Comparative Literature/Book 5/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
NATURE IN NATIONAL LITERATURE.
§ 95. In the earliest poetry of Europe, poetry which reflects the stormy local life out of which national union was to slowly grow, man is too busy with his tribal wars and his conflict with rugged Nature to sing of the mountains or the forests with any sense of pleasure. In Beowulf, Grendel's shadow, dark and deadly, "roams all night the misty moors." When the cruiser "foamy-necked" across the "wild swan's path" has reached the glittering cliffs, the Weders thank God "for making easy to them the watery way." For the Scôp knows nothing, of the glad waters of the dark blue sea or the moonlit lakes of later poesy; he fears the sunset when "dusky night, the shadowing helmet of all creatures, lowering beneath the clouds comes gliding on;" he fears "the haunted waters of the Nixes' mere," and gladly sees the dawn of "God's bright beacon" in the east.
Nor is this want of sympathy with Nature confined to the poetry of the Sea-Robbers. "We find no description of scenery either in the Nibelungen or the Gudrun even where the occasion might lead us to look for it. In the otherwise circumstantial account of the chase during which Siegfried is murdered, the only natural features mentioned are the blooming heather and the cool fountain under the linden tree." In Gudrun, indeed, as Wilhelm Grimm goes on to say, we have such slight descriptive touches as the morning star rising over the sea glistening in the early dawn; but, as in the Homeric pictures of the island of the Cyclops and the gardens of Alkinous, such descriptions of Nature are completely subordinated to human interests. Had we any truly primitive reliques of Celtic or Teutonic poetry, we might find in them Nature-myths, such as those of Hymir and Odin and the Jötuns, in which some Carlyle would descry for us vast reflections of man's primitive personality supposed to be colossal—"huge Brobdingnag genius needing only to be tamed down into Shaksperes, Dantes, Goethes," as if the diverse personalities of these three master-singers could not only be lumped together, but might be treated as the personality of a clansman "tamed down." But Christianity, while absorbing the folk-lore of its converts, humanised and, so to speak, denaturalised it. Combating the sentiments of clan life—Blood-revenge and the like—Christianity was also compelled to combat pagan worships of Nature and the songs in which they were voiced. Inheriting largely from the municipal life of Greece and Rome feelings of man's superiority to Nature, disdainful of material existence as corrupt and perishable, and now brought into direct conflict with the pagan worship of Nature, the new faith could not be expected to perpetuate such poetry of Nature. Moreover, each successive wave of barbaric conquest contributed to make these sentiments of Nature a kind of savage jungle in which the deities of the pagans figured in wild confusion as dragons and monsters more readily convertible into the devils of the faithful than the lovely forms of classical mythology. Finally, the degradation of those clansmen whose communal property these sentiments of Nature would have been, must have aided in dethroning the divinities of Nature; and when the free clans had sunk into the serfdom of feudal villages, it was less likely than ever that their old songs should attract the attention of the monks.[1] If new sympathies with Nature were to arise, clearly they must find their source in a material life more hopeful than that of feudal serfs, a life in which men might again become in some degree joyous pagans pleased with the odours of earth-flowers, and not for ever peering through their short-lived beauty into the unknown and eternal.
Such a life of material pleasure was now only possible in the feudal castle; and here, accordingly, the return to paganism took place. But this feudal paganism was something widely different from either the classical or the tribal. A coarsely objective individualism, almost equally removed from the individualism of the Alexandrian age, aware of its own pettiness in the presence of vast masses of men, and from the clan merger of individual in social being, had now assumed a gigantic and almost grotesque significance in the person of the seigneur. It might be anticipated that before the eyes of this feudal personage Nature, if she attracted attention at all, would assume a dress curiously contrasting with that which she had worn for the poets of Alexandria or the bards of the clan.
§ 96. Feudal song neither humanises Nature, as the Alexandrian had done, nor spiritualises her life—worships in her neither the life of man nor that of God. It would seem as if Christian associations, without doing much to lessen the prodigious self-importance of the seigneur, had been able to drive from his halls the awe of Nature's lasting majesty or the true love of her beauty. In the Chansons de Geste and the songs of Minnesingers the life of the wandering minstrel could not but leave traces of Nature’s influences; but these are seen merely in general allusions, and if among the trampling of horses and the baying of hounds, among the sights and sounds of the chase or the hawking party, we catch a glimpse of "gentle May," or the "dew glistening on the heather-bells," or hear the song of the nightingale, it is only because the feudal scene needs the addition of some such prettiness. These feudal singers reverse the practice of that prose-poet Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who makes his narratives only frames for his pictures of Nature; they offer us hardly any pictures of Nature, little but scattered images (such as the "fading leaves of autumn" or "the fields bared in winter's snow"), which are so frequently and mechanically repeated as to suggest anything but lively sympathy with Nature. The flower and the leaf are but emblems of war and love to them; as sings Bertran de Born—
"Bien me sourit le doux printemps,
Qui fait venir fleurs et feuillages;
Et bien me plait lorsque j'entends
Des oiseaux le gentil ramage.
