The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 45

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increasing years, grew more impersonal, his att.i.tude to Nature more abstract and scientific; the archetypal plant was superseded by the theory of colours.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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 Jungling und der Muhlbach_ 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 relations.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 encompa.s.ses the world. Nature became his G.o.d, 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 s.p.a.ces 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 a.s.signed 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 G.o.ddess! 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 s.h.i.+eld the rising moon. He sat on the sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+nes to the beam of the west. Thy b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 pa.s.sion:

Nor was this fellows.h.i.+p 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 coa.r.s.er 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 pa.s.sion; the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, The colours and their forms, were then to me An appet.i.te, 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 pa.s.sionate 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-a.s.sertion; 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, pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion. 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 sh.o.r.e 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: