Chapter 11

SYMPTOMS OF A RETURN TO NATURE

It is refreshing to find, side by side with these mummified productions, the traces of a pure national poetry flowing clear as ever, 'breaking forth from the very heart of the people, ever renewing its youth, and not misled by the fashion of the day.'[1]

The traces prove that simple primitive love for Nature was not quite dead. For instance, this of the Virgin Mary: 'Mary, she went across the heath, grass and flowers wept for grief, she did not find her son.' And the lines in which the youth forced into the cloister asks Nature to lament with him: 'I greet you all, hill and dale, do not drive me away--grass and foliage and all the green things in the wild forest. O tree! lose your green ornaments, complain, die with me--'tis your duty.'

Then the Spring greetings:

Now we go into the wide, wide world, With joy and delight we go; The woods are dressing, the meadows greening, The flowers beginning to blow. Listen here! and look there! We can scarce trust our eyes, For the singing and soaring, the joy and life everywhere.

And:

What is sweeter than to wander in the early days of Spring From one place to another in sheer delight and glee; While the sun is shining brightly, and the birds exult around Fair Nightingale, the foremost of them all?

This has the pulse of true and naive feeling (the hunter is starting for the hunt in the early morning):

When I come into the forest, still and silent everywhere, There's a look of slumber in it, but the air is fresh and cool. Now Aurora paints the fir tops at their very tips with gold, And the little finch sits up there launching forth his song of praise, Thanking for the night that's over, for the day that's just awake Gently blows the breeze of morning, rocking in the topmost twigs, And it bends them down like children, like good children when they pray; And the dew is an oblation as it drops from their green hair. O what beauties in the forest he that we may see and know! One could melt away one's heart before its wonders manifold!

The sixth line in the original has a melody that reminds one of Goethe's early work.

But even amidst the artificial poetry then in vogue, there were a few side streams which turned away from the main current of the great poet schools, from the unnaturalness and bombast affected especially by the Silesians. As Winter says, even the satirists Moscherosch and Logau were indirectly of use in paving the way for a healthier condition, through their severe criticisms of the corruption of the language; and Logau's one epigram on May, 'This month is a kiss which heaven gives to earth, that she may be a bride now, a mother by-and-by,' outweighs all Harsdörfer's and Zesen's poetry about Nature.

But even by the side of Opitz and Fleming there was at least one poet of real feeling, Friedrich von Spee.[2] With all his mystic and pietist Christianity, he kept an open eye for Nature. His poems are full of disdain of the world and joy in Nature,[3] longings for death and lamentations over sin; he delighted in personifications of abstract ideas, childish playing with words and feelings, and sentimental enthusiasm. But mawkish and canting as he was apt to be, he often shewed a fine appreciation of detail. He was even--a rare thing then--fascinated by the sea.

Now rages and roars the wild, wild sea, Now in soft curves lies quietly; Sweetly the light of the sun's bright glow Mirrors itself in the water below.

Sad winter's past--the stork is here, Birds are singing and nests appear; Bowery homes steal into the day, Flow'rets present their full array; Like little snakes and woods about, The streams go wandering in and out.

His motives, like his diminutives, are constantly recurring. He uses many bold and poetic personifications; the sun 'combs her golden hair,' the moon is a good shepherd who leads his sheep the stars across the blue heath, blowing upon a soft pipe; the sun adorns herself in spring with a crown and a girdle of roses, fills her quiver with arrows, and sends her horses to gallop for miles across the smooth sky; the wind flies about, stopping for breath from time to time; shakes its wings and withdraws into its house when it is tired; the brook of Cedron sits, leaning on a bucket in a hollow, combing his bulrush hair, his shoulders covered by grass and water; he sings a cradle song to his little brooks, or drives them before him, etc.

But the most gifted poet of the set, and the most doughty opponent of Lohenstein's bombast, was the unhappy Christian Guenther.[4]

He vents his feelings in verse because he must. There is a foretaste of Goethe in his lyrics, poured put to free the soul from a burden, and melodious as if by accident. As we turn over the leaves of his book of songs, we find deep feeling for Nature mingled with his love and sorrows.[5]

Bethink you, flowers and trees and shades, Of the sweet evenings here with Flavia! 'Twas here her head upon my shoulder pressed; Conceal, ye limes, what else I dare not say. 'Twas here she clover threw and thyme at me, And here I filled her lap with freshest flowers. Ah! that was a good time! I care more for moon and starlight than the pleasantest of days, And with eyes and heart uplifted from my chamber often gaze With an awe that grows apace till it scarcely findeth space.

