THE UNIVERSAL PANTHEISTIC FEELING OF MODERN TIMES
The eighteenth century, so proudly distinguished as the century of Frederic the Great and Maria Theresa, Kant and Lessing, Rousseau and Voltaire, the age of enlightenment, and, above all, of the Revolution, was the most sentimental period in history. Its feeling for Nature bore the same stamp. Many of the Anacreontists and Göttingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but their horizon was narrow, and though F. Stolberg sang of the sea and his native mountains, most of them only rang the changes on moonlight and starlight, pastoral idylls, the joys of spring, and winter excursions on the ice. Even Rousseau, the prophet of high mountains, was the child of the same sentimental, self-adoring time; a morbid strain, call it misanthropy, melancholy, what you will, underlay all his passion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful souls, moonshine poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, and La Nouvelle Héloise, ennobled and purified the tone of the day and freed it from convention!
It was by dint of his genius for expression, the gift of finding the one right word, that he became the world's greatest lyrist: what he felt became a poem, what he saw a picture.
To see and to fashion into poetry were one with him, whereas his predecessors had called out the whole artillery of Olympus--nymphs, Oreads, Chloe, Phyllis, Damon, Aurora, Echo, and Zephyr--even the still heavier ordnance of the old Teutonic gods and half-gods, only to repeat stereotyped ideas, and produce descriptions of scenery, without lyric thought and feeling.
But Goethe's genius passed through very evident stages of development, and found forerunners in Lessing and Herder.
Lessing's mind was didactic and critical, not lyric, so that his importance here is a negative one. In laying down the limits of poetry and painting in Laocoon, he attacked the error of his day which used poetry for pictures, debasing it to mere descriptions of seasons, places, plants, etc.
He was dealing with fundamental principles when he said:
Simonides called painting dumb poetry, and poetry speaking painting; but ... many modern critics have drawn the crudest conclusions possible from this agreement between painting and poetry. At one time they confine poetry within the narrow limits of painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide sphere of poetry.... This fault-finding criticism has partially misled the virtuosos themselves. In poetry a fondness for description, and in painting a fancy for allegory, has arisen from the desire to make the one a speaking picture without really knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem without having considered in how far painting can express universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.... Since the artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing Nature, and the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently the most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect must be chosen. Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the imagination. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.
And against descriptive poetry he said:
When a poetaster, says Horace, can do nothing else, he falls to describing a grove, an altar, a brook winding through pleasant meadows, a rushing river, or a rainbow. Pope expressly enjoined upon every one who would not prove himself unworthy the name of poet, to abandon as early as possible this fondness for description. A merely descriptive poem he declared to be a feast made up of sauces.
Acute as his distinction was between poetry as the representative art of actions in time, and painting as the representative art of bodies in space, he did not give due value to lyric feeling or landscape painting.[[1]] They belong to a region in which his sharp, critical acumen was not at home.
But his discussions established the position that external objects of any sort, including Nature in all her various shapes, are not proper subjects for poetry when taken as Thomson, Brockes, and Haller took them, by themselves alone, but must first be imbued with human feeling. And the same holds good of landscape painting. Goethe's lyrics are the most perfect examples of this blending of the outer and inner world.
Lessing's criticisms had a salutary, emancipating effect upon prevalent taste; but a more positive influence came into play through Herder's warm predilection for the popular songs, which had been so long neglected, and for all that rises, as in the Psalms, Homer, Shakespeare, Ossian, from primitive sources of feeling, and finds spontaneous expression in poetry. The effect of his pioneering was marked, especially upon Goethe. Herder understood the revulsion of feeling from the unnatural restraint of the Pigtail period, and while holding up the mirror to his own day, he at the same time led its taste and the expression of it towards what was simple and natural, by disclosing the treasures which lay hidden in the poetry of the people. The lyric was freed from the artificiality and convention which had so long ruled it, and although he did not carry out his plan of a history of poetry, his collections and his profound remarks upon them were of great service, sowing a seed that bore fruit in succeeding days.
The popular songs to him were children of the same mother as the plants and flowers. 'All the songs of such unlettered folk,'[[2]] he said, 'weave a living world around existing objects, actions, and events. How rich and manifold they all become! And the eye can actually see them, the mind realize them; they are set in motion. The different parts of the song are no more connected together than the trees and bushes in a wood, the rocks in a desert, or the scenes depicted.' In another place[[3]] he put the history of feeling for Nature very tersely: 'There is no doubt that the spirit of man is made gentler by studying Nature. What did the classics aim at in their Georgics, but under various shapes to make man more humane and raise him gradually to order, industry, and prosperity, and to the power to observe Nature?...' Hence, when poetry revived in the Middle Ages, she soon recollected the true land of her birth among the plants and flowers. The Provencal and the romantic poets loved the same descriptions. Spenser, for instance, has charming stanzas about beautiful wilds with their streams and flowers; Cowley's six books on plants, vegetables, and trees are written with extraordinary affection and a superfluity of imagination; and of our old Brockes, Gessner says: 'He observed Nature's many beauties down to their finest minutiæ, the smallest things move his tender feelings; a dewdrop on a blade of grass in the sunshine inspires him. His scenes are often too laboured, too wide in scope, but still his poems are a storehouse of pictures direct from Nature. Haller's Alps, Kleist's poems and Gessner's, Thomson's Seasons, speak for themselves.'
He delighted in Shaftesbury's praises of Nature as the good and beautiful in the Moralists, and translated it[[4]]; in fact, in Herder we have already an æsthetic cult of the beauties of Nature.
After the moral disquisitions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, etc., Nature's influence on man, moral and æsthetic, became, as we have already seen, a favourite theme in Germany too, both in pious and rationalistic circles[[5]]; but there are few traces of any æsthetic analysis.
The most important one was Kant's, in his Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime in 1764. He distinguished, in the finer feeling for Nature, a feeling for the sublime and a feeling for the beautiful.
Both touch us pleasantly, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain with a snowy peak reaching above the clouds, the account of a storm ... these excite pleasure, but mixed with awe; while flowery meadows, valleys with winding streams and covered by browsing herds, a description of Elysium ... also cause pleasant feelings, but of a gay and radiant kind. To appreciate the first sensations adequately, we must have a feeling for the sublime; to appreciate the second, a feeling for the beautiful.
He mentioned tall oaks, lonely shades in consecrated groves, and night-time, as sublime; day, beds of flowers, low hedges, and trees cut into shapes, as beautiful.
Minds which possess the feeling for the sublime are inclined to lofty thoughts of friendship, scorn of the world, eternity, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening, when the twinkling starlight breaks the darkness. The light of day impels to activity and cheerfulness. The sublime soothes, the beautiful stimulates.
He goes on to subdivide the sublime:
This feeling is sometimes accompanied by horror or by dejection, sometimes merely by quiet admiration, at other times by a sense of wide-spread beauty. I will call the first the terrible, the second the noble, the third the splendid sublime.
Profound solitude is sublime, but in a terrible way. This is why great deserts, like the Desert of Gamo in Tartary, have always been the supposed abode of fearful shades, hobgoblins, and ghostly spectres. The sublime is always great and simple; the beautiful may be small, elaborate, and ornamental.
He tried, too, to define the romantic in Nature, though very vaguely:
The dreadful variety of the sublime, when quite unnatural, is adventurous. When sublimity or beauty is excessive, it is called romantic.
In his Kalligone, which appeared in 1800, Herder quoted Kant in making one of the characters say, 'One calls day beautiful, night sublime,' and tried to carry the idea a step further; 'The sublime and beautiful are not opposed to each other, but stem and boughs of a tree whose top is the most sublimely beautiful of all,' that is the romantic. In the same book he attempted to analyze his impressions of Nature, calling a rugged place odious, an insignificant one without character tedious. 'In the presence of great mountains,' he says, 'the spirit is filled with bold aspirations, whereas in gentle valleys it lies quiet.' Harmony in variety was his ideal, like the sea in storm and calm. 'An ocean of beautiful forms in rest and movement.'
And in reference to the contrast between a place made 'dreadful and horrible' by a torrent dashing over rocks and a quiet and charming valley, he said: 'These changes follow unalterable laws, which are recognized by our minds, and in harmony with our feelings.' He saw the same order in variety among plants, from the highest to the lowest, from palm tree to moss. In the second part of the book he gave an enthusiastic description of the sublime in sky and sea.
His beautiful words on the inspiration of Nature shew his insight into her relation to the poet soul of the people:
Everything in Nature must be inspired by life, or it does not move me, I do not feel it. The cooling zephyr and the morning sunbeam, the wind blowing through the trees, and the fragrant carpet of flowers, must cool, warm, pervade us--then we feel Nature. The poet does not say he feels her, unless he feels her intensely, living, palpitating and pervading him, like the wild Nature of Ossian, or the soft luxuriant Nature of Theocritus and the Orientals. In Nature, the more varieties the better; for instance, in a beautiful country I rustle with the wind and become alive (and give life--inspire), I inhale fragrance and exhale it with the flowers; I dissolve in water; I float in the blue sky; I feel all these feelings.
Herder touched the lyre himself with a skilful hand. Thought predominated with him, but he could make Nature live in his song.[[7]] 'I greet thee, thou wing of heaven,' he sang to the lark; and to the rainbow, 'Beautiful child of the sun, picture and hope over dark clouds ... hopes are colours, are broken sun-rays and the children of tears, truth is the sun.'
In By the Sea at Naples he wrote:
A-weary of the summer's fiery brand,
I sat me down beside the cooling sea,
Where the waves heaving, rolled and kissed the strand
Of the grey shore, ...
And over me, high over in the air,
Of the blue skyey vault, rustled the tree ...
Queen of all trees, slender and beautiful,
The pine tree, lifting me to golden dreams.
In Recollections of Naples:
Yes! they are gone, those happy, happy hours
Joyous but short, by Posilippo's bay!
Sweet dream of sea and lake, of rock and hill,
Grotto and island, and the mirrored sun
In the blue water--thou hast passed away!
and
When the glow of evening softly fades
From the still sea, and with her gleaming host
The moon ascends the sky.
Night is very poetic:
And comest thou again,
Thou Mother of the stars and heavenly thoughts?
Divine and quiet Mother, comest thou?
The earth awaits thee, from thy chalice cup
But one drop of thy heavenly dew to quaff,
Her flowers bend low their heads;
And with them, satiate with vision, droops
My overcharged soul....
O starry goddess with the crown of gold,
Upon whose wide-spread sable mantle gleam
A thousand worlds ...
Silence divine, that filleth all the world,
Flowing so softly to the eternal shores
Of an eternal universe....
And in St John's Night, he exclaims:
Infinite, ah! inexhaustible art thou, Mother Nature!
Like the rest, Herder suffered from the over-sensitiveness of his day. His correspondence with his fiancée shews this[[8]]; one sees Rousseau's influence:
My pleasantest hours are when, quite alone, I walk in a charming wood close to Bückeburg, or lie upon a wall in the shade of my garden, or lastly, for we have had capital moonlight for three nights, and the last was the best of all, when I enjoy these hours of sweetly sleeping night with all the songs of the nightingale.
I reckon no hours more delightful than those of green solitude. I live so romantically alone, and among woods and churches, as only poets, lovers, and philosophers can live.
And his fiancée wrote:
'Tis all joy within and around me since I have known thee, my best beloved: every plant and flower, everything in Nature, seems beautiful to me.
and
I went early to my little room; the moon was quite covered by clouds, and the night so melancholy from the croaking of the frogs, that I could not leave the window for a long time: my whole soul was dark and cloudy; I thought of thee, my dear one, and that thought, that sigh, reduced me to tears.
Do you like the ears of wheat so much? I never pass a cornfield without stroking them.
Goethe focussed all the rays of feeling for Nature which had found lyrical expression before him, and purged taste, beginning with his own, of its unnatural and sickly elements. So he became the liberating genius of modern culture. Not only did German lyric poetry reach its climax in him; but he was the most accurate, individual, and universal interpreter of German feeling for Nature.
His wide original mind kept open house for the most diverse elements of feeling, and exercised an ennobling control upon each and all at will; Homer's naivete, Shakespeare's sympathy, Rousseau's enthusiasm, even Ossian's melancholy, found room there.
