XIV
NATURE IN LITERATURE
SEVERAL different kinds or phases of this thing we call Nature have at different times appeared in literature. For instance, there is the personified or deified Nature of the towering Greek bards, an expression of Nature born of wonder, fear, childish ignorance, and the tyranny of personality; the Greek was so alive himself that he made everything else alive, and so manly and human that he could see only these qualities in Nature. Or the Greek idyllic poets, whose Nature is simple and fresh like spring water, or the open air, or the taste of milk or fruit or bread. The same thing is perhaps true in a measure of Virgil’s Nature. In a later class of writers and artists that arose in Italy, Nature is steeped in the faith and dogmas of the Christian Church; it is a kind of theological Nature.
In English literature there is the artificial Nature of Pope and his class,—a kind of classic liturgy repeated from the books, and as dead and hollow as fossil shells. Earlier than that, the quaint and affected Nature of the Elizabethan poets; later the melodramatic and wild-eyed Nature of the Byronic muse; and lastly, the transmuted and spiritualizedNature of Wordsworth, which has given the prevailing tone and cast to most modern poetry. Thus, from a goddess Nature has changed to a rustic nymph, a cloistered nun, a heroine of romance, besides other characters not so definite, till she has at last become a priestess of the soul. What will be the next phase is perhaps already indicated in the poems of Walt Whitman, in which Nature is regarded mainly in the light of science, through the immense vistas opened up by astronomy and geology. This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs, and has sought to adjust his imagination to the modern problems and conditions, always taking care, however, to preserve an outlook into the highest regions.
I was much struck with a passage in Whitman’s last volume, “Two Rivulets,” in which he says that he has not been afraid of the charge of obscurity in his poems, “because human thought, poetry or melody, must have dim escapes and outlets,—must possess a certain fluid, aërial character, akin to space itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination, but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when addressed to the soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints.” I know no ampler justification of a certain elusive quality there is in the highest poetry—something that refuses to be tabulated or explained, and that is a stumbling-block to many readers—than is contained in these sentences.