He called Naples 'very pretty and big,' and on: 'Then the king took us to the sea and shewed us the ports, which are pretty and strong with bulwarks and gates; we saw many beautiful ships too,' etc. One does not know which is the more wonderful here, the poverty of the description or the utter lack of personal observation: what the wood produced, and how one was protected from the sea, was more important to the writer than wood and sea themselves, and this, even in speaking of the Bay of Naples, perhaps the most beautiful spot in Europe. But instances like these are typical of German descriptions at the time, and their Alpine travels fared no better.[[4]]
Geographical knowledge of the Alps advanced very slowly; there was as yet no æsthetic enjoyment of their beauty. The Frankish historians (Gregory of Tours, Fredegar) chronicled special events in the Alps, but very briefly. Fredegar, for instance, knew of the sudden appearance of a hot spring in the Lake of Thun, and Gregory of Tours notes that the land-slip in 563 at the foot of the Dent du Midi, above the point where the Rhine enters the Lake of Geneva, was a dreadful event. Not only was the Castle of Tauretunum overwhelmed, but the blocking of the Rhine caused a deluge felt as far as Geneva. The pious prince of the Church explained this as a portent of another catastrophe, the pest, which ravaged Gaul soon after.
There was much fabling at that time in the legends of saints, about great mines of iron, gold, and silver, and about chamois and buck, cattle-breeding and Alpine husbandry in the 'regio montana'; for example, in von Aribo's Vita S. Emmerani. When the Alps became more frequented, especially when, through Charlemagne, a political bridge came to unite Italy and Germany, new roads were made and the whole region was better known--in fact, early in mediæval times, not only political, but ecclesiastical and mercantile life spread its threads over a great part of the known world, and began to bind the lives of nations together, so that the Alps no longer remained terra incognita to dwellers far and near.
We have accounts of Alpine journeys by the Abbé Majolus v. Clugny (970), Bernard v. Hildesheim (1101), Aribert v. Mailand, Anno v. Coeln[[5]], but without a trace of orography. They scarcely refer to the snow and glacier regions from the side of physical geography, or even of æsthetic feeling; and do not mention the mountain monarchs so familiar to-day--Mt. Blanc, the Jungfrau, Ortner, Glockner, etc.--which were of no value to their life, practical or scientific. These writers record nothing but names of places and their own troubles and dangers in travelling, especially in winter. And even at the end of the fifteenth century, German travels across the Alps were written in the same strain--for example, the account of the voyage of the Elector-Palatine Alexander v. Zweibrücken and Count Joh. Ludwig zu Nassau (1495-96) from Zurich Rapperschwyl and Wesen to Wallensee: 'This is the real Switzerland; has few villages, just a house here and a house there, but beautiful meadows, much cattle, and very high mountains, on which snow lies, which falls before Christmas, and is as hard as any rock.' As an exception to this we have a vivid and poetic description of the famous Verona Pass in Latin verse by Guntherus Ligurinus.
Günther's description of this notorious ravine, between sky-high Alps, with the torrent rushing at the bottom and a passage so narrow that men could only move forward one by one, sounds like a personal experience. This twelfth-century poem comes to us, in fact, like a belated echo of Fortunatus.
We must now enquire whether the chief representatives of German literature at this time shewed any of the national love of Nature, whether the influence of the Crusades was visible in them, how far scenery took a place in epic and song, and whether, as moderns have so often stated, mediæval Germany stood high above antiquity in this respect. Gervinus, a classic example on the last point, in the section of his history of German poetry which treats of the difference between the German fables about animals on the one hand, and Esop's and the Oriental on the other, said:
The way in which animals are handled in the fables demanded a far slighter familiarity between them and men; so exact a knowledge as we see in the German fables, often involving knowledge of their natural history, such insight into the 'privacy of the animal world,' belonged to quite another kind of men. Antiquity did not delight in Nature, and delight in Nature is the very foundation of these poems. Remote antiquity neither knew nor sought to know any natural history; but only wondered at Nature. The art of hunting and the passion for it, often carried to excess in the Middle Ages, was unknown to it. It is a bold remark of Grimm's that he could smell the old smell of the woods in the German animal poems, but it is one whose truth every one will feel, who turns to this simple poetry with an open mind, who cares for Nature and life in the open.
This is a very tangle of empty phrases and misstatements. No people stood in more heartfelt and naive relation to Nature, especially to the animal world, than the Hindoos and Persians. In earlier enquiries[[6]] we have reviewed the naive feeling displayed in Homer and the sentimental in Hellenism, and have seen that the taste for hunting increased knowledge of Nature in the open in Hellenic days far more than in the Middle Ages. We shall see now that the level of feeling reached in those and imperial Roman days was not regained in European literature until long after the fall of Latin poetry, and that it was the fertilizing influence of that classic spirit, and that alone, which enabled the inborn German taste for Nature, and for hunting, and plant and animal life, to find artistic expression. It was a too superficial knowledge of classic literature, and an inclination to synthesis, and clever a priori argument (a style impressed upon his day by Hegel's method, and fortunately fast disappearing), which led Gervinus to exalt the Middle Ages at the expense of antiquity. It sounds like a weak concession when he says elsewhere:
Joy in Nature, which is peculiar to modern times, in contrast to antiquity, which is seen in the earliest mediæval poems, and in which, moreover, expiring antiquity came to meet the German--this joy in Nature, in dwelling on plant and animal life, is the very soul of this (animal) poetry. As in its plastic art, so in all its poetry, antiquity only concerned itself with gods and heroes; its glance was always turned upwards.
But, as a fact, no one has ever stood with feet more firmly planted on this earth than the Greek, enjoying life and undeterred by much scruple or concern as to the powers above; and centuries of development passed before German literature equalled Greek in love of Nature and expressive representation of her beauty.