While most love lyrics of his day were false in feeling, mere raving extravagances, and therefore poor in those metaphors and comparisons which prove sympathy between Nature and the inner life, it could be said of him that 'Nature wished to know what she looked like, and so she created Goethe.' He was the microcosm in which the macrocosm of modern times was reflected.
He was more modern and universal than any of his predecessors, and his insight into Nature and love for her have been rarely equalled in later days. He did not live, like so many of the elegiac and idyllic poets of the eighteenth century, a mere dream-life of the imagination: Goethe stood firmly rooted among the actualities; from boyhood up, as he said in Wahrheit und Dichtung, he had 'a warm feeling for all objective things.'
No poet, Klopstock not excepted, was richer in verbal invention, and many of the phrases and epithets which he coined form in themselves very striking evidence (which is lost in translation) of his close and original observation of Nature.
He has many beautiful comparisons to Nature:
His lady-love is 'brightly beautiful as morning clouds on yonder height.'
'I was wont to look at thee as one looks at the stars and moon, delighting in thee without the most distant wish in my quiet breast to possess thee.'
'I give kisses as the spring gives flowers.'
'My feeling for thee was like seed, which germinates slowly in winter, but ripens quickly in summer.'
The stars move 'with flower feet.'
The graces are 'pure as the heart of the waters, as the marrow of earth.'
A delicate poem is a rainbow only existing against a dark ground.
In Stella:
Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to return to thy breast from the sandy desert world.
I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning.
In Faust:
The cataract bursting through the rocks is the image of human effort; its coloured reflection the image of life.
When Werther feels himself trembling between existence and non-existence, everything around him sinking away, and the world perishing with him:
The past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the future.
These are among his still more numerous metaphors:
A sea of folly, an ocean of fragrance, the waves of battle, the stream of genius, the tiger claw of despair, the sun-ray of the past. Iphigenia says to Orestes:
O let the pure breath of love blow lightly on thy heart's flame and cool it.
and Eleonora complains about Tasso:
Let him go! But what twilight falls round me now! Formerly the stream carried us along upon the light waves without a rudder.
In Goethe we see very clearly how the inner life, under the pressure of its own intensity, will, so to speak, overflow into the outer world, making that live in its turn; and how this is especially the case when the amorous passion is present to add its impetus to feeling, and attribute its own fervour to all around.
May Song, On the Lake, Ganymede, are instances of this.
Ganymede:
Oh, what a glow
Around me in morning's
Blaze thou diffusest,
Beautiful spring!
With the rapture of love but intenser,
Intenser and deeper and sweeter,
Nestles and creeps to my heart
The sensation divine
Of thy fervour eternal,
Oh, thou unspeakably fair!
Beautiful personifications abound:
The sun is proudly throned in heaven.
The glowing sun gazes at the rugged peak or charms it with fiery love,
Or bathes like the moon in the ocean.
The parting glance of Mother Sun broods on the grapes.
'Morning came frightening away light sleep with its footsteps.'
'The young day arose with delight.'
The moon: 'Thou spreadest thy glance soothingly over my abode.'
On a cloudy night: 'Evening already rocked earth, and night hung on the mountains; from a hill of clouds the moon looked mournfully out of the mist.'
'The lofty stars turn their clear eyes down to me.'
Even the rock lives: 'The hard rock opens its bosom, not envying earth its deep springs.'
The stream: 'Thou hurriest on with joyful light mood; see the rock spring bright with the glance of the stars, yet no shady valley, no flowers make him tarry ... his course winds downwards to the plain, then he scatters in delightful spray, in cloud waves ... foams gloomily to the abyss.'
With gradual step from out the far-off grey,
Self-heralded draws on the storm.
Birds on the wing fly low across the water, weighted down,
And seamen hasten to reef in the sail
Before its stubborn wrath.
His flowers are alive:
The beauteous snowdrops
Droop o'er the plain,
The crocus opens
Its glowing bud ...
With saucy gesture
Primroses flare,
And roguish violets
Hidden with care.
But these are only examples. To obtain a clear idea of Goethe's attitude, we must take a more general survey of his work, for his poetic relationship to Nature, like his mental development in general, passed through various stages of growth. That it was a warm one even in youth is shewn by the letter in 1766 from Leipzig[[9]]:
You live contented in M. I even so here. Lonely, lonely, altogether lonely. Dearest Riese, this loneliness has impressed my soul with a certain sadness.
This solitary joy is mine,
When far apart from all mankind,
By shady brook-side to recline.
And keep my loved ones in my mind....
He goes on with these lines:
Then is my heart with sorrow filled,
Sad is mine eye.
The flooded brook now rages by,
That heretofore so gently rilled.
No bird sings in the bushes now,
The tree so green is dry,
The zephyr which on me did blow
So cheering, now storms northerly,
And scattered blossoms bears on high.
He was already in full sympathy with Nature. A few of his earlier poems[[10]] shew prevalent taste, the allusions to Zephyr and Lima, for instance, in Night; but they are followed by lines which are all his own.
He had an incomparable way of striking the chords of love and Nature together.
Where his lady-love dwells, 'there is love, and goodness is Nature.' He thinks of her
When the bright sunlight shimmers
Across the sea,
When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers.
Thou art seductive and charming; flowers,
Sun, moon, and stars only worship thee.
There is passionate feeling for Nature in the May Song of his Sesenheimer period:
How gloriously gleameth
All Nature to me!
How bright the sun beameth,
How fresh is the lea!
White blossoms are bursting
The thickets among,
And all the gay greenwood
Is ringing with song!
There's radiance and rapture
That nought can destroy,
Oh earth, in thy sunshine,
Oh heart, in thy joy.
Oh love! thou enchanter
So golden and bright,
Like the red clouds of morning
That rest on yon height,
The fields and the bowers,
And everywhere breathing
The incense of flowers.
Looking back in old age to those happy days of youth, he saw in memory not only Frederica but the scenery around her. He said (Wahrheit und Dichtung): 'Her figure never looked more charming than when she was moving along a raised footpath; the charm of her bearing seemed to vie with the flowering ground, and the indestructible cheerfulness of her face with the blue sky.' In Alsace he wrote:
One has only to abandon oneself to the present in order to enjoy the charms of the sky, the glow of the rich earth, the mild evenings, the warm nights, at the side of one's love, or near her.
and one of the poems to Frederica says:
The world lies round me buried deep in mist, but
In one glance of thine lies sunshine and happiness.
There is a strong pulse of life--life that overflows into Nature--in The Departure:
To horse! Away, o'er hill and steep,
Into the saddle blithe I spring;
The eve was cradling earth to sleep,
And night upon the mountains hung.
With robes of mist around him set,
The oak like some huge giant stood,
While, with its hundred eyes of jet,
Peer'd darkness from the tangled wood.
Amid a bank of clouds the moon
A sad and troubled glimmer shed;
The wind its chilly wings unclosed,
And whistled wildly round my head.
Night framed a thousand phantoms dire,
Yet did I never droop nor start;
Within my veins what living fire!
What quenchless glow within my heart!
And very like it, though in a minor key, is the Elegy which begins, 'A tender, youthful trouble.'
He tells in Wahrheit und Dichtung how he found comfort for his love troubles in Frankfort:
They were accustomed to call me, on account of wandering about the district, the 'wanderer.' In producing that calm for the mind, which I felt under the open sky, in the valleys, on the heights, in the fields, and in the woods, the situation of Frankfort was serviceable.... On the setting in of winter a new world was revealed to us, since I at once determined to skate.... For this new joyous activity we were also indebted to Klopstock, to his enthusiasm for this happy species of motion.... To pass a splendid Sunday thus on the ice did not satisfy us, we continued in movement late into the night.... The full moon rising from the clouds, over the wide nocturnal meadows which were frozen into fields of ice, the night breeze which rustled towards us on our course, the solemn thunder of the ice which sunk as the water decreased, the strange echo of our own movements, rendered the scenes of Ossian just present to our minds.
His attachment, to Lotte, stirred far deeper feelings than the earlier ones to Frederica and Lilli:
(If I, my own dear Lilli, loved thee not, How should I joy to view this scene so fair! And yet if I, sweet Lilli, loved thee not, Should I be happy here or anywhere?)
and drew him correspondingly nearer to Nature.
There is no book in any language which so lives and moves and has its being in Nature as Werther.[[11]] In Wahrheit und Dichtung Goethe said of the 'strange element' in which Werther was designed and written:
I sought to free myself internally from all that was foreign to me, to regard the external with love, and to allow all beings, from man downwards, as low as they were comprehensible, to act upon me, each after its own kind. Thus arose a wonderful affinity with the single objects of Nature, and a hearty concord, a harmony with the whole, so that every change, whether of place or region, or of the times of the day and year, or whatever else could happen, affected me in the deepest manner. The glance of the painter associated itself with that of the poet; the beautiful rural landscape, animated by the pleasant river, increased my love of solitude and favoured my silent observations as they extended on all sides.
The strong influence of La Nouvelle Héloise upon Werther was very evident, but there was a marked difference between Goethe's feeling for Nature and Rousseau's. Rousseau had the painter's eye, but not the keen poetic vision.
Goethe's romances are pervaded by the penetrating quality peculiar to his nation, and by virtue of which in Werther, the outer world, the scenery, was not used as framework, but was always interwoven with the hero's mood. The contrast between culture and Nature is always marked in Rousseau, and his religion was deism; Goethe resolves Nature into feeling, and his religion was a growing pantheism. As a work of art, Werther is excellent, La Nouvelle Héloise is not. Goethe used his hero's bearing towards Nature with marvellous effect to indicate the turns and changes of his moods, just as he indicated the threatening calamity and the growing apprehension of it by skilful stress laid upon some of her little traits--a faculty which only Theodore Storm among later poets has caught from him.
The growth of amorous passion is portrayed as an elementary force, and the revolutionary element in the book really consists in the strength of this passion and the assertion of its natural rights. Everything artificial, forced, conventional, in thought, act, and feeling--and what at that time was not?--was repugnant to Werther; what he liked most of all was the simplicity of children and uneducated people.
Nothing distresses me more than to see men torment each other; particularly when in the flower of their age, in the very season of pleasure, they waste their few short days of sunshine in quarrels and disputes, and only perceive their error when it is too late to repair it.
To such intense sympathy as this, all that had been sung ere now by German poets had to give place. Nature, which hitherto had played no rôle at all in fiction, not even among the English, was Werther's truest and most intimate friend.
Werther is sensitive and sentimental, though in a single-hearted way, with a sentimentality that reminds us more and more, as the story proceeds, of the gloomy tone of Ossian and Young. He is a thoroughly original character, who feels that he is right so to be; and although he falls a prey to his melancholy, yet there is much more force and thought in his outpourings than in all the moonshine tirades that preceded him. It is the work of a true poet, in the best days of a brilliant youth.
Werther, like Rousseau, was happiest in solitude. Solitude, in the 'place like paradise,' was precious balm to his feeling heart, which he considers 'like a sick child'; and the 'warm heavenly imagination of the heart' illuminates Nature round him--his 'favourite valley,' the 'sweet spring morning,' Nature's 'unspeakable beauty.' He was absorbed in artistic feeling, though he could not draw; 'I could not draw them, not a stroke, and have never been a greater artist than at that moment.' His power lay in imbuing his whole subject with feeling; he felt the heart of Nature beating, and its echo in his own breast.
When the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, then I throw myself down in the tall grass by the trickling stream; and as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants discover themselves to me. When I hear the buzz of the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel the presence of the Almighty who formed us in His own image, and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, my friend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the idea of a beloved mistress, then I often long and think: O that you could describe these conceptions, that you could impress upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, that it might be the mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God!
O! my friend! but it is too much for my strength. I sink under the weight of the grandeur of these visions.
Werther could not express all his love for Nature, but the secret of it lay in the power to bring his own world of thought and feeling into communion with her, and so give her speech. He divined something immortal in her akin to himself. 'The true feeling of Nature,' he said, 'is love.' He poured 'the stream of his genius' over her, and she became 'dear and familiar' to him.... The simple homely scenery delighted him--the valley, the brook, the fine walnut trees.
When I go out at sunrise in the morning to Walheim, and with my own hands gather the peas in the garden, which are to serve for my dinner; when I sit down to shell them and read my Homer during the intervals, and then, selecting a saucepan from the kitchen, fetch my own butter, put my mess on the fire, cover it up.... Nothing fills me with a more pure and genuine sense of happiness than those traits of patriarchal life, which, thank heaven, I can imitate without affectation.
