No one can study French mediæval lore, or Gothic cathedral, or Book of Hours, without realising how great a love of Nature prevailed in the late Middle Ages. The poems tell of spring, “the season of delight,” of gardens which suffice “for loss of Paradise,” and of birds “with soft melodious chant.” In the dim stillness of the cathedral, Nature is expressed in infinite variety. Foliage grows in the hollows of the mouldings, and sometimes, as at Chartres, even the shafts, as they tower into the gloom, end in half-opened leaves, suggestive of spring, of hope, and of aspiration. Many a sunny façade shows us scenes of rural life—sowing, reaping, vine-dressing, and so forth—fashioned as a calendar in stone, and many a peasant must have rejoiced as he saw himself and his occupation thus represented in effigy. Fortunately for the poor toiler, the Church not only taught that “to labour is to worship,” but further honoured work by thus representing it at the very entrance to the sanctuary, so making it, as it were, the “open sesame” to higher things.
In Books of Hours and illuminated MSS., before the complete border of flowers, birds, and small grotesques was developed, we find ornamental flourishes, like the growth of ivy and hawthorn, splendidly free in design, and painted with evident joy even in the minutest bud or tendril. Everywhere may this love of Nature striving for expression be seen. But we must turn to the poems and romances if we would fully realise it in all its simplicity and truth, since it is in these alone that we get at the actual mediæval feeling unalloyed with all that we ourselves have, perhaps unwittingly, read into it.
Photo. Macbeth.
BOOK OF HOURS.
French, 14th Century, Brit. Mus.
To face page 176.
“All hearts are uplifted and made glad in the time of April and May, when once again the meadows and the pastures become green.” So says one of the old romancers. And this joy in returning spring seems to have pervaded mediæval thought and expression. Little is this to be wondered at when we call to mind the long dreary winters spent in cold and ill-lit castles, or in dark, draughty houses and hovels. Before glass, long regarded as a luxury, came into general use in dwellings, the only protection from rain and cold consisted in wooden shutters, or movable frames with horn slabs (necessarily small), or varnished parchment. In truth, the only warm, bright place was the chimney corner, and here, as near as might be to the blazing logs, the long days of winter were spent in chess-playing, broidery, lute-playing, and love-making, the monotony of this only occasionally broken by the arrival of some wandering minstrel who sang of war and love, or of some packman laden with sundry wares prized of womankind. But in winter such wayfarers were rare, and life was, perforce, one of boredom and discomfort. Thus there was exceeding joy when “woods and thickets donned their rich green mantling of resplendent sheen.”