To his lady-love he writes:

Here where I am writing now 'Tis lonely, shady, cool, and green; And by the slender fig I hear The gentle wind blow towards Schweidnitz. And all the time most ardently I give it thousand kisses for thee.

And at Schweidnitz:

A thousand greetings, bushes, fields, and trees, You know him well whose many rhymes And songs you've heard, whose kisses seen; Remember the joy of those fine summer nights.

To Eleanora:

Spring is not far away. Walk in green solitude Between your alder rows, and think ... As in the oft-repeated lesson The young birds' cry shall bear my longing; And when the west wind plays with cheek and dress be sure He tells me of thy longing, and kisses thee a thousand times for me.

In a time of despair, he wrote:

Storm, rage and tear! winds of misfortune, shew all your tyranny! Twist and split bark and twig, And break the tree of hope in two Stem and leaves are struck by this hail and thunder, The root remains till storm and rain have laid their wrath.

Again:

The woods I'll wander through, From men I'll flee away, With lonely doves I'll coo, And with the wild things stay. When life's the prey of misery, And all my powers depart, A leafy grave will be Far kinder than thy heart.

True lyrist, he gave Nature her full right in his feelings, and found comfort in return; but, as Goethe said of him, gifted but unsteady as he was, 'He did not know how to restrain himself, and so his life and poetry melted away.'

Among those who made use of better material than the Silesian poets, H. Barthold Brockes stood first. Nature was his one and only subject; but in this he was not original, he was influenced by England. While France was dictating a taste like the baroque, and Germany enthusiastically adopting it (every petty prince in the land copied the gardens at Versailles, Schwetzingen more closely than the rest), a revolution which affected all Europe was brought about by England. The order of the following dates is significant: William Kent, the famous garden artist, died in 1748, James Thomson in the same year, Brockes a year earlier; and about the same time the imitations of Robinson Crusoe sprang up like mushrooms.

We have considered Shakespeare's plays; English lyrists too of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries shewed deep feeling for Nature, and invested scenery with their own feelings in a very delicate way.

G. Chaucer (1400) praises the nightingale s song in _From the Floure and Leafe_:

So was I with the song Thorow ravished, that till late and long Ne wist I in what place I was ne where; ... And at the last, I gan full well aspie Where she sat in a fresh grene laurer tree On the further side, even right by me, That gave so passing a delicious smell According to the eglentere full well....

On the sote grass I sat me downe, for, as for mine entent, The birddes song was more convenient, And more pleasant to me by many fold Than meat or drink or any other thing.

Thomas Wyatt (1542) says of his lady-love:

The rocks do not so cruelly Repulse the waves continually, As she my suit and affection So that I am past remedy.

Robert Southwell (1595), in _Love's Servile Lott_, compares love to April:

May never was the month for love, For May is full of floures, But rather Aprill, wett by kinde, For love is full of showers.... Like winter rose and summer yce, Her joyes are still untymelye; Before her hope, behind remorse, Fayre first, in fyne unseemely.

Edmund Spenser (1598) describes a garden in _The Faerie Queene_:

There the most daintie Paradise on ground It selfe did offer to his sober eye, In which all pleasures plenteously abownd, And none does others' happinesse envye; The painted flowres, the trees upshooting hye, The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space, The trembling groves, the christall running by, And, that which all fair workes doth most aggrace, The art which all that wrought appeared in no place.

Mountain scenery was seldom visited or described.

Michael Drayton (1731) wrote an ode on the Peak, in Derbyshire:

Though on the utmost Peak A while we do remain, Amongst the mountains bleak Exposed to sleet and rain, No sport our hours shall break To exercise our vein.

It is clear that he preferred his comfort to everything, for he goes on:

Yet many rivers clear Here glide in silver swathes, And what of all most dear Buxton's delicious baths, Strong ale and noble chear T' assuage breem winter's scathes.

Thomas Carew (1639) sings:

Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose, For in your beauties' orient deep These flowers, as in their causes, sleep. Ask me no more whither do stray The golden atoms of the day, For in pure love Heaven did prepare Those powders to enrich your hair. Ask me no more whither doth haste The nightingale, when May is past, For in your sweet dividing throat She winters and keeps warm her note. Ask me no more where these stars shine That downwards fall in dead of night, For in your eyes they sit, and there Fixed become, as in their sphere. Ask me no more if east or west The phoenix builds her spicy nest, For unto you at last she flies And in your fragrant bosom dies.

