The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 32

Peering through the leaves with joy We notice, as we see the leaves Lighted from one side only, That we can almost see the sun Mixing gold with the tender green, etc.

and so on for another twenty lines.

Yet this rich Burgomaster of Hamburg, for all that he dealt chiefly in rhymed prose, had his moments of rare elevation of thought and mystical rapture about Nature; for instance, in the introduction to _Ueber das Firmament_:

As lately in the sapphire depths, Not bound by earth nor water, aim nor end, In the unplumbed aerial sea I gazed, And my absorbed glance, now here, now there, But ever deeper sank--horror came over me, My eye grew dizzy and my soul aghast.

That infinite vast vault, True picture of Eternity, Since without birth or end From G.o.d alone it comes....

It overwhelmed my soul.

The mighty dome of deep dark light, Bright darkness without birth or bound, Swallowed the very world--burying thought.

My being dwindled to an atom, to a nought; I lost myself, So suddenly it beat me down, And threatened with despair.

But in that salutary nothingness, that blessed loss, All present G.o.d! in Thee--I found myself again.

While English poetry and its German imitations were shewing these signs of reaction from the artificiality of the time, and science and philosophy often lauded Nature to the skies, as, for instance, Shaftesbury[8] (1671-1713), a return to Nature became the principle of English garden-craft in the first half of the eighteenth century.[9] The line of progress here, as in taste generally, did not run straightforward, but fluctuated. From the geometric gardens of Lenotre, England pa.s.sed to the opposite extreme; in the full tide of periwig and hoop petticoat, minuets, beauty-patches and rouge, Addison and Pope were banishing everything that was not strictly natural from the garden. Addison would even have everything grow wild in its own way, and Pope wrote:

To build, to plant, whatever you intend, To rear the column, or the arch to bend, To swell the terrace or to sink the grot, In all let Nature never be forgot.

William Kent made allowance for this idea; but, as a painter, and looking at his native scenery with a painter's eye, he noted its characteristic features--the gentle undulations, the freshness of the green, the wealth of trees--and based his garden-craft on these.

The straight line was banished; in its place came wide s.p.a.ces of lawn and scattered groups of trees of different sorts--dark fir and alder here, silver birch and grey poplar there; and flowery fields with streams running through them stood out in relief against dark woodland.

Stiff walls, bal.u.s.trades, terraces, statues, and so forth, disappeared; the garden was not to contrast with the surrounding landscape, but to merge into it--to be not Art, but a bit of Nature.

It was, in fact, to be a number of such bits, each distinct from the rest--waterfall, sheltered sunny nook, dark wood, light glade. Kent himself soon began to vary this mosaic of separate scenes by adding ruins and pavilions; but it was Chambers the architect who developed the idea of variety by his writings on the dwellings and manners of the Chinese.[10]

The fundamental idea that the garden ought to be a sample of the landscape was common both to Kent and the Chinese; but, as China is far richer than England in varieties of scenery, her gardens included mountains, rocks, swamps, and deserts, as well as sunny fields and plains, while English gardens were comparatively monotonous. When the fashion for the Chinese style came in, as unluckily it did just when we were trying to oust the Rococo, so that one pigtail superseded the other, variety was achieved by groups of buildings in all sorts of styles. Stables, ice-houses, gardeners' cottages took the form of pavilions, paG.o.das, kiosks, and temples.

Meanwhile, as a reaction against the Rococo, enthusiasm for Nature increased, and feeling was set free from restraint by the growing sentimentality. Richardson's novels fed the taste for the pleasures of weeping sensibility, and garden-craft fell under its sway. In all periods the insignificant and non-essential is unable to resist the general stamp, if that only shews a little originality.

These gardens, with temples to friendship and love, melancholy, virtue, re-union, and death, and so forth, were suitable backgrounds for the sentimental scenes described in the English novels, and for the idyllic poets and moonshine singers of Germany. Here it was the fashion to wander, tenderly intertwined, shedding floods of tears and exchanging kisses, and pausing at various places to read the inscriptions which directed them what to feel. At one spot they were to laugh, at another to weep, at a third to be fired with devotion.

Hermitages sprang up everywhere, with hermits, real or dummy. Any good house near a wood, or in a shady position, was called a hermitage, and dedicated to arcadian life, free from care and ceremony. Cla.s.sic and romantic styles competed for favour in architecture; at one moment everything must needs be purely cla.s.sic, each temple Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric; at another Gothic, with the ruins and fortresses of mediaeval romance. And not only English gardens, but those of Europe generally, though to a less degree, pa.s.sed through these stages of development, for no disease is so infectious as fashion.

It was not till the end of the eighteenth century that a healthy reaction set in in England, when Repton turned back to Kent's fundamental principle and freed it from its unnatural excrescences, with the formula: the garden should be an artistic representation of the landscape, a work of art whose materials are provided by Nature herself, whether gra.s.s, flowers, bushes, trees, water, or whatever it may be that she has to offer. Thus began our modern landscape gardening.

In another region too, a change was brought about from the Rococo to a more natural style. It is true that Nature plays no direct _role_ in _Robinson Crusoe_, and wins as little notice there as in its numberless imitations; yet the book roused a longing for healthier, more natural conditions in thousands of minds. It led the idyllic tendency of the day back to its source, and by shewing all the stages, from the raw state of Nature up to the culture of the community, in the life of one man, it brought out the contrast between the far-off age of innocence and the perverted present.

The German _Simplicissimus_ closed with a Robinsonade, in which the hero, after long wandering, found rest and peace on an island in the ocean of the world, alone with himself and Nature. The readers of _Robinson Crusoe_ were in much the same position. Defoe was not only a true artist, but a man of n.o.ble, patient character, and his romance proved a healing medicine to many sick minds, pointing the way back to Nature and a natural fife, and creating a longing for the lost innocence of man.

Rousseau, who was also a zealous advocate of the English gardens, and disgusted by the French Pigtail style, was more impressed by _Robinson Crusoe_ than by any other book. It was the first book his Emilia gave him, as a gospel of Nature and unspoilt taste.

CHAPTER X

THE SENSITIVENESS AND EXAGGERATION OF THE ELEGIAC IDYLLIC FEELING

This longing to return to the lost paradise of Nature gradually produced a state of melancholy hyper-sensitiveness, an epidemic of world pain, quite as unnatural as the Rococo.

The heart came into its rights again and laid claim to absolute dominion in its kingdom, and regret that it had lain so long deprived of its own, gave rise to a tearful pensiveness, which added zest to rest.i.tution. It was convalescence, but followed at once by another complaint. Feeling swung from one extreme to the other.

German feeling in the first half of the eighteenth century was chiefly influenced, on the one hand, by Richardson's novels, which left no room for Nature, and by the poetry of Young and Thomson; on the other, by the pastoral idylls interspersed with anacreontic love-pa.s.sages, affected by the French. At first description and moralizing preponderated.

In 1729 Haller's _Alps_ appeared. It had the merit of drawing the eyes of Europe to Alpine beauty and the moral worth of the Swiss, but shewed little eye for romantic scenery. It is full of descriptive painting, but not of a kind that appeals: scene follows scene with considerable pathos, especially in dealing with the people; but landscape is looked at almost entirely from the moralizing or utilitarian standpoint.

'Here, where the majestic Mount Gothard elevates its summit above the clouds, and where the earth itself seems to approach the sun, Nature has a.s.sembled in one spot all the choicest treasure of the globe. The deserts of Libya, indeed, afford us greater novelties, and its sandy plains are more fertile in monsters: but thou, favoured region, art adorned with useful productions only, productions which can satisfy all the wants of man. Even those heaps of ice, those frowning rocks in appearance so sterile, contribute largely to the general good, for they supply inexhaustible fountains to fertilize the land. What a magnificent picture does Nature spread before the eye, when the sun, gilding the top of the Alps, scatters the sea of vapours which undulates below! Through the receding vale the theatre of a whole world rises to the view! Rocks, valleys, lakes, mountains, and forests fill the immeasurable s.p.a.ce, and are lost in the wide horizon. We take in at a single glance the confines of divers states, nations of various characters, languages, and manners, till the eyes, overcome by such extent of vision, drop their weary lids, and we ask of the enchanted fancy a continuance of the scene.

'When the first emotion of astonishment has subsided, how delightful is it to observe each several part which makes up this sublime whole!

