The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 39

When Eva Konig, 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 hards.h.i.+ps, 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 Rugen too, Swedish at that time, with its striking contrasts of deep blue bays and inlets, chalk rocks and beech woods, came into fas.h.i.+on with lovers of Nature, especially after the road from Sagard to Stubbenkamer had been improved[17]--so much so, in fact, that in 1805 Grumbke 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 Gottingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but their horizon was narrow, and though F. s...o...b..rg 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 pa.s.sion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful souls, moons.h.i.+ne poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, and _La Nouvelle Heloise_, enn.o.bled 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 G.o.ds and half-G.o.ds, only to repeat stereotyped ideas, and produce descriptions of scenery, without lyric thought and feeling.

But Goethe's genius pa.s.sed 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 _Laoc.o.o.n_, 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce, he did not give due value to lyric feeling or landscape painting.[1] They belong to a region in which his sharp, critical ac.u.men 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, emanc.i.p.ating 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 cla.s.sics 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 gra.s.s in the suns.h.i.+ne 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 a.n.a.lysis.

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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 n.o.ble, 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 sh.o.r.e, ...

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 pa.s.sed away!