William Drummond (1746) avowed a taste which he knew to be very unfashionable:

Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove, Far from the clamorous world, doth live his own Though solitary, who is not alone, But doth converse with that eternal love. O how more sweet is birds' harmonious moan Or the soft sobbings of the widow'd dove, Than those smooth whisp'rings near a prince's throne.... O how more sweet is zephyr's wholesome breath And sighs perfum'd, which new-born flowers unfold.

Another sonnet, to a nightingale, says:

Sweet bird, that sing'st away the early hours Of winters past or coming void of care, Well pleased with delights which present are, Fair seasons, budding sprays, sweet-smelling flowers; To rocks, to springs, to rills, from leafy bowers Thou thy Creator's goodness dost declare, And what dear gifts on thee He did not spare, A stain to human sense in sin that lowers, What soul can be so sick which by thy songs Attir'd in sweetness, sweetly is not driven Quite to forget earth's turmoils, spites, and wrongs?

He greets Spring:

Sweet Spring, thou turn'st with all thy goodly train Thy head with flames, thy mantle bright with flowers; The zephyrs curl the green locks of the plain, The clouds for joy in pearls weep down their showers.

Robert Blair (1746) sings in _The Grave_:

Oh, when my friend and I In some thick wood have wander'd heedless on, Hid from the vulgar eye, and sat us down Upon the sloping cowslip-cover'd bank, Where the pure limpid stream has slid along In grateful errors through the underwood, Sweet murmuring; methought the shrill-tongu'd thrush Mended his song of love, the sooty blackbird Mellowed his pipe and soften'd every note, The eglantine smell'd sweeter and the rose Assum'd a dye more deep, whilst ev'ry flower Vied with its fellow plant in luxury Of dress. Oh! then the longest summer's day Seem'd too, too much in haste, still the full heart Had not imparted half; half was happiness Too exquisite to last--Of joys departed Not to return, how painful the remembrance!

The great painter of Nature among the poets was James Thomson. He was not original, but followed Pope, who had lighted up the seasons in a dry, dogmatic way in _Windsor Forest_, and pastoral poems, and after the publication of his _Winter_ the taste of the day carried him on. His deep and sentimental affection for Nature was mixed up with piety and moralizing. He said in a letter to his friend Paterson:

Retirement and Nature are more and more my passion every day; and now, even now, the charming time comes on; Heaven is just on the point, or rather in the very act, of giving earth a green gown. The voice of the nightingale is heard in our lane. You must know that I have enlarged my rural domain ... walled, no, no! paled in about as much as my garden consisted of before, so that the walk runs round the hedge, where you may figure me walking any time of day, and sometimes of the night.... May your health continue till you have scraped together enough to return home and live in some snug corner, as happy as the Corycius senex in Virgil's fourth Georgic, whom I recommend both to you and myself as a perfect model of the truest happy life.

It is a fact that Solitude and Nature became a passion with him. He would wander about the country for weeks at a time, noting every sight and sound, down to the smallest, and finding beauty and divine goodness in all. His _Seasons_ were the result.

There is faithful portraiture in these landscapes in verse; some have charm and delicacy, but, for the most part, they are only catalogues of the external world, wholly lacking in links with the inner life.

Scene after scene is described without pause, or only interrupted by sermonizing; it is as monotonous as a gallery of landscape paintings.

The human beings introduced are mere accessories, they do not live, and the undercurrent of all is praise of the Highest. His predilection is for still life in wood and field, but he does not neglect grander scenery; his muse

"Sees Caledonia, in romantic view: Her airy mountains, from the waving main Invested with a keen diffusive sky, Breathing the soul acute; her forests huge, Incult, robust, and tall, by Nature's hand Planted of old; her azure lakes between, Poured out extensive and of watery wealth Full; winding, deep and green, her fertile vales, With many a cool translucent brimming flood Washed lovely...."

And in _A Hymn_ we read:

Ye headlong torrents rapid and profound, Ye softer floods that lead the humid maze Along the vale; and thou, majestic main, A secret world of wonders in thyself.

It is the lack of human life, the didactic tone, and the wearisome detail which destroys interest in the _Seasons_--the lack of happy moments of invention. Yet it had great influence on his contemporaries in rousing love for Nature, and it contains many beautiful passages. For example:

Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come, And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, While music wakes around, veiled in a shower Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.

