Again, upon this comes the sentimental feeling for Nature, a sort of sympathy created by interest and imagination. Among early races this, like other feelings, expresses itself in the forms of mythology, and half personifies the outer world, giving the tree her Dryad and the fountain her Nymph, making Pan and Echo meet in the forest glade. When the mythological instinct has ceased to be active, it results in sentimental description, sometimes realistic in detail, sometimes largely or even wholly conventional. It has always in it something of a reaction, real or affected, from crowds and the life of cities, an attempt to regain simplicity by isolation from the complex fabric of society.
Once more, the feeling for Nature may go deeper than the senses and the imagination, and become moral. The outer world is then no more a spectacle only, but the symbol of a meaning, the embodiment of a soul. Earth, the mother and fostress, receives our sympathy and gives us her own. The human spirit turns away from itself to seek sustenance from the mountains and the stars. The whole outer universe becomes the visible and sensible language of an ideal essence; and dawn or sunset, winter or summer, is of the nature of a sacrament.
There is over and above all these another sense in which we may speak of the feeling for Nature; and in regard to poetry it is perhaps the most important of all. But it no longer follows, like the rest, a sort of law of development in human nature generally; it is confined to art, and among the arts is eminent in poetry beyond the rest. This is the romantic or magical note. It cannot be analysed, perhaps it cannot be defined; the insufficiency of all attempted definitions of poetry is in great part due to the impossibility of their including this final quality, which, like some volatile essence, escapes the moment the phial is touched. In the poetry of all ages, even in the periods where it has been most intellectual and least imaginative, come sudden lines like the /Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles/ of Corneille, like the /Placed far amid the melancholy main/ of Thomson, where the feeling for Nature cannot be called moral, and yet stirs us like the deepest moral criticism upon life, rising as far beyond the mere idealism of sentiment as it does beyond the utmost refinement of realistic art.
In all these different forms the feeling for Nature may be illustrated from Greek poetry; but the broad fact remains that Nature on the whole has a smaller part than it has with modern poets. Descriptive pieces are executed in a slighter manner, and on the whole with a more conventional treatment. Landscapes, for example, are always a background, never (or hardly ever) the picture itself. The influence of mythology on art was so overwhelming that, down to the last, it determined the treatment of many subjects where we should now go directly to the things themselves. Especially is this so with what has been described as the moral feeling for nature. Among "the unenlightened swains of Pagan Greece," as Wordsworth says, the deep effect of natural beauty on the mind was expressed under the forms of a concrete symbolism, a language to which literature had grown so accustomed that they had neither the power nor the wish to break free from it. The appeal indeed from man to Nature, and especially the appeal to Nature as knowing more about man's destiny than he knows himself, was unknown to the Greek poets. But this feeling is sentimental, not moral; and with them too "something far more deeply interfused" stirred the deepest sources of emotion. The music of Pan, at which the rustle of the oakwood ceases and the waterfall from the cliff is silent and the faint bleating of the sheep dies away,[1] is the expression in an ancient language of the spirit of Nature, fixed and embodied by the enchanting touch of art.
Of the epigrams which deal primarily with the sensuous feeling for Nature, the most common are those on the delight of summer, rustling breezes and cold springs and rest under the shadow of trees. In the ardours of midday the traveller is guided from the road over a grassy brow to an ice-cold spring that gushes out of the rock under a pine; or lying idly on the soft meadow in the cool shade of the plane, is lulled by the whispering west wind through the branches, the monotone of the cicalas, the faint sound of a far-off shepherd's pipe floating down the hills; or looking up into the heart of the oak, sees the dim green roof, layer upon layer, mount and spread and shut out the sky.[2] Or the citizen, leaving the glare of town, spends a country holiday on strewn willow-boughs with wine and music,[3] as in that most perfect example of the poetry of a summer day, the /Thalysia/ of Theocritus. Down to a late Byzantine period this form of poetry, the nearest approach to pure description of nature in the old world, remained alive; as in the picture drawn by Arabius of the view from a villa on the shore of the Propontis, with its gardens set between wood and sea, where the warbling of birds mingled with the distant songs of the ferrymen.[4] Other landscape poems, as they may be called, remarkable for their clear and vivid portraiture, are that of Mnasalcas,[5] the low shore with its bright surf, and the temple with its poplars round which the sea-fowl hover and cry, and that of Anyte,[6] the windy orchard-close near the grey colourless coast, with the well and the Hermes standing over it at the crossways. But such epigrams always stop short of the description of natural objects for their own sake, for the mere delight in observing and speaking about them. Perhaps the nearest approach that Greek poetry makes to this is in a remarkable fragment of Sophocles,[7] describing the shiver that runs through the leaves of a poplar when all the other trees stand silent and motionless.
The descriptions of Nature too are, as a rule, not only slightly sketched, but kept subordinate to a human relation. The brilliance and loveliness of spring is the background for the picture of the sailor again putting to sea, or the husbandman setting his plough at work in the furrow; the summer woods are a resting-place for the hot and thirsty traveller; the golden leaves of autumn thinning in the frosty night, making haste to be gone before the storms of rough November, are a frame for the boy beneath them.[8] The life of earth is rarely thought of as distinct from the life of man. It is so in a few late epigrams. The complaint of the cicala, torn away by shepherds from its harmless green life of song and dew among the leaves, and the poem bidding the blackbird leave the dangerous oak, where, with its breast against a spray, it pours out its clear music,[9] are probably of Roman date; another of uncertain period but of great beauty, an epitaph on an old bee-keeper who lived alone on the hills with the high woods and pastures for his only neighbours, contrasts with a strangely modern feeling the perpetuity of nature and the return of the works of spring with the brief life of man that ends once for all on a cold winter night.[10]
Between the simply sensuous and the deep moral feeling for nature lies the broad field of pastoral. This is not the place to enter into the discussion of pastoral poetry; but it must be noted in passing that it does not imply of necessity any deep love, and still less any close observation, of nature. It looks on nature, as it looks on human life, through a medium of art and sentiment; and its treatment of nature depends less on the actual world around it than on the prevalent art of the time. Greek art concentrated its efforts on the representation of the human figure, and even there preferred the abstract form and the rigid limitations of sculpture; and the poetry that saw, as it were, through the eyes of art sought above all things simplicity of composition and clearness of outline. The scanty vocabulary of colour in Greek poetry, so often noticed, is a special and patent example of this difference in the spirit with which Nature was regarded. As the poetry of Chaucer corresponds, in its wealth and intimacy of decoration, to the illuminations and tapestries of the middle ages, so the epigrams given under this section constantly recall the sculptured reliefs and the engraved gems of Greek art.
But any such general rules must be taken with their exceptions. As there is a risk of reading modern sentiment into ancient work, and even of fixing on the startling modernisms that occur in Greek poetry,[11] and dwelling on them till they assume an exaggerated importance, so there is a risk perhaps as great of slurring over the inmost quality, the poetry of the poetry, where it has that touch of romance or magic that sets it beyond all our generalisations. The magical charm is just what cannot be brought under any rules; it is the result less of art than of instinct, and is almost independent of time and place. The lament of the swallow in an Alexandrian poet[12] touches the same note of beauty and longing that Keats drew from the song of the nightingale; the couplet of Satyrus, where echo repeats the lonely cry of the birds,[13] is, however different in tone, as purely romantic as the opening lines of /Christabel/. —————
[1] Anth. Pal. ix. 823.
[2] App. Plan. 230, 227; Anth. Pal. ix. 71.