Mais j'aime mieux quand sur le pré
Je vois l'étendard arboré,
Flottant comme un signal de guerre;
Quand j'entends par monts et par vaux
Courir chevaliers et chevaux
Et sous leurs pas frémir la terre."
German critics have asked whether contact with Southern Italy, with Asia Minor and Palestine by the Crusades, enriched the feudal poetry of Germany with new imagery drawn from more sunny climes, and have decided in the negative. The question suggests one reason for the weak and stereotyped sentiments of Nature in feudal poetry. Modern science has gifted the literary artist with thoughts of Nature's unity, in which all individual and social distinctions lose themselves—are "made one with Nature;" but the narrowly local associations of feudal life prevented even the coarsest sense of Nature's unity. Only local aspects of Nature—those of their own neighbourhood—could have presented any charm for the seigneur and his retainers; and even these, far from being gilded with any halo like the local divinities of Hellas, were spoiled by associations of villeinage. The fields were for the serfs to till; the forest glades were beautiful only as the haunts of the deer. The Chanson de Roland might offer many an opportunity for descriptions of the Pyrenees, but what pleasure would a glowing picture of the Valley of Roncevaux have afforded the audience of a castle hall? Would they, who cared for Nature even round their walls only as the purveyor of the chase, have listened to descriptions, however beautiful, of a place they had never seen? No; the feudal minstrel suited his lyre to the common feelings of his feudal audiences; and, if he sang of Nature at all, only introduced her general features, without aiming at. truth of local description or even variety of expression, and even these general touches as mere adjuncts of feudal life—"the greyhounds glancing through the groves," and "bow-men bickering on the bent."
Still feudal life and the poetry it created are by no means to be overlooked in the development of our European sentiments of Nature. Such images of Nature as are scattered through feudal songs, though only taken to throw into greater relief the charms of a mistress or the pleasures of the chase, are at least in the main truthful. It was something to have freed Nature from the load of tangled myths under which early barbarism had buried her. It was something to have risen above Christian anathemas of the material world even so far as to find the figures of lord and lady, horse and hound and hawk, more beautiful among the flowers of May and the singing birds. Nature is plainly assuming forms more friendly than were known to the kinsmen of Beowulf when they gladly saw "the Father loosen the bonds of frost," or "drove their roaring vessels over the mists of the floods." But this feudal sentiment of Nature is narrow in the extreme, socially and physically. "Among the Troubadours," says M. Fauriel, "we shall seek in vain for the least picture, false or true, of the country-folks' condition. These Theocriti of the castle know nothing of labourers, herdsmen, flocks, the fields, the harvest, the vintage; they have the air of never having seen brook and river, forest and mountain, village and hut. For them the pastoral world is reduced to lonely shepherdesses guarding some sheep, or not guarding them at all; and the adventures of this pastoral world are limited to conversations of these shepherdesses with the Troubadours who, riding by, never fail to see them and quickly dismount to offer their gallant addresses." How shall the life of Nature be observed from a broader and loftier platform than that of the feudal castle? How shall her immense variety of forms oust the stereotyped Nature-language of feudal song? What social expansion, what individual deepening of man's spirit, shall reveal in Nature sights and sounds not known before?
§ 97. Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries we may watch three great influences at work in creating new ideas of Nature in Europe—the rise of the towns, the progress of geographical discovery, and the Renaissance. At first, indeed, the rise of the towns did not rouse any lively sympathies with Nature. The armed burghers of the Commune, seeing few but enemies beyond their walls, viewed the scenery of the country with much the same feelings as those of the old Greek town-republics. But, in spite of confining men's interest within the city walls at first, the towns of Europe were destined to expand directly and indirectly our modern sentiments of Nature. Their commerce, bringing back knowledge of new climates, animals, vegetation, gave currency to new ideas, new contrasts, of Nature; and the various types of character developed within their walls diversified the human standpoints from which Nature might be perceived. The soul of the free burgher, filled with new sights and sounds, was soon capable of adding much to the songs of feudalism. At the court of the monarch burgher and feudal elements could find a quiet union. Here, then, we might have expected to find a true poetry of Nature springing up. But the Latin and Greek Renaissances were to make our European poetry of Nature an exotic cared of courts before it became a home-growth of democratic taste.
The fantastic geography of the Divina Commedia has too little to do with the world of Nature to admit truthful and sympathetic pictures of her forms. The individualism of Dante's town-born muse leaves as few signs of Nature's handiwork as the town-drama of Athens. Here and there we meet descriptive touches—"il tremolar di marina,"[2] "la divina foresta spessa e viva;"[3] but even in the pine-forests on the shore of Chiassi we hear echoes from Vergil—
"Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie
Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi,
Quand' Eolo Scirocco fuor discioglie."
If we turn to Petrarch expecting to find natural description as a fitting frame for human love-scenes, we shall be disappointed; for, though we may admire the Italian stylist's sonnet on the effects of the Valley of Vaucluse upon his feelings after Laura's death, he sympathises rather with city life and classical reminiscences than with the splendid life of Nature round about him, "I miss with astonishment," says Humboldt,[4] "any expression of feeling connected with the aspects of Nature in the letters of Petrarch, either when, in 1545, he attempted the ascent of Mont Ventour from Vaucluse, longing to catch a glimpse of his native land, or when he visited the gulf of Baiæ, or the banks of the Rhine to Cologne. His mind was occupied by classical remembrances of Cicero and the Roman poets, or by the emotions of his ascetic melancholy, rather than by surrounding Nature."
This was while the Greek revival had scarcely yet begun; no wonder that when the models which Rome had essayed to copy were unveiled before the eyes of Western scholars, their faces were averted from all sights and sounds of Nature save such as their classical gods—for gods indeed the classical artists now became—had stamped with approval. The beauties of the physical world exist only for him who can see them; and when the exquisite but delusive mirage of classical associations stole over the face of Western Europe, men of culture came to see Nature—nay, even social and individual life—through mists in which nothing loomed out clearly save the phantom men and manners of Athens and Rome. "For long the only forests or seas, gardens or fields, frequented by poets, were to be found in the descriptions of Vergil and Homer. In France, at least down to the time of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, the only voyages made by men of letters, the only storms and shipwrecks with which they were acquainted, were those of Ulysses and Æneas."[5] Even in Chaucer we find the conventional garden of the Italian or Provençal muse rather than the landscape of England. Not only does Chaucer know nothing of Nature in the Wordsworthian sense—for his allegories and types bespeak an age in which there was no profound individualism capable of feeling "the silence and the calm of mute insensate things"—but his merely animal enjoyment of her beauty prefers colourless generalities to local truth; he would, perhaps, have shrunk as little from transplanting Italian scenery into England as from making Duke Theseus an English noble, just as Shakspere sets the London guilds in Athens, and places lions in the forest of Arden.[6]
Just when the resurrection of Greek thought was beginning to send forth scholars bound hand and foot in the grave-clothes of antiquity, while mental freedom, fostered by growing towns and decaying feudalism, sought to clothe itself in classical dress so as to escape the censure of Christian dogma—an excuse for much of the Renaissance pedantry—voyages of discovery in the East and West spread new ideas of Nature's handiwork in distant climes. From the letters of Columbus and his ship's journal we may feel the overpowering amazement with which the navigator gazed on impenetrable forests, "where one could scarcely distinguish which were the flowers and leaves belonging to each stem," palms "more beautiful and loftier than date trees," "rose-coloured flamingoes fishing at the mouths of rivers in the early dawn." "Once," he tells us, "I came into a deeply enclosed harbour, and saw high mountains which no human eye had seen before, mountains with lovely waters streaming down. Firs and pines and trees of various form, and beautiful flowers, adorned the heights. Ascending the river which poured itself into the bay, I was astonished at the cool shade, the crystal-clear water, the number of singing birds. It seemed as if I never could quit a spot so delightful—as if a thousand tongues would fail to describe it—as if the spell-bound hand would refuse to write."
Here were materials for Chateaubriands and Lamartines, yet, excepting the great national epic of Portugal,[7] the influences of the new discoveries on literature as distinct from science were not very remarkable. It has been observed that Camoens, like Lucretius, gives us a picture of the water-spout; and no doubt his "cloud of woven vapour whirling round and round and sending down a thin tube to the sea" is at least as graphic as the Roman's "column reaching down from heaven to ocean." But, though Camoens tauntingly bids the learned "try to explain the wonderful things hidden from the world," the spirit of Lucretius was abroad. Before the poet's life closed (1579) Bacon was eighteen years of age; and that "experience," which against "so-called science" he had praised as "the sailor's only guide," was on its way to be systematised. Independent inquiry readily sought an outlet in studies which at first wore the look of being unconnected with dogma; and, in spite of Bacon's imaginative style, the disciples of experience began to separate science from literature as if they possessed no bond in that imaginative element without which experience is a dead thing. Literature, too, just now becoming the toy of courts, without sorrow surrendered to science a study of Nature which would not only have limited the freedom of romance, but bred dissatisfaction with the scenic models of Theocritus and Vergil. It was through classical spectacles that the culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries preferred to see Nature; and it was just in their sentiments of Nature that classical literatures, as already explained, were weakest. Moreover, such sentiments of nature as classical literature had possessed were likely to be gravely misinterpreted by Christian imitators. The pastoral elegy of Modern Europe is a striking evidence of this misinterpretation. The essence of the Greek pastoral elegy is the contrast of man's individual life with Nature's apparent eternity—a melancholy sentiment becoming the lips of a modern materialist, but in the author of Lycidas, the poetic champion of a faith before which the material universe is but as dust and ashes compared with the soul of the veriest wretch who wears the form of man, almost grotesquely out of place. Why should Nature lament the escape of a divinity greater than herself from its clay prison? The Greek chorus in the social life of the Hebrews speaking the Puritanism of England in Samson Agonistes is not a stranger union of incongruities than the poet of individual immortality repeating the materialism of the Greek in lamentations for Edward King. Plainly the individualism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not know whether it was of earth or the infinite; and this confused judgment made it willing to look on Nature partially as a beautiful machine, its exquisite mechanism worthy of such word-pictures as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso contain, partially as a pagan god to be duly invoked only in good old pagan fashion, and partially as a perishable nullity destined to be "rolled together as a scroll"—in any case connected by no profoundly real links with man’s social and individual life.
§ 98. "If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to take this idea along with us, that the pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been, when the best of men followed the employment. To carry this resemblance yet farther, it would not be amiss to give these shepherds some skill in astronomy, as far as it may be useful to that sort of life." So thought and wrote Alexander Pope in his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. Yet who would look for genuine sympathy with Nature from the poet of court intrigues, personal satire, well-bred criticism, and a mongrel Nature in which Sicilian muses sing on the banks of the Thames, and our Theocritean acquaintances, Daphnis and the rest, repeat the similes of the Greek in correct English couplets? Who could expect such sympathy from the disciple of a poet who in his Passage du Rhin is more troubled by the insertion of ugly names ("Quel vers ne tomberait au seul nom de Heusden?") than the description of Nature, and mistakes lifeless symbols like "Rhine, leaning with one hand propped upon his urn," or the classical Naiades, for the fresh inspiration of Nature?
Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that the artificial poetry of courts did nothing for Nature but surround her with the extinct flocks of Pan, the long-withered fruits of Pomona, and the ancient charms of the elderly but ever-blushing Flora. It was in courtly literature that shallow individualism began to understand itself, and worked out to their bitterest disenchantment all the pleasures of which its "palace of art" was capable. The ferocious misanthropy of Swift is the spirit of this individualism in the act of violent suicide; the tame cynicism of Voltaire is this same spirit dying of old age, though wearing still the garlands of a vanished youth. Men, in the poetry of Allan Ramsay and Thomson, Klopstock, Saint Lambert, began to see that Nature without court dress was none the less beautiful; that there were myriads of her sights and sounds which the restricted and now effete individualism of courts had never freely experienced; that of “"this fair volume which we World do name" they had been too long content with "coloured vellum, leaves of gold, fair dangling ribbons," or, at most, "some picture on the margin wrought." At first, indeed, simple truthfulness of description, such as may be found plentifully in Cowper's poems, marked the change from classical and courtly idealism into open-air freedom; but soon the sentiment of Nature was to become something infinitely deeper than any description, however accurate, however beautiful, could express.
Democratic revolution, with its vast masses of men in action, with its theoretic obliteration of all individual inequalities, and its consequent readiness to imagine human life as impersonal—a readiness to be increased by scientific ideas of physical laws likewise impersonal—now came to force into intense conflict ideas of individual and collective humanity. Individualism, feeling trampled underfoot in the rush of multitudes, turned to Nature in search of
"Jardins lumineux, plaines d'asphodèle
Que n'ont point foulés les humains."
"He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird."