His most artistic poem is Winter:

When from the pallid sky the sun descends With many a spot, that o'er his glaring orb Uncertain wanders, stained; red fiery streaks Begin to flush around. The reeling clouds Stagger with dizzy poise, as doubting yet Which master to obey; while rising slow, Blank in the leaden-coloured east, the moon Wears a wan circle round her blunted horns. Seen through the turbid fluctuating air, The stars obtuse emit a shivering ray; Or frequent seem to shoot, athwart the gloom, And long behind them trail the whitening blaze. Snatched in short eddies plays the withered leaf, And on the flood the dancing feather floats. With broadened nostrils to the sky upturned, The conscious heifer snuffs the stormy gale.... Retiring from the downs, where all day long They picked their scanty fare, a blackening train Of clamorous rooks thick urge their weary flight And seek the closing shelter of the grove, Assiduous, in his bower, the wailing owl Plies his sad song. The cormorant on high Wheels from the deep, and screams along the land. Loud shrieks the soaring heron, and with wild wing The circling sea-fowl cleave the flaky skies. Ocean, unequal pressed, with broken tide And blind commotion heaves, while from the shore, Eat into caverns by the restless wave And forest-rustling mountains, comes a voice That solemn-sounding bids the world prepare.

The elaboration of detail in such painting is certain evidence, not only of a keen, but an enthusiastic eye for Nature. As he says in Winter:

Nature, great parent! whose unceasing hand Rolls round the seasons of the changeful year! How mighty, how majestic, are thy works! With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul That sees astonish'd, and astonish'd sings!

Brockes was directly influenced by Pope and Thomson, and translated the _Seasons_, when he had finished his _Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott_. This unwieldy work, insipid and prosaic as it is, was still a literary achievement, thanks to the dignity of the subject and the high seriousness of its aim, at a time when frivolity was the fashion in poetry. Its long pious descriptions of natural phenomena have none of the imposing flow of Thomson's strophes. It treats of fire in 138 verses of eight lines each, of air in 79, water in 78, earth in 74, while flowers and fruit are dissected and analyzed at great length; and all this rhymed botany and physics is loosely strung together, but it shews a warm feeling for Nature of a moralizing and devotional sort. He says himself[7] that he took up the study of poetry first as an amusement, but later more seriously, and chose Nature as his theme, not only because her beauty moved him, but as a means 'whereby man might enjoy a permissible pleasure and be edified at the same time.'

So I resolved to sing the praises of the Creator to the best of my powers, and felt the more bound to do it, because I held that such great and almost inexcusable neglect and ingratitude was a wrong to the Creator, and unbecoming in Christendom. I therefore composed different pieces, chiefly in Spring, and tried my best to describe the beauties of Nature, in order, through my own pleasure, to rekindle the praise of the wise Creator in myself and others, and this led at last to the first part of my _Irdisches Vergnügen_. (1721.)

His evidence from animal and plant life for the teleological argument is very laughable; take, for example, the often-quoted chamois:

The fat is good for phthisis, the gall for the face, chamois flesh is good to eat, and its blood cures vertigo--the skin is no less useful. Doth not the love as well as the wisdom and almightiness of the Creator shine forth from this animal?

For the rest, the following lines from _Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott_ will serve to give an idea of his style; they certainly do honour to his laborious attempt to miss none of the charms of the wood:

Lately as I sat on the green grass Shaded by a lime tree, and read, I raised my eyes by chance and saw Different trees here and there, some far, some near, Some half, some all in light, and some in shade, Their boughs bowed down by leaves. I saw how beautifully both air and flowery mead Were crowned and adorned. To describe the green grace And the landscape it makes so sweet, And at the same time prolong my pleasure, I took pencil and paper And tried to describe the beautiful trees in rhyme, To the glory of God their Creator. Of all the beauty the world lays before our eyes, There certainly is none which does not pale Beside green boughs, Nothing to compare for pure beauty with a wood. The green roofing overhead Makes me feel young again; It hangs there, a living tapestry, To the glory of God and our delight.... Beyond many trees that lay in shade I often saw one in full light; A human eye would scarce believe How sweetly twilight, light and darkness Meet side by side in leafy trees. 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 God 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 God! 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 passed 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 spaces 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, balustrades, 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, pagodas, 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. Classic and romantic styles competed for favour in architecture; at one moment everything must needs be purely classic, each temple Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric; at another Gothic, with the ruins and fortresses of mediæval romance. And not only English gardens, but those of Europe generally, though to a less degree, passed 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 grass, 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 _rôle_ 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 noble, 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.