That ma.s.s of hills, which presents its graceful declivity covered with flocks of sheep whose bleatings resound through the meadows; that large clear lake, which reflects from its level surface sunbeams gently curved; those valleys, rich in verdure, which compose by their various outlines points of perspective which contract in the distance of the landscape! Here rises a bare steep mountain laden with the acc.u.mulated snow of ages; its icy head rests among the clouds, repelling the genial rays of the moon and the fervid heat of the dog-star: there a chain of cultivated hills spreads before the delighted eye; their green pastures are enlivened by flocks, and their golden corn waves in the wind: yet climates so different as those are only separated by a cool, narrow valley. Behold that foaming torrent rushing from a perpendicular height! Its rapid waves dash among the rocks, and shoot even beyond their limits. Divided by the rapidity of its course and the depth of the abyss where it falls, it changes into a grey moving veil; and, at length scattered into humid atoms, it shines with the tints of the rainbow, and, suspended over the valley, refreshes it with plenteous dew. The traveller beholds with astonishment rivers flowing towards the sky, and issuing from one cloud, hide themselves in the grey veil of another.

'Those desert places uncheered by the rays of the sun, those frozen abysses deprived of all verdure, hide beneath their sterile sands invaluable treasures, which defy the rigour of the seasons and all the injuries of time! 'Tis in dark and marshy recesses, upon the damp grottos, that crystal rocks are formed. Thus splendour is diffused through their melancholy vaults, and their shadowy depths gutter with the colours of the rainbow. O Nature, how various are thy operations, how infinite thy fertility!'

We cannot agree with Frey[1] that 'these few strophes may serve as sufficient proof that Haller's poetry is still, even among the ma.s.s of Alpine poetry, unsurpa.s.sed for intense power of direct vision, and easily makes one forget its partial lack of flexibility of diction.'

The truth is, flexibility is entirely lacking; but the lines do express the taste for open-air life among the great sublimities and with simple people. The poem is not romantic but idyllic, with a touch of the elegiac. It is the same with the poem _On the Origin of Evil_ (Book I.):

On those still heights whence constant springs flow down, I paused within a copse, lured by the evening breeze; Wide country lay spread out beneath my feet, Bounded by its own size alone....

Green woods covered the hills, through which the pale tints of the fields Shone pleasantly.

Abundance and repose held sway far as the eye could reach....

And yonder wood, what left it to desire With the red tints upon the half-bare beeches And the rich pine's green shade o'er whitened moss?

While many a sun-ray through the interstices A quivering light upon the darkness shed, Blending in varying hues green night with golden day How pleasant is the quiet of the copse! ...

Yea, all I see is given by Providence, The world itself is for its burgher's joy; Nature's inspired with the general weal, The highest goodness shews its trace in all.

Friedrich von Hagedorn, too, praises country pleasures in _The Feeling of Spring_:

Enamelled meadows! freshly decked in green, I sing your praises constantly; Nature and Spring have decked you out....

Delightful quiet, stimulant of joy, How enviable thou art!

This idyllic taste for country life was common at the time, especially among the so-called 'anacreontists.' Gleim, for instance, in his _Praise of Country Life_: 'Thank G.o.d that I have fled from the bustle of the world and am myself again under the open sky.'

And in _The Countryman_:

How happy is he who, free from cares, ploughs his father's fields; every morning the sun shines on the gra.s.s in which he lies.

And Joh. Friedrich von Cronegk:

Fly from sordid cares and the proud tumult of cities ... here in the peaceful valley shy wisdom sports at ease, where the smiling Muse crowns herself with dewy roses.

With this idyllic tone it is not surprising to find the religious feeling of many hymn writers; for instance, Gleim in _The Goodness of G.o.d_:

For whom did Thy goodness create the world so beautiful, O G.o.d?

For whom are the flowers on hill and dale? ... Thou gavest us power to perceive the beauty.

And above all, honest Gellert:

The skies, the globe, the seas, praise the eternal glory. O my Creator, when I consider Thy might and the wisdom of Thy ways....

Sunshine and storm preach Thee, and the sands of the sea.

Ewald von Kleist excelled Haller as much as Haller had excelled Brockes.