But this negation of self, expressing itself in abstractions as intensely realised as they are delicately beautiful, makes Shelley's sentiment of Nature less profound than that of Wordsworth. Neither in the presence of his fellow-men, whatever their myriad march, nor of Nature, how countless soever her worlds, can the indestructible personality of Wordsworth forget itself. His spirit, like that of Shelley, is divine; but it is no mere fragment of a vast divinity; backwards into the illimitable past, forwards into the illimitable future, now and for ever in the face of man and Nature, it dwells, has dwelt, shall dwell like a star apart in an individuality unmade, unmakable, unchangeable. Before this profound sense of personality, partially Platonic, partially Christian, but most of all awakened by the physical and social conditions of the poet's age, Nature assumes a depth of meaning which only beings of Wordsworthian mould may feel. Byron's descriptive powers, Shelley's musical communion with the sounds of Nature, give place to a realisation of Nature's being all the more terribly significant because the observer refuses to reconcile its conflict with his own personality either by material or immaterial unity; and while the associations of his childhood, youth, and age become consecrated as the earthly dress of an eternal being—not the melancholy entirety of one made of such stuff as dreams are made of—Wordsworth fears not to be materialised by the companionship of Nature, because he has neither deified her being at the expense of his own, nor denied her divinity in order to make himself eternal.
§ 99. When, therefore, we ask, as we have already asked, why it is that in the "mysteries" of Goethe and Byron deep feelings of personality, deep sympathies with Nature, strikingly contrast with the impersonal allegories and absence of Nature in the early drama of Modern Europe, we find our answer in the social and individual evolution of European life—in the expansion of social life, in the deepening of individuality winning new senses of sight and hearing, as it were, for the lights and shades, the murmuring inarticulate voices of Nature—
"Voix fécondes, voix du silence
Dont les lieux déserts sont peuplés."
Social sympathies, individual consciousness, Nature's life, all on a scale of greatness never before approximated, seem to meet in a poet of that great Western Republic whose teeming population is indeed "not merely a nation, but a nation of nations." In America, says Walt Whitman, "there is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night;" in America, more than in the old countries of Europe, far more than in the stationary East, there is "action magnificently moving in vast masses;" in America, too, this largeness of Nature and the nation of nations "were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen." For Whitman the ideal individual of America—America's ideal man—is to absorb into his soul an almost boundless range of social life—all the sights and sounds of Nature and animals; "his spirit responds to his country's spirit; he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes—Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, the blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and Maryland, the growths of pine and cedar and cypress and hickory, forests coated with transparent ice, and icicles hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind."[8]
There is a strange magnificence in this democratic individualism, so prodigious in its width and depth—in the social sympathies, in the personal consciousness of equality, in the fellowship with Nature's mighty life, of these democratic "comrades, there in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim." Far indeed have they passed from the comradeship of the clan, far from the citizenship of the city commonwealth, far from the castes of the East, far from the communes and seigneurs of the West; yet they feel not wholly disunited with the "garnered clusters of ages, that men and women like them grew up and travelled their course and passed on."
Footnotes
[edit]- ↑ On the monks as subduers of Nature's marshes and forests see Montalembert's Monks of the West. Their conflict with Nature seems rather to have confirmed their contempt for the material world than created any sympathy with Nature's life.
- ↑ Il Purgatorio, i. 117.
- ↑ Ibid., xxviii. 2.
- ↑ Cosmos, Poetic Descriptions of Nature, note 82.
- ↑ Victor de Laprade, Le Sent. de la Nat. Chez les Mod., p. 57.
- ↑ Cf. M. Browne, Chaucer's England, vol. i. pp. 210, sqq.; Vol. ii, pp. 224, sqq.
- ↑ "The Æneid," says Hallam (Lit., vol. ii. p. 205), "reflects the glory of Rome as from a mirror; the Lusiad is directly and exclusively what its name ('The Portuguese,' Os Lusiadas) denotes, the praise of the Lusitanian people. Their past history chimes in, by means of episodes, with the great event of Gama's voyage to India." Having made an exception in favour of the Lusiad, we must remind the reader that ocean and Indian scenery by no means banish conventional personification of Nature under classical figures. Venus and the Nereids save the fleet; Bacchus delivers a speech to the assembled gods of the sea; and Neptune in true Vergilian fashion bids Æolus let loose the winds on the Portuguese fleet. But contrast the absence of scenery in Ariosto and Tasso, and we shall admit with M. Laprade that the Lusiad "est le plus ancien monument de notre poésie chrétienne où la nature tienne une grande place et joue un rôle indépendant" (Le Sent. de la Nat. Chez les Mod., p. 78).
- ↑ Preface to Leaves of Grass.