With the growth of his love-passion his feeling for Nature increased; on July 24th he wrote:
I never felt happier, I never understood Nature better, even down to the veriest stem or smallest blade of grass.
Then Albert came on the scene, and love became a torment, and Nature a tormentor:
August 18.--Must it ever be thus, that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of Nature, overwhelming me with a torrent of delight, and which brought all paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a demon which perpetually pursues and harasses me. When in bye-gone days I gazed from these rocks upon yonder mountains across the river and upon the green flowery valley before me, and saw all nature budding and bursting around--the hills clothed from foot to peak with tall thick forest trees, the valleys in all their varied windings shaded with the loveliest woods, and the soft river gliding along amongst the lisping reeds, mirroring the beautiful clouds which the soft evening breeze wafted across the sky--when I heard the groves about me melodious with the music of birds, and saw the million swarms of insects dancing in the last golden beams of the sun, whose setting rays awoke the humming beetles from their grassy beds, whilst the subdued tumult around directed my attention to the ground, and I there observed the arid rock compelled to yield nutriment to the dry moss, whilst the heath flourished upon the barren sands below me--all this displayed to me the inner warmth which animates all Nature, and filled and glowed within my heart. I felt myself exalted by this overflowing fulness to the perception of the Godhead, and the glorious forms of an infinite universe became visible to my soul.... From the inaccessible mountains across the desert, which no mortal foot has trod, far as the confines of the unknown ocean, breathes the spirit of the eternal Creator, and every atom to which He has given existence finds favour in His sight. Ah! how often at that time has the flight of a bird soaring above my head inspired me with the desire of being transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, there to quaff the pleasure of life from the foaming goblet of the infinite, and to partake, if but for a moment, even with the confined powers of my soul, the beatitude of the Creator, who accomplishes all things in himself and through himself.... It is as if a curtain had been drawn from before my eyes.... My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal nature--Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself and every object near it; so that, surrounded by earth, and air, and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart, and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring its own offspring.... If in such moments I find no sympathy ... I either wander through the country, climb some precipitous cliff, or force a path through the trackless thicket, where I am lacerated and torn by thorns and briars, and thence I find relief.
Then, as he was going away, he felt how sympathetic the place had been to him:
I was walking up and down the very avenue which was so dear to me--a secret sympathy had frequently drawn me thither....
the moon rose from behind a hill, increasing his melancholy, and Charlotte put his feeling into words, saying (like Klopstock):
September 10.--Whenever I walk by moonlight, it brings to my remembrance all my beloved and departed friends, and I am filled with thoughts of death and futurity.
Even in his misery he realises the [Greek: charisgoôn] of Euripides, Petrarch's dolendi voluptas--the Wonne der Wehmuth.
On September 4th he wrote:
It is even so! As Nature puts on her autumn tints, it becomes autumn with me and around me. My leaves are sere and yellow, and the neighbouring trees are divested of their foliage.
It was due to this autumn feeling that he could say:
Ossian has superseded Homer in my heart. To what a world does the illustrious bard carry me! To wander over pathless wilds, surrounded by impetuous whirlwinds, where, by the feeble light of the moon, we see the spirits of our ancestors; to hear from the mountain tops, 'mid the roar of torrents, their plaintive sounds issuing from deep caverns.... And this heart is now dead; no sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry, and my senses, no more refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life, that active sacred power which created worlds around me, and it is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills and behold the morning sun breaking through the mists and illuminating the country round it which is still wrapt in silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to attract one tear of joy from my withered heart....
On November 30th he wrote: 'About dinner-time I went to walk by the river side, for I had no appetite,' and goes on in the tone of Ossian:
Everything around me seemed gloomy: a cold and damp easterly wind blew from the mountains, and black heavy clouds spread over the plain.
and in the dreadful night of the flood:
Upon the stroke of twelve I hastened forth. I beheld a fearful sight. The foaming torrents rolled from the mountains in the moonlight; fields and meadows, trees and hedges, were confounded together, and the entire valley was converted into a deep lake which was agitated by the roaring wind. And when the moon shone forth and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of awe and delight. With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss, and cried 'Plunge!' For a moment my senses forsook me, in the intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a plunge into that gulf.
To his farewell letter he adds:
Yes, Nature! put on mourning. Your child, your friend, your lover, draws near his end.
The genuine poetic pantheism, which, for all his melancholy and sentimentality, was the spring of Werther's feeling, is seen in loftier and more comprehensive form in the first part of Faust, when Faust opens the book and sees the sign of macrocosmos:
How all things live and work, and ever blending,
Weave one vast whole from Being's ample range!
How powers celestial, rising and descending,
Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange.
Their flight on rapture-breathing pinions winging,
From heaven to earth their genial influence bringing,
Through the wide whole their chimes melodious ringing.
In the currents of life, in action's storm,
I float and I wave
With billowy motion,--
Birth and the grave
A limitless ocean.
Not only of knowledge of, but of feeling for, Nature, it is said:
Inscrutable in broadest light,
To be unveiled by force she doth refuse.
But Faust is in deep sympathy with her; witness:
Thou full-orbed moon! Would thou wert gazing now
For the last time upon my troubled brow!
and
Loos'd from their icy fetters, streams and rills
In spring's effusive, quick'ning mildness flow,
Hope's budding promise every valley fills.
And winter, spent with age, and powerless now,
Draws off his forces to the savage hills.
and the idyllic evening mood, which gives way to a burst of longing:
In the rich sunset see how brightly glow
Yon cottage homes girt round with verdant green.
Slow sinks the orb, the day is now no more;
Yonder he hastens to diffuse new light.
Oh! for a pinion from the earth to soar,
And after, ever after him to strive!
Then should I see the world outspread below,
Illumined by the deathless evening beams,
The vales reposing, every height aglow,
The silver brooklets meeting golden streams....
Alas! that when on Spirit wing we rise,
No wing material lifts our mortal clay.
But 'tis our inborn impulse, deep and strong,
To rush aloft, to struggle still towards heaven,
When far above us pours its thrilling song
The skylark lost amid the purple even,
When on extended pinion sweeps amain
The lordly eagle o'er the pine-crowned height.
And when, still striving towards its home, the crane
O'er moor and ocean wings its onward flight.
But the most complete expression of Goethe's attitude, not only in the period of Werther and the first part of Faust, but generally, is contained in the Monologue, which was probably written not earlier than the spring of 1788:
Spirit sublime! Thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed. Not vainly hast thou turn'd
To me thy countenance in flaming fire;
Thou gav'st me glorious Nature for my realm,
And also power to feel her and enjoy;
Not merely with a cold and wond'ring glance,
Thou didst permit me in her depths profound,
As in the bosom of a friend, to gaze;
Before me thou dost lead her living tribes,
And dost in silent grove, in air and stream,
Teach me to know my kindred....
His feeling was not admiration alone, nor reverence alone, but the sympathy of Childe Harold:
Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion? Should I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these?
and the very confession of faith of such poetic pantheism is in Faust's words:
Him who dare name,
And yet proclaim,
Yes, I believe?...
The All-embracer,
All-sustainer,
Doth he not embrace, sustain
Thee, me, himself?
Lifts not the heaven its dome above?
Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us rise?
And beaming tenderly with looks of love,
Climb not the everlasting stars on high?
The poems which date directly after the Wetzlar period are full of this sympathetic pantheistic love for Nature--Mahomet's Song, for example, with its splendid comparison of pioneering genius to a mountain torrent:
Ho! the spring that bursts
From the mountain height
Joyous and bright,
As the gleam of a star....
Down in the vale below
Flowers bud beneath his tread ...
And woo him with fond eyes.
And the streamlets of the mountains
Shout to him, and cry out 'Brother'!
Brother! take thy brothers with thee,
With thee to thine ancient father,
To the eternal Ocean,
Who with outstretch'd arms awaits us....
And so beareth he his brothers
To their primal sire expectant,
All his bosom throbbing, heaving,
With a wild, tumultuous joy.
We see the same pathos--the pathos of Pindar and the Psalms--in the comparison:
Like water is the soul of man,
From heaven it comes, to heaven it goes,
And back again to earth in ceaseless change.
in the incomparable Wanderer, in Wanderer's Storm Song, and, above all, in Ganymede, already given, of which Loeper remarks:
The poem is, as it were, a rendering of that letter (Werther's of May 10th) in rhythm. The underlying pantheism had already shewn itself in the Wanderer's Storm Song. It was not the delight in God of a Brockes, not the adoration of a Klopstock, not sesthetic enjoyment of Nature, not, as in later years, scientific interest; it was rather a being absorbed in, identified with, Nature, a sympathy carried so far that the very ego was surrendered to the elements.
On the Lake of Zurich he wrote, June 15th, 1775:
And here I drink new blood, fresh food,
From world so free, so blest;
How sweet is Nature and how good,
Who holds me to her breast.
and Elmire sings in Ermin and Elmire:
From thee, O Nature, with deep breath
I drink in painful pleasure.
One of the gems among his Nature poems is Autumn Feelings (it was the autumn of his love for Lilli):
Flourish greener as ye clamber,
O ye leaves, to seek my chamber;
Up the trellised vine on high
May ye swell, twin-berries tender,
Juicier far, and with more splendour
Ripen, and more speedily.
O'er ye broods the sun at even,
As he sinks to rest, and heaven
Softly breathes into your ear
All its fertilizing fulness,
While the moon's refreshing coolness,
Magic-laden, hovers near.
And alas! ye're watered ever
By a stream of tears that rill
From mine eyes--tears ceasing never,
Tears of love that nought can still.
The lyrical effect here depends upon the blending of a single impression of Nature with the passing mood--an occasional poem rare even for Goethe.
In a letter to Frau von Stein he admitted that he was greatly influenced by Nature:
I have slept well and am quite awake, only a quiet sadness lies upon my soul.... The weather agrees exactly with my state of mind, and I begin to believe that it is the weather around me which has the most immediate effect upon me, and the great world thrills my little one with her own mood.
Again, To the Moon, in the spring 1778, expresses perfect communion between Nature and feeling:
Flooded are the brakes and dells
With thy phantom light,
And my soul receives the spell
Of thy mystic night.
To the meadow dost thou send
Something of thy grace,
Like the kind eye of a friend
Beaming on my face.
Echoes of departed times
Vibrate in mine ear,
Joyous, sad, like spirit chimes,
As I wander here.
Flow, flow on, thou little brook,
Ever onward go!
Trusted heart and tender look
Left me even so!
Richer treasure earth has none
Than I once possessed--
Ah! so rich, that when 'twas gone
Worthless was the rest.
Little brook! adown the vale
Rush and take my song:
Give it passion, give it wail,
As thou leap'st along!
Sound it in the winter night
When thy streams are full,
Murmur it when skies are bright
Mirror'd in the pool.
Happiest he of all created
Who the world can shun,
Not in hate, and yet unhated,
Sharing thought with none,
Save one faithful friend, revealing
To his kindly ear
Thoughts like these, which o'er me stealing,
Make the night so drear.
In January 1778, he wrote to Frau von Stein about the fate of the unhappy Chr. von Lassberg, who had drowned himself in the Ilm:
This inviting grief has something dangerously attractive about it, like the water itself; and the reflections of the stars, which gleam from above and below at once, are alluring.
To the same year belongs The Fisher, which gave such melodious voice to the magic effect of a shimmering expanse of water, 'the moist yet radiant blue,' upon the mood; just as, later on, The Erlking, with the grey of an autumn evening woven ghostlike round tree and shrub, made the mind thrill with foreboding.
Goethe was always an industrious traveller. In his seventieth year he went to Frankfort, Strassburg, the Rhine, Thuringia, and the Harz Mountains (Harzreise, 1777): 'We went up to the peaks, and down to the depths of the earth, and hammered at all the rocks.' His love for Nature increased with his science; but, at the same time, poetic expression of it took a more objective form; the passionate vehemence, the really revolutionary attitude of the Werther period, gave way to one equally spiritual and intellectual, but more temperate.
This transition is clearly seen in the Swiss letters. In his first Swiss travels, 1775, he was only just free from Werther, and his mind was too agitated for quiet observation:
Hasten thee, Kronos!...
Over stock and stone let thy trot
Into life straightway lead....
Wide, high, glorious the view
Gazing round upon life,
While from mount unto mount
Hovers the spirit eterne,
Life eternal foreboding....
Far more significant and ripe--in fact, mature--are the letters in 1779, shewing, as they do, the attitude of a man of profound mind, in the prime of his life and time. He was the first German poet to fall under the spell of the mountains--the strongest spell, as he held, which Nature wields in our latitudes. 'These sublime, incomparable scenes will remain for ever in my mind'; and of one view in particular, over the mountains of Savoy and Valais, the Lake of Geneva, and Mont Blanc, he said: 'The view was so great, man's eye could not grasp it.'
He wrote of his feelings with perfect openness to Frau von Stein, and these letters extended farther back than those from Switzerland, and were partly mixed with them.
From Selz:
An uncommonly fine day, a happy country--still all green, only here and there a yellow beech or oak leaf. Meadows still in their silver beauty--a soft welcome breeze everywhere. Grapes improving with every step and every day. Every peasant's house has a vine up to the roof, and every courtyard a great overhanging arbour. The air of heaven soft, warm, and moist. The Rhine and the clear mountains near at hand, the changing woods, meadows, fields like gardens, do men good, and give me a kind of comfort which I have long lacked.
The pen remains as ever the pen of a poet, but he looks at Switzerland now with a mature, settled taste, analyzing his impressions, and studying mountains, glaciers, boulders, scientifically.
Of the Staubbach Fall, near Lauterbrunnen (Oct. 9th, 1779):
The clouds broke in the upper air, and the blue sky came through. Clouds clung to the steep sides of the rocks; even the top where the Staubbach falls over, was lightly covered. It was a very noble sight ... then the clouds came down into the valley and covered all the foreground. The great wall over which the water falls, still stood out on the right. Night came on.... In the Munsterthal, through which we came, everything was lofty, but more within the mind's power of comprehension than these. In comparison with the immensities, one is, and must remain, too small.
And after visiting the Berne glacier from Thun (Oct. 14):
It is difficult to write after all this ... the first glance from the mountain is striking, the district is surprisingly extensive and pleasant ... the road indescribably beautiful ... the view from the Lake of Brienz towards the snow mountains at sunset is great.
More eloquent is the letter of October 3rd, from the Munsterthal:
The passage through this defile roused in me a grand but calm emotion. The sublime produces a beautiful calmness in the soul, which, entirely possessed by it, feels as great as it ever can feel. How glorious is such a pure feeling, when it rises to the very highest without overflowing. My eye and my soul were both able to take in the objects before me, and as I was preoccupied by nothing, and had no false tastes to counteract their impression, they had on me their full and natural effect. When we compare such a feeling with that we are sensible of, when we laboriously harass ourselves with some trifle, and strain every nerve to gain as much as possible for it, and, as it were, to patch it out, striving to furnish joy and aliment to the mind from its own creation; we then feel sensibly what a poor expedient, after all, the latter is....
When we see such objects as these for the first time, the unaccustomed soul has to expand itself, and this gives rise to a sort of painful joy, an overflowing of emotion which agitates the mind and draws from us the most delicious tears.... If only destiny had bidden me to dwell in the midst of some grand scenery, then would I every morning have imbibed greatness from its grandeur, as from a lonely valley I would extract patience and repose.
One guesses in the dark about the origin and existence of these singular forms.... These masses must have been formed grandly and simply by aggregation. Whatever revolutions may subsequently have up-heaved, rent, and divided them ... the idea of such nightly commotions gives one a deep feeling of the eternal stability of the masses.... One feels deeply convinced that here there is nothing accidental, that here there is working an eternal law which, however slowly, yet surely governs the universe.
By the Lake of Geneva, where he thought of Rousseau, he went up the Dole:
The whole of the Pays de Vaux and de Gex lay like a plan before us ... we kept watching the mist, which gradually retired ... one by one we distinctly saw Lausanne ... Vevey.... There are no words to express the beauty and grandeur of this view ... the line of glittering glaciers was continually drawing the eye back again to the mountains.
From Cluse he wrote:
The air was as warm as it usually is at the beginning of September, and the country we travelled through beautiful. Many of the trees still green; most of them had assumed a brownish-yellow tint, but only a few were quite bare. The crops were rich and verdant, the mountains caught from the red sunset a rosy hue blended with violet, and all these rich tints were combined with grand, beautiful, and agreeable forms of the landscape.
At Chamouni, about effects of light:
Here too again it seemed to us as if the sun had first of all attracted the light mists which evaporated from the tops of the glaciers, and then a gentle breeze had, as it were, combed the fine vapours like a fleece of foam over the atmosphere. I never remember at home, even in the height of summer, to have seen any so transparent, for here it was a perfect web of light.
At the Col de Baume:
Whilst I am writing, a remarkable phenomenon is passing along the sky. The mists, which are shifting about and breaking in some places, allow you through their openings, as through skylights, to catch a glimpse of the blue sky, while at the same time the mountain peaks, rising above our roofs of vapour, are illuminated by the sun's rays....
At Leukertad, at the foot of the Gemmi, he wrote (Nov. 9th):
The clouds which gather here in this valley, at one time completely hiding the immense rocks and absorbing them in a waste impenetrable gloom, or at another letting a part of them be seen like huge spectres, give to the people a cast of melancholy. In the midst of such natural phenomena, the people are full of presentiments and forebodings ... and the eternal and intrinsic energy of his (man's) nature feels itself at every nerve moved to forebode and to indulge in presentiments.
On the way across the Rhine glacier to the Furka, he felt the half-suggestive, half-distressing sense of mountain loneliness:
It was a strange sight ... in the most desolate region of the world, in a boundless monotonous wilderness of mountains enveloped in snow, where for three leagues before and behind you would not expect to meet a living soul, while on both sides you had the deep hollows of a web of mountains, you might see a line of men wending their way, treading each in the deep footsteps of the one before him, and where, in the whole of the wide expanse thus smoothed over, the eye could discern nothing but the track they left behind them. The hollows, as we left them, lay behind us grey and boundless in the mist. The changing clouds continually passed over the pale disc of the sun, and spread over the whole scene a perpetually moving veil.
He sums up the impressions made on him with:
The perception of such a long chain of Nature's wonders, excites within me a secret and inexpressible feeling of enjoyment.
The most profound change in his mental life was brought about by his visit to Italy, 1786-87. The poetic expression of this refining process, this striving towards the classic ideal, towards Sophrosyne, was Iphigenia.
Its effect upon his feeling for Nature appeared in a more matter-of-fact tone; the man of feeling gave way to the scientific observer.
He had, as he said (Oct. 30th, 1887), lately 'acquired the habit of looking only at things, and not, as formerly, seeing with and in the things what actually was not there.'
He no longer imputed his feelings to Nature, and studied her influence on himself, but looked at her with impersonal interest. Weather, cloud, mountain formation, the species of stone, landscape, and social themes, were all treated almost systematically as so much diary memoranda for future use. There was no artistic treatment in such jottings; meteorology, botany, and geology weighed too heavily.
The question, 'Is a place beautiful?' paled beside 'Is its soil clay?' 'Are its rocks quartz, chalk, or mica schist?' The problem of the archetypal plant was more absorbing than the finest groups of trees. The years of practical life at Weimar, and, above all, the ever-growing interest in science, were the chief factors in this change, which led him, as he said in his Treatise on Granite,
from observation and description of the human heart, that part of creation which is the most youthful, varied, unstable, and destructible, to observation of that Son of Nature, which is the oldest, deepest, most stable, most indestructible.
The enthusiastic subjective realism of stormy youth was replaced by the measured objective realism of ripe manhood. Hence the difference between his letters from Switzerland and those from Italy, where this inner metamorphosis was completed; as he said, 'Between Weimar and Palermo I have had many changes.'
For all that, he revelled in the beauty of Italy. As he once said:
It is natural to me to revere the great and beautiful willingly and with pleasure; and to develop this predisposition day by day and hour by hour by means of such glorious objects, is the most delightful feeling.
The sea made a great impression upon him:
I set out for the Lido...landed, and walked straight across the isthmus. I heard a loud hollow murmur--it was the sea! I soon saw it; it crested high against the shore as it retired, it was about noon and time of ebb. I have then at last seen the sea with my own eyes, and followed it on its beautiful bed, just as it quitted it.
But further on he only remarks: 'The sea is a great sight.' Elsewhere, too, it is only noticed very shortly.
Rome stimulated his mind to increased productiveness, and, partly for this reason, he could not assimilate all the new impressions which poured in upon him from without, from ruins, paintings, churches, palaces, the life of the people. He drew a great deal too; from Frascati he wrote (Nov. 15th, 1786):
The country around is very pleasant; the village lies on the side of a hill, or rather of a mountain, and at every step the draughtsman comes upon the most glorious objects. The prospect is unbounded. Rome lies before you, and beyond it on the right is the sea, the mountains of Tivoli, and so on.
In Rome itself (Feb. 2nd, 1787):
Of the beauty of a walk through Rome by moonlight it is impossible to form a conception without having witnessed it.
The sky, so infinitely fine and clear, looked down nobly and innocently upon the mummeries.
In the voyage to Sicily:
At noon we went on board; the weather being extremely fine, we enjoyed the most glorious of views. The corvette lay at anchor near to the Mole. With an unclouded sun the atmosphere was hazy, giving to the rocky walls of Sorrento, which were in the shade, a tint of most beautiful blue. Naples with its living multitudes lay in full sunshine, and glittered brilliantly with countless tints.
and on April 1st:
With a cloudy sky, a bright but broken moonlight, the reflection on the sea was infinitely beautiful.
At first, Italy, and especially Rome, felt strange to him, in scenery, sky, contour, and colour. It was only by degrees that he felt at home there.
He refers to this during his second visit to Rome in a notable remark, which aptly expresses the faculty of apperception--the link between us and the unfamiliar, which enables mental growth.
June 16th, 1787:
One remark more! Now for the first time do the trees, the rocks, nay, Rome itself, grow dear to me; hitherto I have always felt them as foreign, though, on the other hand, I took pleasure in minor subjects having some resemblance to those I saw in youth.
On August 18th, 1787, he wrote:
Yesterday before sunrise I drove to Acqua Acetosa. Verily, one might well lose his senses in contemplating the clearness, the manifoldness, the dewy transparency, the heavenly hue of the landscape, especially in the distance.
In October, when he heard of the engagement of a beautiful Milanese lady with whom he had fallen in love:
I again turned me instantly to Nature, as a subject for landscapes, a field I had been meanwhile neglecting, and endeavoured to copy her in this respect with the utmost fidelity. I was, however, more successful in mastering her with my eyes.... All the sensual fulness which that region offers us in rocks and trees, in acclivities and declivities, in peaceful lakes and lively streams, all this was grasped by my eye more appreciatively, if possible, than ever before, and I could hardly resent the wound which had to such degree sharpened my inward and outward sense.
On leaving Rome, he wrote:
Three nights before, the full moon shone in the clearest heaven, and the enchantment shed over the vast town, though often felt before, was never felt so keenly as now. The great masses of light, clear as in mild daylight, the contrast of deep shades, occasionally relieved by reflexions dimly portraying details, all this transported us as if into another, a simpler and a greater, world.
The later diaries on his travels are sketchy throughout, and more laconic and objective: for example, at Schaffhausen (Sept. 18th):
Went out early, 7.30, to see the Falls of the Rhine; colour of water, green--causes of this, the heights covered by mist--the depths clear, and we saw the castle of Laufen half in mist; thought of Ossian. Love mist when moved by deep feeling.
At Brunnen:
Green of the lake, steep banks, small size of boatman in comparison to the enormous masses of rock. One saw precipices grown over by trees, summits covered by clouds. Sunshine over the scene, one felt the formless greatness of Nature.
He was conscious of the great change in himself since his last visit there, and wrote to Schiller (Oct. 14th, 1797):
I remember the effect these things had upon me twenty years ago. The total impression remained with me, but the details faded, and I had a wonderful longing to repeat the whole experience and correct my impressions. I had become another man, and therefore it must needs appear different to me.
In later years he travelled a great deal in the Harz Mountains, to Carlsbad, Toplitz, the Maine, Marienbad, etc. After the death of his great friends, Schiller and Carl August, he was more and more lonely, and his whole outlook, with increasing years, grew more impersonal, his attitude to Nature more abstract and scientific; the archetypal plant was superseded by the theory of colours. But he kept fresh eyes for natural beauty into ripe age; witness this letter from Heidelberg, May 4th, 1808, to Frau von Stein:
Yesterday evening, after finishing my work, I went alone to the castle, and first scrambled about among the ruins, and then betook myself to the great balcony from which one can overlook the whole country. It was one of the loveliest of May evenings and of sunsets. No! I have really never seen such a fine view! Just imagine! One looked into the beautiful though narrow Neckar valley, covered on both sides with woods and vineyards and fruit trees just coming into flower. Further off the valley widened, and one saw the setting sun reflected in the Rhine as it flowed majestically through most beautiful country. On its further side the horizon was bounded by the Vosges mountains, lit up by the sun as if by a fire. The whole country was covered with fresh green, and close to me were the enormous ruins of the old castle, half in light and half in shade. You can easily fancy how it fascinated me. I stood lost in the view quite half an hour, till the rising moon woke me from my dreams.
Goethe's true lyrical period was in the seventies, before his Italian journeys; during and after that time he wrote more dramatic and epic poetry, with ballads and the more narrative kind of epic. In sending Der Jüngling und der Mühlbach to Schiller from Switzerland in 1797, he wrote: 'I have discovered splendid material for idylls and elegies, and whatever that sort of poetry is called.'
Nature lyrics were few during his Italian travels, as in the journey to Sicily, 1787; among them were Calm at Sea:
Silence deep rules o'er the waters,
Calmly slumbering lies the main.
and Prosperous Voyage:
The mist is fast clearing,
And radiant is heaven,
Whilst Æolus loosens
Our anguish-fraught bond.
The most perfect of all such short poems was the Evening Song, written one September night of 1783 on the Gickelhahn, near Ilmenau. He was writing at the same time to Frau von Stein: 'The sky is perfectly clear, and I am going out to enjoy the sunset. The view is great and simple--the sun down.'
Every tree top is at peace.
E'en the rustling woods do cease
Every sound;
The small birds sleep on every bough.
Wait but a moment--soon wilt thou
Sleep in peace.
The hush of evening, the stilling of desire in the silence of the wood, the beautiful resolution of all discords in Nature's perfect concord, the naive and splendid pantheism of a soul which feels itself at one with the world--all this is not expressed in so many words in the Night Song; but it is all there, like the united voicesin a great symphony. (SCHURÉ.)
The lines are full of that pantheism which not only brings subject and object, Mind and Nature, into symbolic relationship, but works them into one tissue. Taken alone with The Fisher and To the Moon, it would suffice to give him the first place as a poet of Nature.
He was not only the greatest poet, but the greatest and most universal thinker of modern times. With him feeling and knowledge worked together, the one reaching its climax in the lyrics of his younger days, the other gradually moderating the fervour of passion, and, with the more objective outlook of age, laying greater stress upon science. His feeling for Nature, which followed an unbroken course, like his mental development generally, stands alone as a type of perfectly modern feeling, and yet no one, despite the many intervening centuries, stood so near both to Homer and to Shakespeare, and in philosophy to Spinoza.
But because with Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his pantheism is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise man of Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the postulate of this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and the inner life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his religion. In his youth, in the period of Werther, Ganymede, and the first part of Faust, this pantheism was a nameless, unquenchable aspiration towards the divine--for wings to reach, like the rays of light, to unmeasured heights; as he said in the Swiss mountains, 'Into the limitless spaces of the air, to soar over abysses, and let him down upon inaccessible rocks.'
After the Italian journeys science took the lead, the student of Nature supplanted the lover, even his symbolism took a more abstract and realistic form. But he never, even in old age, lost his love for the beauties of Nature, and, holding to Spinoza's fundamental ideas of the unchangeableness and eternity of Nature's laws, and the oneness of the Cosmos, he sought to think it out and base it upon scientific grounds, through the unbroken succession of animal and vegetable forms of life, the uniform 'formation and transformation of all organic Nature.' He wrote to Frau von Stein: 'I cannot express to you how legible the book of Nature is growing to me; my long spelling out has helped me. It takes effect now all of a sudden; my quiet delight is inexpressible; I find much that is new, but nothing that is unexpected--everything fits in and conforms, because I have no system, and care for nothing but truth for its own sake. Soon everything about living things will be clear to me.'[[13]]
Poetic and scientific intuition were simultaneous with him, and their common bond was pantheism. This pantheism marked an epoch in the history of feeling. For Goethe not only transformed the unreal feeling of his day into real, described scenery, and inspired it with human feeling, and deciphered the beauty of the Alps, as no one else had done, Rousseau not excepted; but he also brought knowledge of Nature into harmony with feeling for her, and with his wonderfully receptive and constructive mind so studied the earlier centuries, that he gathered out all that was valuable in their feeling.
As Goethe in Germany, so Byron in England led the feeling for Nature into new paths by his demoniac genius and glowing pantheism. Milton's great imagination was too puritan, too biblical, to allow her independent importance; he only assigned her a rôle in relation to the Deity. In fiction, too, she had no place; but, on the other hand, we find her in such melancholy, sentimental outpourings as Young's Night Thoughts:
Night, sable Goddess! from her ebon throne
In rayless majesty now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre o'er a slumb'ring world...
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the gen'ral pulse
Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause;
An awful pause, prophetic of her end...etc.
There is a wealth of imagery and comparison amid Ossian's melancholy and mourning; clouds and mist are the very shadows of his struggling heroes. For instance:
His spear is a blasted pine, his shield the rising moon. He sat on the shore like a cloud of mist on the rising hill.
Thou art snow on the heath; thy hair is the mist of Cromla, when it curls on the hill, when it shines to the beam of the west. Thy breasts are two smooth rocks seen from Branno of streams.
As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high; as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of battle.
As autumn's dark storms pour from two echoing hills, towards each other approached the heroes.
The clouds of night came rolling down, Darkness rests on the steeps of Cromla. The stars of the north arise over the rolling of Erin's waves; they shew their heads of fire through the flying mist of heaven. A distant wind roars in the wood. Silent and dark is the plain of death.
Wordsworth's influence turned in another direction. His real taste was pastoral, and he preached freer intercourse with Nature, glossing his ideas rather artificially with a theism, through which one reads true love of her, and an undeniable, though hidden, pantheism.
In The Influence of Natural Objects he described how a life spent with Nature had early purified him from passion:
Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me
With stinted kindness. In November days,
When vapours, rolling down the valleys, made
A lonely scene more lonesome, among woods
At noon, and 'mid the calm of summer nights,
When by the margin of the trembling lake
Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine.
'Twas mine among the fields both day and night,
And by the waters all the summer long,
And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile,
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not the summons....
Like Klopstock, he delighted in sledging
while the stars
Eastward were sparkling bright, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Far more characteristic of the man is the confession in Tintern Abbey:
Nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
The colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite, a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrow'd from the eye.
Beautiful notes, to be struck again more forcibly by the frank pantheism of Byron.
What Scott had been doing for Scotland,[[14]] and Moore for Ireland, Wordsworth, with still greater fidelity to truth, tried to do for England and her people; in contrast to Byron and Shelley, who forsook home to range more widely, or Southey, whose Thalaba begins with an imposing description of night in the desert:
How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air,
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain
Breaks the serene of heaven;
In full-orb'd glory yonder Moon divine
Rolls through the dark blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray
The desert-circle spreads
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!
But all that previous English poets had done seemed harmless and innocent in comparison with Byron's revolutionary poetry. Prophecy in Rousseau became poetry in Byron.
There was much common ground between these two passionate aspiring spirits, who never attained to Goethe's serenity. Both were melancholy, and fled from their fellows; both strove for perfect liberty and unlimited self-assertion; both felt with the wild and uproarious side of Nature, and found idyllic scenes marred by thoughts of mankind.
Byron's turbulence never subsided; and his love for Nature, passionate and comprehensive as it was, was always 'sickled o'er' with misanthropy and pessimism, with the 'world-pain.'
He turned to her first through disdain of his kind and love of introspection, and later on, when he was spurned by the London world which had been at his feet, and disdain grew into hatred and disgust, from a wish to be alone. But, as Boettger says:
Though this heart, in which the whole universe is reflected, is a sick one, it has immeasurable depths, and an intensified spirit life which draws everything under its sway and inspires it, feeling and observing everything only as part of itself.
The basis of Byron's feeling for Nature was a revolutionary one--elementary passion. The genius which threw off stanza after stanza steeped in melody, was coupled with an unprecedented subjectivity and individualism. When the first part of Childe Harold came out, dull London society was bewitched by the music and novelty of this enthusiastic lyric of Nature, with its incomparable interweaving of scenery and feeling:
The sails were fill'd, and fair the light winds blew,
As glad to waft him from his native home....
But when the sun was sinking in the sea,
He seized his harp...
Adieu, adieu! my native shore
Fades o'er the waters blue;
The night winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea-mew;
Yon sun that sets upon the sea
We follow in his flight;
Farewell awhile to him and thee,
My native land, good-night!
He says of the beauty of Lusitania:
Oh Christ! it is a goodly sight to see
What Heaven hath done for this delicious land.
What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree!
What goodly prospects o'er the hills expand!...
The horrid crags, by toppling convent crown'd,
The cork trees hoar that clothe the shaggy steep,
The mountain moss, by scorching skies imbrown'd,
The sunken glen, whose sunless shrubs must weep.
The tender azure of the unruffled deep,
The orange tints that gild the greenest bough,
The torrents that from cliff to valley leap,
The vine on high, the willow branch below,
Mix'd in one mighty scene, with varied beauty glow.
Yet his spirit drives him away, 'more restless than the swallow in the skies.'
The charm of the idyllic is in the lines:
But these between, a silver streamlet glides....
Here leans the idle shepherd on his crook,
And vacant on the rippling waves doth look,
That peaceful still 'twixt bitterest foemen flow.
The beauty of the sea and night in this:
The moon is up; by Heaven a lovely eve!
Long streams of light o'er dancing waves expand....
How softly on the Spanish shore she plays,
Disclosing rock, and slope, and forest brown
Distinct....
Bending o'er the vessel's laving side
To gaze on Dian's wave-reflected sphere.
He reflects that:
To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene....
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen
With the wild flock that never needs a fold,
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean,--
This is not solitude; 'tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd.
But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,
And roam along, the world's tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless ...
This is to be alone--this, this is solitude.
His preference for wild scenery shews here:
Dear Nature is the kindest mother still,
Though always changing, in her aspect mild;
From her bare bosom let me take my fill,
Her never-wean'd, though not her favour'd child.
O she is fairest in her features wild,
Where nothing polish'd dares pollute her path;
To me by day or night she ever smiled,
Though I have mark'd her when none other hath,
And sought her more and more, and loved her best in wrath.
He observes everything--now 'the billows' melancholy flow' under the bows of the ship, now the whole scene at Zitza:
Where'er we gaze, around, above, below,
What rainbow tints, what magic charms are found!
Rock, river, forest, mountain, all abound,
And bluest skies that harmonize the whole;
Beneath, the distant torrent's rushing sound
Tells where the volumed cataract doth roll
Between those hanging rocks, that shock yet please the soul.
This is full of poetic vision:
Where lone Utraikey forms its circling cove,
And weary waves retire to gleam at rest,
How brown the foliage of the green hill's grove,
Nodding at midnight o'er the calm bay's breast,
As winds come lightly whispering from the west,
Kissing, not ruffling, the blue deep's serene;--
Here Harold was received a welcome guest;
Nor did he pass unmoved the gentle scene,
For many a job could he from Night's soft presence glean.
Feeling himself 'the most unfit of men to herd with man,' he is happy only with Nature:
Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome to the roar!
Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead.
Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;
Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home;
Where a blue sky and glowing clime extends,
He had the passion and the power to roam;
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam,
Were unto him companionship; they spake
A mutual language, clearer than the tome
Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake
For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake.
Again:
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me, and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture; I can see
Nothing to loathe in Nature save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion? Should I not contemn
All objects, if compared with these?
Love of Nature was a passion with him, and when he looked
Upon the peopled desert past
As on a place of agony and strife,
mountains gave him a sense of freedom.
He praised the Rhine:
Where Nature, nor too sombre nor too gay,
Wild but not rude, awful yet not austere,
Is to the mellow earth as autumn to the year.
and far more the Alps:
Above me are the Alps,
The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps,
And throned eternity in icy halls
Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls
The avalanche, the thunderbolt of snow!
All that expands the spirit, yet appals,
Gather around these summits, as to shew
How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below.
On the Lake of Geneva:
Ye stars which are the poetry of heaven...
All heaven and earth are still--though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep.
All heaven and earth are still: from the high host
Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain coast,
All is concenter'd in a life intense,
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and defence.
And this is in the night. Most glorious night,
Thou wert not sent for slumber; let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 'tis black--and now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain mirth,
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth.
But where of ye, oh tempests, is the goal?
Are ye like those within the human breast?
Or do ye find, at length, like eagles, some high nest?
The morn is up again, the dewy morn
With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,
Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,
And living as if earth contained no tomb.
In Clarens:
Clarens! sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love,
Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought,
Thy trees take root in Love; the snows above
The very glaciers have his colours caught,
And sunset into rose-hues sees them wrought
By rays which sleep there lovingly; the rocks,
The permanent crags, tell here of Love.
Yet
Ever and anon of griefs subdued
There comes a token like a scorpion's sting,
Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued;
And slight withal may be the things which bring
Back on the heart the weight which it would fling
Aside for ever; it may be a sound,
A tone of music, summer's eve or spring,
A flower, the wind, the ocean, which shall wound,
Striking the electric chain with which we are darkly bound.
The unrest and torment of his own heart he finds reflected in Nature:
The roar of waters! from the headlong height
Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice;
The fall of waters! rapid as the light
The flashing mass foams, shaking the abyss;
The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,
And mounts in spray the skies, and thence again
Returns in an unceasing shower, which round
With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain
Is an eternal April to the ground,
Making it all one emerald; how profound
The gulf, and how the giant element
From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
Crushing the cliffs, which downward, worn and rent
With his fierce footsteps, yields in chasms a fearful rent....
Horribly beautiful! but, on the verge
From side to side, beneath the glittering morn,
An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge,
Like Hope upon a deathbed.
The 'enormous skeleton' of Rome impresses him most by moonlight:
When the rising moon begins to climb
Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,
And the low night breeze waves along the air!
Underlying all his varying moods is this note:
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
The sea, the sky with its stars and clouds, and the mountains, are his passion:
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin--his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.
(Childe Harold.)
The day at last has broken. What a night
Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven!
Though varied with a transitory storm,
More beautiful in that variety!...
And can the sun so rise,
So bright, so rolling back the clouds into
Vapours more lovely than the unclouded sky,
With golden pinnacles and snowy mountains,
And billows purpler than the ocean's, making
In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth.
(Sardanapalus.)
He had loved the Scotch Highlands in youth:
Amidst Nature's native scenes,
Loved to the last, whatever intervenes
Between us and our childhood's sympathy
Which still reverts to what first caught the eye.
He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue
Will love each peak that shews a kindred hue,
Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face,
And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace.
(The Island.)
and in The Island he says:
How often we forget all time, when lone,
Admiring Nature's universal throne,
Her woods, her wilds, her waters, the intense
Reply of hers to our intelligence!
Live not the stars and mountains? Are the waves
Without a spirit? Are the dropping cares
Without a feeling in their silent tears?
No, no; they woo and clasp us to their spheres,
Dissolve this clog and clod of clay before
Its hour, and merge our soul in the great shore.
(The Island.)
Byron's feeling was thus, like Goethe's in Werther and Faust, a pantheistic sympathy. But there was this great difference between them--Goethe's mind passed through its period of storm and stress, and attained a serene and ripe vision; Byron's never did. Melancholy and misanthropy always mingled with his feelings; he was, in fact, the father of our modern 'world-pain.'
Still more like a brilliant meteor that flashes and is gone was Shelley, the most highly strung of all modern lyrists. With him, too, love of Nature amounted to a passion; but it was with her remote aerial forms that he was most at home. His imagination, a cosmic one, revelling among the spheres, was like Byron's in its preference for the great, wide, and distant; but unlike his in giving first place to the serene and passionless. As Brandes says: 'In this familiarity with the great forms and movements of Nature, Shelley is like Byron; but like him as a fair genius is like a dark one, as Ariel is like the flame-bringing angel of the morning star.'
We see his love for the sea, especially at rest, in the 'Stanzas written in dejection near Naples,' which contain the beautiful line which proved so prophetic of his death:
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright;
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might....
I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple sea-weeds strewn;
I see the waves upon the shore
Like light dissolved, in star showers thrown....
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,--
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.
In his Essay on Love, speaking of the irresistible longing for sympathy, he says:
In solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, and the water and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.
As Brandes says: 'His pulses beat in secret sympathy with Nature's. He called plants and animals his dear sisters and brothers, and the words which his wife inscribed upon his tombstone in Rome, "cor cordium," are true of his relation to Nature also.'
The Cloud, with its marvellously vivid personification, is a perfect example of his genius.
It gives the measure of his unlikeness to the more homekeeping imaginations of his contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, and Moore; and at the same time to Byron, for here there are no morbid reflections; the poem is pervaded by a naive, childlike tone, such as one hears in the old mythologies.
The Cloud:
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their Mother's breast
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast,
And all the night 'tis my pillow white
While I sleep in the arms of the Blast....
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march,
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-coloured bow;
The Sphere-fire above its soft colours wove
While the moist earth was laughing below.
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky.
As Brandes puts it; When the cloud sings thus of the moon:
When
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom Mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The Stars peep behind her and peer.
or of--
The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
the reader is carried back, by dint of the virgin freshness of the poet's imagination, to the time when the phenomena of Nature were first moulded into mythology.
This kinship to the myth is very clear in the finest of all his poems, the Ode to the West Wind, when the poet says to the wind:
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,...
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed.
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean.
Angels of rain and lightning, there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm.
He calls the wind the 'breath of Autumn's being,' the one
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds.
And cries to it:
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable!...
0 lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee, tameless, and swift, and proud.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit. Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
His poems are full of this power of inspiring all the elements with life, breathing his own feeling into them, and divining love and sympathy in them; for instance:
The fountains mingle with the river,
And the river with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion....
See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another...
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea.
I love all thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight;
The fresh earth in new leaves dressed,
And the starry night,
Autumn evening and the morn
When the golden mists are born.
I love snow and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves and winds and storms--
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.
To Goethe, Byron, and Shelley, this pantheism, universal love, sympathy with Nature in all her forms, was the base of feeling; but both of England's greatest lyrists, dying young, failed to attain perfect harmony of thought and feeling. There always remained a bitter ingredient in their poetry.
Let us now turn to France.
LAMARTINE AND VICTOR HUGO
Rousseau discovered the beauty of scenery for France; St Pierre portrayed it poetically, not only in Paul and Virginia, but in Chaumiére Indienne and Etudes de la Nature. The science which these two writers lacked, Buffon possessed in a high degree; but he had not the power to delineate Nature and feeling in combination: he lacked insight into the hidden analogies between the movements of the mind and the phenomena of the outer world. Chateaubriand, on the contrary, had this faculty to its full modern extent. It is true that his ego was constantly to the fore, even in dealing with Nature, but his landscapes were full of sympathetic feeling. He had Rousseau's melancholy and unrest, and cared nothing for those 'oppressive masses,' mountains, except as backgrounds; but he was enthusiastic about the scenery which he saw in America, the virgin forests, and the Mississippi--above all, about the sea. His Réné, that life-like figure, half-passionate, half-blasé, measuring everything by himself, and flung hither and thither by the waves of passion, shewed a lover's devotion to the sea and to Nature generally.[[15]] 'It was not God whom I contemplated on the waves in the magnificence of His works: I saw an unknown woman, and the miracle of his smile, the beauties of the sky, seemed to me disclosed by her breath. I would have bartered eternity for one of her caresses. I pictured her to myself as throbbing behind this veil of the universe which hid her from my eyes. Oh! why was it not in my power to rend the veil and press the idealized woman to my heart, to spend myself on her bosom with the love which is the source of my inspiration, my despair, and my life?'
In subjectivity and dreaminess both Chateaubriand and Lamartine were like the German romanticists, but their fundamental note was theism, not pantheism. The storm of the French Revolution, which made radical changes in religion, as in all other things, was followed by a reaction. Christianity acquired new power and inwardness, and Nature was unceasingly praised as the mirror of the divine idea of creation.
In his Génie du Christianisme, Chateaubriand said:
The true God, in entering into His Works, has given his immensity to Nature... there is an instinct in man, which puts him in communication with the scenes of Nature.
Lamartine was a sentimental dreamer of dreams, a thinker of lofty thoughts which lost themselves in the inexpressible. His Meditations shew his ardent though sad worship of Nature; his love of evening, moonlight, and starlight. For instance, L'Isolement:
Ici gronde le fleuve aux vagues écumantes,
Il serpente et s'enfonce en un lointain obscur:
Là le lac immobile étend ses eaux dormantes
Oò l'étoile du soir se lève dans l'azur.
An sommet de ces monts couronnés de bois sombres,
Le crépuscule encore jette un dernier rayon;
Et le char vaporeux de la reine des ombres
Monte et blanchit déjà les bords de l'horizon.
Le Soir:
Le soir ramène le silence....
Venus se lève à l'horizon;
A mes pieds l'étoile amoureuse
De sa lueur mystérieuse
Blanchit les tapis de gazon.
De ce hêtre au feuillage sombre
J'entends frissonner les rameaux;
On dirait autour des tombeaux
Qu'on entend voltiger une ombre,
Tout-à-coup, détaché des cieux,
Un rayon de l'astre nocturne,
Glissant sur mon front taciturne,
Vient mollement toucher mes yeux.
Doux reflet d'un globe de flamme
Charmant rayon, que me veux-tu?
Viens-tu dans mon sein abattu
Porter la lumière à mon âme?
Descends-tu pour me révéler
Des mondes le divin mystére,
Ces secrets cachés dans la sphère
Où le jour va te rappeler?
In the thought of happy past hours, he questions the lake:
Un soir, t'en souvient-il, nous voguions en silence;
On n'entendait au loin, sur l'onde et sous les cieux,
Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence
Tes flots harmonieux.
O lac! rochers muets! grottes! forêt obscure!
Vous que le temps épargne ou qu'il peut rajeunir
Gardez de cette nuit, gardez, belle nature,
Au moins le souvenir!...
Que le vent qui gémit, le roseau qui soupire
Que les parfums légers de ton air embaumé,
Que tout ce qu'on entend, l'on voit, ou l'on respire,
Tout dise: 'ils out aimés!
La Prière has:
Le roi brillant du jour, se couchant dans sa gloire,
Descend avec lenteur de son char de victoire;
Le nuage éclatant qui le cache à nos yeux
Conserve en sillons d'or sa trace dans les cieux,
Et d'un reflet de pourpre inonde l'étendue.
Comme une lampe d'or dans l'azur suspendue,
La lune se balance aux bords de l'horizon;
Ses rayons affaiblis dorment sur le gazon,
Et le voile des nuits sur les monts se déplie.
C'est l'heure, où la nature, un moment recueillie,
Entre la nuit qui touche et le jour qui s'enfuit
S'élève au créateur du jour et de la nuit,
Et semble offrir à Dieu dans son brillant langage,
De la création le magnifique hommage.
Voilà le sacrifice immense, universelle!
L'univers est le temple, et la terre est l'autel;
Les cieux en sont le dôme et ses astres sans nombre,
Ces feux demi-voilés, pâle ornement de l'ombre,
Dans la voûte d'azur avec ordre semés,
Sont les sacrés flambeaux pour ce temple allumés...
Mais ce temple est sans voix...
...Mon coeur seul parle dans ce silence--
La voix de l'univers c'est mon intelligence.
Sur les rayons du soir, sur les ailes du vent,
Elle s'élève à Dieu...
Le Golfe de Baia:
Vois-tu comme le flot paisible
Sur le rivage vient mourir?
Mais déjà l'ombre plus épaisse
Tombe et brunit les vastes mers;
Le bord s'efface, le bruit cesse,
Le silence occupe les airs.
C'est l'heure où la Mélancholie
S'assied pensive et recueillie
Aux bords silencieux des mers.
The decay of autumn corresponds to his own dolorous feelings:
Oui, dans ces jours d'automne où la nature expire,
A ses regards voilés je trouve plus d'attraits;
C'est l'adieu d'un ami, c'est le dernier sourire
Des lèvres que la mort va fermer pour jamais.
This is from Ischia:
Le Soleil va porter le jour à d'autres mondes;
Dans l'horizon désert Phébé monte sans bruit,
Et jette, en pénétrant les ténébres profondes,
Un voile transparent sur le front de la nuit.
Voyez du haut des monts ses clartés ondoyantes
Comme un fleuve de flamme inonder les coteaux,
Dormir dans les vallons on glisser sur les pentes,
Ou rejaillir au loin du sein brillant des eaux....
Doux comme le soupir d'un enfant qui sommeille,
Un son vague et plaintif se répand dans les airs....
Mortel! ouvre ton âme à ces torrents de vie,
Reçois par tous les sens les charmes de la nuit....
He sees the transitoriness of all earthly things reflected in Nature:
L'onde qui baise ce rivage,
De quoi se plaint-elle à ses bords?
Pourquoi le roseau sur la plage, pourquoi le ruisseau sous l'ombrage,
Rendent-ils de tristes accords?
De quoi gémit la tourterelle? Tout naist, tout paise.
Such a depth of sympathy and dreamy dolorous reverie was new to France, but Rousseau had broken the ice, and henceforward feeling flowed freely. To Lamartine the theist, as to the pantheists Goethe, Shelley, and Byron, Nature was a friend and lover.
Victor Hugo was of the same mind, but his poetry is clearer and more plastic than Lamartine's. We quote from his finest poems, the Feuilles d'Automne. He was a true lyrist, familiar both with the external life of Nature and the inner life of man. His beautiful 'Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne' has the spirit of Faust. He imagines himself upon a mountain top, with earth on one side, the sea on the other; and there he hears two voices unlike any ever heard before:
L'une venait des mers, chant de gloire! hymne heureux!
C'était la voix des flots qui se parlaient entre eux....
Or, comme je l'ai dit, l'Océan magnifique
Epandait une voix joyeuse et pacifique
Chantant comme la harpe aux temples de Sion,
Et louait la beauté de la création.
while from the other voice:
Pleurs et cris! L'injure, l'anatheme....
C'était la terre et l'homme qui pleuraient!...
L'une disait, Nature! et l'autre, Humanité!
The personifications in this poem are beautiful. He, too, like Lamartine, loves sea and stars most of all. These verses from Les Orientales remind one of St Augustine:
J'étais seul près des flots par une nuit d'étoiles,
Pas un nuage aux cieux; sur les mers pas de voiles,
Et les bois et les monts et toute la nature
Semblaient interroger dans confus murmure
Les flots des mers, les feux du ciel.
Et les étoiles d'or, légions infinies,
A voix haute, à voix basse, avec mille harmonies
Disaient en inclinant leurs couronnes de feu,
Et les flots bleus, que rien gouverne et n'arrête,
Disaient en recourbant l'écume de leur crête:
C'est le Seigneur Dieu, le Seigneur Dieu!
Parfois lorsque tout dort, je m'assieds plein de joie
Sous le dôme étoilé qui sur nos fronts flamboie;
J'écoute si d'en haut il tombe quelque bruit;
Et l'heure vainement me frappe de son aile
Quand je contemple ému cette fête eternelle
Que le ciel rayonnant donne au monde la nuit!
Souvent alors j'ai cru que ces soleils de flamme
Dans ce monde endormi n'échauffaient que mon âme;
Qu'à les comprendre seul j'étais prédestiné;
Que j'étais, moi, vaine ombre obscure et taciturne,
Le roi mystérieuse de la pompe nocturne;
Que le ciel pour moi seul s'était illuminé!
The necessary condition of delight in Nature is very strikingly given:
Si vous avez en vous, vivantes et pressées,
Un monde intérieur d'images, de pensées,
De sentimens, d'amour, d'ardente passion
Pour féconder ce monde, échangez-le sans cesse
Avec l'autre univers visible qui vous presse!
Mêlez toute votre âme à la création....
Que sous nos doigts puissans exhale la nature,
Cette immense clavier!
His lyrics are rich in fine scenes from Nature, unrolled in cold but stately periods, and the poetic intuition which always divines the spirit life brought him near to that pantheism which we find in all the greatest English and German poets of his time,[[16]] and which lay, too, at the root of German romanticism.
THE GERMAN ROMANTICISTS
Schiller did not possess the intrinsically lyrical genius of Goethe; his strength lay, not in song, but drama, and in a didactic form of epic--the song not of feeling, but of thought.
Descriptions of Nature occur here and there in his epics and dramas; but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his contemporaries, he passed through a sentimental period; Evening shews this, and Melancholy, to Laura:
Laura, a sunrise seems to break
Where'er thy happy looks may glow....
Thy soul--a crystal river passing,
Silver clear and sunbeam glassing,
Mays into blossom sad autumn by thee:
Night and desert, if they spy thee,
To gardens laugh--with daylight shine,
Lit by those happy smiles of thine!
With such ecstatic extravagances contrast the excellent descriptions of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems--for instance, the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in The Diver, evening in The Hostage, and landscape in William Tell and The Walk. In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery is made a 'frame for a kind of phenomenology of mankind.'
Flowers of all hue are struggling into glow
Along the blooming fields; yet their sweet strife
Melts into one harmonious concord. Lo!
The path allures me through the pastoral green
And the wide world of fields! The labouring bee
Hums round me, and on hesitating wing
O'er beds of purple clover, quiveringly
Hovers the butterfly. Save these, all life
Sleeps in the glowing sunlight's steady sheen--
E'en from the west no breeze the lull'd airs bring.
Hark! in the calm aloft I hear the skylark sing.
The thicket rustles near, the alders bow
Down their green coronals, and as I pass,
Waves in the rising wind the silvering grass;
Come! day's ambrosial night! receive me now
Beneath the roof by shadowy beeches made
Cool-breathing, etc.
Schiller's interest in Nature was more a matter of reflection than direct observation; its real tendency was philosophical and ethical. He called Nature naive (he included naturalness in Nature); those who seek her, sentimental; but he overlooked (as we saw in an earlier chapter) the fact that antiquity did not always remain naive, and that not all moderns are sentimental.
As Rousseau's pupil he drew a sharp distinction between Nature and Art, and felt happy in solitude where 'man with his torment does not come,' lying, as he says in The Bride of Messina, like a child on the bosom of Nature.
In Schiller's sense of the word, perhaps no poet has been more sentimental about Nature than Jean Paul.
He was the humorous and satirical idyllist par excellence, and laid the scenes of his romances in idyllic surroundings, using the trifling events of daily life to wonderful purpose. There is an almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious metaphors and mixture of ideas. With the exception of Lake Maggiore in Titan, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all his references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated with the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling. They all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own countryside, finding the reflection of their feelings in her. There is a constant interweaving of the human soul and the universe; therein lies his pantheistic trait. 'To each man,' he said,[[17]] 'Nature appears different, and the only question is, which is the most beautiful? Nature is for ever becoming flesh for mankind; outer Nature takes a different form in each mind.' Certainly the nature of Jean Paul was different from the Nature of other mortals. Was she more beautiful? He wrote of her in his usual baroque style, with a wealth of thought and feeling, and everywhere the sparkle of genius; but it is all presented in the strangest motley, as exaggerated and unenjoyable as can be. For example, from Siebenkâs:
I appeared again then on the last evening of the year 1794, on the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to the ocean of eternity.
To the butterfly--proboscis of Siebenkäs, enough honey--cells were still open in every blue thistle-blossom of destiny.
When they had passed the gate--that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it--the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and shining above the dark green earth, and the ocean-calm of Nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it) up above the world, and down beneath it the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far-reaching darkness.
When it was autumn in his heart:
Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead; above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all Nature, trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths.... But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs of Nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers.
When his married life grew more unhappy, in December:
The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet, as he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of Nature.
it seemed to him as if his life dwelt, not in a bodily heart, but in some warm and tender tear, as if his heavy-laden soul were expanding and breaking away through some chink in its prison, and melting into a tone of music, a blue ether wave.
And Titan expresses that inner enfranchisement which Nature bestows upon us:
Exalted Nature! when we see and love thee, we love our fellow-men more warmly, and when we must pity or forget them, thou still remainest with us, reposing before the moist eye like a verdant chain of mountains in the evening red. Ah! before the soul in whose sight the morning dew of its ideals has faded to a cold, grey drizzle ... thou remainest, quickening Nature, with thy flowers and mountains and cataracts, a faithful comforter; and the bleeding son of the gods, cold and speechless, dashes the drop of anguish from his eyes, that they may rest, far and clear, on thy volcanoes, and on thy springs and on thy suns.
This is sunset in his abstruse artistic handling:
The sun sinks, and the earth closes her great eye like that of a dying god. Then smoke the hills like altars; out of every wood ascends a chorus; the veils of day, the shadows, float around the enkindled transparent tree-tops, and fall upon the gay, gem-like flowers. And the burnished gold of the west throws back a dead gold on the east, and tinges with rosy light the hovering breast of the tremulous lark--the evening bell of Nature.
And this sunrise:
The flame of the sun now shot up ever nearer to the kindled morning clouds; at length in the heavens, in the brooks and ponds, and in the blooming cups of dew, a hundred suns rose together, while a thousand colours floated over the earth, and one pure dazzling white broke from the sky. It seemed as if an almighty earthquake had forced up from the ocean, yet dripping, a new-created blooming plain, stretching out beyond the bounds of vision, with all its young instincts and powers; the fire of earth glowed beneath the roots of the immense hanging garden, and the fire of heaven poured down its flames and burnt the colours into the mountain summits and the flowers. Between the porcelain towers of white mountains the coloured blooming heights stood as thrones of the Fruit-Goddess; over the far-spread camp of pleasure blossom-cups and sultry drops were pitched here and there like peopled tents; the ground was inlaid with swarming nurseries of grasses and little hearts, and one heart detached itself after another with wings, or fins, or feelers, from the hot breeding-cell of Nature, and hummed and sucked and smacked its little lips, and sung: and for every little proboscis some blossom-cup of; joy was already open. The darling child of the infinite mother, man, alone stood with bright joyful eyes upon the market-place of the living city of the sun, full of brilliance and noise, and gazed, delighted, around him into all its countless streets; but his eternal mother rested veiled in immensity, and only by the warmth which went to his heart did he feel that he was lying upon hers.
For very overflow of thought and imagery and ecstasy of feeling, Jean Paul never achieved a balanced beauty of expression.
The ideal classic standard which Winckelmann and Lessing had laid down--simple and plastic, calm because objective, crystal-clear in thought and expression--and which Goethe and Schiller had sought to realize and imbue with modern ideas, was too strictly limited for the Romanticists. Hyperion's words expressed their taste more accurately: 'O, man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks!' and they laid stress upon restless movement, fantastic, highly-coloured effects, a crass subjectivity, a reckless licence of the imagination.
Actual and visible things were disregarded; they did not accord with this claim for infinity and the nebulous, for exploring the secret depths of the soul.
It was perhaps a necessary reaction from Goethe's classicism; but it passed like a bad dream, after tending, thanks to its heterogeneous elements, now to the mediæval period, now to that of Storm and Stress, and now to Goethe, Herder, and Winckelmann. It certainly contained germs of good, which have grown and flourished in our own day.
In keeping with its whole character, the Romantic feeling for Nature was subjective and fantastic to excess, mystically enthusiastic, often with a dreamy symbolism at once deep and naive; its inmost core was pantheistic, with a pantheism shading off imperceptibly into mysticism.
After Werther, there is perhaps no work of modern fiction in which Nature plays so artistic a part as in Holderlin's Hyperion.
Embittered by life's failure to realize his ideals, he cries: 'But thou art still visible, sun in the sky! Thou art still green, sacred earth! The streams still rush to the sea, and shady trees rustle at noon. The spring's song of joy sings my mortal thoughts to sleep. The abundance of the universe nourishes and satiates my famished being to intoxication.'
This mystical pantheism could not be more clearly expressed than here:
O blessed Nature! I know not how it happens when I lift my eyes to your beauty; but all the joy of the sky is in the tears which I shed before you--a lover before the lady of his love. When the soft waves of the air play round my breast, my whole being is speechless and listens. Absorbed in the blue expanse, I often look up to the ether and down to the holy sea; and it seems as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of loneliness were lost in the divine life. To be one with all that lives, in blessed self-forgetfulness to return to the All of Nature, that is the height of thought and bliss--the sacred mountain height, the place of eternal rest, where noon loses its sultriness and thunder its voice, and the rough sea is like the waves in a field of wheat.
To such feeling as this the actualities are but fetters, hindering aspiration.
'O, if great Nature be the daughter of a father, is the daughter's heart not his heart? Is not he her deepest feeling? But have I found it? Do I know it?'
He tries to discern the 'soul of Nature,' hears 'the melody of morning light begin with soft notes.' He says to the flower, 'You are my sister,' and to the springs, 'We are of one race': he finds symbolic resemblance between his heart and all the days and seasons: he feels the beauty of the 'land like paradise,' while scarcely ever, except in the poem Heidelberg, giving a clear sketch of scenery. A number of fine comparisons from Nature are scattered through his writings [[18]]:
The caresses of the charming breezes.
She light, clear, flattering sea.
Sacred air, the sister of the mind which moves and
lives in us with fiery force, present everywhere immortal.
Earth, 'one of the flowers of the sky.'
Heaven, 'the unending garden of life.'
Beauty, that 'which is one and all.'
He describes his love in a mystical form:
We were but one flower, and our souls lived in each other as flowers do, when they love and hide their joy within a closed calyx.... The clear starry night had now become my element, for the beautiful life of my love grew in the stillness as in the depths of earth gold grows mysteriously.
He delights 'thus to drink the joy of the world out of one cup with the lady of his love.'
'Yea, man is a sun, seeing all and transfiguring all when he loves; and when he does not love, he is like a dark dwelling in which a little smelly lamp is burning.' All this is soft and feminine, but it has real poetic charm.
Beautiful too, though sad and gloomy, is his Song of Fate:
Nowhere may man abide,
But painfully from hour to hour
He stumbles blindly on to the unknown,
As water falls from rock to rock
The long year through.
His pantheism finds expression in the odes--in To Nature, for instance:
Since my heart turneth upward to the sun
As one that hears her voice,
Hailing the stars as brothers, and the spring
As melody divine;
Since in the breath that stirs the wood thy soul,
The soul of joy, doth move
On the still waters of my heart--therefore,
O Nature! these are golden days to me!
Tieck, too, was keenly alive to Nature. Spring[[19]]:
Look all around thee how the spring advances!
New life is playing through the gay green trees!
See how in yonder bower the light leaf dances
To the bird's tread and to the quivering breeze!
How every blossom in the sunlight glances!
The winter frost to his dark cavern flees,
And earth, warm wakened, feels through every vein
The kindling influence of the vernal rain.
Now silvery streamlets, from the mountain stealing,
Dance joyously the verdant vales along;
Cold fear no more the songster's tongue is sealing,
Down in the thick dark grove is heard his song.
And all their bright and lovely hues revealing,
A thousand plants the field and forest throng;
Light comes upon the earth in radiant showers,
And mingling rainbows play among the flowers.
All his writings seem intoxicated with Nature. The hero of his novel William Lovell, scamp though he is, a man of criminal egotism whose only law is licence, is deeply in love with Nature.
He wrote from Florence:
Nature refreshes my soul with her endless beauty. I am often full of enthusiasm at the thousand charms of Nature and Art ... at last my longing to travel to wonderful distant places is satisfied. Even as a child, when I stood outside my father's country-house, and gazed at the distant mountains and discovered a windmill on the very line of the horizon, it seemed to beckon me as it turned, my blood pulsed more quickly, my mind flew to distant regions, a strange longing often filled my eyes with tears.
Often it seems to me as if the enigma in ourselves were about to be unriddled, as if we were suddenly to see the transformation of all our feelings and strange experiences. Night surrounded me with a hundred terrors, the transparent moonlight sky was like a crystal dome overhead--in this world the most unusual feelings were as shadows.
'Franz Sternbald' had the same intoxicated feeling for Nature:
I should like to fill the whole world with songs of love, to move moonrise and sunrise to echo back my joys and sorrows; and trees, twigs, leaves, grasses to catch the melody and all repeat my music with a thousand tongues.[[20]]
To the Romantic School, Music and Nature were a passion; they longed to resolve all their feelings, like Byron, at one flash, into music. 'For thought is too distant.' Night and the forest, moonlight and starlight, were in all their songs.
There is a background of landscape all through Franz Sternbald's Wanderings.
In the novels of the eighteenth century landscape had had no place; Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he only wanted to fill up the page.
Rousseau altered this; Sophie la Roche, in her Freundschaftlichen Frauenzimmerbriefen, introduced ruins, moonlight scenery, hills, vales, and flowering hedges, etc., into scenes of thought and feeling; and most of all, Goethe in Werther tunes scenery and soul to one key. In his later romances he avoided descriptions of scenery. Jean Paul, like Tieck in Franz Sternbald, never spares us one sunset or sunrise. Some of Tieck's concise descriptions are very telling, like Theodore Storm's at the present day:
Rosy light quivered on the blades of grass, and morning moved in waves along them.
The redder the evening grew, the heavier became his dreams; the darkened trees, the shadows lengthening across the fields, the smoke from the roofs of a little village, and the stars coming into view one by one in the sky--all this moved him deeply, moved him to a wistful compassion for himself.
As Franz wanders about the wood:
He observes the trees reflected in a neighbouring pond. He had never looked at landscape with this pleasure, it had never been given to him to discern the various colours and their shadows, the charm of the stillness, the effect of the foliage, as now in the clear water. Till now he had never drawn a landscape, only looked at it as a necessary adjunct to many historical pictures, had never felt that lifeless Nature could herself compose something whole and complete in itself, and so worthy to be represented.
Tieck's shorter stories, fairy tales and others, shew taste for the mysterious and indefinite aspects of Nature--reflections in water, rays of light, cloud forms:
They became to him the most fitting characters in which to record that indefinite inexpressible feeling which gave its special colour to his spiritual life.[[21]]
The pantheism of Boehme, with whom he was closely associated, always attracted him, and in Jena he came under the influence of Steffens, and also of Schelling, whose philosophy of Nature called Nature a mysterious poem, a dreaming mind. This mind it became the chief aim of Novalis, as well as Tieck, to decipher.
From simple descriptions of Nature he went on to read mystic meanings into her, seeking, psychologically in his novels and mystically in his fairy tales, to fathom the connection between natural phenomena and elementary human feeling. Blond Egbert was the earliest example of this:
Night looked sullenly through the windows, and the trees without rustled in the wet cold ... the moon looked fitfully through breaks in the driving clouds.[[22]]
In the same book Bertha describes the horror of loneliness, the vague longings, and then the overwhelming delight in new impressions, which seized her when she fled from home as a child and lost herself among the mountains.
The Runenberg gives in a very powerful way the idea of the weird fascination which the subterranean powers were supposed to exert over men, alluring and befooling them, and rousing their thirst for gold.
The demoniacal elements in mountain scenery, its crags and abysses, are contrasted with idyllic plains. The tale is sprinkled over with descriptions of Nature, which give it a fairy-like effect.[[23]]
The most extraordinary product of this School was Novalis. With him everything resolved itself into presentiment, twilight, night, into vague longings for a vague distant goal, which he expressed by the search for 'the blue flower.' This is from Heinrich von Ofterdingen:
'The cheerful pageant of the glorious evening rocked him in soft imaginings; the flower of his heart was visible now and then as by sheet lightning.' He looked at Nature with the mystic's eye, and described her fantastically:
I am never tired of looking minutely at the different plants. Growing plants are the direct language of the earth; each new leaf, each remarkable flower, is a mystery which projects itself, and because it cannot move with love and longing, nor attain to words, is a dumb, quiet plant. When in solitude one finds such a flower, does it not seem as if all around it were brightened, and, best of all, do not the little feathered notes around it remain near? One could weep for joy, and there, far from the world, stick hands and feet into the earth, to take root, and never more leave so delightful a spot. This green mysterious carpet of love is drawn over the whole earth.
It is not surprising that night should attract this unnaturally excited imagination most of all:
Sacred, inexpressible, mysterious Night, delicious balsam drops from thy hands, from the poppy sheaf; thou upliftest the heavy wings of the Spirit.[[24]]
Night and death are delight and bliss.
The fairy-like tale of Hyacinth and Little Rose, with its charming personifications, is refreshing after all this:
The violet told the strawberry in confidence, she told her friend the gooseberry, who never ceased to jeer when Hyacinth went, so the whole garden and wood soon knew it, and when Hyacinth went out, voices from all sides cried out, 'Little Rose is my favourite.' When he goes into the wide world to find the land of Isis, he asks the way of the animals, and of springs, rocks, and trees, and the flowers smile at him, the springs offer him a fresh drink, and there is wonderful music when he comes home. 'O that men could understand the music of Nature!' cries the listener in the tale. Then follows a description of 'the sweet passion for the being of Nature and her enchanting raptures,' and the charm of the poetic imagination which finds 'a great sympathy with man's heart' in all the external world. For example, in the breath of wind, which 'with a thousand dark and dolorous notes seems to dissolve one's quiet grief into one deep melodious sigh of all Nature.'
'And am I myself other than the stream when I gaze gloomily down into its waters and lose my thoughts in its flow?' And in ecstasy the youth exclaims: 'Whose heart does not leap for joy, when he feels Nature's innermost life in its fulness, when that powerful feeling, for which language has no other name than love and bliss, spreads like a vapour through his being, and he sinks, palpitating, on the dark alluring breast of Nature, and his poor self is lost in the overwhelming waves of joy?'[[25]]
Here we have the key to the romantic feeling for Nature--communion of the soul with Nature in a twilight mood of dreamy absorption.
Yet amidst all this, real delight in romantic scenery was not quite lacking: witness Hulsen's[[26]] Observations on Nature on a Journey through Switzerland; and the genuine lyric of Nature, untainted by mystic and sickly influences, was still to be heard, as in Eichendorff's beautiful songs and his Tautgenichts.
The Romantic School, in fact, far as it erred from the path, did enlarge the life of feeling generally, and with that, feeling for Nature, and modern literature is still bound to it by a thousand threads.
Our modern rapture has thus been reached by a path which, with many deviations in its course, has come to us from a remote past, and is still carrying us farther forward.
Its present intensity is due to the growth of science, for although feeling has become more realistic and matter-of-fact in these days of electricity and the microscope, love for Nature has increased with knowledge. Science has even become the investigator of religion, and the pantheistic tendency of the great poets has passed into us, either in the idea of an all-present God, or in that of organic force working through matter--the indestructible active principle of life in the region of the visible. Our explorers combine enthusiasm for Nature with their tireless search for truth--for example, Humboldt, Haeckel, and Paul Güssfeldt; and though, as the shadow side to this light, travelling and admiration of Nature have become a fashion, yet who nowadays can watch a great sunset or a storm over the sea, and remain insensible to the impression?
Landscape painting and poetry shew the same deviations from the straight line of development as in earlier times. Our garden craft, like our architecture, is eclectic; but the English park style is still the most adequate expression of prevalent taste: spaces of turf with tree groups, a view over land or sea, gradual change from garden to field; to which has been added a wider cultivation of foreign plants. In landscape painting the zigzag course is very marked: landscapes such as Bocklin's, entirely projected by the imagination and corresponding to nothing on earth, hang together in our galleries with the most faithful studies from Nature. It is the same with literature. In fiction, novels which perpetuate the sentimental rhapsodies of an early period, and open their chapters with forced descriptions of landscape, stand side by side with the masterly work of great writers--for example, Spielhagen, Wilhelmine von Hillern, and Theodore Storm.
In poetry, the lyric of Nature is inexhaustible. Heine, the greatest lyrist after Goethe, though his poetry has, like the Nixie, an enchantingly fair body with a fish's tail, wrote in the Travels in the Harz: 'How infinitely blissful is the feeling when the outer world of phenomena blends and harmonizes with the inner world of feeling; when green trees, thoughts, birds' songs, sweet melancholy, the azure of heaven, memory, and the perfume of flowers, run together and form the loveliest of arabesques.'
But his delight in Nature was spoilt by irony and straining after effect--for example, in The Fig Tree; and although The Lotos Flower is a gem, and the North Sea Pictures shew the fine eye of a poet who, like Byron and Shelley, can create myths, his personifications as a whole are affected, and his personal feeling is forced upon Nature for the sake of a witty effect.
Every element of Nature has found skilled interpreters both in poetry and painting, and technical facility and truth of representation now stand on one level with the appreciation of her charms.