The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 49

The necessary condition of delight in Nature is very strikingly given:

Si vous avez en vous, vivantes et pressees, Un monde interieur d'images, de pensees, De sentimens, d'amour, d'ardente pa.s.sion Pour feconder ce monde, echangez-le sans cesse Avec l'autre univers visible qui vous presse!

Melez toute votre ame a la creation....

Que sous nos doigts puissans exhale la nature, Cette immense clavier!

His lyrics are rich in fine scenes from Nature, unrolled in cold but stately periods, and the poetic intuition which always divines the spirit life brought him near to that pantheism which we find in all the greatest English and German poets of his time,[16] and which lay, too, at the root of German romanticism.

THE GERMAN ROMANTICISTS

Schiller did not possess the intrinsically lyrical genius of Goethe; his strength lay, not in song, but drama, and in a didactic form of epic--the song not of feeling, but of thought.

Descriptions of Nature occur here and there in his epics and dramas; but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his contemporaries, he pa.s.sed through a sentimental period; _Evening_ shews this, and _Melancholy, to Laura_:

Laura, a sunrise seems to break Where'er thy happy looks may glow....

Thy soul--a crystal river pa.s.sing, Silver clear and sunbeam gla.s.sing, Mays into blossom sad autumn by thee: Night and desert, if they spy thee, To gardens laugh--with daylight s.h.i.+ne, Lit by those happy smiles of thine!

With such ecstatic extravagances contrast the excellent descriptions of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems--for instance, the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in _The Diver_, evening in _The Hostage_, and landscape in _William Tell_ and _The Walk_. In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery is made a 'frame for a kind of phenomenology of mankind.'

Flowers of all hue are struggling into glow Along the blooming fields; yet their sweet strife Melts into one harmonious concord. Lo!

The path allures me through the pastoral green And the wide world of fields! The labouring bee Hums round me, and on hesitating wing O'er beds of purple clover, quiveringly Hovers the b.u.t.terfly. Save these, all life Sleeps in the glowing sunlight's steady sheen-- E'en from the west no breeze the lull'd airs bring.

Hark! in the calm aloft I hear the skylark sing.

The thicket rustles near, the alders bow Down their green coronals, and as I pa.s.s, Waves in the rising wind the silvering gra.s.s; Come! day's ambrosial night! receive me now Beneath the roof by shadowy beeches made Cool-breathing, etc.

Schiller's interest in Nature was more a matter of reflection than direct observation; its real tendency was philosophical and ethical.

He called Nature naive (he included naturalness in Nature); those who seek her, sentimental; but he overlooked (as we saw in an earlier chapter) the fact that antiquity did not always remain naive, and that not all moderns are sentimental.

As Rousseau's pupil he drew a sharp distinction between Nature and Art, and felt happy in solitude where 'man with his torment does not come,' lying, as he says in _The Bride of Messina_, like a child on the bosom of Nature.

In Schiller's sense of the word, perhaps no poet has been more sentimental about Nature than Jean Paul.

He was the humorous and satirical idyllist _par excellence_, and laid the scenes of his romances in idyllic surroundings, using the trifling events of daily life to wonderful purpose. There is an almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious metaphors and mixture of ideas. With the exception of Lake Maggiore in _t.i.tan_, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all his references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated with the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling. They all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own countryside, finding the reflection of their feelings in her. There is a constant interweaving of the human soul and the universe; therein lies his pantheistic trait. 'To each man,' he said,[17]

'Nature appears different, and the only question is, which is the most beautiful? Nature is for ever becoming flesh for mankind; outer Nature takes a different form in each mind.' Certainly the nature of Jean Paul was different from the Nature of other mortals. Was she more beautiful? He wrote of her in his usual baroque style, with a wealth of thought and feeling, and everywhere the sparkle of genius; but it is all presented in the strangest motley, as exaggerated and unenjoyable as can be. For example, from _Siebenkas_:

I appeared again then on the last evening of the year 1794, on the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to the ocean of eternity.

To the b.u.t.terfly--proboscis of Siebenkas, enough honey--cells were still open in every blue thistle-blossom of destiny.

When they had pa.s.sed the gate--that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it--the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and s.h.i.+ning above the dark green earth, and the ocean-calm of Nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it) up above the world, and down beneath it the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far-reaching darkness.

When it was autumn in his heart:

Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead; above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all Nature, trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths.... But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs of Nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers.

When his married life grew more unhappy, in December:

The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet, as he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of Nature.

and in spring

it seemed to him as if his life dwelt, not in a bodily heart, but in some warm and tender tear, as if his heavy-laden soul were expanding and breaking away through some c.h.i.n.k in its prison, and melting into a tone of music, a blue ether wave.

And _t.i.tan_ expresses that inner enfranchis.e.m.e.nt which Nature bestows upon us:

Exalted Nature! when we see and love thee, we love our fellow-men more warmly, and when we must pity or forget them, thou still remainest with us, reposing before the moist eye like a verdant chain of mountains in the evening red. Ah! before the soul in whose sight the morning dew of its ideals has faded to a cold, grey drizzle ... thou remainest, quickening Nature, with thy flowers and mountains and cataracts, a faithful comforter; and the bleeding son of the G.o.ds, cold and speechless, dashes the drop of anguish from his eyes, that they may rest, far and clear, on thy volcanoes, and on thy springs and on thy suns.

