect concord, the naive and splendid pantheism of a soul which + feels itself at one with the world--all this is not expressed in + so many words in the _Night Song_; but it is all there, like the + united voicesin a great symphony. (SCHURE.) + +The lines are full of that pantheism which not only brings subject +and object, Mind and Nature, into symbolic relationship, but works +them into one tissue. Taken alone with _The Fisher_ and _To the +Moon_, it would suffice to give him the first place as a poet of +Nature. + +He was not only the greatest poet, but the greatest and most +universal thinker of modern times. With him feeling and knowledge +worked together, the one reaching its climax in the lyrics of his +younger days, the other gradually moderating the fervour of passion, +and, with the more objective outlook of age, laying greater stress +upon science. His feeling for Nature, which followed an unbroken +course, like his mental development generally, stands alone as a type +of perfectly modern feeling, and yet no one, despite the many +intervening centuries, stood so near both to Homer and to +Shakespeare, and in philosophy to Spinoza. + +But because with Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his pantheism +is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise man of +Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the postulate of +this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and the inner +life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and +encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his +religion. In his youth, in the period of _Werther, Ganymede_, and the +first part of _Faust_, this pantheism was a nameless, unquenchable +aspiration towards the divine--for wings to reach, like the rays of +light, to unmeasured heights; as he said in the Swiss mountains, +'Into the limitless spaces of the air, to soar over abysses, and let +him down upon inaccessible rocks.' + +After the Italian journeys science took the lead, the student of +Nature supplanted the lover, even his symbolism took a more abstract +and realistic form. But he never, even in old age, lost his love for +the beauties of Nature, and, holding to Spinoza's fundamental ideas +of the unchangeableness and eternity of Nature's laws, and the +oneness of the Cosmos, he sought to think it out and base it upon +scientific grounds, through the unbroken succession of animal and +vegetable forms of life, the uniform 'formation and transformation of +all organic Nature.' He wrote to Frau von Stein: 'I cannot express to +you how legible the book of Nature is growing to me; my long spelling +out has helped me. It takes effect now all of a sudden; my quiet +delight is inexpressible; I find much that is new, but nothing that +is unexpected--everything fits in and conforms, because I have no +system, and care for nothing but truth for its own sake. Soon +everything about living things will be clear to me.'[13] + +Poetic and scientific intuition were simultaneous with him, and their +common bond was pantheism. This pantheism marked an epoch in the +history of feeling. For Goethe not only transformed the unreal +feeling of his day into real, described scenery, and inspired it with +human feeling, and deciphered the beauty of the Alps, as no one else +had done, Rousseau not excepted; but he also brought knowledge of +Nature into harmony with feeling for her, and with his wonderfully +receptive and constructive mind so studied the earlier centuries, +that he gathered out all that was valuable in their feeling. + +As Goethe in Germany, so Byron in England led the feeling for Nature +into new paths by his demoniac genius and glowing pantheism. Milton's +great imagination was too puritan, too biblical, to allow her +independent importance; he only assigned her a _role_ in relation to +the Deity. In fiction, too, she had no place; but, on the other hand, +we find her in such melancholy, sentimental outpourings as Young's +_Night Thoughts_: + + Night, sable Goddess! from her ebon throne + In rayless majesty now stretches forth + Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world... + Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse + Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause; + An awful pause, prophetic of her end...etc. + +There is a wealth of imagery and comparison amid Ossian's melancholy +and mourning; clouds and mist are the very shadows of his struggling +heroes. For instance: + + His spear is a blasted pine, his shield the rising moon. He sat + on the shore like a cloud of mist on the rising hill. + + Thou art snow on the heath; thy hair is the mist of Cromla, when + it curls on the hill, when it shines to the beam of the west. Thy + breasts are two smooth rocks seen from Branno of streams. + + As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high; + as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of + battle. + + As autumn's dark storms pour from two echoing hills, towards each + other approached the heroes. + + The clouds of night came rolling down, Darkness rests on the + steeps of Cromla. The stars of the north arise over the rolling + of Erin's waves; they shew their heads of fire through the flying + mist of heaven. A distant wind roars in the wood. Silent and dark + is the plain of death. + +Wordsworth's influence turned in another direction. His real taste +was pastoral, and he preached freer intercourse with Nature, glossing +his ideas rather artificially with a theism, through which one reads +true love of her, and an undeniable, though hidden, pantheism. + +In _The Influence of Natural Objects_ he described how a life spent +with Nature had early purified him from passion: + + Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me + With stinted kindness. In November days, + When vapours, rolling down the valleys, made + A lonely scene more lonesome, among woods + At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights, + When by the margin of the trembling lake + Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went + In solitude, such intercourse was mine. + 'Twas mine among the fields both day and night, + And by the waters all the summer long, + And in the frosty season, when the sun + Was set, and visible for many a mile, + The cottage windows through the twilight blazed, + I heeded not the summons.... + +Like Klopstock, he delighted in sledging + + while the stars + Eastward were sparkling bright, and in the west + The orange sky of evening died away. + +Far more characteristic of the man is the confession in _Tintern +Abbey_: + + Nature then + (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days + And their glad animal movements all gone by) + To me was all in all. I cannot paint + What then I was. The sounding cataract + Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, + The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, + The colours and their forms, were then to me + An appetite, a feeling and a love + That had no need of a remoter charm + By thought supplied, or any interest + Unborrow'd from the eye. + +Beautiful notes, to be struck again more forcibly by the frank +pantheism of Byron. + +What Scott had been doing for Scotland,[14] and Moore for Ireland, +Wordsworth, with still greater fidelity to truth, tried to do for +England and her people; in contrast to Byron and Shelley, who forsook +home to range more widely, or Southey, whose _Thalaba_ begins with an +imposing description of night in the desert: + + How beautiful is night! + A dewy freshness fills the silent air, + No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain + Breaks the serene of heaven; + In full-orb'd glory yonder Moon divine + Rolls through the dark blue depths. + Beneath her steady ray + The desert-circle spreads + Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky. + How beautiful is night! + +But all that previous English poets had done seemed harmless and +innocent in comparison with Byron's revolutionary poetry. Prophecy in +Rousseau became poetry in Byron. + +There was much common ground between these two passionate aspiring +spirits, who never attained to Goethe's serenity. Both were +melancholy, and fled from their fellows; both strove for perfect +liberty and unlimited self-assertion; both felt with the wild and +uproarious side of Nature, and found idyllic scenes marred by +thoughts of mankind. + +Byron's turbulence never subsided; and his love for Nature, +passionate and comprehensive as it was, was always 'sickled o'er' +with misanthropy and pessimism, with the 'world-pain.' + +He turned to her first through disdain of his kind and love of +introspection, and later on, when he was spurned by the London world +which had been at his feet, and disdain grew into hatred and disgust, +from a wish to be alone. But, as Boettger says: + + Though this heart, in which the whole universe is reflected, is a + sick one, it has immeasurable depths, and an intensified spirit + life which draws everything under its sway and inspires it, + feeling and observing everything only as part of itself. + +The basis of Byron's feeling for Nature was a revolutionary +one--elementary passion. The genius which threw off stanza after +stanza steeped in melody, was coupled with an unprecedented +subjectivity and individualism. When the first part of _Childe +Harold_ came out, dull London society was bewitched by the music and +novelty of this enthusiastic lyric of Nature, with its incomparable +interweaving of scenery and feeling: + + The sails were fill'd, and fair the light winds blew, + As glad to waft him from his native home.... + But when the sun was sinking in the sea, + He seized his harp... + Adieu, adieu! my native shore + Fades o'er the waters blue; + The night winds sigh, the breakers roar, + And shrieks the wild sea-mew; + Yon sun that sets upon the sea + We follow in his flight; + Farewell awhile to him and thee, + My native land, good-night! + +He says of the beauty of Lusitania: + + Oh Christ! it is a goodly sight to see + What Heaven hath done for this delicious land. + What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree! + What goodly prospects o'er the hills expand!... + The horrid crags, by toppling convent crown'd, + The cork trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep, + The mountain moss, by scorching skies imbrown'd, + The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep. + The tender azure of the unruffled deep, + The orange tints that gild the greenest bough, + The torrents that from cliff to valley leap, + The vine on high, the willow branch below, + Mix'd in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow. + +Yet his spirit drives him away, 'more restless than the swallow in +the skies.' + +The charm of the idyllic is in the lines: + + But these between, a silver streamlet glides.... + Here leans the idle shepherd on his crook, + And vacant on the rippling waves doth look, + That peaceful still 'twixt bitterest foemen flow. + +The beauty of the sea and night in this: + + The moon is up; by Heaven a lovely eve! + Long streams of light o'er dancing waves expand.... + How softly on the Spanish shore she plays, + Disclosing rock, and slope, and forest brown + Distinct.... + + Bending o'er the vessel's laving side + To gaze on Dian's wave-reflected sphere. + +He reflects that: + + To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, + To slowly trace the forest's shady scene.... + To climb the trackless mountain all unseen + With the wild flock that never needs a fold, + Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean,-- + This is not solitude; 'tis but to hold + Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd. + But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, + To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, + And roam along, the world's tired denizen, + With none who bless us, none whom we can bless ... + This is to be alone--this, this is solitude. + +His preference for wild scenery shews here: + + Dear Nature is the kindest mother still, + Though always changing, in her aspect mild; + From her bare bosom let me take my fill, + Her never-wean'd, though not her favour'd child. + O she is fairest in her features wild, + Where nothing polish'd dares pollute her path; + To me by day or night she ever smiled, + Though I have mark'd her when none other hath, + And sought her more and more, and loved her best in wrath. + +He observes everything--now 'the billows' melancholy flow' under the +bows of the ship, now the whole scene at Zitza: + + Where'er we gaze, around, above, below, + What rainbow tints, what magic charms are found! + Rock, river, forest, mountain, all abound, + And bluest skies that harmonize the whole; + Beneath, the distant torrent's rushing sound + Tells where the volumed cataract doth roll + Between those hanging rocks, that shock yet please the soul. + +This is full of poetic vision: + + Where lone Utraikey forms its circling cove, + And weary waves retire to gleam at rest, + How brown the foliage of the green hill's grove, + Nodding at midnight o'er the calm bay's breast, + As winds come lightly whispering from the west, + Kissing, not ruffling, the blue deep's serene;-- + Here Harold was received a welcome guest; + Nor did he pass unmoved the gentle scene, + For many a job could he from Night's soft presence glean. + +Feeling himself 'the most unfit of men to herd with man,' he is happy +only with Nature: + + Once more upon the waters! yet once more! + And the waves bound beneath me as a steed + That knows his rider. Welcome to the roar! + Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead. + + Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends; + Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home; + Where a blue sky and glowing clime extends, + He had the passion and the power to roam; + The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam, + Were unto him companionship; they spake + A mutual language, clearer than the tome + Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake + For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake. + +Again: + + I live not in myself, but I become + Portion of that around me, and to me + High mountains are a feeling, but the hum + Of human cities torture; I can see + Nothing to loathe in Nature save to be + A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, + Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee, + And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain + Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain. + + Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part + Of me and of my soul, as I of them? + Is not the love of these deep in my heart + With a pure passion? Should I not contemn + All objects, if compared with these? + +Love of Nature was a passion with him, and when he looked + + Upon the peopled desert past + As on a place of agony and strife, + +mountains gave him a sense of freedom. + +He praised the Rhine: + + Where Nature, nor too sombre nor too gay, + Wild but not rude, awful yet not austere, + Is to the mellow earth as autumn to the year. + +and far more the Alps: + + Above me are the Alps, + The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls + Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, + And throned eternity in icy halls + Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls + The avalanche, the thunderbolt of snow! + All that expands the spirit, yet appals, + Gather around these summits, as to shew + How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below. + +On the Lake of Geneva: + + Ye stars which are the poetry of heaven... + All heaven and earth are still--though not in sleep, + But breathless, as we grow when feeling most; + And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep. + All heaven and earth are still: from the high host + Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain coast, + All is concenter'd in a life intense, + Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost, + But hath a part of being, and a sense + Of that which is of all Creator and defence. + + And this is in the night. Most glorious night, + Thou wert not sent for slumber; let me be + A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, + A portion of the tempest and of thee! + How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, + And the big rain comes dancing to the earth! + And now again 'tis black--and now, the glee + Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain mirth, + As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth. + But where of ye, oh tempests, is the goal? + Are ye like those within the human breast? + Or do ye find, at length, like eagles, some high nest? + + The morn is up again, the dewy morn + With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom, + Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn, + And living as if earth contained no tomb. + +In Clarens: + + Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love, + Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought, + Thy trees take root in Love; the snows above + The very glaciers have his colours caught, + And sunset into rose-hues sees them wrought + By rays which sleep there lovingly; the rocks, + The permanent crags, tell here of Love. + +Yet + + Ever and anon of griefs subdued + There comes a token like a scorpion's sting, + Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued; + And slight withal may be the things which bring + Back on the heart the weight which it would fling + Aside for ever; it may be a sound, + A tone of music, summer's eve or spring, + A flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound, + Striking the electric chain with which we are darkly bound. + +The unrest and torment of his own heart he finds reflected in Nature: + + The roar of waters! from the headlong height + Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice; + The fall of waters! rapid as the light + The flashing mass foams, shaking the abyss; + The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss, + And boil in endless torture; while the sweat + Of their great agony, wrung out from this + Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet + That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set, + And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again + Returns in an unceasing shower, which round + With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain + Is an eternal April to the ground, + Making it all one emerald; how profound + The gulf, and how the giant element + From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound, + Crushing the cliffs, which downward, worn and rent + With his fierce footsteps, yields in chasms a fearful rent.... + Horribly beautiful! but, on the verge + From side to side, beneath the glittering morn, + An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge, + Like Hope upon a deathbed. + +The 'enormous skeleton' of Rome impresses him most by moonlight: + + When the rising moon begins to climb + Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there; + When the stars twinkle through the loops of time, + And the low night breeze waves along the air! + +Underlying all his varying moods is this note: + + There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, + There is a rapture on the lonely shore, + There is society, where none intrudes, + By the deep sea, and music in its roar: + I love not man the less, but Nature more, + From these our interviews, in which I steal + From all I may be, or have been before, + To mingle with the Universe and feel + What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. + +The sea, the sky with its stars and clouds, and the mountains, are +his passion: + + Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll! + Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; + Man marks the earth with ruin--his control + Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain + The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain + A shadow of man's ravage, save his own, + When, for a moment, like a drop of rain + He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, + Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown. + (_Childe Harold_.) + + The day at last has broken. What a night + Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven! + Though varied with a transitory storm, + More beautiful in that variety!... + And can the sun so rise, + So bright, so rolling back the clouds into + Vapours more lovely than the unclouded sky, + With golden pinnacles and snowy mountains, + And billows purpler than the ocean's, making + In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth. + (_Sardanapalus.)_ + +He had loved the Scotch Highlands in youth: + + Amidst Nature's native scenes, + Loved to the last, whatever intervenes + Between us and our childhood's sympathy + Which still reverts to what first caught the eye. + He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue + Will love each peak that shews a kindred hue, + Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face, + And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace. + (_The Island_.) + +and in _The Island_ he says: + + How often we forget all time, when lone, + Admiring Nature's universal throne, + Her woods, her wilds, her waters, the intense + Reply of hers to our intelligence! + Live not the stars and mountains? Are the waves + Without a spirit? Are the dropping cares + Without a feeling in their silent tears? + No, no; they woo and clasp us to their spheres, + Dissolve this clog and clod of clay before + Its hour, and merge our soul in the great shore. + (_The Island_.) + +Byron's feeling was thus, like Goethe's in _Werther_ and _Faust_, a +pantheistic sympathy. But there was this great difference between +them--Goethe's mind passed through its period of storm and stress, +and attained a serene and ripe vision; Byron's never did. Melancholy +and misanthropy always mingled with his feelings; he was, in fact, +the father of our modern 'world-pain.' + +Still more like a brilliant meteor that flashes and is gone was +Shelley, the most highly strung of all modern lyrists. With him, too, +love of Nature amounted to a passion; but it was with her remote +aerial forms that he was most at home. His imagination, a cosmic one, +revelling among the spheres, was like Byron's in its preference for +the great, wide, and distant; but unlike his in giving first place to +the serene and passionless. As Brandes says: 'In this familiarity +with the great forms and movements of Nature, Shelley is like Byron; +but like him as a fair genius is like a dark one, as Ariel is like +the flame-bringing angel of the morning star.' + +We see his love for the sea, especially at rest, in the 'Stanzas +written in dejection near Naples,' which contain the beautiful line +which proved so prophetic of his death: + + The sun is warm, the sky is clear, + The waves are dancing fast and bright; + Blue isles and snowy mountains wear + The purple noon's transparent might.... + I see the deep's untrampled floor + With green and purple sea-weeds strewn; + I see the waves upon the shore + Like light dissolved, in star showers thrown.... + Yet now despair itself is mild, + Even as the winds and waters are; + I could lie down like a tired child + And weep away the life of care + Which I have borne, and yet must bear,-- + Till death like sleep might steal on me, + And I might feel in the warm air + My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea + Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. + +In his _Essay on Love_, speaking of the irresistible longing for +sympathy, he says: + + In solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by + human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the + flowers, the grass, and the water and the sky. In the motion of + the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a + secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the + tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the + rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable + relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a + dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious + tenderness to the eyes, like the voice of one beloved singing to + you alone. + +As Brandes says: 'His pulses beat in secret sympathy with Nature's. +He called plants and animals his dear sisters and brothers, and the +words which his wife inscribed upon his tombstone in Rome, "cor +cordium," are true of his relation to Nature also.' + +_The Cloud_, with its marvellously vivid personification, is a +perfect example of his genius. + +It gives the measure of his unlikeness to the more homekeeping +imaginations of his contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, and +Moore; and at the same time to Byron, for here there are no morbid +reflections; the poem is pervaded by a naive, childlike tone, such as +one hears in the old mythologies. + +_The Cloud_: + + I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers + From the seas and the streams; + I bear light shade for the leaves when laid + In their noonday dreams. + From my wings are shaken the dews that waken + The sweet buds every one, + When rocked to rest on their Mother's breast + As she dances about the sun. + I wield the flail of the lashing hail, + And whiten the green plains under; + And then again I dissolve it in rain, + And laugh as I pass in thunder. + + I sift the snow on the mountains below, + And their great pines groan aghast, + And all the night 'tis my pillow white + While I sleep in the arms of the Blast.... + From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape, + Over a torrent sea, + Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof, + The mountains its columns be. + The triumphal arch through which I march, + With hurricane, fire, and snow, + When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair, + Is the million-coloured bow; + The Sphere-fire above its soft colours wove + While the moist earth was laughing below. + I am the daughter of Earth and Water, + And the nursling of the Sky. + +As Brandes puts it; When the cloud sings thus of the moon: + + When + That orbed maiden with white fire