The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 28

The material of all things issues from the original womb, For Nature works with a master hand in her own inner depths; She is art, alive and gifted with a splendid mind.

Which fas.h.i.+ons its own material, not that of others, And does not falter or doubt, but all by itself Lightly and surely, as fire burns and sparkles.

Easily and widely, as light spreads everywhere, Never scattering its forces, but stable, quiet, and at one, Orders and disposes of everything together.

Campanella, even in a revolting prison, sang in praise of the wisdom and love of G.o.d, and His image in Nature. He personified everything in her; nothing was without feeling; the very movements of the stars depended on sympathy and antipathy; harmony was the central soul of all things.

The most extraordinary of all German thinkers was the King of Mystics, Jacob Bohme. Theist and pantheist at once, his mind was a ferment of different systems of thought. It is very difficult to unriddle his _Aurora_, but love of Nature, as well as love of G.o.d, is clear in its mystical utterances:

G.o.d is the heart or source of Nature.

Nature is the body of G.o.d.

'As man's mind rules his whole body in every vein and fills his whole being, so the Holy Ghost fills all Nature, and is its heart and rules in the good qualities of all things.'

'But now heaven is a delightful chamber of pleasure, in which are all the powers, as in all Nature the sky is the heart of the waters.'

In another place he calls G.o.d the vital power in the tree of life, the creatures His branches, and Nature the perfection and self-begotten of G.o.d.

Nature's powers are explained as pa.s.sion, will, and love, often in lofty and beautiful comparisons:

'As earth always bears beautiful flowers, plants, and trees, as well as metals and animate beings, and these finer, stronger, and more beautiful at one time than another; and as one springs into being as another dies, causing constant use and work, so it is in still greater degree with the begetting of the holy mysteries[5] ...

creation is nothing else than a revelation of the all-pervading superficial G.o.dhead ... and is like the music of many flutes combined into one great harmony.'

But the most representative man, both of the fifteenth century and, in a sense, of the German race, was Luther. That maxim of Goethe's for teaching and ethics,' Cheerfulness is the mother of all virtues, might well serve as a motto for Luther;

The two men had much in common.

The one, standing half in the Middle Ages, had to free himself from mental slavery by strength of will and courage of belief.

The other, as the prophet of the nineteenth century, the incarnation of the modern man, had to shake off the artificiality and weak sentimentality of the eighteenth.

To both alike a healthy joy in existence was the root of being.

Luther was always open to the influence of Nature, and, characteristically, the Psalter was his favourite book. 'Lord, how manifold are Thy works, in wisdom hast Thou made them all!'

True to his German character, he could be profoundly sad; but his disposition was delightfully cheerful and healthy, and we see from his letters and table-talk, that after wife and child, it was in 'G.o.d's dear world' that he took the greatest pleasure. He could not have enough of the wonders of creation, great or small. 'By G.o.d's mercy we begin to see the splendour of His works and wonders in the little flowers, as we consider how kind and almighty He is; therefore we praise and thank Him. In His creatures we see the power of His word--how great it is. In a peach stone, too, for hard as the sh.e.l.l is, the very soft kernel within causes it to open at the right time.'[6] Again, 'So G.o.d is present in all creatures, even the smallest leaves and poppy seeds.'

All that he saw of Nature inspired him with confidence in the fatherly goodness of G.o.d. He wrote, August 5th, 1530, to Chancellor Brneck:

I have lately seen two wonderful things: the first, looking from the window at the stars and G.o.d's whole beautiful sky dome, I saw never a pillar to support it, and yet it did not fall, and is still firm in its place. Now, there are some who search for such pillars and are very anxious to seize them and feel them, and because they cannot, fidget and tremble as if the skies would certainly fall ... the other, I also saw great thick clouds sweep over our heads, so heavy that they might be compared to a great sea, and yet I saw no ground on which they rested, and no vats in which they were contained, yet they did not fall on us, but greeted us with a frown and flew away. When they had gone, the rainbow lighted both the ground and the roof which had held them.

Luther often used very forcible images from Nature. 'It is only for the sake of winter that we lie and rot in the earth; when our summer comes, our grain will spring up--rain, sun, and wind prepare us for it--that is, the Word, the Sacraments, and the Holy Ghost.'

His Bible was an orchard of all sorts of fruit trees; in the introduction to the Psalter, he says of the thanksgiving psalms: 'There one looks into the hearts of the saints as into bright and beautiful gardens--nay, as into heaven itself, where pure and happy thoughts of G.o.d and His goodness are the lovely flowers.'

His description of heaven for his little son John is full of simple reverent delight in Nature, quite free from platonic and mystical speculation as to G.o.d's relation to His universe; and Protestant divines kept this tone up to the following century, until the days of rationalism and pietism.

Of such spontaneous hearty joy in Nature as this, the national songs of a nation are always the medium. They were so now; for, while a like feeling was nowhere else to be found, the Volkslieder expressed the simple familiar relations.h.i.+p of the child of Nature to wood, tree, and flower in touching words and a half-mythical, half-allegorical tone which often revealed their old Germanic origin.

There is a fourteenth-century song, probably from the Lower Rhine,[7]

which suggests the poems of the eighth and ninth centuries, about a great quarrel between Spring, crowned with flowers, and h.o.a.ry-headed Winter, in which one praises and the other blames the cuckoo for announcing Spring.

In this song, Summer complains to mankind and other friends that a mighty master is going to drive him away; this mighty master, Winter, then takes up the word, and menaces Spring with the approach of frost, who will slight and imprison him, and then kill him; ice and hail agree with Winter, and storm, rain, snow, and bitter winds are called his va.s.sals, etc.

There are naive verses in praise of Spring and Summer:

When that the breezes blow in May, And snow melts from the wood away, Blue violets lift their heads on high, And when the little wood-birds sing, And flow'rets from the ground up-spring, Then everybody's glad.

Others complaining of Winter, who must have leave of absence, and the wrongs it has wrought are poured out to Summer. The little birds are very human; the owlet complains:

Poor little owlet me!

I have to fly all alone through the wood to-night; The branch I want to perch on is broken, The leaves are all faded, My heart is full of grief.

The cuckoo is either praised for bringing good news, or made fun of as the 'Gutzgauch.'

A cuckoo will fly to his heart's treasure, etc.

The fable songs[8] of animal weddings are full of humour. The fox makes arrangements for his wedding: 'Up with you now, little birds! I am going to take a bride. The starling shall saddle the horses, for he has a grey mantle; the beaver with the cap of marten fur must be driver, the hare with his light foot shall be outrider; the nightingale with his clear voice shall sing the songs, the magpie with his steady hop must lead the dances,' etc.

The nightingale, with her rich tones, is beloved and honoured before all the winged things; she is called 'the very dear nightingale,' and addressed as a lady.

'Thou art a little woodbird, and flyest in and out the green wood; fair Nightingale, thou little woodbird, thou shalt be my messenger.'

It is she who warns the girl against false love, or is the silent witness of caresses.

There were a great many wis.h.i.+ng songs: 'Were I a little bird and had two wings, I would fly to thee,' or 'Were I a wild falcon, I would take flight and fly down before a rich citizen's house--a little maid is there,' etc. 'And were my love a brooklet cold, and sprang out of a stone, little should I grieve if I were but a green wood; green is the wood, the brooklet is cold, my love is shapely.' The betrayed maiden cries: 'Would G.o.d I were a white swan! I would fly away over mountain and deep valley o'er the wide sea, so that my father and mother should not know where I was.'

Flowers were used symbolically in many ways; roses are always the flowers of love. 'Pretty girls should be kissed, roses should be gathered,' was a common saying; and 'Gather roses by night, for then all the leaves are covered with cooling dew.' 'The roses are ready to be gathered, so gather them to-day. He who does not gather in summer, will not gather in winter.' There is tenderness in this: 'I only know a little blue flower, the colour of the sky; it grows in the green meadow, 'tis called forget-me-not.'

These are sadder:

There is a lime tree in this valley, O G.o.d! what does it there?

It will help me to grieve That I have no lover.

'Alas! you mountains and deep valleys, is this the last time I shall see my beloved? Sun, moon, and the whole sky must grieve with me till my death.'

Where lovers embrace, flowers spring out of the gra.s.s, roses and other flowers and gra.s.ses laugh, the trees creak and birds sing;[9]

where lovers part, gra.s.s and leaves fade.[10]

Most touching of all is the idea, common to the national songs of all nations, that out of the grave of two lovers, lilies and roses spring up, or climbing plants, love thus outliving death.

We look in vain among the master singers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for such fresh heartfelt tones as these, although honest Hans Sachs shews joy in Nature here and there; most charmingly in the famous comparison of 'the Wittenberg Nightingale, which every one hears everywhere now,' in praise of Luther:

'Wake up, the dawn is nigh! I hear a joyous nightingale singing in the green hedge, it fills the hills and valleys with its voice. The night is stooping to the west, the day is rising from the east, the morning red is leaping from the clouds, the sun looks through. The moon quenches her light; now she is pale and wan, but erewhile with false glamours she dazzled all the sheep and turned them from their pasture lands and pastor....'

Fischart too, in his quaint description of a voyage on the Rhine in _Gluckhaft Schiff_, shews little feeling for Nature; but in _Simplicissimus_, on the other hand, that monument of literature which reflected contemporary culture to a unique degree, it is very marked; the more so since it appeared when Germany lay crushed by the Thirty Years' War.

When the hero as a boy was driven from his village home and fled into the forest, he came upon a hermit who took care of him, and waking at midnight, he heard the old man sing:

Come, nightingale, comfort of the night, Let your voice rise in a song of joy, come praise the Creator, While other birds are sound asleep and cannot sing!...

The stars are s.h.i.+ning in the sky in honour of G.o.d....

My dearest little bird, we will not be the laziest of all And lie asleep; we will beguile the time with praise Till dawn refreshes the desolate woods.