The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 26

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 hoa.r.s.e That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements.... Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of h.e.l.l, 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, b.u.t.tress, 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 ma.s.s 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 h.e.l.lenic 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 ma.s.s.[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. t.i.tian 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 gra.s.s 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 Lubke says,[4] one soon sees that Durer 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 Durer 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]

Durer'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.