laden, + Whom Mortals call the Moon, + Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor + By the midnight breezes strewn; + And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, + Which only the angels hear, + May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, + The Stars peep behind her and peer. + +or of-- + + The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes, + +the reader is carried back, by dint of the virgin freshness of the +poet's imagination, to the time when the phenomena of Nature were +first moulded into mythology. + +This kinship to the myth is very clear in the finest of all his +poems, the _Ode to the West Wind_, when the poet says to the wind: + + O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,... + Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, + Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed. + Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean. + Angels of rain and lightning, there are spread + On the blue surface of thine airy surge, + Like the bright hair uplifted from the head + Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge + Of the horizon to the zenith's height, + The locks of the approaching storm. + +He calls the wind the 'breath of Autumn's being,' the one + + Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed + The winged seeds. + +And cries to it: + + If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; + If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; + A wave to pant beneath thy power and share + The impulse of thy strength, only less free + Than thou, O uncontrollable!... + 0 lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! + I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed! + A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed + One too like thee, tameless, and swift, and proud. + Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is; + What if my leaves are falling like its own? + The tumult of thy mighty harmonies + Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, + Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, + My spirit. Be thou me, impetuous one! + Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, + Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth; + And by the incantation of this verse, + Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth + Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! + Be through my lips to unawakened earth + The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, + If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? + +His poems are full of this power of inspiring all the elements with +life, breathing his own feeling into them, and divining love and +sympathy in them; for instance: + + The fountains mingle with the river, + And the river with the ocean; + The winds of heaven mix for ever + With a sweet emotion.... + See the mountains kiss high heaven, + And the waves clasp one another... + And the sunlight clasps the earth, + And the moonbeams kiss the sea. + +and: + + I love all thou lovest, + Spirit of Delight; + The fresh earth in new leaves dressed, + And the starry night, + Autumn evening and the morn + When the golden mists are born. + I love snow and all the forms + Of the radiant frost; + I love waves and winds and storms-- + Everything almost + Which is Nature's, and may be + Untainted by man's misery. + +To Goethe, Byron, and Shelley, this pantheism, universal love, +sympathy with Nature in all her forms, was the base of feeling; but +both of England's greatest lyrists, dying young, failed to attain +perfect harmony of thought and feeling. There always remained a +bitter ingredient in their poetry. + +Let us now turn to France. + + +LAMARTINE AND VICTOR HUGO + +Rousseau discovered the beauty of scenery for France; St Pierre +portrayed it poetically, not only in _Paul and Virginia_, but in +_Chaumiere Indienne_ and _Etudes de la Nature_. The science which +these two writers lacked, Buffon possessed in a high degree; but he +had not the power to delineate Nature and feeling in combination: he +lacked insight into the hidden analogies between the movements of the +mind and the phenomena of the outer world. Chateaubriand, on the +contrary, had this faculty to its full modern extent. It is true that +his ego was constantly to the fore, even in dealing with Nature, but +his landscapes were full of sympathetic feeling. He had Rousseau's +melancholy and unrest, and cared nothing for those 'oppressive +masses,' mountains, except as backgrounds; but he was enthusiastic +about the scenery which he saw in America, the virgin forests, and +the Mississippi--above all, about the sea. His Rene, that life-like +figure, half-passionate, half-_blase_, measuring everything by +himself, and flung hither and thither by the waves of passion, shewed +a lover's devotion to the sea and to Nature generally.[15] 'It was +not God whom I contemplated on the waves in the magnificence of His +works: I saw an unknown woman, and the miracle of his smile, the +beauties of the sky, seemed to me disclosed by her breath. I would +have bartered eternity for one of her caresses. I pictured her to +myself as throbbing behind this veil of the universe which hid her +from my eyes. Oh! why was it not in my power to rend the veil and +press the idealized woman to my heart, to spend myself on her bosom +with the love which is the source of my inspiration, my despair, and +my life?' + +In subjectivity and dreaminess both Chateaubriand and Lamartine were +like the German romanticists, but their fundamental note was theism, +not pantheism. The storm of the French Revolution, which made radical +changes in religion, as in all other things, was followed by a +reaction. Christianity acquired new power and inwardness, and Nature +was unceasingly praised as the mirror of the divine idea of creation. + +In his _Genie du Christianisme_, Chateaubriand said: + + The true God, in entering into His Works, has given his immensity + to Nature... there is an instinct in man, which puts him in + communication with the scenes of Nature. + +Lamartine was a sentimental dreamer of dreams, a thinker of lofty +thoughts which lost themselves in the inexpressible. His +_Meditations_ shew his ardent though sad worship of Nature; his love +of evening, moonlight, and starlight. For instance, _L'Isolement_: + + Ici gronde le fleuve aux vagues ecumantes, + Il serpente et s'enfonce en un lointain obscur: + La le lac immobile etend ses eaux dormantes + Oo l'etoile du soir se leve dans l'azur. + An sommet de ces monts couronnes de bois sombres, + Le crepuscule encore jette un dernier rayon; + Et le char vaporeux de la reine des ombres + Monte et blanchit deja les bords de l'horizon. + +_Le Soir_: + + Le soir ramene le silence.... + Venus se leve a l'horizon; + A mes pieds l'etoile amoureuse + De sa lueur mysterieuse + Blanchit les tapis de gazon. + De ce hetre au feuillage sombre + J'entends frissonner les rameaux; + On dirait autour des tombeaux + Qu'on entend voltiger une ombre, + Tout-a-coup, detache des cieux, + Un rayon de l'astre nocturne, + Glissant sur mon front taciturne, + Vient mollement toucher mes yeux. + Doux reflet d'un globe de flamme + Charmant rayon, que me veux-tu? + Viens-tu dans mon sein abattu + Porter la lumiere a mon ame? + Descends-tu pour me reveler + Des mondes le divin mystere, + Ces secrets caches dans la sphere + Ou le jour va te rappeler? + +In the thought of happy past hours, he questions the lake: + + Un soir, t'en souvient-il, nous voguions en silence; + On n'entendait au loin, sur l'onde et sous les cieux, + Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence + Tes flots harmonieux. + O lac! rochers muets! grottes! foret obscure! + Vous que le temps epargne ou qu'il peut rajeunir + Gardez de cette nuit, gardez, belle nature, + Au moins le souvenir!... + Que le vent qui gemit, le roseau qui soupire + Que les parfums legers de ton air embaume, + Que tout ce qu'on entend, l'on voit, ou l'on respire, + Tout dise: 'ils out aimes! + +_La Priere_ has: + + Le roi brillant du jour, se couchant dans sa gloire, + Descend avec lenteur de son char de victoire; + Le nuage eclatant qui le cache a nos yeux + Conserve en sillons d'or sa trace dans les cieux, + Et d'un reflet de pourpre inonde l'etendue. + Comme une lampe d'or dans l'azur suspendue, + La lune se balance aux bords de l'horizon; + Ses rayons affaiblis dorment sur le gazon, + Et le voile des nuits sur les monts se deplie. + C'est l'heure, ou la nature, un moment recueillie, + Entre la nuit qui touche et le jour qui s'enfuit + S'eleve au createur du jour et de la nuit, + Et semble offrir a Dieu dans son brillant langage, + De la creation le magnifique hommage. + Voila le sacrifice immense, universelle! + L'univers est le temple, et la terre est l'autel; + Les cieux en sont le dome et ses astres sans nombre, + Ces feux demi-voiles, pale ornement de l'ombre, + Dans la voute d'azur avec ordre semes, + Sont les sacres flambeaux pour ce temple allumes... + Mais ce temple est sans voix... + + ...Mon coeur seul parle dans ce silence-- + La voix de l'univers c'est mon intelligence. + Sur les rayons du soir, sur les ailes du vent, + Elle s'eleve a Dieu... + +_Le Golfe de Baia_: + + Vois-tu comme le flot paisible + Sur le rivage vient mourir? + Mais deja l'ombre plus epaisse + Tombe et brunit les vastes mers; + Le bord s'efface, le bruit cesse, + Le silence occupe les airs. + C'est l'heure ou la Melancholie + S'assied pensive et recueillie + Aux bords silencieux des mers. + +The decay of autumn corresponds to his own dolorous feelings: + + Oui, dans ces jours d'automne ou la nature expire, + A ses regards voiles je trouve plus d'attraits; + C'est l'adieu d'un ami, c'est le dernier sourire + Des levres que la mort va fermer pour jamais. + +This is from _Ischia_: + + Le Soleil va porter le jour a d'autres mondes; + Dans l'horizon desert Phebe monte sans bruit, + Et jette, en penetrant les tenebres profondes, + Un voile transparent sur le front de la nuit. + Voyez du haut des monts ses clartes ondoyantes + Comme un fleuve de flamme inonder les coteaux, + Dormir dans les vallons on glisser sur les pentes, + Ou rejaillir au loin du sein brillant des eaux.... + Doux comme le soupir d'un enfant qui sommeille, + Un son vague et plaintif se repand dans les airs.... + Mortel! ouvre ton ame a ces torrents de vie, + Recois par tous les sens les charmes de la nuit.... + +He sees the transitoriness of all earthly things reflected in Nature: + + L'onde qui baise ce rivage, + De quoi se plaint-elle a ses bords? + Pourquoi le roseau sur la plage, pourquoi le ruisseau sous l'ombrage, + Rendent-ils de tristes accords? + De quoi gemit la tourterelle? Tout naist, tout paise. + +Such a depth of sympathy and dreamy dolorous reverie was new to +France, but Rousseau had broken the ice, and henceforward feeling +flowed freely. To Lamartine the theist, as to the pantheists Goethe, +Shelley, and Byron, Nature was a friend and lover. + +Victor Hugo was of the same mind, but his poetry is clearer and more +plastic than Lamartine's. We quote from his finest poems, the +_Feuilles d'Automne_. He was a true lyrist, familiar both with the +external life of Nature and the inner life of man. His beautiful 'Ce +qu'on entend sur la montagne' has the spirit of _Faust_. He imagines +himself upon a mountain top, with earth on one side, the sea on the +other; and there he hears two voices unlike any ever heard before: + + L'une venait des mers, chant de gloire! hymne heureux! + C'etait la voix des flots qui se parlaient entre eux.... + Or, comme je l'ai dit, l'Ocean magnifique + Epandait une voix joyeuse et pacifique + Chantant comme la harpe aux temples de Sion, + Et louait la beaute de la creation. + +while from the other voice: + + Pleurs et cris! L'injure, l'anatheme.... + C'etait la terre et l'homme qui pleuraient!... + L'une disait, Nature! et l'autre, Humanite! + +The personifications in this poem are beautiful. He, too, like +Lamartine, loves sea and stars most of all. These verses from _Les +Orientales_ remind one of St Augustine: + + J'etais seul pres des flots par une nuit d'etoiles, + Pas un nuage aux cieux; sur les mers pas de voiles, + Et les bois et les monts et toute la nature + Semblaient interroger dans confus murmure + Les flots des mers, les feux du ciel. + Et les etoiles d'or, legions infinies, + A voix haute, a voix basse, avec mille harmonies + Disaient en inclinant leurs couronnes de feu, + Et les flots bleus, que rien gouverne et n'arrete, + Disaient en recourbant l'ecume de leur crete: + C'est le Seigneur Dieu, le Seigneur Dieu! + + Parfois lorsque tout dort, je m'assieds plein de joie + Sous le dome etoile qui sur nos fronts flamboie; + J'ecoute si d'en haut il tombe quelque bruit; + Et l'heure vainement me frappe de son aile + Quand je contemple emu cette fete eternelle + Que le ciel rayonnant donne au monde la nuit! + Souvent alors j'ai cru que ces soleils de flamme + Dans ce monde endormi n'echauffaient que mon ame; + Qu'a les comprendre seul j'etais predestine; + Que j'etais, moi, vaine ombre obscure et taciturne, + Le roi mysterieuse de la pompe nocturne; + Que le ciel pour moi seul s'etait illumine! + +The necessary condition of delight in Nature is very strikingly +given: + + Si vous avez en vous, vivantes et pressees, + Un monde interieur d'images, de pensees, + De sentimens, d'amour, d'ardente passion + Pour feconder ce monde, echangez-le sans cesse + Avec l'autre univers visible qui vous presse! + Melez toute votre ame a la creation.... + Que sous nos doigts puissans exhale la nature, + Cette immense clavier! + +His lyrics are rich in fine scenes from Nature, unrolled in cold but +stately periods, and the poetic intuition which always divines the +spirit life brought him near to that pantheism which we find in all +the greatest English and German poets of his time,[16] and which lay, +too, at the root of German romanticism. + + +THE GERMAN ROMANTICISTS + +Schiller did not possess the intrinsically lyrical genius of Goethe; +his strength lay, not in song, but drama, and in a didactic form of +epic--the song not of feeling, but of thought. + +Descriptions of Nature occur here and there in his epics and dramas; +but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his +contemporaries, he passed through a sentimental period; _Evening_ +shews this, and _Melancholy, to Laura_: + + Laura, a sunrise seems to break + Where'er thy happy looks may glow.... + Thy soul--a crystal river passing, + Silver clear and sunbeam glassing, + Mays into blossom sad autumn by thee: + Night and desert, if they spy thee, + To gardens laugh--with daylight shine, + Lit by those happy smiles of thine! + +With such ecstatic extravagances contrast the excellent descriptions +of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems--for instance, +the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in _The Diver_, +evening in _The Hostage_, and landscape in _William Tell_ and _The +Walk_. In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery +is made a 'frame for a kind of phenomenology of mankind.' + + Flowers of all hue are struggling into glow + Along the blooming fields; yet their sweet strife + Melts into one harmonious concord. Lo! + The path allures me through the pastoral green + And the wide world of fields! The labouring bee + Hums round me, and on hesitating wing + O'er beds of purple clover, quiveringly + Hovers the butterfly. Save these, all life + Sleeps in the glowing sunlight's steady sheen-- + E'en from the west no breeze the lull'd airs bring. + Hark! in the calm aloft I hear the skylark sing. + The thicket rustles near, the alders bow + Down their green coronals, and as I pass, + Waves in the rising wind the silvering grass; + Come! day's ambrosial night! receive me now + Beneath the roof by shadowy beeches made + Cool-breathing, etc. + +Schiller's interest in Nature was more a matter of reflection than +direct observation; its real tendency was philosophical and ethical. +He called Nature naive (he included naturalness in Nature); those who +seek her, sentimental; but he overlooked (as we saw in an earlier +chapter) the fact that antiquity did not always remain naive, and +that not all moderns are sentimental. + +As Rousseau's pupil he drew a sharp distinction between Nature and +Art, and felt happy in solitude where 'man with his torment does not +come,' lying, as he says in _The Bride of Messina_, like a child on +the bosom of Nature. + +In Schiller's sense of the word, perhaps no poet has been more +sentimental about Nature than Jean Paul. + +He was the humorous and satirical idyllist _par excellence_, and laid +the scenes of his romances in idyllic surroundings, using the +trifling events of daily life to wonderful purpose. There is an +almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious +metaphors and mixture of ideas. With the exception of Lake Maggiore +in _Titan_, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all his +references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated with +the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling. They +all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own +countryside, finding the reflection of their feelings in her. There +is a constant interweaving of the human soul and the universe; +therein lies his pantheistic trait. 'To each man,' he said,[17] +'Nature appears different, and the only question is, which is the +most beautiful? Nature is for ever becoming flesh for mankind; outer +Nature takes a different form in each mind.' Certainly the nature of +Jean Paul was different from the Nature of other mortals. Was she +more beautiful? He wrote of her in his usual baroque style, with a +wealth of thought and feeling, and everywhere the sparkle of genius; +but it is all presented in the strangest motley, as exaggerated and +unenjoyable as can be. For example, from _Siebenkas_: + + I appeared again then on the last evening of the year 1794, on + the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne + away to the ocean of eternity. + + To the butterfly--proboscis of Siebenkaes, enough honey--cells + were still open in every blue thistle-blossom of destiny. + + When they had passed the gate--that is to say, the + un-Palmyra-like ruins of it--the crystal reflecting grotto of the + August night stood open and shining above the dark green earth, + and the ocean-calm of Nature stayed the wild storm of the human + heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of + silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it) up above the + world, and down beneath it the reaped corn stood in the sheaves + without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a + poor old man gathering snails for the snail pits, seemed to be + the only things that dwelt in the far-reaching darkness. + +When it was autumn in his heart: + + Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead; + above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim + phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over + the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in + clinging folds, as if all Nature, trembling into dust, must + vanish in its wreaths.... But one bright thought pierced these + dark fogs of Nature and the soul, turning them to a white + gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and + gently lighting upon flowers. + +When his married life grew more unhappy, in December: + + The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet, as he stood + upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of Nature. + +and in spring + + it seemed to him as if his life dwelt, not in a bodily heart, but + in some warm and tender tear, as if his heavy-laden soul were + expanding and breaking away through some chink in its prison, and + melting into a tone of music, a blue ether wave. + +And _Titan_ expresses that inner enfranchisement which Nature bestows +upon us: + + Exalted Nature! when we see and love thee, we love our fellow-men + more warmly, and when we must pity or forget them, thou still + remainest with us, reposing before the moist eye like a verdant + chain of mountains in the evening red. Ah! before the soul in + whose sight the morning dew of its ideals has faded to a cold, + grey drizzle ... thou remainest, quickening Nature, with thy + flowers and mountains and cataracts, a faithful comforter; and + the bleeding son of the gods, cold and speechless, dashes the + drop of anguish from his eyes, that they may rest, far and clear, + on thy volcanoes, and on thy springs and on thy suns. + +This is sunset in his abstruse artistic handling: + + The sun sinks, and the earth closes her great eye like that of a + dying god. Then smoke the hills like altars; out of every wood + ascends a chorus; the veils of day, the shadows, float around the + enkindled transparent tree-tops, and fall upon the gay, gem-like + flowers. And the burnished gold of the west throws back a dead + gold on the east, and tinges with rosy light the hovering breast + of the tremulous lark--the evening bell of Nature. + +And this sunrise: + + The flame of the sun now shot up ever nearer to the kindled + morning clouds; at length in the heavens, in the brooks and + ponds, and in the blooming cups of dew, a hundred suns rose + together, while a thousand colours floated over the earth, and + one pure dazzling white broke from the sky. It seemed as if an + almighty earthquake had forced up from the ocean, yet dripping, a + new-created blooming plain, stretching out beyond the bounds of + vision, with all its young instincts and powers; the fire of + earth glowed beneath the roots of the immense hanging garden, and + the fire of heaven poured down its flames and burnt the colours + into the mountain summits and the flowers. Between the porcelain + towers of white mountains the coloured blooming heights stood as + thrones of the Fruit-Goddess; over the far-spread camp of + pleasure blossom-cups and sultry drops were pitched here and + there like peopled tents; the ground was inlaid with swarming + nurseries of grasses and little hearts, and one heart detached + itself after another with wings, or fins, or feelers, from the + hot breeding-cell of Nature, and hummed and sucked and smacked + its little lips, and sung: and for every little proboscis some + blossom-cup of; joy was already open. The darling child of the + infinite mother, man, alone stood with bright joyful eyes upon + the market-place of the living city of the sun, full of + brilliance and noise, and gazed, delighted, around him into all + its countless streets; but his eternal mother rested veiled in + immensity, and only by the warmth which went to his heart did he + feel that he was lying upon hers. + +For very overflow of thought and imagery and ecstasy of feeling, Jean +Paul never achieved a balanced beauty of expression. + +The ideal classic standard which Winckelmann and Lessing had laid +down--simple and plastic, calm because objective, crystal-clear in +thought and expression--and which Goethe and Schiller had sought to +realize and imbue with modern ideas, was too strictly limited for the +Romanticists. Hyperion's words expressed their taste more accurately: +'O, man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks!' and they +laid stress upon restless movement, fantastic, highly-coloured +effects, a crass subjectivity, a reckless licence of the imagination. + +Actual and visible things were disregarded; they did not accord with +this claim for infinity and the nebulous, for exploring the secret +depths of the soul. + +It was perhaps a necessary reaction from Goethe's classicism; but it +passed like a bad dream, after tending, thanks to its heterogeneous +elements, now to the mediaeval period, now to that of Storm and +Stress, and now to Goethe, Herder, and Winckelmann. It certainly +contained germs of good, which have grown and flourished in our own +day. + +In keeping with its whole character, the Romantic feeling for Nature +was subjective and fantastic to excess, mystically enthusiastic, +often with a dreamy symbolism at once deep and naive; its inmost core +was pantheistic, with a pantheism shading off imperceptibly into +mysticism. + +After _Werther_, there is perhaps no work of modern fiction in which +Nature plays so artistic a part as in Holderlin's _Hyperion_. + +Embittered by life's failure to realize his ideals, he cries: 'But +thou art still visible, sun in the sky! Thou art still green, sacred +earth! The streams still rush to the sea, and shady trees rustle at +noon. The spring's song of joy sings my mortal thoughts to sleep. The +abundance of the universe nourishes and satiates my famished being to +intoxication.' + +This mystical pantheism could not be more clearly expressed than +here: + + O blessed Nature! I know not how it happens when I lift my eyes + to your beauty; but all the joy of the sky is in the tears which + I shed before you--a lover before the lady of his love. When the + soft waves of the air play round my breast, my whole being is + speechless and listens. Absorbed in the blue expanse, I often + look up to the ether and down to the holy sea; and it seems as if + a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of + loneliness were lost in the divine life. To be one with all that + lives, in blessed self-forgetfulness to return to the All of + Nature, that is the height of thought and bliss--the sacred + mountain height, the place of eternal rest, where noon loses its + sultriness and thunder its voice, and the rough sea is like the + waves in a field of wheat. + +To such feeling as this the actualities are but fetters, hindering +aspiration. + +'O, if great Nature be the daughter of a father, is the daughter's +heart not his heart? Is not he her deepest feeling? But have I found +it? Do I know it?' + +He tries to discern the 'soul of Nature,' hears 'the melody of +morning light begin with soft notes.' He says to the flower, 'You are +my sister,' and to the springs, 'We are of one race': he finds +symbolic resemblance between his heart and all the days and seasons: +he feels the beauty of the 'land like paradise,' while scarcely ever, +except in the poem _Heidelberg_, giving a clear sketch of scenery. A +number of fine comparisons from Nature are scattered through his +writings [18]: + + The caresses of the charming breezes. + + She light, clear, flattering sea. + + Sacred air, the sister of the mind which moves and + lives in us with fiery force, present everywhere immortal. + + Earth, 'one of the flowers of the sky.' + + Heaven, 'the unending garden of life.' + + Beauty, that 'which is one and all.' + +He describes his love in a mystical form: + + We were but one flower, and our souls lived in each other as + flowers do, when they love and hide their joy within a closed + calyx.... The clear starry night had now become my element, for + the beautiful life of my love grew in the stillness as in the + depths of earth gold grows mysteriously. + +He delights 'thus to drink the joy of the world out of one cup with +the lady of his love.' + +'Yea, man is a sun, seeing all and transfiguring all when he loves; +and when he does not love, he is like a dark dwelling in which a +little smelly lamp is burning.' All this is soft and feminine, but it +has real poetic charm. + +Beautiful too, though sad and gloomy, is his _Song of Fate_: + + Nowhere may man abide, + But painfully from hour to hour + He stumbles blindly on to the unknown, + As water falls from rock to rock + The long year through. + +His pantheism finds expression in the odes--in _To Nature_, for +instance: + + Since my heart turneth upward to the sun + As one that hears her voice, + Hailing the stars as brothers, and the spring + As melody divine; + Since in the breath that stirs the wood thy soul, + The soul of joy, doth move + On the still waters of my heart--therefore, + O Nature! these are golden days to me! + +Tieck, too, was keenly alive to Nature. Spring[19]: + + Look all around thee how the spring advances! + New life is playing through the gay green trees! + See how in yonder bower the light leaf dances + To the bird's tread and to the quivering breeze! + How every blossom in the sunlight glances! + The winter frost to his dark cavern flees, + And earth, warm wakened, feels through every vein + The kindling influence of the vernal rain. + Now silvery streamlets, from the mountain stealing, + Dance joyously the verdant vales along; + Cold fear no more the songster's tongue is sealing, + Down in the thick dark grove is heard his song. + And all their bright and lovely hues revealing, + A thousand plants the field and forest throng; + Light comes upon the earth in radiant showers, + And mingling rainbows play among the flowers. + +All his writings seem intoxicated with Nature. The hero of his novel +_William Lovell_, scamp though he is, a man of criminal egotism whose +only law is licence, is deeply in love with Nature. + +He wrote from Florence: + + Nature refreshes my soul with her endless beauty. I am often full + of enthusiasm at the thousand charms of Nature and Art ... at + last my longing to travel to wonderful distant places is + satisfied. Even as a child, when I stood outside my father's + country-house, and gazed at the distant mountains and discovered + a windmill on the very line of the horizon, it seemed to beckon + me as it turned, my blood pulsed more quickly, my mind flew to + distant regions, a strange longing often filled my eyes with + tears. + + Often it seems to me as if the enigma in ourselves were about to + be unriddled, as if we were suddenly to see the transformation of + all our feelings and strange experiences. Night surrounded me + with a hundred terrors, the transparent moonlight sky was like a + crystal dome overhead--in this world the most unusual feelings + were as shadows. + +'Franz Sternbald' had the same intoxicated feeling for Nature: + + I should like to fill the whole world with songs of love, to move + moonrise and sunrise to echo back my joys and sorrows; and trees, + twigs, leaves, grasses to catch the melody and all repeat my + music with a thousand tongues.[20] + +To the Romantic School, Music and Nature were a passion; they longed +to resolve all their feelings, like Byron, at one flash, into music. +'For thought is too distant.' Night and the forest, moonlight and +starlight, were in all their songs. + +There is a background of landscape all through _Franz Sternbald's +Wanderings_. + +In the novels of the eighteenth century landscape had had no place; +Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an +extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he +only wanted to fill up the page. + +Rousseau altered this; Sophie la Roche, in her _Freundschaftlichen +Frauenzimmerbriefen_, introduced ruins, moonlight scenery, hills, +vales, and flowering hedges, etc., into scenes of thought and +feeling; and most of all, Goethe in _Werther_ tunes scenery and soul +to one key. In his later romances he avoided descriptions of scenery. +Jean Paul, like Tieck in _Franz Sternbald_, never spares us one +sunset or sunrise. Some of Tieck's concise descriptions are very +telling, like Theodore Storm's at the present day: + + Rosy light quivered on the blades of grass, and morning moved in + waves along them. + + The redder the evening grew, the heavier became his dreams; the + darkened trees, the shadows lengthening across the fields, the + smoke from the roofs of a little village, and the stars coming + into view one by one in the sky--all this moved him deeply, moved + him to a wistful compassion for himself. + +As Franz wanders about the wood: + + He observes the trees reflected in a neighbouring pond. He had + never looked at landscape with this pleasure, it had never been + given to him to discern the various colours and their shadows, + the charm of the stillness, the effect of the foliage, as now in + the clear water. Till now he had never drawn a landscape, only + looked at it as a necessary adjunct to many historical pictures, + had never felt that lifeless Nature could herself compose + something whole and complete in itself, and so worthy to be + represented. + +Tieck's shorter stories, fairy tales and others, shew taste for the +mysterious and indefinite aspects of Nature--reflections in water, +rays of light, cloud forms: + + They became to him the most fitting characters in which to record + that indefinite inexpressible feeling which gave its special + colour to his spiritual life.[21] + +The pantheism of Boehme, with whom he was closely associated, always +attracted him, and in Jena he came under the influence of Steffens, +and also of Schelling, whose philosophy of Nature called Nature a +mysterious poem, a dreaming mind. This mind it became the chief aim +of Novalis, as well as Tieck, to decipher. + +From simple descriptions of Nature he went on to read mystic meanings +into her, seeking, psychologically in his novels and mystically in +his fairy tales, to fathom the connection between natural phenomena +and elementary human feeling. _Blond Egbert_ was the earliest example +of this: + + Night looked sullenly through the windows, and the trees without + rustled in the wet cold ... the moon looked fitfully through + breaks in the driving clouds.[22] + +In the same book Bertha describes the horror of loneliness, the vague +longings, and then the overwhelming delight in new impressions, which +seized her when she fled from home as a child and lost herself among +the mountains. + +_The Runenberg_ gives in a very powerful way the idea of the weird +fascination which the subterranean powers were supposed to exert over +men, alluring and befooling them, and rousing their thirst for gold. + +The demoniacal elements in mountain scenery, its crags and abysses, +are contrasted with idyllic plains. The tale is sprinkled over with +descriptions of Nature, which give it a fairy-like effect.[23] + +The most extraordinary product of this School was Novalis. With him +everything resolved itself into presentiment, twilight, night, into +vague longings for a vague distant goal, which he expressed by the +search for 'the blue flower.' This is from _Heinrich von +Ofterdingen_: + +'The cheerful pageant of the glorious evening rocked him in soft +imaginings; the flower of his heart was visible now and then as by +sheet lightning.' He looked at Nature with the mystic's eye, and +described her fantastically: + + I am never tired of looking minutely at the different plants. + Growing plants are the direct language of the earth; each new + leaf, each remarkable flower, is a mystery which projects itself, + and because it cannot move with love and longing, nor attain to + words, is a dumb, quiet plant. When in solitude one finds such a + flower, does it not seem as if all around it were brightened, + and, best of all, do not the little feathered notes around it + remain near? One could weep for joy, and there, far from the + world, stick hands and feet into the earth, to take root, and + never more leave so delightful a spot. This green mysterious + carpet of love is drawn over the whole earth. + +It is not surprising that night should attract this unnaturally +excited imagination most of all: + + Sacred, inexpressible, mysterious Night, delicious balsam drops + from thy hands, from the poppy sheaf; thou upliftest the heavy + wings of the Spirit.[24] + +Night and death are delight and bliss. + +The fairy-like tale of _Hyacinth and Little Rose,_ with its charming +personifications, is refreshing after all this: + + The violet told the strawberry in confidence, she told her friend + the gooseberry, who never ceased to jeer when Hyacinth went, so + the whole garden and wood soon knew it, and when Hyacinth went + out, voices from all sides cried out, 'Little Rose is my + favourite.' When he goes into the wide world to find the land of + Isis, he asks the way of the animals, and of springs, rocks, and + trees, and the flowers smile at him, the springs offer him a + fresh drink, and there is wonderful music when he comes home. 'O + that men could understand the music of Nature!' cries the + listener in the tale. Then follows a description of 'the sweet + passion for the being of Nature and her enchanting raptures,' and + the charm of the poetic imagination which finds 'a great sympathy + with man's heart' in all the external world. For example, in the + breath of wind, which 'with a thousand dark and dolorous notes + seems to dissolve one's quiet grief into one deep melodious sigh + of all Nature.' + + 'And am I myself other than the stream when I gaze gloomily down + into its waters and lose my thoughts in its flow?' And in ecstasy + the youth exclaims: 'Whose heart does not leap for joy, when he + feels Nature's innermost life in its fulness, when that powerful + feeling, for which language has no other name than love and + bliss, spreads like a vapour through his being, and he sinks, + palpitating, on the dark alluring breast of Nature, and his poor + self is lost in the overwhelming waves of joy?'[25] + +Here we have the key to the romantic feeling for Nature--communion of +the soul with Nature in a twilight mood of dreamy absorption. + +Yet amidst all this, real delight in romantic scenery was not quite +lacking: witness Hulsen's[26] _Observations on Nature on a Journey +through Switzerland_; and the genuine lyric of Nature, untainted by +mystic and sickly influences, was still to be heard, as in +Eichendorff's beautiful songs and his _Tautgenichts_. + +The Romantic School, in fact, far as it erred from the path, did +enlarge the life of feeling generally, and with that, feeling for +Nature, and modern literature is still bound to it by a thousand +threads. + +Our modern rapture has thus been reached by a path which, with many +deviations in its course, has come to us from a remote past, and is +still carrying us farther forward. + +Its present intensity is due to the growth of science, for although +feeling has become more realistic and matter-of-fact in these days of +electricity and the microscope, love for Nature has increased with +knowledge. Science has even become the investigator of religion, and +the pantheistic tendency of the great poets has passed into us, +either in the idea of an all-present God, or in that of organic force +working through matter--the indestructible active principle of life +in the region of the visible. Our explorers combine enthusiasm for +Nature with their tireless search for truth--for example, Humboldt, +Haeckel, and Paul Guessfeldt; and though, as the shadow side to this +light, travelling and admiration of Nature have become a fashion, yet +who nowadays can watch a great sunset or a storm over the sea, and +remain insensible to the impression? + +Landscape painting and poetry shew the same deviations from the +straight line of development as in earlier times. Our garden craft, +like our architecture, is eclectic; but the English park style is +still the most adequate expression of prevalent taste: spaces of turf +with tree groups, a view over land or sea, gradual change from garden +to field; to which has been added a wider cultivation of foreign +plants. In landscape painting the zigzag course is very marked: +landscapes such as Bocklin's, entirely projected by the imagination +and corresponding to nothing on earth, hang together in our galleries +with the most faithful studies from Nature. It is the same with +literature. In fiction, novels which perpetuate the sentimental +rhapsodies of an early period, and open their chapters with forced +descriptions of landscape, stand side by side with the masterly work +of great writers--for example, Spielhagen, Wilhelmine von Hillern, +and Theodore Storm. + +In poetry, the lyric of Nature is inexhaustible. Heine, the greatest +lyrist after Goethe, though his poetry has, like the Nixie, an +enchantingly fair body with a fish's tail, wrote in the _Travels in +the Harz_: 'How infinitely blissful is the feeling when the outer +world of phenomena blends and harmonizes with the inner world of +feeling; when green trees, thoughts, birds' songs, sweet melancholy, +the azure of heaven, memory, and the perfume of flowers, run together +and form the loveliest of arabesques.' + +But his delight in Nature was spoilt by irony and straining after +effect--for example, in _The Fig Tree_; and although _The Lotos +Flower_ is a gem, and the _North Sea Pictures_ shew the fine eye of a +poet who, like Byron and Shelley, can create myths, his +personifications as a whole are affected, and his personal feeling is +forced upon Nature for the sake of a witty effect. + +Every element of Nature has found skilled interpreters both in poetry +and painting, and technical facility and truth of representation now +stand on one level with the appreciation of her charms. + + + + +NOTES + +INTRODUCTION + + +[Footnote 1: _Kritische Gaenge_. Comp. Vischer, _Ueber den optischen +Formsinn,_ and Carl du Prel, _Psychologie der Lyrik_.] + +[Footnote 2: As in elegy _Ghatarkarparam_.] + +[Footnote 3: Comp. Humboldt, _Cosmos_. Schnaase, _Geschichte der +bildenden Kuenste_.] + +[Footnote 4: See _Die Entwickelung des Naturgefuehls bei den Griechen +und Roemern_, Biese.] + + +CHAPTER I + +[Footnote 1: Lucos ac nemora consecrant deorumque nominibus adpellant +secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident, Tac. Germ. Comp. Grimm, +_Deutsche Mythologie_.] + +[Footnote 2: Grimm. Simrock, _Handbuch der Mythologie_.] + +[Footnote 3: Grimm.] + +[Footnote 4: Grimm.] + +[Footnote 5: Grimm.] + +[Footnote 6: _Geschichte der bildenden Kuenste_. Comp. Grimm, +_Deutsche Rechtsaltertuemer_.] + +[Footnote 7: Grimm.] + +[Footnote 8: Carriere, _Die Poesie_.] + + +CHAPTER II + +[Footnote 1: Clement of Rome, i _Cor._ 19, 20. Zoeckler, _Geschichte +der Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft_.] + +[Footnote 2: Comp. _Vita S. Basilii_.] + +[Footnote 3: _Basilii opera omnia_. Parisus, 1730.] + +[Footnote 4: _Cosmos_.] + +[Footnote 5: Biese, _Die Entwickelung des Naturgefuehls bei den +Griechen und Roemern_.] + +[Footnote 6: _Melanges philosophiques, historiques, et litteraires_.] + +[Footnote 7: _Homily_ 4.] + +[Footnote 8: _Homily_ 6.] + +[Footnote 9: Biese, _Die Entwickelung des Naturgefuehls bei den +Griechen und Roemern_. + +'In spring the Cydmian apple trees give blossom watered by river +streams in the hallowed garden of the nymphs; in spring the buds grow +and swell beneath the leafy shadow of the vine branch. But my heart +knoweth no season of respite; nay, like the Thracian blast that +rageth with its lightning, so doth it bear down from Aphrodite's +side, dark and fearless, with scorching frenzy in its train, and from +its depths shaketh my heart with might.'] + +[Footnote 10: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 11: _Deutsche Rundschau_, 1879.] + +[Footnote 12: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 13: Chrysostom was not only utilitarian, but praised and +enjoyed the world's beauty. From the fifth to third century, Greek +progress in feeling for Nature can be traced from unconscious to +conscious pleasure in her beauty.] + +[Footnote 14: _De Mortalitate_, cap. 4.] + +[Footnote 15: _Geschichte der christlich-lateinischen Literatur_.] + +[Footnote 16: When one thinks of Sappho, Simonides, Theocritus, +Meleager, Catullus, Ovid, and Horace, it cannot be denied that this +is true of Greek and Roman lyric.] + +[Footnote 17: As in the Homeric time, when each sphere of Nature was +held to be subject to and under the influence of its special deity. +But it cannot be admitted that metaphor was freer and bolder in the +hymns; on the contrary, it was very limited and monotonous.] + +[Footnote 18: In _Cathemerinon_.] + +[Footnote 19: Comp. fragrant gardens of Paradise, Hymn 3. + +In Hamartigenia he says that the evil and ugly in Nature originates +in the devil.] + +[Footnote 20: Ebert.] + +[Footnote 21: The Robinsonade of the hermit Bonosus upon a rocky +island is interesting.] + +[Footnote 22: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 23: Comp. _ad Paulinum_, epist. 19, _Monum. German._ v. 2.] + +[Footnote 24: _Carm. nat. 7._] + +[Footnote 25: _Ep._ xi.] + +[Footnote 26: _Migne Patrol_ 60.] + +[Footnote 27: _Migne Patrol_ 59.] + +[Footnote 28: Ebert.] + +[Footnote 29: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 30: Comp. Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 31: _Migne Patrol_ 58.] + +[Footnote 32: _Carm._ lib. i.] + +[Footnote 33: _Amoenitas loci_: Variorum libri Lugduni, 1677.] + +[Footnote 34: _Monum. Germ._, 4th ed., Leo, lib. viii.] + +[Footnote 35: _Deutsche Rundschau_, 1882.] + +[Footnote 36: _Monum. German Histor., poet. lat. medii aevi_, I. +Berlin 1881, ed. Duemmler. Alcuin, _Carmen_ 23.] + +[Footnote 37: Zoeckler, _Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen +Theologie und Naturwissenschaft_. 'On rocky crags by the sea, on +shores fringed by oak or beech woods, in the shady depths of forests, +on towering mountain tops, or on the banks of great rivers, one sees +the ruins or the still inhabited buildings which once served as the +dwellings of the monks who, with the cross as their only weapon, were +the pioneers of our modern culture. Their flight from the life of +traffic and bustle in the larger towns was by no means a flight from +the beauties of Nature.' The last statement is only partly true. In +the prime of the monastic era the beauties of Nature were held to be +a snare of the devil. Still, in choosing a site, beauty of position +was constantly referred to as an auxiliary motive. 'Bernhard loved +the valley,' 'but Bernhard chose mountains,' are significant +phrases.] + +[Footnote 38: Comp. Grimm, _Deutsche Mythologie_, on the old Germanic +idea of a conflict between winter and spring.] + +[Footnote 39: Duemmler, vi. _Carolus et Leo papa._] + +[Footnote 40: Walahfridi Strabi, _De cultura hortorum_.] + +[Footnote 41: Comp. H. von Eichen, _Geschichte und System der +mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung_. Stuttg. Cotta, 1887.] + + +CHAPTER III + +[Footnote 1: Prutz, _Geschichte der Kreuzzuege_. Berlin, 1883.] + +[Footnote 2: Allatius, _Symmicta_. Coeln, 1653.] + +[Footnote 3: _Deutsche Pilgerreisen nach dem heiligen Lande_, +Roehricht und Meissner. Berlin, 1880.] + +[Footnote 4: For excellent bibliographical evidence see _Die +geographische Kenntnis der Alpen im Mittelalter_ in supplement to +_Muenchner Allgem. Zeitung_, January 1885.] + +[Footnote 5: Comp. Oehlmann, _Die Alpenpaesse im Mittelalter, Jahrbuch +fuer Schweizer_.] + +[Footnote 6: Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 7: Fr. Diez, _Leben und Werke der Troubadours_. Zwickau, +1829] + +[Footnote 8: _Des Minnesangs Fruehling_, von Lachmann-Haupt.] + +[Footnote 9: _Geschichte der Malerei._ Woermann und Wottmann.] + +[Footnote 10: 'Detailed study of Nature had begun; but the attempt to +blend the separate elements into a background landscape in +perspective betrayed the insecurity and constraint of dilettante work +at every point.' Ludwig Kaemmerer on the period before Van Eyck in +_Die Landschaft in der deutschen Kunst bis zum Tode Albrecht Duerers_. +Leipzig, 1880] + + +CHAPTER IV + +[Footnote 1: _Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien._] + +[Footnote 2: _Untersuchungen ueber die kampanische Wandmalerei._ +Leipzig, 1873.] + +[Footnote 3: Comp. Schnaase, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 4: _Argon_, ii. 219; iii. 260, 298. Comp. Cic. _ad Att._, +iv. 18, 3.] + +[Footnote 5: _Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland._ +Berlin, 1882. (Oncken, _Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstettungen_, +ii. 8.)] + +[Footnote 6: _Itinerar. syr._, Burckhardt ii.] + +[Footnote 7: _Loci specie percussus_, Burckhardt i.] + +[Footnote 8: In his paper 'Kulturgeschichte und Naturwissenschaft' +(_Deutsche Rundschau_, vol. xiii.), which is full both of original +ideas and of exaggerated summary opinions, Du Bois Reymond fails to +do justice to this, and altogether misjudges Petrarch's feeling for +Nature. After giving this letter in proof of mediaeval feeling, he +goes on to say: 'Full of shame and remorse, he descends the mountain +without another word. The poor fellow had given himself up to +innocent enjoyment for a moment, without thinking of the welfare of +his soul, and instead of gloomy introspection, had looked into the +enticing outer world. Western humanity was so morbid at that time, +that the consciousness of having done this was enough to cause +painful inner conflict to a man like Petrarch--a man of refined +feeling, and scientific, though not a deep thinker.' Even granting +this, which is too tragically put, the world was on the very eve of +freeing itself from this position, and Petrarch serves as a witness +to the change.] + +[Footnote 9: Comp., too, _De Genealogia Deorum_, xv., in which he +says of trees, meadows, brooks, flocks and herds, cottages, etc., +that these things 'animum mulcent,' their effect is 'mentem in se +colligere.'] + +[Footnote 10: Comp. Voigt, _Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini als Papst +Pius II. und sein Zeitalter_.] + +[Footnote 11: Comp. Geiger and Ad. Wolff, _Die Klassiker aller Zeiten +und Nationen_.] + +[Footnote 12: Quando mira la terra ornata e bella. Rime di V. +Colonna.] + +[Footnote 13: Ombrosa selva che il mio duolo ascolti.] + + +CHAPTER V + +[Footnote 1: Ruge, _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen._ +Berlin, 1881. (_Allgem. Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen_, von +Oncken.) _Die neu Welt der Landschaften_, etc. Strasburg, 1534.] + +[Footnote 2: _De rebus oceanicis et novo orbi Decades tres Petri +Martyris at Angleria Mediolanensis, Coloniae_, 1574.] + +[Footnote 3: _Il viaggio di Giovan Leone e Le Navagazioni, di Aloise +da Mosto. di Pietro, di Cintra. di Anxone, di un Piloto Portuguese e +di Vasco di Gama quali si leggono nella raccolta di Giovambattista +Ramusio._ Venezia, 1837.] + +[Footnote 4: For example, this from Ramusio: 'And the coast is all +low land, full of most beautiful and very tall trees, which are +evergreen, as the leaves do not wither as do those in our country, +but a new leaf appears before the other is cast off: the trees extend +right down into the marshy tract of shore, and look as if flourishing +on the sea. The coast is a most glorious sight, and in my opinion, +though I have cruised about in many parts both in the East and in the +West, I have never seen any coast which surpassed this in beauty. It +is everywhere washed by many rivers, and small streams of little +importance, as big ships will not be able to enter them.] + +[Footnote 5: Ideler, _Examen critique_. Cosmos.] + +[Footnote 6: _Coleccion de los viajes y decubrimientos que hicieron +por mar los espanoles desde fines del siglo XV. con varios documentos +ineditos ... co-ordinata e illustrada por Don Martin Fernandez de +Navarrete._ Madrid, 1858.] + +[Footnote 7: _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen._] + +[Footnote 8: As he lay sick and despairing off Belem, an unknown +voice said to him compassionately: 'O fool! and slow to believe and +serve thy God.... He gave thee the keys of those barriers of the +ocean sea which were closed with such mighty chains, and thou wast +obeyed through many lands, and hast gained an honourable fame +throughout Christendom.' In a letter to the King and Queen of Spain +in fourth voyage.] + +[Footnote 9: Humboldt.] + +[Footnote 10: Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 11: Zoeckler, _Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen +Theologie und Naturwissenschaft_.] + +[Footnote 12: F. Hammerich, _St Birgitta._] + +[Footnote 13: Zoeckler, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 14: Comp. Wilkens' _Fray Luis de Leon_. Halle, 1866.] + +[Footnote 15: Comp. Wilkens' _Fray Luis de Leon_. Halle, 1866.] + +[Footnote 16: Comp. Wilkens' _Fray Luis de Leon_. Halle, 1866.] + +[Footnote 17: Comp. Wilkens' _Fray Luis de Leon_. Halle, 1866.] + +[Footnote 18: Humboldt.] + +[Footnote 19: Comp. Carriere, _Die Poesie_.] + +[Footnote 20: Zoeckler, in Herzog's _Real-Encykl._, xxi., refers to +'Le Solitaire des Indes ou la Vie de Gregoire Lopez.' Goerres, _Die +christliche Mystik_; S. Arnold, _Leben der Glaeubigen_; French, _Life +of St Teresa_.] + + +CHAPTER VI + +[Footnote 1: In _Shakespeare Studien_, chap. 4, Hense treats +Shakespeare's attitude towards Nature very suggestively; but I have +gone my own way.] + +[Footnote 2: _Hamlet_, i. 3: 'The canker galls the infants of the +spring too oft before their buttons be disclosed.' Comp. i. 1; _Romeo +and Juliet_, i. 1; _Henry VI._, part 2, iii. 1; _Tempest_, i. 2.] + +[Footnote 3: Comp. Henkel, _Das Goethe'sche Gleichnis_; _Henry IV._, +2nd pt., iv. 4; _Richard II._, i. i; _Othello_, iii. 3, and v. 2; +_Cymbeline_, ii. 4; _King John_, ii. 2; _Hamlet_, iii. 1; _Tempest_, +iv. 2.] + +[Footnote 4: See Hense for bucolic idyllic traits.] + +[Footnote 5: _Poetische Personifikation in griechischen Dichtungen._] + + +CHAPTER VII + +[Footnote 1: Comp. Woermann, _Ueber den landschaftlichen Natursinn +der Griechen und Roemer, Vorstudien zu einer Arckaeologie der +Landschaftsmalerei_. Muenchen, 1871.] + +[Footnote 2: Comp. Schnaase, _Geschichte der bildenden Kuenste im 15 +Jahrhundert_, edited by Luebke. Stuttgart, 1879.] + +[Footnote 3: Falke, _Geschichte des modernen Geschmacks_. Leipzig, +1880] + +[Footnote 4: _Geschichte der deutschen Renaissance_. Stuttgart, +1873.] + +[Footnote 5: Comp. also Kaemmerer, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 6: Lubke, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 7: Lubke refers to A. von Zahn's searching work, _Durer's +Kunstlehre und sein Verhaeltnis zur Renaissance_. Leipzig, 1866.] + +[Footnote 8: Proportion III., B.T. iii. b. Nuremberg, 1528.] + +[Footnote 9: _Op. cit._] + +[Footnote 10: In what follows, I have borrowed largely from +Rosenberg's interesting writings (_Greuzboten_, Nos. 43 and 44, +1884-85), and still more from Schnaase, Falke, and Carriere, as I +myself only know the masters represented at Berlin and Munich.] + +[Footnote 11: Kaemmerer, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 12: Kaemmerer, _op. cit._] + + +CHAPTER VIII + +[Footnote 1: _Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und +Deutschland._] + +[Footnote 2: _Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und +Deutschland._] + +[Footnote 3: Zoeckler.] + +[Footnote 4: Comp. Hase, _Sebastian Frank von Woerd der +Schwarmgeist_.] + +[Footnote 5: Comp. Hubert, _Kleine Schriften_.] + +[Footnote 6: Zoeckler, etc.] + +[Footnote 7: Comp. Uhland, _Schriften zur Geschichte der Dichtung und +Sage_. Alte hoch und nieder deutsche Volkslieder, where plants, ivy, +holly, box, and willow, represent summer and winter.] + +[Footnote 8: Uhland.] + +[Footnote 9: Uhland.] + +[Footnote 10: Wunderhorn.] + +[Footnote 11: Biese, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 12: Fred Cohn, '_Die Gaerten in alter und neuer Zeit,' D. +Rundschau_ 18, 1879. In Italy in the sixteenth century there was a +change to this extent, that greenery was no longer clipt, but allowed +to grow naturally, and the garden represented the transition from +palace to landscape, from bare architectural forms to the free +creations of Nature. The passion for flowers--the art of the pleasure +garden, flourished in Holland and Germany. (Falke.)] + +[Footnote 13: W.H. Riehl states (_Kulturstudien aus drei +Jahrhunderten_) that Berlin, Augsburg, Leipzig, Darmstadt, and +Mannheim were described in the seventeenth century as having 'very +fine and delightful positions'; and the finest parts of the Black +Forest, Harz and Thuringian mountains as 'very desolate,' deserted, +and monotonous, or, at best, as not particularly pleasant scenery. If +only a region were flat and treeless, a delicious landscape could be +charmed out of it. Welcker, Court physician at Hesse Cassel, +describing Schlangenbad in 1721, said that it lay in a desolate, +unpleasing district, where nothing grew but foliage and grass, but +that through ingenious planting of clipt trees in lines and cross +lines, some sort of artistic effect had been produced. Clearly the +principles of French garden-craft had become a widely accepted dogma +of taste. Riehl contrasts the periwig period with the mediaeval, and +concludes that the mediaeval backgrounds of pictures implied feeling +for the wild and romantic. He says: 'In the Middle Ages the painters +chose romantic jagged forms of mountains and rocks for backgrounds, +hence the wild, bare, and arid counted as a prototype of beautiful +scenery, while some centuries later such forms were held to be too +rustic and irregular for beauty.' One cannot entirely agree with +this. He weakens it himself in what follows. 'It was not a real scene +which rose Alp-like before their mind's eye, but an imaginary and +sacred one; their fantastic, romantic ideal called for rough and +rugged environment': and adds, arguing in a circle, 'Their minds +passed then to real portraiture of Nature, and decided the landscape +eye of the period.' My own opinion is that the loftiness of the +'heroic' mountain backgrounds seemed suitable for the sacred subjects +which loomed so large and sublime in their own minds, and that these +backgrounds did not reveal their ideal of landscape beauty, nor 'a +romantic feeling for Nature,' nor 'a taste for the romantic,' nor yet +a wondrous change of view in the periwig period.] + +[Footnote 14: In his _Harburg Program_ of 1883 _(Beitraege zur +Geschichte des Naturgefuehls_), after an incomplete survey of ancient +and modern writings on the subject, Winter sketches the development +of modern feeling for Nature in Germany from Opitz to 1770, as shewn +in the literature of that period, basing his information chiefly upon +Goedeke's _Deutsche Dichtung._] + +[Footnote 15: Comp. Chovelius _Die bedeutendsten deutschen Romanz des +17 Jahrhunderts_. Leipzig, 1866.] + +[Footnote 16: Chovelius.] + +[Footnote 17: Daniel Lohenstein's _Blumen_. Breslau, 1689.] + + +CHAPTER IX + +[Footnote 1: Freiherr von Ditfurth, _Deutsche Volks und +Gesellschaftslieder des 17 und 18 Jahrhunderts_, 1872.] + +[Footnote 2: Goedeke-Tittmannschen Sammlung, xiii., +_Trutz-Nachtigall._] + +[Footnote 3: _Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur_.] + +[Footnote 4: Tittmann's _Deutsche Dichter des 17 Jahrhunderts_, vol. +vi.] + +[Footnote 5: Comp., too, iv. 5: 'Die ihr alles hoert und saget, Luft +and Forst und Meer durchjaget; Echo, Sonne, Mond, und Wind, Sagt mir +doch, wo steckt mein Kind?' + +21. 'Den sanften West bewegt mein Klagen, Es rauscht der Bach den +Seufzern nach Aus Mitleid meiner Plagen; Die Voegel schweigen, Um nur +zu zeigen Dass diese schoene Tyrannei Auch Tieren ueberlegen sei.' +_Abendlied_ contains beautiful personifications: 'Der Feierabend ist +gemacht, Die Arbeit schlaeft, der Traum erwacht, Die Sonne fuehrt die +Pferde trinken; Der Erdkreis wandert zu der Ruh, Die Nacht drueckt ihm +die Augen zu, Die schon dem suessen Schlafe winken.'] + +[Footnote 6: Hettner, _Litteraturgeschichte des 18 Jahrhunderts_.] + +[Footnote 7: Lappenberg in _Zeitschrift fuer Hamburgische Geschichte_, +ii. Hettner, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 8: 'Ye fields and woods, my refuge from the toilsome world +of business, receive me in your quiet sanctuaries and favour my +Retreat and thoughtful Solitude. Ye verdant plains, how gladly I +salute ye! Hail all ye blissful Mansions! Known Seats! Delightful +Prospects! Majestick Beautys of this earth, and all ye rural Powers +and Graces! Bless'd be ye chaste Abodes of happiest Mortals who here +in peaceful Innocence enjoy a Life unenvy'd, the Divine, whilst with +its bless'd Tranquility it affords a happy Leisure and Retreat for +Man, who, made for contemplation and to search his own and other +natures, may here best meditate the cause of Things, and, plac'd +amidst the various scenes of Nature, may nearer view her Works. O +glorious Nature! supremely fair and sovereignly good! All-loving and +All-lovely All-Divine! Whose looks are so becoming, and of such +infinite grace, whose study brings such Wisdom, and whose +contemplation such Delight.... Since by thee (O Sovereign mind!) I +have been form'd such as I am, intelligent and rational; since the +peculiar Dignity of my Nature is to know and contemplate Thee; permit +that with due freedom I exert those Facultys with which thou hast +adorn'd me. Bear with my ventrous and bold approach. And since not +vain Curiosity, nor fond Conceit, nor Love of aught save Thee alone, +inspires me with such thoughts as these, be thou my Assistant, and +guide me in this Pursuit; whilst I venture thus to tread the +Labyrinth of wide Nature, and endeavour to trace thee in thy Works.'] + +[Footnote 9: Comp. Jacob von Falke, '_Der englische Garten_' (_Nord +und Sued_, Nov. 1884), and his _Geschichte des modernen Geschmacks_.] + +[Footnote 10: _Dessins des edifices, meubles, habits, machines, et +utensils des Chinois_, 1757.] + + +CHAPTER X + +[Footnote 1: '_Die Alpen im Lichte verschiedener Zeitalter_,' +_Sammlung wissenschaftlicher Vortraege_, Virchow und Holtzendorff. +Berlin, 1877.] + +[Footnote 2: + + Geschaefte Zwang und Grillen Entweihn nicht diese Trift; + Ich finde hier im Stillen Des Unmuts Gegengift. + Es webet, wallt, und spielet, Das Laub um jeden Strauch, + Und jede Staude fuehlet Des lauen Zephyrs Hauch. + Was mir vor Augen schwebet Gefaellt und huepft und singt, + Und alles, alles lebet, Und alles scheint verjuengt. + Ihr Thaeler und ihr Hoehen Die Lust und Sommer schmueckt! + Euch ungestoert zu sehen, Ist, was mein Herz erquickt. + Die Reizung freier Felder Beschaemt der Gaerten Pracht, + Und in die offnen Waelder Wird ohne Zwang gelacht.... + In jaehrlich neuen Schaetzen zeigt sich des Landmanns Glueck, + Und Freiheit und Ergoetzen Erheitern seinen Blick.... + Ihm prangt die fette Weide Und die betante Flur; + Ihm gruenet Lust und Freude Ihm malet die Natur.'] + +[Footnote 3: _Litteratur geschichte_.] + +[Footnote 4: _Saemtliche poetische Werke_, J.P. Uz. Leipzig, 1786.] + +[Footnote 5: _Saemtliche Werke_. Berlin, 1803.] + +[Footnote 6: _Saemtliche Werke_, J.G. Jacobi, vol. viii. Zurich, +1882.] + +[Footnote 7: He said of his garden at Freiburg, which was laid out in +terraces on a slope, that all that Flora and Pomona could offer was +gathered there. It had a special Poet's Corner on a hillock under a +poplar, where a moss-covered seat was laid for him upon some +limestone rock-work; white and yellow jasmine grew round, and laurels +and myrtles hung down over his head. Here he would rest when he +walked in the sun; on his left was a mossy Ara, a little artificial +stone altar on which he laid his book, and from here he could gaze +across the visible bit of the distant Rhine to the Vosges, and give +himself up undisturbed to his thoughts.] + +[Footnote 8: Gessners _Schriften_. Zurich, 1770.] + +[Footnote 9: Spalding, _Die Bestimmung des Menschen_. Leipzig, 1768.] + +[Footnote 10: Klopstock's _Briefe_. Brunswick, 1867.] + +[Footnote 11: Comp. _Odes_, 'Die Kunst Tialfs' and 'Winterfreuden.'] + +[Footnote 12: _Briefe_.] + +[Footnote 13: Julian Schmidt.] + +[Footnote 14: Comp. his letters from Switzerland, which contain +nothing particular about the scenery, although he crossed the Lake of +Zurich, and 'a wicked mountain' to the Lake of Zug and Lucerne.] + +[Footnote 15: Claudius, who, at a time when the lyric both of poetry +and music was lost in Germany in conventional tea and coffee songs, +was the first to rediscover the direct expression of feeling--that +is, Nature feeling. (Storm's _Hausbuch_.)] + + +CHAPTER XI + +[Footnote 1: I have obtained much information and suggestion from +'_Ueber die geographische Kenntnis der Alpen im Mittelalter_,' and +'_Ueber die Alpine Reiselitteratur in fruherer Zeit_,' in _Allgem. +Zeitung_. Jan. 11, 1885, and Sept. 1885, respectively.] + +[Footnote 2: _Evagatorium 3, Bibliothek d. litterar. Vereins_. +Stuttgart, 1849.] + +[Footnote 3: _Bibliothek des litterar. Vereins_. Stuttgart, 1886.] + +[Footnote 4: _Descriptio Larii lacus_. Milan, 1558.] + +[Footnote 5: _Itinerarium Basil_. 