The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 27

His riper judgment preferred her to all other models. Nature, in his remarks on the theory of art, includes the animate and the inanimate, living creatures as well as scenery, and it is interesting to observe that his admiration of her as a divine thing was due to deep religious feeling. In his work on Proportion[8] he says:

'Certainly art is hidden in Nature, and he who is able to separate it by force from Nature, he possesses it. Never imagine that you can or will surpa.s.s Nature's achievements; human effort cannot compare with the ability which her Creator has given her. Therefore no man can ever make a picture which excels Nature's; and when, through much copying, he has seized her spirit, it cannot be called original work, it is rather something received and learnt, whose seeds grow and bear fruit of their own kind. Thereby the gathered treasure of the heart, and the new creature which takes shape and form there, comes to light in the artist's work.'

Elsewhere Durer says 'a good painter's mind is full of figures,' and he repeatedly remarks upon the superabundant beauty of all living things which human intelligence rarely succeeds in reproducing.

The first modern landscapes in which man was only accessory were produced in the Netherlands. Quiet, absorbed musing on the external world was characteristic of the nation; they studied the smallest and most trifling objects with care, and set a high value on minutiae.

The still-life work of their prime was only possible to such an easy-going, life-loving people; the delightful animal pictures of Paul Potter and Adrian van de Velde could only have been painted in the land of Reineke Fuchs. Carriere says about these masters of genre painting[9]: 'Through the emphasis laid upon single objects, they not only revealed the national characteristics, but penetrated far into the soul of Nature and mirrored their own feelings there, so producing works of art of a kind unknown to antiquity. That divine element, which the Greek saw in the human form, the Germanic race divined in all the visible forms of Nature, and so felt at one with them and able to reveal itself through them.

'Nature was studied more for her own sake than in her relation to man, and scenery became no longer mere background, but the actual object of the picture. Animals, and even men, whether bathing in the river, lying under trees, or hunting in the forest, were nothing but accessories; inorganic Nature was the essential element. The greatest Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible creva.s.ses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or tropical luxuriance, but to common objects of everyday life. But these they grasped with a precision and depth of feeling which gave charm to the most trifling--it was the life of the universe divined in its minutiae. In its treatment of landscape their genre painting displayed the very characteristics which had brought it into being.'[10]

The physical characters of the country favoured landscape painting too. No doubt the moist atmosphere and its silvery sheen, which add such freshness and brilliance to the colouring, influenced the development of the colour sense, as much as the absence of sharp contrasts in contour, the suggestive skies, and abundance of streams, woods, meadows, and dales.

But it was in devotional pictures that the Netherlanders first tried their wings; landscape and scenes from human life did not free themselves permanently from religion and take independent place for more than a century later. The fourteenth-century miniatures shew the first signs of the northern feeling for Nature in ill.u.s.trations of the seasons in the calendar pictures of religious ma.n.u.scripts.

Beginnings of landscape can be clearly seen in that threshold picture of Netherland art, the altar-piece at Ghent by the brothers Van Eyck, which was finished in 1432. It shews the most accurate observation: all the plants, gra.s.ses, flowers, rose bushes, vines, and palms, are correctly drawn; and the luxuriant valley in which the Christian soldiers and the knights are riding, with its rocky walls covered by undergrowth jutting stiffly forward, is very like the valley of the Maas.

One sees that the charm of landscape has dawned upon the painters.

Their skies are no longer golden, but blue, and flecked with cloudlets and alive with birds; wood and meadow s.h.i.+ne in sappy green; fantastic rocks lie about, and the plains are bounded by low hills.

They are drinking deep draughts from a newly-opened spring, and they can scarcely have enough of it. They would like to paint all the leaves and fruit on the trees, all the flowers on the gra.s.s, even all the dewdrops. The effect of distance too has been discovered, for there are blue hill-tops beyond the nearer green ones, and a foreground scene opens back on a distant plain (in the Ghent altar-piece, the scene with the pilgrims); but they still possess very few tones, and their overcrowded detail is almost all, from foreground to furthest distance, painted in the same luminous strong dark-green, as if in insatiable delight at the beauty of their own colour. The progress made by Jan van Eyck in landscape was immense.

To the old masters Nature had been an unintelligible chaos of detail, but beauty, through ecclesiastical tradition, an abstract attribute of the Holy Family and the Saints, and they had used their best powers of imagination in accordance with this view. Hence they placed the Madonna upon a background of one colour, generally gilded. But now the great discovery was made that Nature was a distinct ent.i.ty, a revelation and reflection of the divine in herself. And Jan van Eyck introduced a great variety of landscapes behind his Madonnas. One looks, for instance, through an open window to a wide stretch of country with fields and fortresses, and towns with streets full of people, all backed by mountains. And whether the scene itself, or only its background, lies in the open, the landscape is of the widest, enlivened by countless forms and adorned by splendid buildings.

Mola.n.u.s, the savant of Lowen, proclaimed Dierick Bouts, born like his predecessor Ouwater at Haarlem, to be the inventor of landscape painting (claruit inventor in describendo rare); but the van Eycks were certainly before him, though he increased the significance of landscape painting and shewed knowledge of aerial perspective and gradations of tone. Landscape was a distinct ent.i.ty to him, and could excite the mood that suited his subject, as, for instance, in the side picture of the Last Supper, where the foreground is drawn with such exactness that every plant and even the tiny creatures crawling on the gra.s.s can be identified.

The scenery of Roger van der Weyden of Brabant--river valleys surrounded by jagged rocks and mountains, isolated trees, and meadows bright with sappy green--is clearly the result of direct Nature study; it has a uniform transparent atmosphere, and a clear green s.h.i.+mmer lies over the foreground and gradually pa.s.ses into blue haze further back.

His pupil, Memling, shews the same fine gradations of tone. The composition of his richest picture, 'The Marriage of St Catherine,'

did not allow s.p.a.ce for an unbroken landscape, but the lines of wood and field converge to a vista in such a way that the general effect is one of unity.

Joachim de Patenir, who appeared in 1515, was called a landscape painter by his contemporaries, because he reduced his sacred figures to a modest size, enlarged his landscape, and handled it with extreme care. He was very far from grasping it as a whole, but his method was synthetical; his river valleys, with ma.s.ses of tree and bush and romantic rocks, fantastic and picturesque, with fortresses on the river banks, all shew this.

Kerry de Bles was like him, but less accurate; with all the rest of the sixteenth-century painters of Brabant and Flanders, he did not rise to the idea of landscape as a whole.

The most minute attention was given to the accurate painting of single objects, especially plants; the Flemings caring more for perfect truth to life, the Dutch for beauty. The Flemings generally sought to improve their landscape by embellis.h.i.+ng its lines, while the Dutch gave its spirit, but adhered simply and strictly to Nature.

The landscapes of Peter Brueghel the elder, with their dancing peasants surrounded by rocks, mills, groups of trees, are painful in their thoroughness; and Jan Brueghel carried imitation of Nature so far that his minutise required a magnifying-gla.s.s--it was veritable miniature work. He introduced fruit and flower painting as a new feature of art.

Rubens and Brueghel often painted on each other's canvas, Brueghel supplying landscape backgrounds for Rubens' pictures, and Rubens the figures for Brueghel's landscapes. Yet Rubens himself was the best landscapist of the Flemish school. He was more than that. For Brueghel and his followers, with all their patience and industry, their blue-green landscape with imaginary trees, boundless distance and endless detail, were very far from a true grasp of Nature. It was Rubens and his school who really made landscape a legitimate independent branch of art. They studied it in all its aspects, quiet and homely, wild and romantic, some taking one and some the other: Rubens himself, in his large way, grasping the whole without losing sight of its parts. They all lifted the veil from Nature and saw her as she was (Falke).

Brueghel put off the execution of a picture for which he had a commission from winter to spring, that he might study the flowers for it from Nature when they came out, and did not grudge a journey to Brussels now and then to paint flowers not to be had at Antwerp.

There is a characteristic letter which he sent to the Archbishop of Milan with a picture:

'I send your Reverence the picture with the flowers, which are all painted from Nature. I have painted in as many as possible. I believe so many rare and different flowers have never been painted before nor so industriously. It will give a beautiful effect in winter; some of the colours almost equal Nature. I have painted an ornament under the flowers with artistic medallions and curiosities from the sea. I leave it to your reverence to judge whether the flowers do not far exceed gold and jewels in colour.'

He also painted landscapes in which people were only accessory, sunny valleys with leaf.a.ge, golden cornfields, meadows with rows of dancing country folk or reapers in the wheat.

Rubens, though he felt the influence of southern light and suns.h.i.+ne as much as his fellows who had been in Italy, took his backgrounds from his native land, from parts round Antwerp, Mechlin, and Brussels. Foliage, water, and undulating ground were indispensable to him--were, to a certain extent, the actual bearers of the impression he wished to convey.

Brueghel always kept a childlike att.i.tude, delighting in details, and proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the point of deception. Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold subjective way. He opened the book of Nature, so to speak, not to spell out the words syllable by syllable, but to master her secret, to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he found there--in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape painter. The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic excitement and tension. Take, for instance, the evening scene with the rainbow in the Louvre, marvellous in its delicate gradations of atmospheric tone, and the equally marvellous thunderstorm in the Belvedere at Vienna, where a rain-cloud bursts under sulphur lightning, and a mountain stream, swollen to a torrent and lashed by the hurricane, carries all before it--trees, rocks, animals, and men.

In France, scarcely a flower had been seen in literature since the Troubadour days, not even in the cla.s.sical poetry of Corneille and Racine. There were idyllic features in Fenelon's _Telemachus_, and Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain.

Honore d'Urfe's famous _Astree_ was much translated; but both his shepherds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of courts and carpet knights was over the whole, with a certain trace of sadness.

The case was different with French painting. After the Netherlands, it was France, by her mediaeval ill.u.s.trated ma.n.u.scripts, who chiefly aided in opening the world's eyes to landscape. Both the Poussins penetrated below the surface of Nature. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of trees in the foreground, a hill with a cla.s.sic building in the middle, and a chain of mountains in the distance, and laid more stress on drawing than colour. There was greater life in the pictures of his brother-in-law, Caspar Doughet, also called Poussin; his gra.s.s is more succulent, his winds sigh in the trees, his storm bends the boughs and scatters the clouds.

It was Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) who brought the ideal style to its perfection. He inspired the very elements with mind and feeling; his valleys, woods, and seas were just a veil through which divinity was visible. All that was ugly, painful, and confused was purified and transfigured in his hands. There is no sadness or dejection in his pictures, but a spirit of serene beauty, free from ostentation, far-fetched contrast, or artificial glitter. Light breezes blow in his splendid trees, golden light quivers through them, drawing the eye to a bright misty horizon; we say with Uhland, 'The sky is solemn, as if it would say "this is the day of the Lord."'

Artistic feeling for Nature became a wors.h.i.+p with Claude Lorraine.

The Netherlands recorded all Nature's phases in n.o.ble emulation with ever-increasing delight.

The poetry of air, cloudland, light, the cool freshness of morning, the hazy sultriness of noon, the warm light of evening, it all lives and moves in Cuyp's pictures and Wynant's, while Aart van der Meer painted moonlight and winter snow, and Jan van Goyen the melancholy of mist shot by sunlight. He, too--Jan van Goyen--was very clever in producing effect with very small means, with a few trees reflected in water, or a sand-heap--the art in which Ruysdael excelled all others.

The whole poetry of Nature--that secret magic which lies like a spell over quiet wood, murmuring sea, still pool, and lonely pasture--took form and colour under his hands; so little sufficed to enchant, to rouse thought and feeling, and lead them whither he would. Northern seriousness and sadness brood over most of his work; the dark trees are overhung by heavy clouds and rain, mist and dusky shadows move among his ruins. He had painted, says Carriere, the peace of woodland solitude long before Tieck found the word for it.

Beechwoods reflected in a stream, misty cloud ma.s.ses lighted by the rising sun; he moves us with such things as with a morning hymn, and his picture of a swollen torrent forcing its way between graves which catch the last rays of the sun, while a cloud of rain shrouds the ruins of a church in the background, is an elegy which has taken shape and colour.

Ruysdael marks the culminating point of this period of development, which had led from mere backgrounds and single traits of Nature--even a flower stem or a blade of gra.s.s, up to elaborate compositions imbued by a single motive, a single idea.

To conjure up with slight material a complete little world of its own, and waken responsive feeling, is not this the secret of the charm in the pictures of his school--in the wooded hill or peasant's courtyard by Hobbema, the Norwegian mountain scene of Albert van Everdingen, the dusky fig-trees, rugged crags, and foaming cataract, or the half-sullen, half-smiling sea-pieces of Bakhuysen and Van der Velde?

All these great Netherlander far outstripped the poetry of their time; it was a hundred years later before mountain and sea found their painter in words, and a complete landscape picture was not born in German poetry until the end of the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER VIII

HUMANISM, ROCOCO, AND PIGTAIL

Many decades pa.s.sed before German feeling for Nature reached the heights attained by the Italian Renaissance and the Netherland landscapists. In the Middle Ages, Germany was engrossed with ecclesiastical dogma--man's relation, not only to G.o.d, but to the one saving Church--and had little interest for Science and Art; and the great achievement of the fifteenth century, the Reformation, called for word and deed to reckon with a thousand years of old traditions and the slavery of intellectual despotism. The new time was born amid bitter throes. The questions at issue--religious and ecclesiastical questions concerned with the liberty of the Christian--were of the most absorbing kind, and though Germany produced minds of individual stamp such as she had never known before, characters of original and marked physiognomy, it was no time for the quiet contemplation of Nature. Mental life was stimulated by the new current of ideas and new delight in life awakened: yet there is scarcely a trace of the intense feeling for Nature which we have seen in Petrarch and aeneas Sylvius.

Largely as it was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, it is certainly a mistake to reckon the Humanist movement in Germany, as Geiger does,[1] as a 'merely imported culture, entirely lacking independence.' The germ of this great movement towards mental freedom was contained in the general trend of the time, which was striving to free itself from the fetters of the Middle Ages in customs and education as well as dogma. It was chiefly a polemical movement, a fight between contentious savants. The writings of the Humanists at this naively sensuous period were full of the joy of life and love of pleasure; but scarcely any simple feeling for Nature can be found in them, and there was neither poet nor poem fit to be compared with Petrarch and his sonnets.

Natural philosophy, too, was proscribed by scholastic wisdom; the real Aristotle was only gradually sh.e.l.led out from under mediaeval accretions. The natural philosopher, Conrad Summenhart[2] (1450-1501) was quite unable to disbelieve the foolish legend, that the appearance of a comet foretold four certain events--heat, wind, war, and the death of princes. At the same time, not being superst.i.tious, he held aloof from the crazy science of astrology and all the fraud connected with it. Indeed, as an observer of Nature, and still more as a follower and furtherer of the scholastic Aristotelian natural philosophy, he shewed a leaning towards the theory of development, for, according to him, the more highly organized structures proceed from those of lower organization, and these again form the inorganic under the influence of meteors and stars. The poet laureate Conrad Celtes (_b_. 1459), a singer of love and composer of four books about it, was a true poet. His incessant wandering, for he was always moving from place to place, was due in part to love of Nature and of novelty, but still more to a desire to spread his own fame. He lacked the naivete and openness to impressions of the true child of Nature; his songs in praise of spring, etc., scatter a colourless general praise, which is evidently the result of arduous thought rather than of direct impressions from without; and his many references to ancient deities shew that he borrowed more than his phrases.

Though geography was then closely bound up with the writing of history, as represented by Beatus Rhena.n.u.s (1485-1547) and Johann Aventinus, and patriotism and the accounts of new lands led men to wish to describe the beauties and advantages of their own, the imposing discoveries across the seas did not make so forcible an impression upon the German humanist as upon savants elsewhere, especially in Italy and Spain. A mystico-theosophical feeling for Nature, or rather a magical knowledge of her, flourished in Germany at this time among the learned, both among Protestants and those who were partially true to Catholicism. One of the strangest exponents of such ideas was Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Cologne[3] (1535).

His system of the world abounded in such fantastic caprices as these: everything depends on harmony and sympathy; when one of Nature's strings is struck, the others sound with it: the a.n.a.logical correspondences are at the same time magical: symbolic relations between natural objects are sympathetic also: a true love-bond exists between the elm and vine: the sun bestows life on man; the moon, growth; Mercury, imagination; Venus, love, etc. G.o.d is reflected in the macrocosm, gives light in all directions through all creatures, is adumbrated in man microcosmically, and so forth.

Among others, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim (1541), ranked Nature and the Bible, like Agrippa, as the best books about G.o.d and the only ones without falsehood.

'One must study the elements, follow Nature from land to land, since each single country is only one leaf in the book of creation. The eyes that find pleasure in this true experience are the true professors, and more reliable than all learned writings.'

He held man to be less G.o.d's very image than a microcosmic copy of Nature--the quintessence of the whole world. Other enthusiasts made similar statements. Sebastian Frank of Donauworth (1543) looked upon the whole world as an open book and living Bible, in which to study the power and art of G.o.d and learn His will: everything was His image, all creatures are 'a reflection, imprint, and expression of G.o.d, through knowledge of which man may come to know the true Mover and Cause of all things.'

He shewed warm feeling for Nature in many similes and descriptions[4]-- in fact, much of his pithy drastic writing sounds pantheistic. But he was very far from the standpoint of the great Italian philosophers, Giordano Bruno and Campanella. Bruno, a poet as well as thinker, distinguished Nature in her self-development--matter, soul, and mind--as being stages and phases of the One.