Part 2

This incapacity for appreciating mountainous sublimity involved a blindness to the rugged and picturesque on smaller scales. In minor chords, and in combinations of tone superficially discordant, we have learned to recognize some of nature's richest harmonies; this is one of our marks of development. Closely linked, too, with this first of modern passions for nature, indeed unified with it by the qualities of strength and massiveness, is our feeling for the ocean and great woods.

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore: There is society where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar."

Even deeper than the idea of companionship here is the mystical sense of absorption into that physical world which seems the very dwelling-place of the infinite soul, which finds one of its most remarkable manifestations in an intense and almost defiant sensation of human transitoriness and unimportance, and which is frequently blended with very exultation in the reflection that presently we ourselves shall be unified forever with the unconscious life that stretches out before us:

"Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees."

There is a strange fascination to the modern mind, in presence of the majesties of nature, in this thought of humanity's return to the earth-mother. Innumerable generations have come home to her, as many or more are to be born that they may follow them, and she remains. Perhaps we are never so serenely conscious of self, as in these rare moments when we bear without a pang the thought of losing personal identity. There is something more here than the certainty of at least materialistic immortality, and the impression of infinite repose and beauty.

The projection of our immediate sensation into the long future silence suffuses nature with pantheistic life, until the eager and buoyant thrills of spiritual realization render one grateful to have been permitted to gain such a sensation at what seems the trivial cost of feeling oneself the mere creature of a day. Such a mood as this certainly comes but seldom, but probably every one who has ever experienced any imaginative sensibility to a grand landscape will recall a heightened sensation that is beyond description.[2]

But still stranger than the failure to catch the finer suggestions in the more strenuous forms of nature, is the way in which such sights are ignored. In southern Europe, mountains, storms, rocks, the ocean, are scarcely ever described, even as objects of awe or terror. When in the course of a story they have to be mentioned, the treatment is brief and matter of fact. Heinrich von Veldeke in his famous epic, makes nothing of his necessary introduction of a storm at sea, nor does Gottfried, or indeed any one of this whole period.

_Gudrun_, that epic of the people which deserves to stand near the more famous _Niebelungen Lied_, treats constantly of the ocean, yet never with any feeling except dread of shipwreck. This poem, however, shows a more northern tone in one or two descriptions of winter, that are at least elaborated. In the scene, for instance, when Herwig and Ortwin arrive at the shore where Hildeburg and Gudrun, almost naked, are washing the clothes for their cruel mistress, we find some realistic touches, such as their trembling before the March wind, in which their hair was streaming as they toiled on the beach, while before them the sea was full of cakes of ice that had broken up under the early spring. In another connection, too, the poet compares something to a thick snowstorm, driven by mountain winds. The sense of fitness in a sympathetic natural environment for the human action, that has been so generally regarded in literature, as by Shakespeare, is indeed occasionally found in mediæval poetry; so in an interesting French romance that relates the trials of a heroine who barely escapes with her life, after the loss of everything dear: "The lady is in the wood and bitterly she wails. She hears the wolves howl, and the screech-owls cry; it lightens terribly, and the thunder is heavy, rain, hail, and wind--'tis wild for a lady all alone."

Exceptions occur now and then. Dante, for example, was impressed by the mountains; no readers of the _Purgatory_ need to be reminded of his experience in climbing them. The setting for a mood of unrealized love in one of his lyrics is in winter, among the whitened hills: "He wooed the lady in a lovely grassy meadow, surrounded by lofty hills." But the arbitrary verbal repetitions of the _sestina_ modify the original face of the image of the mountains towering about the lover's plain, and the pensive beauty of the whole poem may be connected with an allegory. But I believe that even in Dante we never catch the sense of exultation in the earth's power and majesty.

Our modern feeling for forests is not only at times sombre and oppressive; we also derive a sense of sublime composure from them. This latter sentiment was hardly shared by the mediævals. Dante was only following earlier poets when he located the opening of Hell by a gloomy wood, and his repeated metaphor of life as a forest, "confusing," "gloomy," and "dark," accords with the feeling of his age. He would not have appreciated Chateaubriand. He has left us, however, a rare and interesting reference to the soughing in the pines on the Adriatic, which shows how well his ear could interpret its solemn beauty. The mystical apple-tree, moreover, near the close of the _Purgatory_, whose blossoms are so exquisitely defined, indirectly reminds us how exceptional is a mention of fruit trees in flower. Yet the Provençal, French, and German lyrics constantly begin with the joyousness of spring, and the happy contrast from the season that destroys flowers and foliage. Nothing is more conventional than these nature preludes. Over and over, till we close our books impatiently, we hear reiterations of the charm of spring and summer. There is a slender kind of grace and sincerity that would lend interest to many of these, if they had come down by themselves; but they lie together in books in wearisome uniformity. A dandelion in April is much prettier than the dandelions in June. These preludes are usually in keeping with the love-phrases that follow, cold and imitative. For poets thought and felt in exterior generalities, rather than in detachment and inner consciousness. Their typical landscape may be seen in a passage from Gottfried von Strassburg,--one of Germany's most brilliant poets--where Tristan and Isolde have fled to the forest grotto, in fear of King Mark. The grotto is fitted up luxuriously, in keeping with the temper of the entire poem, but since it is in the wilderness, far away from roads or paths, in a description of its surroundings we might certainly look for a sense of the picturesque. But so far from caring for the wild and rugged, Gottfried does not even like a quiet woodland simplicity.

"Above the entrance stood three broad lindens, no more; but below, stretching down the slope, were innumerable trees that hid the retreat. On one side was a level stretch where a fountain flowed, a fresh, cool stream, clearer than the sun. Above it, too, stood three beautiful shady lindens that shielded the spring from rain and the sun. Bright blossoms and green grass struggled with each other sweetly on the field. One caught also the delightful songs of birds which sang more delightfully there than anywhere else. Eye and ear each had its pleasure, there was shade and sun, air and breezes soft and pleasing."

He goes on to describe the lovers, in a passage from which I translate the opening:

When they waked and when they slept, Side by side they ever kept. In the morning o'er the dew Softly to the field they drew, Where, beside the little pool, Flowers and grass were dewy cool. And the cool fields pleased them well, Pleased them, too, their love to tell, Straying idly thro' the glade, Hearing music, as they strayed. Sweetly sang the birds, and then In their walk they turned again Where the cool brook rippled by, Listening to the melody, As it flowed and as it went: Where across the field it bent, There they sat them down to hear, Resting there, its murmur clear. And until the sunshine blazed, In the rivulet they gazed.

These lines are characteristic of Gottfried, even to the lingering verbal repetition, and the picture certainly is pretty, as is the whole account of the lovers' life that follows. Nothing in early German literature comes closer to refined modern sensuousness than Gottfried's best passages; there is a dreamy passion in them, and sometimes they flash. His rich voluptuous strain has more of the poet than the free-liver, and his general tone is curiously modern. It would be a showy phrase to call his _Tristan_ the _Don Juan_ of the middle ages, for the poems are very dissimilar, yet it is safe to say that we think of Byron as we read him. Contrast these representative poets of the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries in this matter of their feeling for nature. For once among German settings we have a wild scene. But we observe how studiously it is modified into the conventional meadow, with trees in uniform little groups, a grassy field is sprinkled with flowers, there is a spring, and the little stream that escapes from it instead of tumbling down over a rocky bed into a glen, flows across the field. Gottfried mentions mountains and rocks that lie round about, only to point out that they are types of the difficulties and perils to be undergone before reaching love's shrine. The almost inaccessible retreat was necessary as a shelter for the fugitives from Mark's court; the poet has done his best to obliterate the reality. If we turn to Byron, and look for instance at that incomparable passage in which he relates the early love of Juan and Haidee, we observe where he voluntarily places his lovers:

"It was a wild and breaker-beaten coast, With cliffs above and a broad sandy shore; Guarded by shoals and rocks as by a host, With here and there a creek, whose aspect wore A better welcome to the tempest-tost; And rarely ceased the haughty billows' roar."

"And thus they wandered forth, and hand in hand, Over the shining pebbles and the shells, Glided along the smooth and hardened sand, And in the worn and wild receptacles Worked by the storms, yet worked as it were planned, In hollow halls, with sparry roofs and cells, They turned to rest; and each clasped by an arm, Yielded to the deep twilight's purple charm."

And, to pass over the description of sky, sea, moon, and starlight, that follows, as elements in the nature-setting, notice the scene where Juan is sleeping:

"The lady watched her lover, and that hour Of Love's, and Night's, and Ocean's solitude, O'erflowed her soul with their united power, Amid the barren sand and rocks so rude, She and her wave-worn love had made their bower."

It would be easy to parallel these two situations; the older by no means ends with the middle ages, for Eden's "blissful bower" is no exception in modern poetry before the romantic age: while in our own century counterparts to this conception of untrained and strenuous natural surroundings for even the happiest of emotions will occur to every one.[3] The idle triteness in those inevitable scenes of spring, was manifest to some of the poets themselves. So the Comte de Champagne declares foliage and flowers of no service to poets, except for rhyming and to amuse commonplace people. The great Wolfram himself derides the conventionality of all romance narratives falling in spring and early summer:

Arthur is the man of May; Each event in every lay, Happened or at Whitsuntide Or when the May was blooming wide.

And Uhland cites from the lives of the troubadours the contemporaneous criticism upon a minor poet of the twelfth century, who wrote in the old style about leaves, and flowers, and the song of birds,--nothing of any account. We may recollect that such criticisms go far back of the middle ages: Horace glances at his contemporaries' conventional descriptions of a stream hastening through pleasant fields.

In the widely popular romances of Enid we find illustrations of Welsh, French, and German treatment in the hands of leading authors, and there is one point in the narrative where we may compare their feeling for the natural environment. Readers of Tennyson will recall the passage in the wandering, where, after one of Geraint's struggles with bandits, he comes upon a lad carrying provisions. Chrestien's treatment of the episode is clear and straightforward; the youth and two comrades are taking cheese, cakes, and wine to the count's meadows for the haymakers. The young man notices the travellers' worn appearance, and invites them to sit down "in this fair meadow, under these ironwood trees," to rest and eat.

Hartmann von Aue (whose paraphrase of the French poem is, by the way, far from the merit of his _Iwein_) narrates the incident in the same manner, omitting the poetically specific touches of the haymaking, and the shady spot in the field; but characteristically inserting some courteous concern on the part of the young man, for the comfort of Enid. But if we turn to the _Mabinogion_ we come upon something very different:

"And early in the day they left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand, and mowers mowing the meadows; and there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a lofty steep, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck, and they saw that there was something in the satchel, but they knew not what it was. And he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher."

How charming it is, even to the lovely touch of color. We know here that the unremembered writer saw nature and cared for it as we do. Indeed, this mediæval Welshman satisfies us quite as well as does even Tennyson's transcript:

"So through the green gloom of the wood they passed, And issuing under open heavens beheld A little town with towers, upon a rock: And close beneath, a meadow gemlike chased In the brown wild, and mowers mowing in it: And down a rocky pathway from the place There came a fair-hair'd youth, that in his hand Bare victual for the mowers."

There we have a simplicity treated with Tennysonian artifice, which "victual" does not succeed in correcting; beautiful in its way, though its way is perhaps not so fine as the prose. Yet we notice the modern spirit in the appreciation of the "brown wild" as well as the meadow, and out of the more general and evasive "steep" is developed the picturesque "rocky pathway."

Except for the interest in establishing these forms of nature-appreciation from such older and more original sources, we might have satisfied ourselves with illustrations of them from Chaucer's early poems, where his descriptions are almost wholly derivative. His feeling for "the smale, softe, swote gras," that was sweetly embroidered with flowers; the earth's joyous oblivion of the cold, in her enthusiasm of May; his constant delight in the "smale foules," and the like, are purely conventional, though the unction with which he writes shows his real enjoyment. There are touches in Chaucer, however, that we miss in his romance predecessors, such as his eye for delicate effects--most interesting as marking the growth of accurate observation and sensitive rendering, like the description of twilight in _Troylus and Creyseyde_, when

"White thynges wexen dymme and donne For lakke of lyght,"

or the graceful illustration in the same poem of a sudden troubling of one's mood:

"But right as when the sonne shyneth brighte In March that chaungeth ofte tyme his face, And that a cloude is put with wynde to flyght, Which overspret the sonne, as for a space, A cloudy thought gan through his soule pace."

Such a touch makes us feel how modern he is. Yet he does not love the picturesque. Under the influence of a Breton lay, he writes in the loveliest of all his tales, of the rugged sea-coast on whose high bank Dorigen and her friends used to walk (since "stood hire castel faste by the see") and look down upon "the grisly rokkes blake," which, in her apprehension for her lord's safe return, she would call "these grisly, feendly rokkes blake." But we feel that even had Arviragus been at her side she would never have regarded the coast as we should regard it. Still we observe the advance in observation and literary expression. In the _Knight's Tale_, the wild picturesque is employed again to connote the terrible, but no poet, from Statius to Boccaccio, his guides in the passage, had written such lines as his setting for the temple of the God of War:

"First on the wal was peynted a forest In which there dwelleth neither man nor best, With knotty, knarry, bareyne trees olde Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to biholde, In which ther ran a rumbel and a swough, As though a storm sholde bresten every bough."

Nothing even in _Childe Roland_ sketches desolating natural effects with more power. Yet Chaucer had a superior, in the sympathetic eye and adequate expression for the stern and stormy phases of nature, in a countryman of whom perhaps he never heard. We do not know the name of the author of _Sir Gawayn and the Grene Knyght_. But the poem marks on the whole the noblest conception in our literature before Spenser. It possesses moral dignity, romantic interest, simplicity, and directness, united with deep seriousness of style, creative imagination in dealing both with character and with nature. Chaucer wrote nothing so spiritual, though much of course more artistic and poetically valuable. In regard to this one matter of the interpretation of nature, it would be difficult to point out passages in the whole range of mediæval literature so fine and so remarkable as such descriptions as follow, of the northern winter scenes through which Gawayn passed on his weird mission.

A forest full deep, and wild to a wonder, High hills on each side, and crowded woods under, Of oaks hoar and huge, a hundred together. The hazel and hawthorne were grown altogether Everywhere coated by moss ragged, rough; Many birds on bare branches, unhappy enough; That piteously piped there, for pain of the cold.

Wondrous fair was the earth, for the frost lay thereby; On the mist ruddy gleams the sun cast, as on high He coasted full clearly the clouds of the sky.

They beat along banks where the branches are bare, They climbed along cliffs where clingeth the cold, The clouds yet held up, but 'twas ugly beneath. Mist lowered on the moor, dissolved on the mountains. Each hill had a hat, a huge misty cloak. Brooks boiling and breaking dashed on the banks, Shattered brightly on shore.

That is what we find in the North, and such English feeling for the sublime is nothing new; it goes far back beyond these lines into the generations that seem misty as the air which their poets are wont to describe. Mr. Stopford Brooke's recent volume on Anglo-Saxon poetry makes it unnecessary to enter into the subject of old England's eye and ear for nature. Its accounts of the sympathy for the bold and fierce bear out what one might guess without knowledge--that the stern northern climate and familiarity with ocean life found large poetical expression. Luxury, southern artifice of sentiment and literary manner, had not invaded the rugged men of the North; they delight in describing elemental conflicts, and sometimes with studied elaboration. But if the pictures of the German and French poets are uniform in their mildness, those of these Anglo-Saxons are marked by their stormy aspect. We exchange spring for winter.

The same contrast holds true when we take up the Scandinavian poets; they show much feeling and power, but little susceptibility to the beauty of gentleness and grace. Mr. Brooke has remarked upon a similarity between the _Tempest_ of Cynewulf and Shelley's _Ode to the West Wind_. A closer parallel may be observed in the _Lines Among the Euganean Hills_ and the so-called Helgi poet; where we find a curiously identical image of rooks and hawks flying into the early morning with wings sparkling from the mists through which they have passed. The Norse poems are fond of screaming eagles, and ravens on the high branches.

That weird northern imagination too has vivid pictures, as the shields of the night-warriors shining in the waning moon. Nature also occasionally speaks to their personal moods, both by harmony and contrast. A poet's boat is swept fiercely by the tempest, as he dies with thoughts of his "linen-clad lady" in his heart. Another watches the sea dashing against the steep cliff, and thinks of his far-away love, in the control of his rival. Like the early English, they feel exultation in sea and storm. They know them intimately and their descriptions are spirited and faithful. They love them, but they love fiercely, terribly, as they do their women. Yet even as in their human passions, there are tranquillities. "They rode their steeds through dewy dales and dusky glens: the air, a sea of mist, shook as they passed by." We linger behind the storming horsemen for a moment, to look back as the silence steals in again through those dusky glens.

But to return to what is our real subject, the sentiment for nature in what we may term the polite literatures of mediævalism.

The reason for their feeling about winter is summed up in one of the Latin student songs, "the cold icy harshness of winter, its fierceness, and dull, miserable inactivity." It kept them within, when their interests and concerns were so mainly out-of-door. The poets are for ever singing in praise of spring, not so much because they loved it for itself, as because it brought them a life that was gay and easy. They seldom introduce touches of appreciation in their descriptions of the wintry season. Snow may have appeared lovely to them, but we observe Dante as doing something singular when he compares the talking of ladies, which was mingled with sighs and tears, to raindrops interspersed with beautiful snowflakes (_cp._ _Inf._, 14, 30; 24, 5), and one of the most memorable lines in his friend Guido Cavalcanti's poems is the one which mentions the dreamy sinking down of snow, falling when the air is windless. The old-time gentlemen apparently hugged the fire and drank of "their bugle-horn the wyn," and ate "brawn of the tusked swyn," when winter came, instead of watching the snow, through their little windows.