1624.] + +[Footnote 6: Osenbrueggen, _Wanderungen in der Schweiz_, 1867; +_Entwickelungsgeschichte des Schweizreisens_; Friedlaender, _Ueber die +Entstehung und Entwickelung_.] + +[Footnote 7: Comp. Erich Schmidt, _Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe_. +Jena, 1875.] + +[Footnote 8: Remarks on several parts of Italy. London, 1761.] + +[Footnote 9: Letters of Lady M. Wortley Montagu, Sept. 25, 1718.] + +[Footnote 10: Friedlaender, _op. cit._] + +[Footnote 11: Schmidt. Moser's description of a sensitive soul in +_Patriotischen Phantasien_ is most amusing.] + +[Footnote 12: Laprade adduces little of importance in his book _Le +Sentiment de la Nature_ (2nd edition), the first volume of which I +have dealt with elsewhere. I have little in common with Laprade, +although he is the only writer who has treated the subject +comprehensively and historically. His standpoint is that of Catholic +theology; he never separates feeling for Nature from religion, and is +severe upon unbelievers. The book is well written, and in parts +clever, but only touches the surface and misses much. His position is +thus laid down: 'Le vrai sentiment de la Nature, le seul poetique, le +seul fecond et puissant, le seul innocent de tout danger, est celui +qui ne separe jamais l'idee des choses visibles de la pensee de +Dieu.' He accounts for the lack of any important expressions of +feeling for Nature in French classics with: 'Le genie de la France +est le genie de l'action.' and 'L'ame humaine est le but de la +poesie.' He recognizes that even with Fenelon 'la Nature reste a ses +yeux comme une simple decoration du drame que l'homme y joue, le +poete en lui ne la regarde jamais a travers les yeux du mystique.' Of +the treatment of Nature in La Fontaine's Fables, he says: 'Ce n'est +pas peindre la Nature, c'est l'abolir'; and draws this conclusion: +'Le sentiment de l'infini est absent de la poesie du dix-septieme +siecle aussi bien que le sentiment de la Nature'; and again: +'L'esprit general du dix-huitieme siecle est la negation meme de la +poesie ... l'amour de la Nature n'etait guerre autre chose qu'une +haine deguisee et une declaration de guerre a la societe et a la +religion. Il n'y a pai trace du sentiment legitime et profond qui +attire l'artiste et le poete vers les splendeurs de la creation, +revelatrices du monde invisible. Ne demandez pas an dix-huiteme +siecle la poesie de la Nature, pas plus que celle du coeur.' Buffon +shews 'l'etat poetique des sciences de la Nature,' but his brilliant +prose painting lacks 'la presence de Dieu, la revelation de l'infini +les harmonies de l'ame et de la Nature n'existent pas pour Buffon.... +plus de la rhetorique que de vrai sentiment de la Nature.'] + +[Footnote 13: Comp. the garden of Elysium in _La Nouvelle Heloise:_ +Where the gardener's hand is nowhere to be discerned, nothing +contradicts the idea of a desert island, and I cannot perceive any +footsteps of men ... you see nothing here in an exact row, nothing +level, Nature plants nothing by the ruler.'] + +[Footnote 14: _OEuvres de Jacques Bernardin Henri de Saint Pierre_.] + +[Footnote 15: 'B. de S. Pierre a plus que Rousseau les facultes +propres du paysagiste, l'amour meme du pittoresque, la vive curiosite +des sites, des animaux, et des plants, la couleur et une certaine +magie speciale du pinceau,' Laprade adds the reproof: 'Sa pensee +religieuse est au-dessous de son talent d'artiste et en abaisse le +niveau.'] + +[Footnote 16: _Voyage round the World_, 1772-1775.] + +[Footnote 17: Paul Lemnius, 1597, _Landes Rugiae_; Kosegarten, +1777-1779; Rellstab, 1799, _Ausflucht noch der Insel Ruegen;_ Navest, +1800, _Wanderungen durch die Insel Ruegen_; Gruembke, 1805; _Indigena, +Streifzuege durch das Ruegenland_. J.P. Hackert in 1762, and K. D. +Friedrichs in 1792, painted the scenery. Comp. E. Boll, _Die Inset +Ruegen_, 1858.] + + +CHAPTER XII + +[Footnote 1: Comp. Gottschall, _Poetik_. Breslau, 1853.] + +[Footnote 2: _Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Voelker_, Saemtliche +_Werke_, Teil 7.] + +[Footnote 3: _Op. cit._, Teil 15.] + +[Footnote 4: _Zur Philosophie und Gesehichte,_ 2 Teil.] + +[Footnote 5: J.G. Sulzer's _Unterredungen ueber die Schoenheit der +Naetur nebst desselben moralischen Betrachtungen ueber besondere +Gegenstaende der Naturlehre_ is typical. Charites describes his +conversion to the love of Nature by his friend Eukrates. Eukrates +woke him at dawn and led him to a hill close by, as the sun rose. The +fresh air, the birds' songs, and the wide landscape move him, and +Eukrates points out that the love of Nature is the 'most natural of +pleasures,' making the labourer so happy that he forgets servitude +and misery, and sings at his work. 'This pleasure is always new to +us, and the heart, provided it be not possessed by vanity or stormy +passions, lies always open to it. Do you not know that they who are +in trouble, and, above all, they who are in love, find their chief +relief here? Is not a sick man better cheered by sunshine than by any +other refreshment?' Then he points out Nature's harmonies and changes +of colour, and warns Charites to avoid the storms of the passions. +'Yonder brook is a picture of our soul; so long as it runs quietly +between its banks, the water is clear and grass and flowers border +it; but when it swells and flows tumultuously, all this ornament is +torn away, and it becomes turbid. To delight in Nature the mind must +be free.... She is a sanctity only approached by pure souls.... As +only the quiet stream shews the sky and the objects around, so it is +only on quiet souls that Nature's pictures are painted; ruffled water +reflects nothing.' He waxes eloquent about birds' songs, flowers, and +brooks, and wanders by the hour in the woods, 'all his senses open to +Nature's impressions,' which are 'rays from that source of all +beauty, the sight of which will one day bless the soul.' His friend +is soon convinced that Nature cannot be overpraised, and that her art +is endlessly great.] + +[Footnote 6: _Vorn Gefuehl des Schoenen und Physiologie ueberhaupt._ +Winter.] + +[Footnote 7: Comp. _Das Fluchtigste_. 'Tadle nicht der Nachtigallen, +Bald verhallend suesses Lied,' oder 'Nichts verliert sich,' etc.] + +[Footnote 8: Herder's _Nachlass_, Duentzer und F.G. von Herder, 1857.] + +[Footnote 9: Bernay's _Der junge Goethe_.] + +[Footnote 10: _Die Sproedde, Die Bekehrte, Maerz, Lust und Qual, Luna, +Gegenwart_.] + +[Footnote 11: Laprade is all admiration for the 'incomparable artiste +et poete inspire du sentiment de la Nature, c'est qu'il excelle a +peindre le monde exterieur et le coeur humain l'un par l'autre, qu'il +mele les images de l'univers visible a l'expression des sentiments +intimes, de maniere a n'en former qu'un seul tissu.... Tous les +elements d'un objet d'une situation apparaissent a la fois, et dans +leur harmonie, essentielle a cet incomparable esprit.' He is +astonished at the symbolism in _Werthtr_: 'Chaque lettre repond a la +saison ou elle est ecrite.... l'idee et l'image s'identifient dans un +fait supreme, dans un cri; il se fait entre l'emotion intime et +l'impression du dehors une sorte de fusion.' And despite Goethe's +Greek paganism and pantheism, he declares: 'Le nom de Goethe marque +une de ces grandes dates, une de ces grandes revolutions de la +poesie--la plus grande, nous le croyons, depuis Homer.' ... 'Goethe +est la plus haut expression poetique des tendances de notre siecle +vers le monde exterieur et la philosophie de la Nature.'] + +[Footnote 12: Comp. _Tagebucher und Briefe Goethe's aus Italien an +Frau von Stein und Herder_. E. Schmidt, Weimar, 1886.] + +[Footnote 13: Julian Schmidt.] + +[Footnote 14: _The Lady of the Lake_ breathes a delightful freshness, +the very spirit of mountain and wood, free alike from the moral +preaching of Wordsworth, and from the storms of passion.] + +[Footnote 15: Laprade.] + +[Footnote 16: 'Sa formule religieuse, c'est une question; sa pensee, +c'est le doute ... l'artiste divinise chaque detail. Son pantheisme +ne s'applique pas seulement a l'ensemble des choses; Dieu tout entier +est reellement present poor lui dans chaque fragment de matiere dans +le plus immonde animal ... c'est une religion aussi vieille que +l'humanite decline; cela s'appelle purement et simplement le +fetichisme.' (Laprade.)] + +[Footnote 17: _Vorschule der AEsthetik_. Compare 'With every genius a +new Nature is created for us in the further unveiling of the old.' 2 +Aufi. _Berlin Reimer_, 1827.] + +[Footnote 18: 'Like a lily softly swaying in the hushed air, so my +being moves in its elements, in the charming dream of her.' 'Our +souls rush forward in colossal plans, like exulting streams rushing +perpetually through mountain and forest.' 'If the old mute rock of +Fate did not stand opposing them, the waves of the heart would never +foam so beautifully and become mind.' 'There is a night in the soul +which no gleam of starlight, not even dry wood, illuminates,' etc.] + +[Footnote 19: Comp. Tieck's _Biographie von Koepke_. Brandes.] + +[Footnote 20: _Franz Sternbald_, I. Berlin, 1798.] + +[Footnote 21: Haym, _Die romantische Schule_. Berlin, 1870.] + +[Footnote 22: _Phantasus_, i. Berlin, 1812.] + +[Footnote 23: 'A young hunter was sitting in the heart of the +mountains in a thoughtful mood beside his fowling-piece, while the +noise of the water and the woods was sounding through the solitude +... it grew darker ... the birds of night began to shoot with fitful +wing along their mazy courses ... unthinkingly he pulled a straggling +root from the earth, and on the instant heard with affright a stifled +moan underground, which winded downwards in doleful tones, and died +plaintively away in the deep distance. The sound went through his +inmost heart; it seized him as if he had unwittingly touched the +wound, of which the dying frame of Nature was expiring in its agony.' +(Runenberg.)] + +[Footnote 24: _Hymnen an die Nacht_.] + +[Footnote 25: In _Die Lehrlinge von Sais_.] + +[Footnote 26: _Athenaeum_, iii., 1800.] + + + + +INDEX + + +Addison +AEschylus +Agrippa v. Nettesheim +Alamanni +Alberti, Leon +Alcantara +Alcuin +Alexander +Ambrose +Angilbert +Anno v. Coeln +Apollonios Rhodios +Apollonius Sidonius +Apuleius +Aquinus, Thomas +Aribert v. Mailand +Aribo +Ariosto +Aristophanes +Aristotle +Augustine +Augustus +Ausonius +Aventinus +Avitus + +Baccioli, Lucca +Bakhuysen +Basil +Beauvais, V. v. +Beda +v. Bern +Bernhard v. Clairvaux +Bernhard v. Hildesheim +Bernhard v. Ventadour +Bertran de Born +Birgitta +Blair +de Bles +Boccaccio +Boecklin +Boehme +Boetius +Boie +Bojardo +Bonaventura +Boucher +Bouts +Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel, A. v. +Brockes +Brueghel, Peter and Jan +Bruno +Buffon +Buerger +Burkhard v. Monte Sion +Byron, + +Calderon +Calpernius +Camoens +Campanella +Carew +Cassiodorus +Catullus +Celtes +Chambers +Charlemagne +Chateaubriand +Chaucer +Chlodwig +Chlotaire +Chrysostom +Cicero +Claudius +Clement of Rome +v. Clugny, Abbe M. +Colonna, Vittoria +Columbus +Columella +Corneille +Cornelia +Correggio +Cowley +Cramer +Cronegk +Crugot +Cuyp +Cyprian + +Dante +Darius +Defoe +Dionisius da B.S. Sepolchro +Domidius +Dracontius +Drayton +Drummond +du Bois-Reymond +Duerer + +v. Eichendorff +Eist, Deitmar v. +Ekkehart +Ennodius +Epiphanius, M.H. +Euripides +Everdingen, A. v. +v. Eyck + +Fabri +Fenelon +Fischart +Fleming +Forster +Fortunatus, +Francis of Assisi +Frank, Sebastian +Fredegar +Frederic the Great +Friedlander +Fuerttenbach + +Gatterer +Gellert +Gerhard, Paul +Gervinus +Gessner, Conrad +Gessner, Salomon +Giorgione +Gleim +Goethe +Gogen +Gottfried v. Strassburg +Gozzoli +Grasser +Gregory Nazianzen +Gregory of Nyssa +Gregory of Tours +Gruembke +Gryphius +Guarini, G. +Guenther, Christian +Guenther d. Liguriner +Guotenberg, U. v. +Gussfeldt + +Hadrian +Haeckel +Hagedorn +Haller +Harsdoerfer +Hartmann +Hebel +Hegel +Heine +Herder +Hermes +Hilary +Hillern, W. v. +Hobbema +Hoffmannswaldau +Hoelderlin +Hoelty +Homer +Horace +Hugo v. St. Victor +Hugo, Victor +Hulsen +Humboldt + +Ibykos +Isodore + +Jacob v. Bern +Jacobi, Joh. G. +Jerome +Jovius + +Kalidasa +Kallimachos +Kant +Kent +Keyssler +Kiechel +Klaj +Kleist, E. v. +Klipphausen +Klopstock +Koenig, Eva +Kuerenberg + +Lamartine +Lamprecht +Leman +Lenotre +Leon, Luis de +Leonardo da Vinci +Lessing +Livy +Logau +Lohenstein +Longos +Lopez +Lorraine, Claude +Louis XIV. +Louis XV. +Lucretius +Ludwig zu Nassau +Luis de Leon +Lueneberg +Luther + +Maghas +Mantegna +Mareuil, A. v. +Maria Theresa +v. Martius +Medici, Lorenzo de +Meer, Aart v. d. +Meleager +Memling +Menander +Michael Angelo +Milton +Minucius Felix +Molanus +Montagu +Montemayor +Montreux +Moore +Morungen, H. v. + +Moscherosch +Moeser +Mosto, A. da +Murdach + +Navarrete, F. de +Nemesianus +Nettesheim, C.A. v. +Nicolas +Nonnos +Novalis + +Opitz +Osorio +Ossian +Ouwater +Ovid + +Paracelsus +Patenir +Paul, Jean, +Paul, St +Paulinus of Nola +Perdiccas +Peter Martyr +Petrarch +Pfintzing +Phidias +Philip of Macedon +Phokas +Pico della Mirandola +Pierre, B. de St +Pindar +Pisanello +Pius II. (Enea Silvio), +Plato +Pliny +Polo, Marco +Pope +Potter, Paul +Poussin +Propertius +Prudentius +Ptolemaios + +Racine +Radegunde +Raphael +Regensburg +Reinmar +Reissner +Richardson +Rickel, D. v. +Roche, Sophie la +Ronsard +Rousseau, +Rubens +Rucellai +Rueckert +Rugge +Ruysbroek +Ruysdael + +Sabiende, R. v. +Sachs, Hans +Sannazaro +Sappho +Saussure +v. Schachten +Schaller +Scherr +Scheuchzer +Schickhart +Schiller +Scipio Africanus +Scott +Seneca +Shaftesbury +Shakespeare, +Shelley, +Sidney +Simonides +Socrates +Sophocles +Southey +Southwell +Spalding +Spee +Spenser +Spielhagen +Spinoza +Spix +Stolberg +Storm, Th. +Sulzer +Summenhart +Suso + +Tasso +Tauler +Teresa v. Avila +Theocritus +Theodoric +Theodulf +Thomson +Tiberius +Tibullus +Tieck +Titian +Toscanelli, Paolo + +Uhland +d'Urfe +Uz, Joh. P. + +Vasco da Gama +Velde, Adrian v. d. +Veldegge, H. v. +Vespucci +Virgil +Vischer +Vives, Luis +Volkmar +Voltaire +Voss + +Wahlafried +Walther v. d. Vogelweide +Wandelbert +Watteau +Weyden, Roger v. d. +William of Tours +Winckelmann +Wolfram v. Eschenbach +Wordsworth +Wyatt +Wynant + +Young + +Zesen, P. v. +Ziegler, A. v. +Zimmermann +Zweibruecken, A. v. + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR +NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND MODERN TIMES*** + + +******* This file should be named 13814.txt or 13814.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/8/1/13814 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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