The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 17

(Sonnet 18.)

The most famous lines in this poem are those which describe a romantic garden so vividly that Humboldt says 'it reminds one of the charming scenery of Sorrento.' It certainly proves that even epic poetry tried to describe Nature for her own sake:

The garden then unfolds a beauteous scene, With flowers adorned and ever living green; There silver lakes reflect the beaming day, Here crystal streams in gurgling fountains play.

Cool vales descend and sunny hills arise, And groves and caves and grottos strike the eyes.

Art showed her utmost power; but art concealed With greater charm the pleased attention held.

It seemed as Nature played a sportive part And strove to mock the mimic works of art: By powerful magic breathes the vernal air, And fragrant trees eternal blossoms bear: Eternal fruits on every branch endure, Those swelling from their buds, and these mature: The joyous birds, concealed in every grove, With gentle strife prolong the notes of love.

Soft zephyrs breathe on woods and waters round, The woods and waters yield a murmuring sound; When cease the tuneful choir, the wind replies, But, when they sing, in gentle whisper dies; By turns they sink, by turns their music raise And blend, with equal skill, harmonious lays.

But even here the scene is surrounded by an imaginary atmosphere; flowers, fruit, creatures, and atmosphere all lie under a magic charm. Ta.s.so's importance for our subject lies far more in his much-imitated pastorals.

The _Arcadia_ of Jacopo Sannazaro, which appeared in 1504, a work of poetic beauty and still greater literary importance,[11] paved the way for pastoral poetry, which, like the sonnet, was interwoven with prose. The shepherd's occupations are described with care, though many of the songs and terms of expression rather fit the man of culture than the child of Nature, and he had that genuine enthusiasm for the rural which begets a convincing eloquence. ''Tis you,' he says at the end, addressing the Muse, 'who first woke the sleeping woods, and taught the shepherds how to strike up their lost songs.'

Bembo wrote this inscription for his grave:

Strew flowers o'er the sacred ashes, here lies Sannazaro; With thee, gentle Virgil, he shares Muse and grave.

Virgil too was industriously imitated in the didactic poetry of his country.

Giovanni Rucellai (born 1475) wrote a didactic poem, _The Bees_, which begins:

'O chaste virgins, winged visitants of flowery banks, whilst I prepared to sing your praise in lofty verse, at peep of day I was o'ercome by sleep, and then appeared a chorus of your tiny folk, and from their rich mellifluous haunts, in a clear voice these words flowed forth.... And I will sing how liquid and serene the air distils sweet honey, heavenly gilt, on flowerets and on gra.s.s, and how the bees, chaste and industrious, gather it, and thereof with care and skill make perfumed wax to grace the altars of our G.o.d.'

And a didactic poem by Luigi Alamanni (born 1495), called _Husbandry_, has: 'O blessed is he who dwells in peace, the actual tiller of his joyous fields, to whom, in his remoteness, the most righteous earth brings food, and secure in well-being, he rejoices in his heart. If thou art not surrounded by society rich with purple and gems, nor with houses adorned with costly woods, statues, and gold;... at least, secure in the humble dwelling of wood from the copse hard by, and common stones collected close at hand, which thine own hand has founded and built, whenever thou awakenest at the approach of dawn, thou dost not find outside those who bring news of a thousand events contrary to thy desires.... Thou wanderest at will, now quickly, now slowly, across the green meadow, through the wood, over the gra.s.sy hill, or by the stream. Now here, now there ... thou handlest the hatchet, axe, scythe, or hoe.... To enjoy in sober comfort at almost all seasons, with thy dear children, the fruits of thine own tree, the tree planted by thyself, this brings a sweetness sweet beyond all others.'

These didactic writings, inspired by Virgilian Georgics, show a distinct preference for the idyllic.

Sannazaro's _Arcadia_ went through sixty editions in the sixteenth century alone. Ta.s.so reckoned with the prevalent taste of his day in _Aminta_, which improved the then method of dramatizing a romantic idyll. The whole poem bears the stamp of an idealizing and romantic imagination, and embodies in lyric form his sentimental idea of the Golden Age and an ideal world of Nature. Even down to its details _Aminta_ recalls the pastorals of Longos; and Daphne's words (Act I.

Scene 1) suggest the most feeling outpourings of Kallimachos and Nonnos:

And callest thou sweet spring-time The time of rage and enmity, Which breathing now and smiling, Reminds the whole creation, The animal, the human, Of loving! Dost thou see not How all things are enamoured Of this enamourer, rich with joy and health?

Observe that turtle-dove, How, toying with his dulcet murmuring, He kisses his companion. Hear that nightingale Who goes from bough to bough Singing with his loud heart, 'I love!' 'I love!'...

The very trees Are loving. See with what affection there, And in how many a clinging turn and twine, The vine holds fast its husband. Fir loves fir, The pine the pine, and ash and willow and beech Each towards the other yearns, and sighs and trembles.

That oak tree which appears So rustic and so rough, Even that has something warm in its sound heart; And hadst thou but a spirit and sense of love, Thou hadst found out a meaning for its whispers.

Now tell me, would thou be Less than the very plants and have no love?

One seems to hear Sakuntala and her friends talking, or Akontios complaining. So, too, when the unhappy lover laments (Aminta):

In my lamentings I have found A very pity in the pebbly waters, And I have found the trees Return them a kind voice: But never have I found, Nor ever hope to find, Compa.s.sion in this hard and beautiful What shall I call her?

Aminta describes to Tirsis how his love grew from boyhood up:

There grew by little and little in my heart, I knew not from what root, But just as the gra.s.s grows that sows itself, An unknown something which continually Made me feel anxious to be with her.

Sylvia kisses him:

Never did bee from flower Suck sugar so divine As was the honey that I gathered then From those twin roses fresh.

In Act II. Scene 1, the rejected Satyr, like the rejected Polyphemus or Amaryllis in Theocritus, complains in ant.i.theses which recall Longos:

The woods hide serpents, lions, and bears under their green shade, and in your bosom hatred, disdain, and cruelty dwell....

Alas, when I bring the earliest flowers, you refuse them obstinately, perhaps because lovelier ones bloom on your own face; if I offer beautiful apples, you reject them angrily, perhaps because your beautiful bosom swells with lovelier ones.... and yet I am not to be despised, for I saw myself lately in the clear water, when winds were still and there were no waves.

This is the sentimental pastoral poetry of h.e.l.lenism reborn and intensified.

So with the elegiac motive so loved by Alexandrian and Roman poets, praise of a happy past time; the chorus sings in _Aminta_:

O lovely age of gold, Not that the rivers rolled With milk, or that the woods wept honeydew; Not that the ready ground Produced without a wound, Or the mild serpent had no tooth that slew....

But solely that.... the law of gold, That glad and golden law, all free, all fitted, Which Nature's own hand wrote--What pleases is permitted!...

Go! let us love, the daylight dies, is born; But unto us the light Dies once for all, and sleep brings on eternal night.

Over thirty pastoral plays can be ascribed to Italy in the last third of the sixteenth century. The most successful imitator of Ta.s.so was Giovanni Battista Guarini (born 1537) in _The True Shepherd (II Pastor Fido)_. One quotation will shew how he outvied _Aminta_. In Act I, Scene 1, Linko says:

Look round thee, Sylvia; behold All in the world that's amiable and fair Is love's sweet work: heaven loves, the earth, the sea, Are full of love and own his mighty sway.

Love through the woods The fiercest beasts; love through the waves attends Swift gliding dolphins and the sluggish whales.

That little bird which sings....

Oh, had he human sense, 'I burn with love,' he'd cry, 'I burn with love,'

And in his heart he truly burns, And in his warble speaks A language, well by his dear mate conceived, Who answering cries, 'And I too burn with love.'

He praises woodland solitude:

Dear happy groves!

And them all silent, solitary gloom, True residence of peace and of repose!

How willingly, how willingly my steps To you return, and oh! if but my stars Benightly had decreed My life for solitude, and as my wish Would naturally prompt to pa.s.s my days-- No, not the Elysian fields, Those happy gardens of the demi-G.o.ds, Would I exchange for yon enchanting shades.

The love lyrics of the later Renaissance are remarkably rich in vivid pictures of Nature combined with much personal sentiment. Petrarch's are the model; he inspired Vittoria Colonna, and she too revelled in sad feelings and memories, especially about the death of her husband:[12]

'When I see the earth adorned and beautiful with a thousand lovely and sweet flowers, and how in the heavens every star is resplendent with varied colours; when I see that every solitary and lively creature is moved by natural instinct to come out of the forests and ancient caverns to seek its fellow by day and by night; and when I see the plains adorned again with glorious flowers and new leaves, and hear every babbling brook with grateful murmurs bathing its flowery banks, so that Nature, in love with herself, delights to gaze on the beauty of her works, I say to myself, reflecting: "How brief is this our miserable mortal life!" Yesterday this plain was covered with snow, to-day it is green and flowery. And again in a moment the beauty of the heavens is overclouded by a fierce wind, and the happy loving creatures remain hidden amidst the mountains and the woods; nor can the sweet songs of the tender plants and happy birds be heard, for these cruel storms have dried up the flowers on the ground; the birds are mute, the most rapid streams and smallest rivulets are checked by frost, and what was one hour so beautiful and joyous, is, for a season, miserable and dead.'

Here the two pictures in the inner and outer life are equally vivid to the poetess; it is the real 'pleasure of sorrow,' and she lingers over them with delight.

Bojardo, too, reminds us of Petrarch; for example, in Sonnet 89:[13]

Thou shady wood, inured my griefs to hear, So oft expressed in quick and broken sighs; Thou glorious sun, unused to set or rise But as the witness of my daily fear;

Ye wandering birds, ye flocks and ranging deer, Exempt from my consuming agonies; Thou sunny stream to whom my sorrow flies 'Mid savage rocks and wilds, no human traces near.

O witnesses eternal, how I live!

My sufferings hear, and win to their relief That scornful beauty--tell her how I grieve!

But little 'tis to her to hear my grief.

To her, who sees the pangs which I receive, And seeing, deigns them not the least relief.

Lorenzo de Medici's idylls were particularly rich in descriptions of Nature and full of feeling. 'Here too that delight in pain, in telling of their unhappiness and renunciation; here too those wonderful tones which distinguish the sonnets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries so favourably from those of a later time.'

(Geiger.)

There is a delicate compliment in this sonnet: