The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 50

He describes his love in a mystical form:

We were but one flower, and our souls lived in each other as flowers do, when they love and hide their joy within a closed calyx.... The clear starry night had now become my element, for the beautiful life of my love grew in the stillness as in the depths of earth gold grows mysteriously.

He delights 'thus to drink the joy of the world out of one cup with the lady of his love.'

'Yea, man is a sun, seeing all and transfiguring all when he loves; and when he does not love, he is like a dark dwelling in which a little smelly lamp is burning.' All this is soft and feminine, but it has real poetic charm.

Beautiful too, though sad and gloomy, is his _Song of Fate_:

Nowhere may man abide, But painfully from hour to hour He stumbles blindly on to the unknown, As water falls from rock to rock The long year through.

His pantheism finds expression in the odes--in _To Nature_, for instance:

Since my heart turneth upward to the sun As one that hears her voice, Hailing the stars as brothers, and the spring As melody divine; Since in the breath that stirs the wood thy soul, The soul of joy, doth move On the still waters of my heart--therefore, O Nature! these are golden days to me!

Tieck, too, was keenly alive to Nature. Spring[19]:

Look all around thee how the spring advances!

New life is playing through the gay green trees!

See how in yonder bower the light leaf dances To the bird's tread and to the quivering breeze!

How every blossom in the sunlight glances!

The winter frost to his dark cavern flees, And earth, warm wakened, feels through every vein The kindling influence of the vernal rain.

Now silvery streamlets, from the mountain stealing, Dance joyously the verdant vales along; Cold fear no more the songster's tongue is sealing, Down in the thick dark grove is heard his song.

And all their bright and lovely hues revealing, A thousand plants the field and forest throng; Light comes upon the earth in radiant showers, And mingling rainbows play among the flowers.

All his writings seem intoxicated with Nature. The hero of his novel _William Lovell_, scamp though he is, a man of criminal egotism whose only law is licence, is deeply in love with Nature.

He wrote from Florence:

Nature refreshes my soul with her endless beauty. I am often full of enthusiasm at the thousand charms of Nature and Art ... at last my longing to travel to wonderful distant places is satisfied. Even as a child, when I stood outside my father's country-house, and gazed at the distant mountains and discovered a windmill on the very line of the horizon, it seemed to beckon me as it turned, my blood pulsed more quickly, my mind flew to distant regions, a strange longing often filled my eyes with tears.

Often it seems to me as if the enigma in ourselves were about to be unriddled, as if we were suddenly to see the transformation of all our feelings and strange experiences. Night surrounded me with a hundred terrors, the transparent moonlight sky was like a crystal dome overhead--in this world the most unusual feelings were as shadows.

'Franz Sternbald' had the same intoxicated feeling for Nature:

I should like to fill the whole world with songs of love, to move moonrise and sunrise to echo back my joys and sorrows; and trees, twigs, leaves, gra.s.ses to catch the melody and all repeat my music with a thousand tongues.[20]

To the Romantic School, Music and Nature were a pa.s.sion; they longed to resolve all their feelings, like Byron, at one flash, into music.

'For thought is too distant.' Night and the forest, moonlight and starlight, were in all their songs.

There is a background of landscape all through _Franz Sternbald's Wanderings_.

In the novels of the eighteenth century landscape had had no place; Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he only wanted to fill up the page.

Rousseau altered this; Sophie la Roche, in her _Freundschaftlichen Frauenzimmerbriefen_, introduced ruins, moonlight scenery, hills, vales, and flowering hedges, etc., into scenes of thought and feeling; and most of all, Goethe in _Werther_ tunes scenery and soul to one key. In his later romances he avoided descriptions of scenery.

Jean Paul, like Tieck in _Franz Sternbald_, never spares us one sunset or sunrise. Some of Tieck's concise descriptions are very telling, like Theodore Storm's at the present day:

Rosy light quivered on the blades of gra.s.s, and morning moved in waves along them.

The redder the evening grew, the heavier became his dreams; the darkened trees, the shadows lengthening across the fields, the smoke from the roofs of a little village, and the stars coming into view one by one in the sky--all this moved him deeply, moved him to a wistful compa.s.sion for himself.

As Franz wanders about the wood:

He observes the trees reflected in a neighbouring pond. He had never looked at landscape with this pleasure, it had never been given to him to discern the various colours and their shadows, the charm of the stillness, the effect of the foliage, as now in the clear water. Till now he had never drawn a landscape, only looked at it as a necessary adjunct to many historical pictures, had never felt that lifeless Nature could herself compose something whole and complete in itself, and so worthy to be represented.

