The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 29

_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 a.s.sumed 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 s.h.i.+mmering sea, which had gladdened the eyes of Roman rulers in cla.s.sic 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 ca.n.a.l-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, b.a.l.l.s, 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 leaf.a.ge, 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 cla.s.sics (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, gra.s.s 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, _Schferei von der schonen 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 _Schferei 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 t.i.tan'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, Konigsberg, and Nuremberg; but, for the most part, it was an idle tinkle of words without feeling, empty artificial stuff with high-flown t.i.tles, 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 fas.h.i.+on--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 sh.e.l.l 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-Wolfenb.u.t.tel 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 pa.s.sionate 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 Harsdorfer. Their strength lay in imitating the sounds of Nature, and they were much admired. What is still more astonis.h.i.+ng, Lohenstein's writings were the model for thirty years, and it was the fas.h.i.+on 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: