The Development Of The Feeling For Nature In The Middle Ages And Modern Times Part 30

In whom does not Love's spirit plant his flame?

One sees the oil of love burn in the starry lamps, That pleasant light can nothing be but love, For which the dew from Phoebus' veil doth fall.

Heaven loves the beauteous globe of earth, And gazes down on her by night with thousand eyes; While earth to please the heaven Doth clover, lilies, tulips in her green hair twine, The elm and vine stock intertwine, The ivy circles round the almond trees, And weeps salt tears when they are forced apart.

And where the flowers burn with glow of Love, It is the rose that shews the brightest flame, For is the rose not of all flowers the queen, The wondrous beauty child of sun and earth?

Artificiality and bombast reached its highest pitch in these poets, and feeling for Nature was entirely absent.

CHAPTER IX

SYMPTOMS OF A RETURN TO NATURE

It is refres.h.i.+ng 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 fas.h.i.+on 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, gra.s.s 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--gra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 Harsdorfer'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 gra.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 pa.s.sing a delicious smell According to the eglentere full well....

On the sote gra.s.s 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: