The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 21

The poem, _The Starry Sky_,[18] is full of lofty enthusiasm for Nature and piety:

When yonder glorious sky Lighted with million lamps I contemplate, And turn my dazzled eye To this vain mortal state All mean and visionary, mean and desolate, A mingled joy and grief Fills all my soul with dark solicitude....

List to the concert pure Of yon harmonious countless worlds of light.

See, in his...o...b..t sure Each takes his journey bright, Led by an unseen hand through the vast maze of night.

See how the pale moon rolls Her silver wheel....

See Saturn, father of the golden hours, While round him, bright and blest, The whole empyrean showers Its glorious streams of light on this low world of ours.

But who to these can turn And weigh them 'gainst a weeping world like this, Nor feel his spirit burn To grasp so sweet a bliss And mourn that exile hard which here his portion is?

For there, and there alone, Are peace and joy and never dying love: Day that shall never cease, No night there threatening, No winter there to chill joy's ever-during spring.

Ye fields of changeless green Covered with living streams and fadeless flowers; Thou paradise serene, Eternal joyful hours Thy disembodied soul shall welcome in thy towers!

It was chiefly in Spanish literature at this time that Nature was used allegorically. Tieck[19] says: 'In Calderon's poetry, and that of his contemporaries, we often find, in romances and song-like metres, most charming descriptions of the sea, mountains, gardens, and woody valleys, but almost always used allegorically, and with an artistic polish which ends by giving us, not so much a real impression of Nature, as one of clever description in musical verse, repeated again and again with slight variations.' This is true of Leon, but far more of Calderon, since it belongs to the very essence of drama. But, despite his pa.s.sion for description and his Catholic and conventional tone, there is inexhaustible fancy, splendid colour, and a modern element of individuality in his poems. His heroes are conscious of their own ego, feel themselves to be 'a miniature world,' and search out their own feelings 'in the wild waves of emotion' (as Aurelian, for example, in _Zen.o.bia_).

Fernando says in _The Constant Prince_:

These flowers awoke in beauty and delight At early dawn, when stars began to set; At eve they leave us but a fond regret, Locked in the cold embraces of the night.

These shades that shame the rainbow's arch of light.

Where gold and snow in purple pomp are met, All give a warning man should not forget, When one brief day can darken things so bright.

'Tis but to wither that the roses bloom-- 'Tis to grow old they bear their beauteous flowers, One crimson bud their cradle and their tomb.

Such are man's fortunes in this world of ours; They live, they die; one day doth end their doom, For ages past but seem to us like hours.

The warning which Zen.o.bia gives her captor in his hour of triumph to beware of sudden reverses of fortune is finely conceived:

Morn comes forth with rays to crown her, While the sun afar is spreading Golden cloths most finely woven All to dry her tear-drops purely.

Up to noon he climbs, then straightway Sinks, and then dark night makes ready For the burial of the sea Canopies of black outstretching-- Tall ships fly on linen pinions, On with speed the breezes send it, Small the wide seas seem and straitened, To its quick flight onward tending.

Yet one moment, yet one instant, And the tempest roars, uprearing Waves that might the stars extinguish, Lifted for that ship's o'erwhelming.

Day, with fear, looks ever nightwards, Calms must storm await with trembling; Close behind the back of pleasure Evermore stalks sadness dreary.

In _Life's a Dream_ Prince Sigismund, chained in a dark prison, says:

What sinned I more herein Than others, who were also born?

Born the bird was, yet with gay Gala vesture, beauty's dower, Scarcely 'tis a winged flower Or a richly plumaged spray, Ere the aerial halls of day It divideth rapidly, And no more will debtor be To the nest it hates to quit; But, with more of soul than it, I am grudged its liberty.

And the beast was born, whose skin Scarce those beauteous spots and bars, Like to constellated stars, Doth from its greater painter win Ere the instinct doth begin: Of its fierceness and its pride, And its lair on every side, It has measured far and nigh; While, with better instinct, I Am its liberty denied.

Born the mute fish was also, Child of ooze and ocean weed; Scarce a finny bark of speed To the surface brought, and lo!

In vast circuits to and fro Measures it on every side Its illimitable home; While, with greater will to roam, I that freedom am denied.

Born the streamlet was, a snake Which unwinds the flowers among, Silver serpent, that not long May to them sweet music make, Ere it quits the flowery brake, Onward hastening to the sea With majestic course and free, Which the open plains supply; While, with more life gifted, I Am denied its liberty.

In Act II. Clotardo tells how he has talked to the young prince, brought up in solitude and confinement:

There I spoke with him awhile Of the human arts and letters, Which the still and silent aspect Of the mountains and the heavens Him have taught--that school divine Where he has been long a learner, And the voices of the birds And the beasts has apprehended.

Descriptions of time and place are very rich in colour.

One morning on the ocean, When the half-awakened sun, Trampling down the lingering shadows Of the western vapours dun, Spread its ruby-tinted tresses Over jessamine and rose, Dried with cloths of gold Aurora's Tears of mingled fire and snows Which to pearl his glance converted.

Since these gardens cannot steal Away your oft returning woes, Though to beauteous spring they build Snow-white jasmine temples filled With radiant statues of the rose; Come into the sea and make Thy bark the chariot of the sun, And when the golden splendours run Athwart the waves, along thy wake The garden to the sea will say (By melancholy fears deprest)-- 'The sun already gilds the west, How very short has been this day.'

