The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 36

We find the same taste, often expressed in a very original way, in both the brothers s...o...b..rg. In Christian s...o...b..rg'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 s...o...b..rg 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, s.h.i.+ning, 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 Jungling, 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 gus.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d, Free as a G.o.d, Though yonder beckon treacherous calms below, The wavering l.u.s.tre 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 G.o.d, Free as a G.o.d.

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-sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sion 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 cra.s.s exaggeration, Rousseau was the first example.

h.e.l.lenism, 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.serted 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 pa.s.sed 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 fas.h.i.+ons, 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 Pa.s.s 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. Gra.s.ser wrote of Rhoetia[5]: 'There are marble ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sage 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, antic.i.p.ating Rousseau. 'I have resolved that so long as G.o.d 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 ma.s.ses, and lift one's head among the clouds.

How it stimulates wors.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d (Irdisches Vergungen 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 pa.s.sed, 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.'