How like a deer, stricken by many princes,Dost thou lie here! (Julius Cæsar.)
How like a deer, stricken by many princes,
Dost thou lie here! (Julius Cæsar.)
Richard III. is called:
The wretched bloody and usurping boarThat spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines,Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his troughIn your embowell'd bosoms; this foul swineLies now even in the centre of this isle.The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind.(Richard III.)
The wretched bloody and usurping boar
That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines,
Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his trough
In your embowell'd bosoms; this foul swine
Lies now even in the centre of this isle.
The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind.
(Richard III.)
The smallest objects are noted:
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;They kill us for their sport. (King Lear.)Marcus: Alas! my lord, I have but kill'd a fly.Titus: But how if that fly had a father and a mother?How would he hang his slender gilded wings,And buzz lamenting doings in the air!Poor harmless fly!That, with his pretty buzzing melody,Came here to make us merry! and thouHast kill'd him!(Titus Andronicus.)
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;They kill us for their sport. (King Lear.)
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport. (King Lear.)
Marcus: Alas! my lord, I have but kill'd a fly.
Marcus: Alas! my lord, I have but kill'd a fly.
Titus: But how if that fly had a father and a mother?How would he hang his slender gilded wings,And buzz lamenting doings in the air!Poor harmless fly!That, with his pretty buzzing melody,Came here to make us merry! and thouHast kill'd him!(Titus Andronicus.)
Titus: But how if that fly had a father and a mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
And buzz lamenting doings in the air!
Poor harmless fly!
That, with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry! and thou
Hast kill'd him!
(Titus Andronicus.)
Shakespeare has abundance of this idyllic miniature painting, for which all the literature of the day shewed a marked taste.
Tamora says:
My lovely Aaron, wherefore look'st thou sad,When everything doth make a gleeful boast?The birds chant melody on every bush,The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun,The green leaves quiver with the cooling windAnd make a chequer'd shadow on the ground.(Titus Andronicus.)
My lovely Aaron, wherefore look'st thou sad,
When everything doth make a gleeful boast?
The birds chant melody on every bush,
The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun,
The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind
And make a chequer'd shadow on the ground.
(Titus Andronicus.)
And Valentine inTwo Gentlemen of Verona:
This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,I better brook than flourishing peopled towns;Here can I sit alone, unseen of any,And to the nightingale's complaining notesTune my distresses and record my woes.
This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,
I better brook than flourishing peopled towns;
Here can I sit alone, unseen of any,
And to the nightingale's complaining notes
Tune my distresses and record my woes.
Like this, in elegiac sentimentality, is Romeo:
Before the worshipp'd sunPeer'd forth the golden window of the east....Many a morning hath he there been seenWith tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew.
Before the worshipp'd sun
Peer'd forth the golden window of the east....
Many a morning hath he there been seen
With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew.
Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, andAs You Like Itare particularly rich in idyllic traits; the artificiality of court life is contrasted with life in the open; there are songs, too, in praise of woodland joys:
Under the greenwood treeWho loves to lie with me,And tune his merry noteUnto the sweet bird's throat,Come hither, come hither, come hither!Here shall he seeNo enemyBut winter and rough weather.(As You Like It.)Blow, blow, thou winter wind,Thou art not so unkindAs man's ingratitude.Thy tooth is not so keen,Because thou art not seenAltho' thy breath be rude.Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho unto the green holly!Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly
Under the greenwood treeWho loves to lie with me,And tune his merry noteUnto the sweet bird's throat,Come hither, come hither, come hither!Here shall he seeNo enemyBut winter and rough weather.(As You Like It.)
Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither!
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather.
(As You Like It.)
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,Thou art not so unkindAs man's ingratitude.Thy tooth is not so keen,Because thou art not seenAltho' thy breath be rude.Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho unto the green holly!Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude.
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen
Altho' thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho unto the green holly!
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly![4]
(As You Like It.)
Turning again to comparisons, we find birds used abundantly:
More pity that the eagle should be mewedWhile kites and buzzards prey at liberty.(Richard III.)True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings.(Richard III.)As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,Or russet-pated choughs, many in sortRising and cawing at the gun's reportSever themselves and madly sweep the sky,So at his sight away his fellows fly.(Midsummer Night's Dream.)
More pity that the eagle should be mewedWhile kites and buzzards prey at liberty.(Richard III.)
More pity that the eagle should be mewed
While kites and buzzards prey at liberty.
(Richard III.)
True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings.(Richard III.)
True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings.
(Richard III.)
As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,Or russet-pated choughs, many in sortRising and cawing at the gun's reportSever themselves and madly sweep the sky,So at his sight away his fellows fly.(Midsummer Night's Dream.)
As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,
Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort
Rising and cawing at the gun's report
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky,
So at his sight away his fellows fly.
(Midsummer Night's Dream.)
And plant life is touched with special tenderness:
All the bystanders had wet their cheeksLike trees bedashed with rain.(Richard III.)Why grow the branches when the root is gone?Why wither not the leaves that want their sap?(Richard III.)Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other.(Richard III.)Ah! my tender babes!My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets.(Richard III.)
All the bystanders had wet their cheeksLike trees bedashed with rain.(Richard III.)
All the bystanders had wet their cheeks
Like trees bedashed with rain.
(Richard III.)
Why grow the branches when the root is gone?Why wither not the leaves that want their sap?(Richard III.)
Why grow the branches when the root is gone?
Why wither not the leaves that want their sap?
(Richard III.)
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other.(Richard III.)
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other.
(Richard III.)
Ah! my tender babes!My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets.(Richard III.)
Ah! my tender babes!
My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets.
(Richard III.)
Romeo is
To himself so secret and so close ...As is the bud bit with an envious worm,Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the airOr dedicate his beauty to the sun.
To himself so secret and so close ...
As is the bud bit with an envious worm,
Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.
It is astonishing to see how Shakespeare noted the smallest and most fragile things, and found the most poetic expression for them without any sacrifice of truth to Nature.
Juliet is 'the sweetest flower of all the field.' Laertes says to Ophelia:
For Hamlet and the trifling of his favourHold it a fashion and a toy in blood,A violet in the youth of primy nature,Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting,The perfume and suppliance of a moment.The canker galls the infants of the springToo oft before their buttons be disclosed;And in the morn and liquid dew of youthContagious blastments are most imminent.(Hamlet.)
For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a moment.
The canker galls the infants of the spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed;
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
(Hamlet.)
Hamlet soliloquizes:
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitableSeems to me all the uses of this world.Fie on't, O fie! 'tis an unweeded gardenThat grows to seed; things rank and gross in naturePossess it merely.
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seems to me all the uses of this world.
Fie on't, O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you--this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you--this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
But the great advance which he made is seen far more in the sympathetic way in which he drew Nature into the action of the play.
He established perfect harmony between human fate and the natural phenomena around it.
There are moonlight nights for Romeo and Juliet'sbrief dream, when all Nature, moon, stars, garden, seemed steeped in love together.
He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet
In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.)
In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.)
What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature inMacbeth! And inLear, as Jacobi says:
What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and there a lightning flash from God--a flash of Providence, rending the clouds.
What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and there a lightning flash from God--a flash of Providence, rending the clouds.
One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry, especially in Shakespeare.
With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and illuminated all and everything.
Hense says[5];
The personification is plastic when Æschylus calls the heights the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks of hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did not, and could not, exist in antiquity.
The personification is plastic when Æschylus calls the heights the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks of hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did not, and could not, exist in antiquity.
The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his feelings, the more he can see in Nature.
Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors, new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination.
The motive of amorous passion, for instance, was a very divining-rod in his hands, revealing the most delicate relations between Nature and the soul. Ibykos had pointed the contrast between the gay spring time and his own unhappy heart in which Eros raged like 'the Thracian blast.' Theocritus had painted the pretty shepherdess drawing all Nature under the spell of her charms; Akontios (Kallimachos) had declared that if trees felt the pangs and longings of love, they would lose their leaves; all such ideas, modern in their way, had been expressed in antiquity.
This is Shakespeare's treatment of them:
How like a winter hath my absence beenFrom thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!What old December's bareness everywhere!And yet this time removed was summer time,The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ...For summer and his pleasures wait on thee.And thou away the very birds are mute,Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheerThat leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near,(Sonnet 97.)From you have I been absent in the spring,When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trimHath put a spirit of youth in everything,That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smellOf different flowers in odour and in hueCould make me any summer's story tell....Yet seem'd it winter still....(Sonnet 98.)
How like a winter hath my absence beenFrom thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!What old December's bareness everywhere!And yet this time removed was summer time,The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ...For summer and his pleasures wait on thee.And thou away the very birds are mute,Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheerThat leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near,(Sonnet 97.)
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ...
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee.
And thou away the very birds are mute,
Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near,
(Sonnet 97.)
From you have I been absent in the spring,When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trimHath put a spirit of youth in everything,That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smellOf different flowers in odour and in hueCould make me any summer's story tell....Yet seem'd it winter still....(Sonnet 98.)
From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell....
Yet seem'd it winter still....
(Sonnet 98.)
Or compare again the cypresses in Theocritus sole witnesses of secret love; or Walther's
One little birdie who never will tell,
One little birdie who never will tell,
with
These blue-veined violets whereon we leanNever can blab, nor know not what we mean.(Venus and Adonis.)
These blue-veined violets whereon we lean
Never can blab, nor know not what we mean.
(Venus and Adonis.)
Comparisons of ladies' lips to roses, and hands to lilies, are common with the old poets. How much more modern is:
The forward violet thus did I chide;Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smellsIf not from my love's breath?...The lily I condemned for thy hand,And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair;The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,One blushing shame, another white despair....More flowers I noted, yet I none could seeBut sweet or colour it had stolen from thee.(Sonnet 99.)
The forward violet thus did I chide;
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells
If not from my love's breath?...
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair;
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair....
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee.
(Sonnet 99.)
And how fine the personification in Sonnet 33:
Full many a glorious morning have I seenFlatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,Kissing with golden face the meadows green,Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;Anon permit the basest clouds to rideWith ugly rack on his celestial face,And from the forlorn world his visage hide,Stealing unseen to West with this disgrace:Even so my sun one early morn did shineWith all triumphant splendour on my brow;But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to West with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.
This is night inVenus and Adonis:
Look! the world's comforter with weary gaitHis day's hot task hath ended in the West;The owl, night's herald, shrieks 'tis very late;The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nestAnd coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light,Do summon us to part and bid good-night.
Look! the world's comforter with weary gait
His day's hot task hath ended in the West;
The owl, night's herald, shrieks 'tis very late;
The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest
And coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light,
Do summon us to part and bid good-night.
And this morning, inRomeo and Juliet:
The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night,Checkering the Eastern clouds with streaks of light.And flecked darkness like a drunkard reelsFrom forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels;Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,The day to cheer, and night's dank dew to dry ...
The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night,
Checkering the Eastern clouds with streaks of light.
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels;
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer, and night's dank dew to dry ...
Such wealth and brilliance of personification was not found again until Goethe, Byron, and Shelley.
He is unusually rich in descriptive phrases:
The weary sun hath made a golden set,And by the bright track of his golden carGives token of a goodly day to-morrow.The worshipp'd SunPeered forth the golden window of the East.The all-cheering sunShould in the farthest East begin to drawThe shady curtains from Aurora's bed.
The weary sun hath made a golden set,And by the bright track of his golden carGives token of a goodly day to-morrow.
The weary sun hath made a golden set,
And by the bright track of his golden car
Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow.
The worshipp'd SunPeered forth the golden window of the East.
The worshipp'd Sun
Peered forth the golden window of the East.
The all-cheering sunShould in the farthest East begin to drawThe shady curtains from Aurora's bed.
The all-cheering sun
Should in the farthest East begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora's bed.
The moon:
Like to a silver bowNew bent in heaven.
Like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven.
Titania says:
I will wind thee in my arms....So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckleGently entwist; the female ivy soEnrings the barky fingers of the elm.O how I love thee!That same dew, which sometime on the budsWas wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,Stood now within the pretty flow'rets' eyesLike tears.(Midsummer Night's Dream.)DaffodilsThat come before the swallow dares, and takeThe winds of March with beauty.(Winter's Tale.)Pale primrosesThat die unmarried, ere they can beholdBright Phoebus in his strength.(Winter's Tale.)
I will wind thee in my arms....So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckleGently entwist; the female ivy soEnrings the barky fingers of the elm.O how I love thee!
I will wind thee in my arms....
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
O how I love thee!
That same dew, which sometime on the budsWas wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,Stood now within the pretty flow'rets' eyesLike tears.(Midsummer Night's Dream.)
That same dew, which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flow'rets' eyes
Like tears.
(Midsummer Night's Dream.)
DaffodilsThat come before the swallow dares, and takeThe winds of March with beauty.(Winter's Tale.)
Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.
(Winter's Tale.)
Pale primrosesThat die unmarried, ere they can beholdBright Phoebus in his strength.(Winter's Tale.)
Pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength.
(Winter's Tale.)
Goethe calls winds and waves lovers. InTroilus and Cressidawe have:
The sea being smooth,How many shallow bauble boats dare sailUpon her patient breast, making their wayWith those of nobler bulk!But let the ruffian Boreas once enrageThe gentle Thetis, and anon beholdThe strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut,Bounding between two moist elementsLike Perseus' horse.
The sea being smooth,
How many shallow bauble boats dare sail
Upon her patient breast, making their way
With those of nobler bulk!
But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage
The gentle Thetis, and anon behold
The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut,
Bounding between two moist elements
Like Perseus' horse.
And further on in the same scene:
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!Commotion in the winds!... the bounded watersShould lift their bosoms higher than the shores.
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds!
... the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores.
The personification of the river inHenry IV.is half mythical:
When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bankIn single opposition, hand to hand,He did confound the best part of an hourIn changing hardiment with great Glendower;Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink,Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood;Who, then affrighted with their bloody looks,Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.
When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank
In single opposition, hand to hand,
He did confound the best part of an hour
In changing hardiment with great Glendower;
Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink,
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood;
Who, then affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,
Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.
Striking instances of personification fromAntony and Cleopatraare:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throneBurn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold;Purple the sails, and so perfumed, thatThe winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and madeThe water which they beat to follow fasterAs amorous of their strokes.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne
Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster
As amorous of their strokes.
And Antony, enthron'd in the market-place, sat alone
Whistling to the air, which but for vacancyHad gone to gaze on Cleopatra tooAnd made a gap in nature.
Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too
And made a gap in nature.
Instead of accumulating further instances of these very modern and individual (and sometimes far-fetched) personifications, it is of more interest to see how Shakespeare used Nature, not only as background and colouring, but to act a part of her own in the play, so producing the grandest of all personifications.
At the beginning of Act III. inKing Lear, Kent asks:
Who's there beside foul weather?Gentleman: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.Kent: Where's the King?Gent: Contending with the fretful elements.Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main,That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rageCatch in their fury and make nothing of;Strives in his little world of men to outscornThe to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.
Who's there beside foul weather?
Who's there beside foul weather?
Gentleman: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.
Gentleman: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.
Kent: Where's the King?
Kent: Where's the King?
Gent: Contending with the fretful elements.Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main,That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rageCatch in their fury and make nothing of;Strives in his little world of men to outscornThe to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.
Gent: Contending with the fretful elements.
Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,
Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main,
That things might change or cease; tears his white hair,
Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage
Catch in their fury and make nothing of;
Strives in his little world of men to outscorn
The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.
In the stormy night on the wild heath the poor old man hears the echo of his own feelings in the elements; his daughters' ingratitude, hardness, and cruelty produce a moral disturbance like the disturbance in Nature; he breaks out:
Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow!You cataracts and hurricanes, spoutTill you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks!You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts,Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at onceThat make ungrateful man....Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain!Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters,I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness;I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,You owe me no subscription; then, let fallYour horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man:But yet I call you servile ministers,That will with two pernicious daughters joinYour high engender'd battles 'gainst a headSo old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!
Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ungrateful man....
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters,
I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription; then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!
How closely here animate and inanimate Nature are woven together, the reasoning with the unreasoning. The poet makes the storm, rain, thunder, and lightning live, and at the same time endues his human figures with a strength of feeling and passion which gives them kinship to the elements. InOthello, too, thereisuproar in Nature:
Do but stand upon the foaming shore,The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds....I never did like molestation viewOn the enchafed flood.
Do but stand upon the foaming shore,
The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds....
I never did like molestation view
On the enchafed flood.
but even the unruly elements spare Desdemona:
Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,The gather'd rocks and congregated sands.Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel--As having sense of beauty, do omitTheir mortal natures, letting go safely byThe divine Desdemona.
Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,
The gather'd rocks and congregated sands.
Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel--
As having sense of beauty, do omit
Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
The divine Desdemona.
Cassio lays stress upon 'the great contention of the sea and skies'; but when Othello meets Desdemona, he cries:
O my soul's joy!If after every tempest come such calms,May the winds blow till they have wakened death!And let the labouring bark climb hills of seasOlympus-high, and duck again as lowAs hell's from heaven. If it were now to die,'Twere now to be most happy.
O my soul's joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have wakened death!
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus-high, and duck again as low
As hell's from heaven. If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy.
Iago calls the elements to witness his truthfulness:
Witness, you ever-burning lights above,You elements that clip us round about,Witness, that here Iago doth give upThe execution of his wit, hands, heart,To wrong'd Othello's service.
Witness, you ever-burning lights above,
You elements that clip us round about,
Witness, that here Iago doth give up
The execution of his wit, hands, heart,
To wrong'd Othello's service.
Nature is disgusted at Othello's jealousy:
Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earthAnd will not hear it.
Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks;
The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,
Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth
And will not hear it.
In terrible mental confusion he cries:
O insupportable, O heavy hour!Methinks it should be now a huge eclipseOf sun and moon, and that the affrighted globeShould yawn at alteration.
O insupportable, O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.
Unhappy Desdemona sings:
The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,Sing all a green willow;Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,Sing willow, willow, willow;The fresh streams ran by her and murmur'd her moans,Sing willow, willow, willow.
The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow;
The fresh streams ran by her and murmur'd her moans,
Sing willow, willow, willow.
A song inCymbelinecontains a beautiful personification of flowers:
Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,And Phoebus 'gins arise,His steeds to water at those springsOn chalic'd flowers that lies;And winking Mary-buds beginTo ope their golden eyes;With everything that pretty is,My lady sweet, arise;Arise! Arise!
Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chalic'd flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes;
With everything that pretty is,
My lady sweet, arise;
Arise! Arise!
The clearest expression of sympathy for Nature is inMacbeth.
Repeatedly we meet the idea that Nature shudders before the crime, and gives signs of coming disaster.
Macbeth himself says:
Stars, hide your fires!Let not light see my black and deep desires;The eye wink at the hand; yet let that beWhich the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires;
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
and Lady Macbeth:
... The raven himself is hoarseThat croaks the fatal entrance of DuncanUnder my battlements.... Come, thick night,And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the darkTo cry 'Hold! hold!'...
... The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.... Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry 'Hold! hold!'...
The peaceful castle to which Duncan comes all unsuspectingly, is in most striking contrast to the fateful tone which pervades the tragedy. Duncan says:
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the airNimbly and sweetly recommends itselfUnto our gentle senses.
This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.
and Banquo:
This guest of summer,The temple-haunting martlet, does approveBy his loved masonry, that the heaven's breathSmells wooingly here; no jetty, frieze,Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this birdHath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;Where they most breed and haunt I have observ'dThe air is delicate.
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve
By his loved masonry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here; no jetty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle;
Where they most breed and haunt I have observ'd
The air is delicate.
Perhaps the familiar swallow has never been treated with more discrimination; and at this point of the tale of horror it has the effect of a ray of sunshine in a sky dark with storm clouds.
In Act II. Macbeth describes his own horror and Nature's:
Now o'er the one half worldNature seems dead.... Thou sure and firm-set earth,Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fearThy very stones prate of my whereabouts.
Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead.... Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts.
Lady Macbeth says:
It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellmanWhich gives the stern'st good-night.
It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman
Which gives the stern'st good-night.
Lenox describes this night:
The night has been unruly: where we layOur chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of deathAnd prophesying, with accents terrible,Of dire combustion and confus'd events,New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure birdClamour'd the live-long night: some say, the earthWas feverish and did shake.
The night has been unruly: where we lay
Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death
And prophesying, with accents terrible,
Of dire combustion and confus'd events,
New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird
Clamour'd the live-long night: some say, the earth
Was feverish and did shake.
and later on, an old man says:
Three score and ten I can remember well;Within the volume of which time I have seenHours dreadful and things strange; but this sore nightHath trifled former knowings.
Three score and ten I can remember well;
Within the volume of which time I have seen
Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night
Hath trifled former knowings.
Rosse answers him:
Ah, good father,Thou see'st the heavens, as troubled with man's act,Threaten his bloody stage; by the clock 'tis day,And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.Is't night's predominance or the day's shameThat darkness does the-face of earth entombWhen living light should kiss it?
Ah, good father,
Thou see'st the heavens, as troubled with man's act,
Threaten his bloody stage; by the clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.
Is't night's predominance or the day's shame
That darkness does the-face of earth entomb
When living light should kiss it?
The whole play is a thrilling expression of the sympathy for Nature which attributes its own feelings to her--a human shudder in presence of the wicked--a human horror of crime, most thrilling of all in Macbeth's words:
Come, seeling night,Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,And with thy bloody and invisible handCancel and tear to pieces that great bondWhich keeps me pale.
Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale.
InHamlet, too, Nature is shocked at man's mis-deeds:
... Such an act (the queen's)That blurs the grace and blush of modesty... Heaven's face doth glow,Yea, this solidity and compound massWith tristful visage, as against the doom,Is thought-sick at the act.
... Such an act (the queen's)
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty
... Heaven's face doth glow,
Yea, this solidity and compound mass
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.
But there are other personifications in this most wonderful of all tragedies, such as the magnificent one:
But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad.Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.
But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad.
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.
The first player declaims:
But, as we often see, against some stormA silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,The bold winds speechless, and the orb belowAs hush as death....
But, as we often see, against some storm
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless, and the orb below
As hush as death....
Ophelia dies:
When down her weedy trophies and herselfFell in the weeping brook.
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook.
and Laertes commands:
Lay her i' the earth,And from her fair and unpolluted fleshMay violets spring.
Lay her i' the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring.
Thus Shakespeare's great imagination gave life and soul to every detail of Nature, and he obtained the right background for his dramas, not only through choice of scenery, but by making Nature a sharer of human impulse, happy with the happy, shuddering in the presence of wickedness.
He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so closely allied to mythology. And this holds good not only in dealing with the great elementary forces--storms, thunder, lightning, etc.--but with flowers, streams, the glow of sunlight. Always and everywhere the grasp of Nature was intenser, more individual, and subjective, than any we have met hitherto.
Idyllic feeling for Nature became sympathetic in his hands.
The indispensable condition of landscape-painting--painting, that is, which raises the representation of Nature to the level of its main subject and paints her entirely for her own sake--is the power to compose separate studies into a whole and imbue that with an artistic idea. It was therefore impossible among people like the Hebrews,[1]whose eyes were always fixed on distance and only noted what lay between in a cursory way, and among those who considered detail without relation to a whole, as we have seen in mediæval poetry until the Renaissance. But just as study of the laws of aerial and linear perspective demands a trained and keen eye, and therefore implies interest in Nature, so the artistic idea, the soul of the picture, depends directly upon the degree of the artist's feeling for her Literature and painting are equal witnesses to the feeling for Nature, and so long as scenery was only background in poetry, it had no greater importance in painting. Landscape painting could only arise in the period which produced complete pictures of scenery in poetry--the sentimental idyllic period.
We have seen how in the Italian Renaissance the fetters of dogma, tradition, and mediæval custom were removed, and servility and visionariness gave place to healthy individuality and realism; howman and the world were discovered anew; and further, how among the other Romanic nations a lively feeling for Nature grew up, partly idyllic, partly mystic; and finally, how this feeling found dramatic expression in Shakespeare.
Natural philosophy also, in the course of its search for truth, as it threw off both one-sided Christian ideas and ancient traditions, came gradually to feel an interest in Nature; not only her laws, but her beauty, became an object of enthusiastic study. By a very long process of development the Hellenic feeling for Nature was reached again in the Renaissance; but it always remained, despite its sentimental and pantheistic elements, sensual, superficial, and naive, in comparison with Christian feeling, which a warmer heart and a mind trained in scholastic wisdom had rendered more profound and abstract. Hence Nature was sometimes an object of attention in detail, sometimes in mass.[2]
As we come to the first landscape painters and their birthplace in the Netherlands, we see how steady and orderly is the development of the human mind, and how factors that seem isolated are really links in one chain.
In the Middle Ages, landscape was only background with more or less fitness to the subject. By the fifteenth century it was richer in detail, as we see in Pisanello and the Florentines Gozzoli and Mantegna. The poetry of earth had been discovered; the gold grounds gave way to field, wood, hill, and dale, and the blue behind the heads became a dome of sky. In the sixteenth century, Giorgione shewed the value of effects of light, and Correggio's backgrounds were in harmony with his tender, cheerful scenes. Titian loved to paint autumn; the sunny days of October with blue grapes, golden oranges, and melons; and evening with deep harmonies of colour over the sleeping earth. He was a great pioneer in the realm oflandscape. With Michael Angelo not a blade of grass grew; his problem was man alone. Raphael's backgrounds, on the other hand, are life-like in detail: his little birds could fly out of the picture, the stems of his plants seem to curve and bend towards us, and we look deep into the flower they hold out.[3]
In the German Renaissance too, the great masters limited themselves to charming framework and ingenious arabesques for their Madonnas and Holy Families. But, as Lübke says,[4]one soon sees that Dürer depended on architecture for borders and backgrounds far less than Holbein; he preferred landscape.
'The charm of this background is so great, the inwardness of German feeling for Nature so strongly expressed in it, that it has a special value of its own, and the master through it has become the father of landscape painting.'[5]
This must be taken with a grain of salt; but, at all events, it is true that Dürer combined 'keen and devoted study of Nature (in the widest sense of the word) with a penetration which aimed at tracing her facts up to their source.'[6]It is interesting to see how these qualities overcame his theoretical views on Nature and art.[7]Dürer's deep respect for Nature proved him a child of the new era. Melanchthon relates that he often regretted that he had been too much attracted in his younger days by variety and the fantastic, and had only understood Nature's simple truth and beauty later in life.
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, hepossesses it. Never imagine that you can or will surpass 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 Dürer 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 minutiæ.
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. Carrière 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 bathingin 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 crevasses, 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 minutiæ. 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 illustrations of the seasons in the calendar pictures of religious manuscripts. 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, grasses, 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 shine 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 grass, 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 entity, 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.
Molanus, the savant of Löwen, 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 entity 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 grass 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 shimmer lies over the foreground and gradually passes 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 space 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 masses 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 embellishing 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-glass--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 leafage, golden cornfields, meadows with rows of dancing country folk or reapers in the wheat.
Rubens, though he felt the influence of southern light and sunshine 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 attitude, 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 Belvedereat 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 classical poetry of Corneille and Racine. There were idyllic features in Fénelon'sTelemachus, and Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain.
Honoré d'Urfé's famousAstréewas 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 mediæval illustrated manuscripts, 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 classic 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 grass 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. Lightbreezes 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 worship with Claude Lorraine.
The Netherlands recorded all Nature's phases in noble 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 Carrière, the peace of woodland solitude long before Tieck found the word for it.
Beechwoods reflected in a stream, misty cloud masses 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 merebackgrounds and single traits of Nature--even a flower stem or a blade of grass, 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.
Many decades passed 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 God, 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 Æneas 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 movementtowards 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 shelled out from under mediæval 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 superstitious, 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 referencesto 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 Rhenanus (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 analogical 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. God 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 God 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 God's very image than a microcosmic copy of Nature--the quintessence of the whole world. Other enthusiasts made similar statements. Sebastian Frank of Donauwörth (1543) looked upon the whole world as an open book and living Bible, in which to study the power and art of God and learn His will: everything was His image, all creatures are 'a reflection, imprint, and expression of God, 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.