The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 8

He says of La Boneia, 'That plain has many homesteads, and beautiful groves of olive and fig and other trees of various kinds, and much timber. Moreover, it abounds in no common measure in rivers and pasture land'; closes a geographical account of Lebanon thus, 'There are in Liba.n.u.s and Antiliba.n.u.s themselves fertile and well-tilled valleys, rich in pasture land, vineyards, gardens, plantations--in a word, in all the good things of the world'; and says of the Plain of Galilee, 'I never saw a lovelier country, if our sins and wrong-doing did not prevent Christians from living there.'

He had some feeling too for a distant view. He wrote of Samaria: 'The site was very beautiful; the view stretched right to the Sea of Joppa and to Antipatris and Caesarea of Palestine, and over the whole mountain of Ephraim down to Ramathaym and Sophim and to Carmel near Accon by the sea. And it is rich in fountains and gardens and olive groves, and all the good things this world desires.' But it would be going too far to conclude from the following words that he appreciated the contrast between simple and sublime scenery: 'It must be noticed too, that the river, from the source of Jordan at the foot of Lebanon as far as the Desert of Pharan, has broad and pleasant plains on both sides, and beyond these the fields are surrounded by very high mountains as far as the Red Sea.'

In dealing with Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, religious enthusiasm suppresses any reference to scenery.

These descriptions shew that the wealth and fertility of the country were praised before its beauty, and that this was only referred to in short, meagre phrases, which tell less about it than any raptures without special knowledge.

It was much the same with Phokas, who visited the Holy Land in 1135.[2]

He was greatly impressed by the position of Antioch, 'with its meadows and fruitful gardens, and the murmur of waters as the river, fed by the torrents of the Castalian spring, flows quietly round the town and besprinkles its towers with its gentle waves ... but most to be admired of all is the mountain between town and sea, a n.o.ble and remarkable sight--indeed, a delight to the beholder's eye ... the Orontes flows with countless windings at the foot of it, and discharges itself into the sea.'

He thought Lebanon very beautiful and worthy its praise in Holy Scripture: 'The sun lies like white hair upon its head; its valleys are crowned with pines, cedars, and cypresses; streams, beautiful to look at and quite cold, flow from the ravines and valleys down to the sea, and the freshly melted snow gives the flowing water its crystal clearness.'

Tyre, too, was praised for its beauty: 'Strangers were particularly delighted with one spring, which ran through meadows; and if one stands on the tower, one can see the dense growth of plants, the movement of the leaves in the glow of noon.'

The plain of Nazareth, too, was 'a heaven on earth, the delight of the soul.'

But recollections of the sacred story were dearer to Phokas than the scenery, and elsewhere he limited himself to noting the rich fruit gardens, shady groups of trees, and streams and rivers with pleasant banks.

Epiphanius Monachus Hagiopolitae, in his _Enarratio Syriae_, was a very dry pioneer; so, too, the _Anonymus de locis Hierosolymitanis_; Perdiccas, in his _Hierosolyma_, describes Sion thus: 'It stands on an eminence so as to strike the eye, and is beautiful to behold, owing to a number of vines and flower gardens and pleasant spots.'

It must be admitted then, that, beside utilitarian admiration of a Paradise of fruitfulness, there is some record of simple, even enthusiastic delight in its beauty; but only as to its general features, and in the most meagre terms. The country was more interesting to the Crusaders as the scene of the Christian story than as a place in which to rest and dream and admire Nature for her own sake.

The accounts of German pilgrimages[3] of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries only contain dry notices, such as those of Jacob von Bern (1346-47), Pfintzing (1436-40), and Ulrich Leman (1472-80). The last-mentioned praises Damascus in this clumsy fas.h.i.+on: 'The town is very gay, quite surrounded by orchards, with many brooks and springs flowing inside and out, and an inexpressible number of people in it,'

etc. Dietrich von Schachten describes Venice in this way: 'Venice lies in the sea, and is built neither on land nor on mountain, but on wooden piles, which is unbelievable to one who has not seen it'; and Candia: 'Candia is a beautiful town in the sea, well built; also a very fruitful island, with all sorts of things that men need for living.' He describes a ride through Southern Italy: 'Sat.u.r.day we rode from Trepalda, but the same day through chestnut and hazel woods; were told that these woods paid the king 16,000 gulden every year. After that we rode a German mile through a wood, where each tree had its vine--many trees carried 3 ohms of wine, which is pleasant to see--and came to Nola.'

He called Naples 'very pretty and big,' and on: 'Then the king took us to the sea and shewed us the ports, which are pretty and strong with bulwarks and gates; we saw many beautiful s.h.i.+ps too,' etc. One does not know which is the more wonderful here, the poverty of the description or the utter lack of personal observation: what the wood produced, and how one was protected from the sea, was more important to the writer than wood and sea themselves, and this, even in speaking of the Bay of Naples, perhaps the most beautiful spot in Europe. But instances like these are typical of German descriptions at the time, and their Alpine travels fared no better.[4]

Geographical knowledge of the Alps advanced very slowly; there was as yet no aesthetic enjoyment of their beauty. The Frankish historians (Gregory of Tours, Fredegar) chronicled special events in the Alps, but very briefly. Fredegar, for instance, knew of the sudden appearance of a hot spring in the Lake of Thun, and Gregory of Tours notes that the land-slip in 563 at the foot of the Dent du Midi, above the point where the Rhine enters the Lake of Geneva, was a dreadful event. Not only was the Castle of Tauretunum overwhelmed, but the blocking of the Rhine caused a deluge felt as far as Geneva.

The pious prince of the Church explained this as a portent of another catastrophe, the pest, which ravaged Gaul soon after.

There was much fabling at that time in the legends of saints, about great mines of iron, gold, and silver, and about chamois and buck, cattle-breeding and Alpine husbandry in the 'regio montana'; for example, in von Aribo's _Vita S. Emmerani_. When the Alps became more frequented, especially when, through Charlemagne, a political bridge came to unite Italy and Germany, new roads were made and the whole region was better known--in fact, early in mediaeval times, not only political, but ecclesiastical and mercantile life spread its threads over a great part of the known world, and began to bind the lives of nations together, so that the Alps no longer remained _terra incognita_ to dwellers far and near.

We have accounts of Alpine journeys by the Abbe Majolus v. Clugny (970), Bernard v. Hildesheim (1101), Aribert v. Mailand, Anno v.

Coeln[5], but without a trace of orography. They scarcely refer to the snow and glacier regions from the side of physical geography, or even of aesthetic feeling; and do not mention the mountain monarchs so familiar to-day--Mt. Blanc, the Jungfrau, Ortner, Glockner, etc.--which were of no value to their life, practical or scientific.

These writers record nothing but names of places and their own troubles and dangers in travelling, especially in winter. And even at the end of the fifteenth century, German travels across the Alps were written in the same strain--for example, the account of the voyage of the Elector-Palatine Alexander v. Zweibrucken and Count Joh. Ludwig zu Na.s.sau (1495-96) from Zurich Rapperschwyl and Wesen to Wallensee: 'This is the real Switzerland; has few villages, just a house here and a house there, but beautiful meadows, much cattle, and very high mountains, on which snow lies, which falls before Christmas, and is as hard as any rock.' As an exception to this we have a vivid and poetic description of the famous Verona Pa.s.s in Latin verse by Guntherus Ligurinus.

Gunther's description of this notorious ravine, between sky-high Alps, with the torrent rus.h.i.+ng at the bottom and a pa.s.sage so narrow that men could only move forward one by one, sounds like a personal experience. This twelfth-century poem comes to us, in fact, like a belated echo of Fortunatus.

We must now enquire whether the chief representatives of German literature at this time shewed any of the national love of Nature, whether the influence of the Crusades was visible in them, how far scenery took a place in epic and song, and whether, as moderns have so often stated, mediaeval Germany stood high above antiquity in this respect. Gervinus, a cla.s.sic example on the last point, in the section of his history of German poetry which treats of the difference between the German fables about animals on the one hand, and Esop's and the Oriental on the other, said:

The way in which animals are handled in the fables demanded a far slighter familiarity between them and men; so exact a knowledge as we see in the German fables, often involving knowledge of their natural history, such insight into the 'privacy of the animal world,' belonged to quite another kind of men. Antiquity did not delight in Nature, and delight in Nature is the very foundation of these poems. Remote antiquity neither knew nor sought to know any natural history; but only wondered at Nature.

The art of hunting and the pa.s.sion for it, often carried to excess in the Middle Ages, was unknown to it. It is a bold remark of Grimm's that he could smell the old smell of the woods in the German animal poems, but it is one whose truth every one will feel, who turns to this simple poetry with an open mind, who cares for Nature and life in the open.

This is a very tangle of empty phrases and misstatements. No people stood in more heartfelt and naive relation to Nature, especially to the animal world, than the Hindoos and Persians. In earlier enquiries[6] we have reviewed the naive feeling displayed in Homer and the sentimental in h.e.l.lenism, and have seen that the taste for hunting increased knowledge of Nature in the open in h.e.l.lenic days far more than in the Middle Ages. We shall see now that the level of feeling reached in those and imperial Roman days was not regained in European literature until long after the fall of Latin poetry, and that it was the fertilizing influence of that cla.s.sic spirit, and that alone, which enabled the inborn German taste for Nature, and for hunting, and plant and animal life, to find artistic expression. It was a too superficial knowledge of cla.s.sic literature, and an inclination to synthesis, and clever _a priori_ argument (a style impressed upon his day by Hegel's method, and fortunately fast disappearing), which led Gervinus to exalt the Middle Ages at the expense of antiquity. It sounds like a weak concession when he says elsewhere:

Joy in Nature, which is peculiar to modern times, in contrast to antiquity, which is seen in the earliest mediaeval poems, and in which, moreover, expiring antiquity came to meet the German--this joy in Nature, in dwelling on plant and animal life, is the very soul of this (animal) poetry. As in its plastic art, so in all its poetry, antiquity only concerned itself with G.o.ds and heroes; its glance was always turned upwards.

