"Here (in Heiligenstadt, near Vienna, in the summer of 1808, lying by the brook with nut-trees, listening to the birds singing), I wrote the 'Scene by the Brook,' and the goldhammers there up above me, the quails and cuckoos round about me, helped compose."—Beethoven to Schindler. These last words throw a light on the oft-abused passage where the birds are imitated. We should not judge a Beethoven hastily—especially not assign to his action low grounds. We here see that the passage was not introduced in mere material imitation, but rather as a genial tribute and record; so the passage becomes beautiful, and the opposite of superficial. Emerson says, "Yon swallow weaving his straw into his nest should weave it into my poem." No doubt, in the savage—in his passionate love of freedom and roaming—we already find the germ of the poetic love of nature; and some two thousand years ago we find such sublime celebration as this (and what ages of evolution does it imply!)—
"As when in heaven the stars about the morn
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest." —Iliad (Tennyson).
"A rock-wall'd glen, water'd by a streamlet,
And shadowed o'er with pines." —Euripides (Milman).
"Yon starry conclave
Those glorious dynasts of the sky, that bear
Winter and summer round to mortal man."
—Aiskulos (Idem).
"Smooth lies the surface of the purple seas,
Nor curl'd, nor whiten'd, by the gentle breeze;
No more, hoarse dashing from the breakers steep,
The heavy waves recoil into the deep;
The zephyrs breathe, the murm'ring swallow weaves
Her straw-built chamber 'neath the shadowy eaves."
—Agathias (Idem).
And yesterday, was written—
"Vesuvius wears his brilliant plume
Above a sun-lit dome of snow;
And darkly thro' the illumin'd gloom
Extends his mighty base below:
On Mount St. Angelo's ponderous crest,
And in his furrows, snow, too, sleeps;
Great glitt'ring clouds are piled o'er that:
All rises out of glamourous deeps;
For, glinting up, thro' olive bowers,
And many an arm-outstretching tree,
Is the sun-tipt, early-winter-morning,
Slumberous, breathing sea."
In the sister arts—sister graces—painting and music, down to Turner and the Turner of music, Beethoven (he also would have given us the Python slaying Apollo, and the going home of the Teméraire, the Plague of Darkness, Æneas leaving Carthage, and Italy, Ancient and Modern: Schumann, too, is very Turner-like, perhaps more so, has more of that mystical glamour—Beethoven, like Rembrandt, only ideal); in the sister arts, Nature could not fail to be celebrated, or rather let us say ideally reproduced, and even transfigured, through the geniuses of these arts, her eldest children—nay, herself (made man). In Beethoven, then—a tone-poet, German, and born on the Rhine, at, perhaps, its grandest part—as we might expect, this worship and celebration of nature, this apotheosis in tone, culminates. Her sweetness and her grandeur, coloured, too, by his own Beethoven-soul, are by him sublimely revealed—in many a page and passage dear to the sympathetic knower. It was, then, impossible that Beethoven should not write (betitled or not) a Pastoral Symphony; and this, if only as one manifestation of his (like nature) many-sidedness. Moreover, though the Greek poesy reads as fresh as if written yesterday, nevertheless nature-worship, such as we understand it—an overpowering sense of her mysticism, a rapturous losing of ourselves in her—seems a thing not only specially Teutonic and modern, but modern even among the Teutonic peoples themselves, dating after the Reformation; and, indeed, almost as though nature-worship was to supply the place of religion (in the narrow sense, worship of an anthropomorphic maker of nature), rapture in her to supply the place of religious rapture, no longer possible; if so, a beautiful ordinance! Hence, then, if we go a little way below the surface, the present masterpiece, Beethoven's universally favourite (though far from greatest, indeed, the Symphony in D is superior—much more powerful, especially the first movement, and at least equally fresh) "Pastoral Symphony." It does not, indeed (at least the opening allegro), celebrate that peculiar, that sacred sentiment we have been speaking of; it does not utter the unutterable, but it is a true and lovely nature-poem nevertheless, worthy of all acceptation; without it the splendid series of symphonies would have been incomplete. Let us approach it.