This is sunset in his abstruse artistic handling:

The sun sinks, and the earth closes her great eye like that of a dying G.o.d. Then smoke the hills like altars; out of every wood ascends a chorus; the veils of day, the shadows, float around the enkindled transparent tree-tops, and fall upon the gay, gem-like flowers. And the burnished gold of the west throws back a dead gold on the east, and tinges with rosy light the hovering breast of the tremulous lark--the evening bell of Nature.

And this sunrise:

The flame of the sun now shot up ever nearer to the kindled morning clouds; at length in the heavens, in the brooks and ponds, and in the blooming cups of dew, a hundred suns rose together, while a thousand colours floated over the earth, and one pure dazzling white broke from the sky. It seemed as if an almighty earthquake had forced up from the ocean, yet dripping, a new-created blooming plain, stretching out beyond the bounds of vision, with all its young instincts and powers; the fire of earth glowed beneath the roots of the immense hanging garden, and the fire of heaven poured down its flames and burnt the colours into the mountain summits and the flowers. Between the porcelain towers of white mountains the coloured blooming heights stood as thrones of the Fruit-G.o.ddess; over the far-spread camp of pleasure blossom-cups and sultry drops were pitched here and there like peopled tents; the ground was inlaid with swarming nurseries of gra.s.ses and little hearts, and one heart detached itself after another with wings, or fins, or feelers, from the hot breeding-cell of Nature, and hummed and sucked and smacked its little lips, and sung: and for every little proboscis some blossom-cup of; joy was already open. The darling child of the infinite mother, man, alone stood with bright joyful eyes upon the market-place of the living city of the sun, full of brilliance and noise, and gazed, delighted, around him into all its countless streets; but his eternal mother rested veiled in immensity, and only by the warmth which went to his heart did he feel that he was lying upon hers.

For very overflow of thought and imagery and ecstasy of feeling, Jean Paul never achieved a balanced beauty of expression.

The ideal cla.s.sic standard which Winckelmann and Lessing had laid down--simple and plastic, calm because objective, crystal-clear in thought and expression--and which Goethe and Schiller had sought to realize and imbue with modern ideas, was too strictly limited for the Romanticists. Hyperion's words expressed their taste more accurately: 'O, man is a G.o.d when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks!' and they laid stress upon restless movement, fantastic, highly-coloured effects, a cra.s.s subjectivity, a reckless licence of the imagination.

Actual and visible things were disregarded; they did not accord with this claim for infinity and the nebulous, for exploring the secret depths of the soul.

It was perhaps a necessary reaction from Goethe's cla.s.sicism; but it pa.s.sed like a bad dream, after tending, thanks to its heterogeneous elements, now to the mediaeval period, now to that of Storm and Stress, and now to Goethe, Herder, and Winckelmann. It certainly contained germs of good, which have grown and flourished in our own day.

In keeping with its whole character, the Romantic feeling for Nature was subjective and fantastic to excess, mystically enthusiastic, often with a dreamy symbolism at once deep and naive; its inmost core was pantheistic, with a pantheism shading off imperceptibly into mysticism.

After _Werther_, there is perhaps no work of modern fiction in which Nature plays so artistic a part as in Holderlin's _Hyperion_.

Embittered by life's failure to realize his ideals, he cries: 'But thou art still visible, sun in the sky! Thou art still green, sacred earth! The streams still rush to the sea, and shady trees rustle at noon. The spring's song of joy sings my mortal thoughts to sleep. The abundance of the universe nourishes and satiates my famished being to intoxication.'

This mystical pantheism could not be more clearly expressed than here:

O blessed Nature! I know not how it happens when I lift my eyes to your beauty; but all the joy of the sky is in the tears which I shed before you--a lover before the lady of his love. When the soft waves of the air play round my breast, my whole being is speechless and listens. Absorbed in the blue expanse, I often look up to the ether and down to the holy sea; and it seems as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of loneliness were lost in the divine life. To be one with all that lives, in blessed self-forgetfulness to return to the All of Nature, that is the height of thought and bliss--the sacred mountain height, the place of eternal rest, where noon loses its sultriness and thunder its voice, and the rough sea is like the waves in a field of wheat.

To such feeling as this the actualities are but fetters, hindering aspiration.

'O, if great Nature be the daughter of a father, is the daughter's heart not his heart? Is not he her deepest feeling? But have I found it? Do I know it?'

He tries to discern the 'soul of Nature,' hears 'the melody of morning light begin with soft notes.' He says to the flower, 'You are my sister,' and to the springs, 'We are of one race': he finds symbolic resemblance between his heart and all the days and seasons: he feels the beauty of the 'land like paradise,' while scarcely ever, except in the poem _Heidelberg_, giving a clear sketch of scenery. A number of fine comparisons from Nature are scattered through his writings [18]:

The caresses of the charming breezes.

She light, clear, flattering sea.

Sacred air, the sister of the mind which moves and lives in us with fiery force, present everywhere immortal.

Earth, 'one of the flowers of the sky.'

Heaven, 'the unending garden of life.'

Beauty, that 'which is one and all.'