But, as a fact, no one has ever stood with feet more firmly planted on this earth than the Greek, enjoying life and undeterred by much scruple or concern as to the powers above; and centuries of development pa.s.sed before German literature equalled Greek in love of Nature and expressive representation of her beauty.

To rank the two national epics of Germany, the _Nibelungenlied_ and _Gudrun_, side by side with the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ is to exaggerate their value. And here, as ever, overstraining the comparison is mischievous.

The _Nibelungenlied_ is undeniably charming with its laconic and yet plastic descriptions, its vigorous heroes, and the tragic course of their fate; so is _Gudrun_, that melodious poem of the North Sea. But they never, either in composition, method of representation, or descriptive epithets, reach the perfect art of the Greek epics. What moral beauty and plastic force there is in Homer's comparisons and in his descriptions of times and seasons! what a clear eye and warm heart he has for Nature in all her moods! and what raw and scanty beginnings of such things we have in the _Nibelungenlied_! It is true Homer had not attained to the degree of sympathy which finds in Nature a friend, a sharer of one's joys and sorrows; she is pictured objectively in the form of epic comparisons; but how faithfully, and with what range and variety!

There can scarcely be another epic in the world so poor in descriptions of time and place as the _Nibelungenlied_; it cannot be used to prove German feeling for Nature!

India, Persia, and Greece made natural phenomena the counterparts of human life, weaving into the tale, by way of comparison or environment, charming genre pictures of plant and animal life, each complete in itself; in the _Nibelungenlied_ Nature plays no part at all, not even as framework.

Time is indicated as spa.r.s.ely as possible:

'Upon the 7th day at Worms on the Rhine sh.o.r.e, the gallant hors.e.m.e.n arrived.'

'On a Whitsun morning we saw them all go by'; or 'When it grew towards even, and near the sun's last ray, seeing the air was cooler'; or 'He must hang, till light morning threw its glow through the window.' The last is the most poetic; elsewhere it is 'Day was over, night fell.'

Terseness can be both a beauty and a force; but, in comparison with Greece, how very little feeling for Nature these expressions contain!

It is no better with descriptions of place:

'From the Rhine they rode through Hesse, their warriors as well, towards the Saxon country, where they to fighting fell.'

'He found a fortress placed upon a mountain.'

'Into a wide-roomed palace of fas.h.i.+on excellent, for there, beneath it rus.h.i.+ng, one saw the Danube's flood.'

Even the story of the hunt and the murder of Siegfried is quite matter-of-fact and spa.r.s.e as to scenery: 'By a cold spring he soon lost his life ... then they rode from there into a deep wood ...

there they encamped by the green wood, where they would hunt on the broad mead ... one heard mountain and tree echo.'

'The spring of water was pure and cool and good.' ...

'There fell Chriemhild's husband among the flowers ... all round about the flowers were wetted with his blood.'

One thinks instinctively of Indian and Greek poetry, of Adonis and the death of Baldur in the Northern Saga. But even here, where the subject almost suggests it, there is no trace of Nature's sympathy with man.

References to the animal world too--Chriemhild's dreams of the falcons seized by two eagles, and the two wild boars which attacked Siegfried, the game hunted in the forests by the heroes who run like panthers--all show it to be of no importance.

Even such phrases as rosy-red, snow-white, etc., are rare--'Her lovely face became all rosy-red with pleasure'; but there is a certain tenderness in the comparisons of Chriemhild:

'Then came the lovely maiden, even as morning red from sombre clouds outbreaking,' and, 'just as the moon in brightness excels the brightest stars, and suddenly outs.h.i.+ning, athwart the clouds appears,' so she excelled all other women.

It has been said that one can hear the sighing of the north wind and the roar of the North Sea in _Gudrun_, but this is scarcely more than a pretty phrase. The 'dark tempestuous' sea, 'wild unfathomable'

waves, the sh.o.r.e 'wet from the blood of the slain,' are indeed mentioned, but that is all.

Wat of Sturmland says to the young warriors: 'The air is still and the moon s.h.i.+nes clear ... when the red star yonder in the south dips his head in the brine, I shall blow on my great horn that all the hosts shall hear'; but it is hope of morning, not delight in the starry sky, that he is expressing.

Indications of place too are of the briefest, just 'It was a broad neck of land, called the Wulpensand,' or, 'In a few hours they saw the sh.o.r.es where they would land, a little harbour lay in sight enfolded by low hills clothed with dark fir trees.'

The first trace of sympathy with Nature occurs in the account of the effect of Horand's song.