Tieck's shorter stories, fairy tales and others, shew taste for the mysterious and indefinite aspects of Nature--reflections in water, rays of light, cloud forms:

They became to him the most fitting characters in which to record that indefinite inexpressible feeling which gave its special colour to his spiritual life.[21]

The pantheism of Boehme, with whom he was closely a.s.sociated, always attracted him, and in Jena he came under the influence of Steffens, and also of Sch.e.l.ling, whose philosophy of Nature called Nature a mysterious poem, a dreaming mind. This mind it became the chief aim of Novalis, as well as Tieck, to decipher.

From simple descriptions of Nature he went on to read mystic meanings into her, seeking, psychologically in his novels and mystically in his fairy tales, to fathom the connection between natural phenomena and elementary human feeling. _Blond Egbert_ was the earliest example of this:

Night looked sullenly through the windows, and the trees without rustled in the wet cold ... the moon looked fitfully through breaks in the driving clouds.[22]

In the same book Bertha describes the horror of loneliness, the vague longings, and then the overwhelming delight in new impressions, which seized her when she fled from home as a child and lost herself among the mountains.

_The Runenberg_ gives in a very powerful way the idea of the weird fascination which the subterranean powers were supposed to exert over men, alluring and befooling them, and rousing their thirst for gold.

The demoniacal elements in mountain scenery, its crags and abysses, are contrasted with idyllic plains. The tale is sprinkled over with descriptions of Nature, which give it a fairy-like effect.[23]

The most extraordinary product of this School was Novalis. With him everything resolved itself into presentiment, twilight, night, into vague longings for a vague distant goal, which he expressed by the search for 'the blue flower.' This is from _Heinrich von Ofterdingen_:

'The cheerful pageant of the glorious evening rocked him in soft imaginings; the flower of his heart was visible now and then as by sheet lightning.' He looked at Nature with the mystic's eye, and described her fantastically:

I am never tired of looking minutely at the different plants.

Growing plants are the direct language of the earth; each new leaf, each remarkable flower, is a mystery which projects itself, and because it cannot move with love and longing, nor attain to words, is a dumb, quiet plant. When in solitude one finds such a flower, does it not seem as if all around it were brightened, and, best of all, do not the little feathered notes around it remain near? One could weep for joy, and there, far from the world, stick hands and feet into the earth, to take root, and never more leave so delightful a spot. This green mysterious carpet of love is drawn over the whole earth.

It is not surprising that night should attract this unnaturally excited imagination most of all:

Sacred, inexpressible, mysterious Night, delicious balsam drops from thy hands, from the poppy sheaf; thou upliftest the heavy wings of the Spirit.[24]

Night and death are delight and bliss.

The fairy-like tale of _Hyacinth and Little Rose,_ with its charming personifications, is refres.h.i.+ng after all this:

The violet told the strawberry in confidence, she told her friend the gooseberry, who never ceased to jeer when Hyacinth went, so the whole garden and wood soon knew it, and when Hyacinth went out, voices from all sides cried out, 'Little Rose is my favourite.' When he goes into the wide world to find the land of Isis, he asks the way of the animals, and of springs, rocks, and trees, and the flowers smile at him, the springs offer him a fresh drink, and there is wonderful music when he comes home. 'O that men could understand the music of Nature!' cries the listener in the tale. Then follows a description of 'the sweet pa.s.sion for the being of Nature and her enchanting raptures,' and the charm of the poetic imagination which finds 'a great sympathy with man's heart' in all the external world. For example, in the breath of wind, which 'with a thousand dark and dolorous notes seems to dissolve one's quiet grief into one deep melodious sigh of all Nature.'

'And am I myself other than the stream when I gaze gloomily down into its waters and lose my thoughts in its flow?' And in ecstasy the youth exclaims: 'Whose heart does not leap for joy, when he feels Nature's innermost life in its fulness, when that powerful feeling, for which language has no other name than love and bliss, spreads like a vapour through his being, and he sinks, palpitating, on the dark alluring breast of Nature, and his poor self is lost in the overwhelming waves of joy?'[25]

Here we have the key to the romantic feeling for Nature--communion of the soul with Nature in a twilight mood of dreamy absorption.

Yet amidst all this, real delight in romantic scenery was not quite lacking: witness Hulsen's[26] _Observations on Nature on a Journey through Switzerland_; and the genuine lyric of Nature, untainted by mystic and sickly influences, was still to be heard, as in Eichendorff's beautiful songs and his _Tautgenichts_.

The Romantic School, in fact, far as it erred from the path, did enlarge the life of feeling generally, and with that, feeling for Nature, and modern literature is still bound to it by a thousand threads.

Our modern rapture has thus been reached by a path which, with many deviations in its course, has come to us from a remote past, and is still carrying us farther forward.