There is a striking remark about a garden; Menon says:

A beautiful garden surrounded by wild forest Is the more beautiful the nearer it approaches its opposite.

Splendour of colour was everything with Calderon, but it was splendour of so stiff and formal a kind, that, like the whole of his intensely severe, even inquisitorial outlook, it leaves us cold.

We must turn to Shakespeare to learn how strongly the pulse of sympathy for Nature could beat in contemporary drama. Goethe said: 'In Calderon you have the wine as the last artificial result of the grape, but expressed into the goblet, highly spiced and sweetened, and so given you to drink; but in Shakespeare you have the whole natural process of its ripening besides, and the grapes themselves one by one, for your enjoyment, if you will.'

In _Worship at the Cross_ there is pious feeling for Nature and mystical feeling side by side with an obnoxious fanaticism, superst.i.tion, and other objectionable traits[20]; and mystical confessions of the same sort may be gathered in numbers from the works of contemporary monks and nuns. Even of such a fanatic and self-tormentor as the Spanish Franciscan Petrus von Alcantara (1562), his biographer says that despite his strict renunciation of the world, he retained a most warm and deep feeling for Nature.

'Whatever he saw of the outer world increased his devotion and gave it wings. The starry sky seen through his little monastery window, often kept him rapt in deep meditation for hours; often he was as if beside himself, so strong was his pious feeling when he saw the power and glory of G.o.d reflected in charming flowers and plants.'

When Gregorio Lopez (1596), a man who had studied many sides of Nature, was asked if so much knowledge confused him, he answered: 'I find G.o.d in all things, great and small.' Similar remarks are attributed to many others.

Next to Leon, as a poet in enthusiasm and mysticism, came St Teresa von Avila. She was especially notable for the ravishingly pretty pictures and comparisons she drew from Nature to explain the soul life of the Christian.[21]

In all these outpourings of mystic feeling for Nature, there was no interest in her entirely for her own sake; they were all more or less dictated by religious feeling. It was in the later German and Italian mystics--for example, Bruno, Campanella, and Jacob Boehme--that a more subjective and individual point of view was attained through Pantheism and Protestantism.

The Protestant free-speaking Shakespeare shewed a far more intense feeling for Nature than the Catholic Calderon.

CHAPTER VI

SHAKESPEARE'S SYMPATHY FOR NATURE

The poetry of India may serve as a measure of the part which Nature can play in drama; it is full of comparisons and personifications, and eloquent expressions of intimate sympathy with plants and animals. In Greek tragedy, Nature stepped into the background; metaphors, comparisons, and personifications are rarer; it was only by degrees, especially in Sophocles and Euripides, in the choruses and monologues, that man's interest in her appeared, and he began to greet the light or the sky, land or sea, to attribute love, pity, or hate to her, or find comfort in her lonely places. During the Middle Ages, drama lay fallow, and the blossoming period of French tragedy, educated to the pathos of Seneca, only produced cold declamation, frosty rhetoric; of any real sympathy between man and Nature there was no question.

Over this mediaeval void Calderon was the bridge to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare reached the Greek standpoint and advanced far beyond it.

He was not only the greatest dramatist of modern times as to human action, suffering, and character, but also a genius in the interpretation of Nature.[1]

In place of the narrow limits of the old dramatists, he had the wider and maturer modern vision, and, despite his mastery of language, he was free both from the exaggeration and redundance of Oriental drama, and from the mere pa.s.sion for describing, which so often carried Calderon away.

In him too, the subjectivity, which the Renaissance brought into modern art, was still more fully developed. His metaphors and comparisons shew this, and, most of all, the very perfect art with which he a.s.signs Nature a part in the play, and makes her not only form the appropriate background, dark or bright as required, but exert a distinct influence upon human fate.

As Carriere points out:

At a period which had painting for its leading art, and was turning its attention to music, his mental accord produced effects in his works to which antiquity was a stranger.

Herder had already noted that Shakespeare gives colour and atmosphere where the Greek only gave outline. And although Shakespeare's outlines are drawn with more regard to fidelity than to actual beauty, yet, like a great painter, he brings all Nature into sympathy with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night in _Hamlet_, breathe the bracing Highland air in _Macbeth_, the air of the woods in _As You Like It_; the storm on the heath roars through Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the pomegranate outside Julia's window.

'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,' when Love solves all differences in the _Merchant of Venice_! On the other hand, when Macbeth is meditating the murder of Duncan, the wolf howls, the owl hoots, and the cricket cries. And since Shakespeare's characters often act out of part, so that intelligible motive fails, while it is important to the poet that each scene be raised to dramatic level and viewed in a special light, Goethe's words apply:

Here everything which in a great world event pa.s.ses secretly through the air, everything which at the very moment of a terrible occurrence men hide away in their hearts, is expressed; that which they carefully shut up and lock away in their minds is here freely and eloquently brought to light; we recognize the truth to life, but know not how it is achieved.

Amorous pa.s.sion in his hands is an interpreter of Nature; in one of his sonnets he compares it to an ocean which cannot quench thirst.

In Sonnet 130 he says: