E'en as when o'er the parching flame there glows A flame, which may from some chance cause ignite, (All while the whistling, puffing Boreas blows), Fanned by the wind sets all the growth alight, The shepherd's group, lying in their repose Of quiet sleep, aroused in wild afright At crackling flames that spread both wide and high, Gather their goods and to the village fly; So doth the Moor.

E'en as the daisy which once brightly smiled, Plucked by unruly hands before its hour, And harshly treated by the careless child, All in her chaplet tied with artless power. Droops, of its colour and its scent despoiled, So seems this pale and lifeless damsel flower; The roses of her lips are dry and dead, With her sweet life the mingled white and red.

The following simile reminds us of the far-fetched comparison of Apollonios Rhodios[11]:

As the reflected lustre from the bright Steel mirror, or of beauteous crystal fine, Which, being stricken by the solar light, Strikes back and on some other part doth shine; And when, to please the child's vain curious sight, Moved o'er the house, as may his hand incline, Dances on walls and roof and everywhere, Restless and tremulous, now here now there, So did the wandering judgment fluctuate.

He says of Diana:

And, as confronted on her way she pressed, So beautiful her form and bearing were, That everything that saw her love confessed, The stars, the heaven, and the surrounding air.

The Indus and Ganges are personified in stanza xiv. 74, the Cape in v. 50.

His time references are mostly mixed up with ancient mythology:

As soon, however, as the enamelled morn O'er the calm heaven her lovely looks outspread, Opening to bright Hyperion, new-born, Her purple portals as he raised his head, Then the whole fleet their ships with flags adorn.

and:

So soon, however, as great Sol has spread His rays o'er earth, whom instantly to meet, Her purple brow Aurora rising shews, And rudely life around the horizon throws.

He is at his best in writing of the sea.

He says of the explorers on first setting sail:

Now were they sailing o'er wide ocean bright, The restless waves dividing as they flew; The winds were breathing prosperous and light, The vessels' hollow sails were filled to view; The seas were covered o'er with foaming white Where the advancing prows were cutting through The consecrated waters of the deep.... Thus went we forth these unknown seas to explore, Which by no people yet explored had been; Seeing new isles and climes which long before Great Henry, first discoverer, had seen.

Now did the moon in purest lustre rise On Neptune's silvery waves her beams to pour, With stars attendant glittered all the skies, E'en like a meadow daisy-spangled o'er; The fury of the winds all peaceful lies In the dark caverns close along the shore, But still the night-watch constant vigils keep, As long had been their custom on the deep.

To tell thee of the dangers of the sea At length, which human understanding scare, Thunder-storms, sudden, dreadful in degree, Lightnings, which seem to set on fire the air, Dark floods of rain, nights of obscurity, Rollings of thunder which the world would tear, Were not less labour than a great mistake, E'en if I had an iron voice to speak.

He describes the electric fires of St Elmo and the gradual development of the waterspout:

I saw, and clearly saw, the living light Which sailors everywhere as sacred hold In time of storm and crossing winds that fight, Of tempest dark and desperation cold; Nor less it was to all a marvel quite, And matter surely to alarm the bold, To observe the sea-clouds, with a tube immense, Suck water up from Ocean's deep expanse.... A fume or vapour thin and subtle rose, And by the wind begin revolving there; Thence to the topmost clouds a tube it throws, But of a substance so exceeding rare.... But when it was quite gorged it then withdrew The foot that on the sea beneath had grown, And o'er the heavens in fine it raining flew, The jacent waters watering with its own.

The storm at sea reminds us of AEschylus in splendour:

The winds were such, that scarcely could they shew With greater force or greater rage around, Than if it were this purpose then to blow The mighty tower of Babel to the ground.... Now rising to the clouds they seem to go O'er the wild waves of Neptune borne on end; Now to the bowels of the deep below; It seems to all their senses, they descend; Notus and Auster, Boreas, Aquila, The very world's machinery would rend; While flashings fire the black and ugly night And shed from pole to pole a dazzling light.... But now the star of love beamed forth its ray, Before the sun, upon the horizon clear, And visited, as messenger of day, The earth and spreading sea, with brow to cheer....

And, as it subsides:

The mountains that we saw at first appeared, In the far view, like clouds and nothing more.

Off the coast of India:

Now o'er the hills broke forth the morning light Where Ganges' stream is murmuring heard to flow, Free from the storm and from the first sea's fight, Vain terror from their hearts is banished now.

His magic island, the Ilha of Venus, could only have been imagined by a poet who had travelled widely. All the delights of the New World are there, with the vegetation of Southern Europe added. It is a poet's triumphant rendering of impressions which the discoverers so often felt their inability to convey:

From far they saw the island fresh and fair, Which Venus o'er the waters guiding drove (E'en as the wind the canvas white doth bear).... Where the coast forms a bay for resting-place, Curved and all quiet, and whose shining sand Is painted with red shells by Venus' hand.... Three beauteous mounts rise nobly to the view, Lifting with graceful pride their sweeling head, O'er which enamelled grass adorning grew. In this delightful lovely island glad, Bright limpid streams their rushing waters threw From heights with rich luxuriant verdure clad, 'Midst the white rocks above, their source derive, The streams sonorous, sweet, and fugitive.... A thousand trees toward heaven their summits raise, With fruits odoriferous and fair; The orange in its produce bright displays The tint that Daphne carried in her hair; The citron on the ground its branches lays, Laden with yellow weights it cannot bear; The beauteous melons, which the whole perfume The virgin bosom in their form assume. The forest trees, which on the hills combine To ennoble them with leafy hair o'ergrown, Are poplars of Alcides; laurels shine, The which the shining God loved as his own; Myrtles of Cytherea with the pine Of Cybele, by other love o'erthrown; The spreading cypress tree points out where lies The seat of the ethereal paradise.... Pomegranates rubicund break forth and shine, A tint whereby thou, ruby, losest sheen. 'Twixt the elm branches hangs the jocund vine, With branches some of red and some of green.... Then the refined and splendid tapestry, Covering the rustic ground beneath the feet, Makes that of Achemeina dull to be, But makes the shady valley far more sweet. Cephisian flowers with head inclined we see About the calm and lucid lake's retreat.... 'Twas difficult to fancy which was true, Seeing on heaven and earth all tints the same, If fair Aurora gave the flowers their time, Or from the lovely flowers to her it came; Flora and Zephyr there in painting drew The violets tinted, as of lovers' flame, The iris, and the rose all fair and fresh E'en as it doth on cheek of maiden blush.... Along the water sings the snow-white swan, While from the branch respondeth Philomel.... Here, in its bill, to the dear nest, with care, The rapid little bird the food doth bear.

Subjective feeling for Nature is better displayed in the lyric than the epic.

The Spaniard, Fray Luis de Leon, was a typical example of a sixteenth-century lyrist; full of mild enthusiasm for Nature, the theosophico-mystical attitude of the Catholic.

A most fervid feeling for Nature from the religious side breathed in St Francis of Assisi—the feeling which inspired his hymn to Brother Sun (Cantico del Sole), and led his brother Egidio, intoxicated with love to his Creator, to kiss trees and rocks and weep over them[12]:

Praised by His creatures all, Praised be the Lord my God By Messer Sun, my brother above all, Who by his rays lights us and lights the day— Radiant is she, with his great splendour stored, Thy glory, Lord, confessing. By Sister Moon and Stars my Lord is praised, Where clear and fair they in the heavens are raised By Brother Wind, etc....

His follower, Bonaventura, too, in his verses counted—

The smallest creatures his brothers and sisters, and called upon crops, vineyards, trees, flowers, and stars to praise God.

Bernard von Clairvaux made it a principle 'to learn from the earth, trees, corn, flowers, and grass'; and he wrote in his letter to Heinrich Murdach (Letter 106):

Believe me, I have proved it; you will find more in the woods than in books; trees and stones will teach you what no other teacher can.

He looked upon all natural objects as 'rays of the Godhead,' copies of a great original.

His contemporary, Hugo von St Victor, wrote:

The whole visible world is like a book written by the finger of God. It is created by divine power, and all human beings are figures placed in it, not to shew the free-will of man, but as a revelation and visible sign, by divine will, of God's invisible wisdom. But as one who only glances at an open book sees marks on it, but does not read the letters, so the wicked and sensual man, in whom the spirit of God is not, sees only the outer surface of visible beings and not their deeper parts.

German mystics wrote in the same strain; for instance, the popular Franciscan preacher, Berthold von Regensburg (1272),

Whose sermons on fields and meadows drew many thousands of hearers, and moved them partly by the unusual freshness and vitality of his pious feeling for Nature,

in spite of many florid symbolical accessories, such as we find again in Ekkehart and other fifteenth-century mystics, and especially in Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroek.

The northern prophetess and foundress of an Order Birgitta (1373) held that the breath of the Creator was in all visible things: 'We feel it pervading us in her visions,' says Hammerich,[13]

Whether by gurgling brook or snow-covered firs. It is with us when the prophetess leads us along the ridges of the Swedish coast with their surging waves or down the shaft of a mine, or to wander in the quiet of evening through vineyards between roses and lilies, while the dew is falling and the bells ring out the Ave Maria.

Vincentius von Beauvais (1264) in his Speculum Naturae demonstrates the value of studying Nature from a religious and moral point of view; and the Carthusian general, Dionysius von Rickel (1471), in his paper On the beauty of the world and the glory of God (De venustate mundi et de pulchritudine Dei) says in Chapter xxii.: 'All the beauty of the animal world is nothing but the reflection and out-flow of the original beauty of God,' and gives as special examples:

Roses, lilies, and other beautiful and fragrant flowers, shady woods, pine trees, pleasant meadows, high, mountains, springs, streams and rivers, and the broad arm of the immeasurable sea ... and above all shine the stars, completing their course in the clear sky in wonderful splendour and majestic order.

Raymundus von Sabieude, a Spaniard, who studied medicine and philosophy at Toulouse, and wrote his Theologia Naturalis in 1436, considered Nature, like Thomas Aquinas, from a mystical and scholastic point of view, as made up of living beings in a graduated scale from the lowest to the highest; and he lauded her in terms which even Pope Clement VII. thought exaggerated. Piety in him went hand in hand with a natural philosophy like Bacon's, and his interest in Nature was rather a matter of intellect than feeling.

God has given us two books—the book of all living beings, or Nature, and the Holy Scriptures. The first was given to man from the beginning when all things were created, for each living being is but a letter of the alphabet written by the finger of God, and the book is composed of them all together as a book is of letters ... man is the capital letter of this book. This book is not like the other, falsified and spoilt, but familiar and intelligible; it makes man joyous and humble and obedient, a hater of evil and a lover of virtue.

Among the savants of the Renaissance who applied the inductive method to Nature before Bacon,[14] we must include the thoughtful and pious Spaniard Luis Vives (1540), who wrote concerning the useless speculations of alchemists and astrologers about occult things: 'It is not arguing that is needed here, but silent observation of Nature.' Knowledge of Nature, he said, would serve both body and soul.

The tender religious lyrics of the mystic, Luis de Leon, followed next.[15] His life (1521-1591) brings us up to the days of the Inquisition. He himself, an excellent teacher and man of science, was imprisoned for years for opinions too openly expressed in his writings; but with all his varied fortunes he never lost his innate manliness and tenderness. His biographer tells us, that as soon as the holidays began, he would hurry away from the gloomy lecture rooms and the noisy students at Salamanca, to the country, where he had taken an estate belonging to a monastery at the foot of a hill by a river, with a little island close by.

It had a large uncultivated garden, made beautiful by fine old trees, with paths among the vines and a stream running through it to the river, and a long avenue of poplars whose rustle blended with the noise of the mill-wheel. Beyond was a view of fields. Leon would sit for hours here undisturbed, dipping his feet in the brook under a poplar—the tree which was reputed to flourish on sand alone and give shelter to all the birds under heaven—while the rustle of the leaves sang his melancholy to sleep. His biographer goes on to say that he had the Spaniard's special delight in Nature, and understood her language and her secrets; and the veiled splendour of her tones, colours, and forms could move him to tears. As he sat there gazing at the clouds, he felt lifted up in heart by the insignificance of all things in comparison with the spirit of man.

In the pitching and tossing of his 'ships of thought' he never lost the consciousness of Nature's beauty, and would pray the clouds to carry his sighs with them in their tranquil course through heaven. He loved the sunrise, birds, flowers, bees, fishes; nothing was meaningless to him; all things were letters in a divine alphabet, which might bring him a message from above. Nature was symbolic; the glow of dawn meant the glow of divine love; a wide view, true freedom; rays of sunshine, rays of divine glory; the setting sun, eternal light; stars, flowers of light in an everlasting spring.

His love for the country, especially for its peacefulness, was free from the folly and excess of the pastoral poetry of his day. He did not paint Nature entirely for her own sake; man was always her master[16] in his poems, and he sometimes, very finely, introduced himself and his affairs at the close, and represented Nature as addressing himself.

His descriptions are short, and he often tries to represent sounds onomato-poetically.

This is from his ode, Quiet Life[17]:

O happy he who flies Far from the noisy world away— Who with the worthy and the wise Hath chosen the narrow way. The silence of the secret road That leads the soul to virtue and to God!... O streams, and shades, and hills on high, Unto the stillness of your breast My wounded spirit longs to fly— To fly and be at rest. Thus from the world's tempestuous sea, O gentle Nature, do I turn to thee.... A garden by the mountain side Is mine, whose flowery blossoming Shews, even in spring's luxuriant pride, What Autumn's suns shall bring: And from mountain's lofty crown A clear and sparkling rill comes tumbling down; Then, pausing in its downward force The venerable trees among, It gurgles on its winding course; And, as it glides along, Gives freshness to the day and pranks With ever changing flowers its mossy banks. The whisper of the balmy breeze Scatters a thousand sweets around, And sweeps in music through the trees With an enchanting sound That laps the soul in calm delight Where crowns and kingdoms are forgotten quite.

The poem, The Starry Sky,[18] is full of lofty enthusiasm for Nature and piety:

When yonder glorious sky Lighted with million lamps I contemplate, And turn my dazzled eye To this vain mortal state All mean and visionary, mean and desolate, A mingled joy and grief Fills all my soul with dark solicitude.... List to the concert pure Of yon harmonious countless worlds of light. See, in his orbit sure Each takes his journey bright, Led by an unseen hand through the vast maze of night. See how the pale moon rolls Her silver wheel.... See Saturn, father of the golden hours, While round him, bright and blest, The whole empyrean showers Its glorious streams of light on this low world of ours. But who to these can turn And weigh them 'gainst a weeping world like this, Nor feel his spirit burn To grasp so sweet a bliss And mourn that exile hard which here his portion is? For there, and there alone, Are peace and joy and never dying love: Day that shall never cease, No night there threatening, No winter there to chill joy's ever-during spring. Ye fields of changeless green Covered with living streams and fadeless flowers; Thou paradise serene, Eternal joyful hours Thy disembodied soul shall welcome in thy towers!

It was chiefly in Spanish literature at this time that Nature was used allegorically. Tieck[19] says: 'In Calderon's poetry, and that of his contemporaries, we often find, in romances and song-like metres, most charming descriptions of the sea, mountains, gardens, and woody valleys, but almost always used allegorically, and with an artistic polish which ends by giving us, not so much a real impression of Nature, as one of clever description in musical verse, repeated again and again with slight variations.' This is true of Leon, but far more of Calderon, since it belongs to the very essence of drama. But, despite his passion for description and his Catholic and conventional tone, there is inexhaustible fancy, splendid colour, and a modern element of individuality in his poems. His heroes are conscious of their own ego, feel themselves to be 'a miniature world,' and search out their own feelings 'in the wild waves of emotion' (as Aurelian, for example, in Zenobia).

Fernando says in The Constant Prince:

These flowers awoke in beauty and delight At early dawn, when stars began to set; At eve they leave us but a fond regret, Locked in the cold embraces of the night. These shades that shame the rainbow's arch of light. Where gold and snow in purple pomp are met, All give a warning man should not forget, When one brief day can darken things so bright. 'Tis but to wither that the roses bloom— 'Tis to grow old they bear their beauteous flowers, One crimson bud their cradle and their tomb. Such are man's fortunes in this world of ours; They live, they die; one day doth end their doom, For ages past but seem to us like hours.

The warning which Zenobia gives her captor in his hour of triumph to beware of sudden reverses of fortune is finely conceived:

Morn comes forth with rays to crown her, While the sun afar is spreading Golden cloths most finely woven All to dry her tear-drops purely. Up to noon he climbs, then straightway Sinks, and then dark night makes ready For the burial of the sea Canopies of black outstretching— Tall ships fly on linen pinions, On with speed the breezes send it, Small the wide seas seem and straitened, To its quick flight onward tending. Yet one moment, yet one instant, And the tempest roars, uprearing Waves that might the stars extinguish, Lifted for that ship's o'erwhelming. Day, with fear, looks ever nightwards, Calms must storm await with trembling; Close behind the back of pleasure Evermore stalks sadness dreary.

In Life's a Dream Prince Sigismund, chained in a dark prison, says:

What sinned I more herein Than others, who were also born? Born the bird was, yet with gay Gala vesture, beauty's dower, Scarcely 'tis a winged flower Or a richly plumaged spray, Ere the aerial halls of day It divideth rapidly, And no more will debtor be To the nest it hates to quit; But, with more of soul than it, I am grudged its liberty. And the beast was born, whose skin Scarce those beauteous spots and bars, Like to constellated stars, Doth from its greater painter win Ere the instinct doth begin: Of its fierceness and its pride, And its lair on every side, It has measured far and nigh; While, with better instinct, I Am its liberty denied. Born the mute fish was also, Child of ooze and ocean weed; Scarce a finny bark of speed To the surface brought, and lo! In vast circuits to and fro Measures it on every side Its illimitable home; While, with greater will to roam, I that freedom am denied. Born the streamlet was, a snake Which unwinds the flowers among, Silver serpent, that not long May to them sweet music make, Ere it quits the flowery brake, Onward hastening to the sea With majestic course and free, Which the open plains supply; While, with more life gifted, I Am denied its liberty.

In Act II. Clotardo tells how he has talked to the young prince, brought up in solitude and confinement:

There I spoke with him awhile Of the human arts and letters, Which the still and silent aspect Of the mountains and the heavens Him have taught—that school divine Where he has been long a learner, And the voices of the birds And the beasts has apprehended.

Descriptions of time and place are very rich in colour.

One morning on the ocean, When the half-awakened sun, Trampling down the lingering shadows Of the western vapours dun, Spread its ruby-tinted tresses Over jessamine and rose, Dried with cloths of gold Aurora's Tears of mingled fire and snows Which to pearl his glance converted.

Since these gardens cannot steal Away your oft returning woes, Though to beauteous spring they build Snow-white jasmine temples filled With radiant statues of the rose; Come into the sea and make Thy bark the chariot of the sun, And when the golden splendours run Athwart the waves, along thy wake The garden to the sea will say (By melancholy fears deprest)— 'The sun already gilds the west, How very short has been this day.'

There is a striking remark about a garden; Menon says:

A beautiful garden surrounded by wild forest Is the more beautiful the nearer it approaches its opposite.

Splendour of colour was everything with Calderon, but it was splendour of so stiff and formal a kind, that, like the whole of his intensely severe, even inquisitorial outlook, it leaves us cold.

We must turn to Shakespeare to learn how strongly the pulse of sympathy for Nature could beat in contemporary drama. Goethe said: 'In Calderon you have the wine as the last artificial result of the grape, but expressed into the goblet, highly spiced and sweetened, and so given you to drink; but in Shakespeare you have the whole natural process of its ripening besides, and the grapes themselves one by one, for your enjoyment, if you will.'

In Worship at the Cross there is pious feeling for Nature and mystical feeling side by side with an obnoxious fanaticism, superstition, and other objectionable traits[20]; and mystical confessions of the same sort may be gathered in numbers from the works of contemporary monks and nuns. Even of such a fanatic and self-tormentor as the Spanish Franciscan Petrus von Alcantara (1562), his biographer says that despite his strict renunciation of the world, he retained a most warm and deep feeling for Nature.

'Whatever he saw of the outer world increased his devotion and gave it wings. The starry sky seen through his little monastery window, often kept him rapt in deep meditation for hours; often he was as if beside himself, so strong was his pious feeling when he saw the power and glory of God reflected in charming flowers and plants.'

When Gregorio Lopez (1596), a man who had studied many sides of Nature, was asked if so much knowledge confused him, he answered: 'I find God in all things, great and small.' Similar remarks are attributed to many others.

Next to Leon, as a poet in enthusiasm and mysticism, came St Teresa von Avila. She was especially notable for the ravishingly pretty pictures and comparisons she drew from Nature to explain the soul life of the Christian.[21]

In all these outpourings of mystic feeling for Nature, there was no interest in her entirely for her own sake; they were all more or less dictated by religious feeling. It was in the later German and Italian mystics—for example, Bruno, Campanella, and Jacob Boehme—that a more subjective and individual point of view was attained through Pantheism and Protestantism.

The Protestant free-speaking Shakespeare shewed a far more intense feeling for Nature than the Catholic Calderon.



CHAPTER VI

SHAKESPEARE'S SYMPATHY FOR NATURE

The poetry of India may serve as a measure of the part which Nature can play in drama; it is full of comparisons and personifications, and eloquent expressions of intimate sympathy with plants and animals. In Greek tragedy, Nature stepped into the background; metaphors, comparisons, and personifications are rarer; it was only by degrees, especially in Sophocles and Euripides, in the choruses and monologues, that man's interest in her appeared, and he began to greet the light or the sky, land or sea, to attribute love, pity, or hate to her, or find comfort in her lonely places. During the Middle Ages, drama lay fallow, and the blossoming period of French tragedy, educated to the pathos of Seneca, only produced cold declamation, frosty rhetoric; of any real sympathy between man and Nature there was no question.

Over this mediaeval void Calderon was the bridge to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare reached the Greek standpoint and advanced far beyond it. He was not only the greatest dramatist of modern times as to human action, suffering, and character, but also a genius in the interpretation of Nature.[1]

In place of the narrow limits of the old dramatists, he had the wider and maturer modern vision, and, despite his mastery of language, he was free both from the exaggeration and redundance of Oriental drama, and from the mere passion for describing, which so often carried Calderon away.

In him too, the subjectivity, which the Renaissance brought into modern art, was still more fully developed. His metaphors and comparisons shew this, and, most of all, the very perfect art with which he assigns Nature a part in the play, and makes her not only form the appropriate background, dark or bright as required, but exert a distinct influence upon human fate.

As Carriere points out:

At a period which had painting for its leading art, and was turning its attention to music, his mental accord produced effects in his works to which antiquity was a stranger.

Herder had already noted that Shakespeare gives colour and atmosphere where the Greek only gave outline. And although Shakespeare's outlines are drawn with more regard to fidelity than to actual beauty, yet, like a great painter, he brings all Nature into sympathy with man. We feel the ghostly shudder of the November night in Hamlet, breathe the bracing Highland air in Macbeth, the air of the woods in As You Like It; the storm on the heath roars through Lear's mad outburst, the nightingale sings in the pomegranate outside Julia's window.

'How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,' when Love solves all differences in the Merchant of Venice! On the other hand, when Macbeth is meditating the murder of Duncan, the wolf howls, the owl hoots, and the cricket cries. And since Shakespeare's characters often act out of part, so that intelligible motive fails, while it is important to the poet that each scene be raised to dramatic level and viewed in a special light, Goethe's words apply:

Here everything which in a great world event passes secretly through the air, everything which at the very moment of a terrible occurrence men hide away in their hearts, is expressed; that which they carefully shut up and lock away in their minds is here freely and eloquently brought to light; we recognize the truth to life, but know not how it is achieved.

Amorous passion in his hands is an interpreter of Nature; in one of his sonnets he compares it to an ocean which cannot quench thirst.

In Sonnet 130 he says:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dim; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.... And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied by false compare.

His lady-love is a mirror in which the whole world is reflected:

Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind.... For if it see the rudest or gentlest sight, The most sweet favour or deformed'st creature, The mountain or the sea, the day or night, The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature. (Sonnet 113.)

When she leaves him it seems winter even in spring: 'For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And thou away, the very birds are mute.' (Sonnet 97.)

Here, as in the dramas,[2] contrasts in Nature are often used to point contrasts in life:

How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame Which like a canker in the fragrant rose Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! O in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose! (Sonnet 95.)

and

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done; Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud; Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. (Sonnet 35.)

In an opposite sense is Sonnet 70:

The ornament of beauty is suspect A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air, For canker vice the sweetest buds did love, And thou presentest a pure unstained prime.

Sonnet 7 has:

Lo! in the orient when the gracious light Lifts up his burning head, each under eye Doth homage to his new-appearing sight, Serving with looks his sacred majesty.

Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate, Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date— But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet 60:

Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

Sonnet 73:

That time of life thou mayst in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by-and-by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

There are no better similes for the oncoming of age and death, than the sere leaf trembling in the wind, the twilight of the setting sun, the expiring flame.

Almost all the comparisons from Nature in his plays are original, and rather keen and lightning-like than elaborate, often with the terseness of proverbs;

The strawberry grows underneath the nettle. (Henry V.)

Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep. (Henry VI.)

The waters swell before a boisterous storm. (Richard III.)

Sometimes they are heaped up, like Calderon's, 'making it' (true love)

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' The jaws of darkness do devour it up. (Midsummer Night's Dream.)

Compared with Homer's they are very bold, and shew an astonishing play of imagination; in place of the naive simplicity and naturalness of antiquity, this modern genius gives us a dazzling display of wit and thought. To quote only short examples[3]:

'Open as day,' 'deaf as the sea,' 'poor as winter,' 'chaste as unsunn'd snow.'

He ranges all Nature. These are characteristic examples:

King Richard doth himself appear As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fiery portal of the east, When he perceives the envious clouds are bent To dim his glory and to stain the track Of his bright passage to the occident. (Richard II.)

Since the more fair crystal is the sky, The uglier seem the clouds that in it fly. As when the golden sun salutes the morn, And, having gilt the ocean with his beams, Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach And overlooks the highest peering hills, So Tamora. (Titus Andronicus.)

As all the world is cheered by the sun, So I by that; it is my day, my life. (Richard III.)

So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not To those fresh morning drops upon the rose, As thy eye-beams, when their fresh rays have smote The night of dew that on my cheek down flows; Nor shines the silver moon one half so bright Through the transparent bosom of the deep. As doth thy face through tears of mine give light; Thou shinest on every tear that I do weep. (Love's Labour's Lost.)

This is modern down to its finest detail, and much richer in individuality than the most famous comparisons of the same kind in antiquity.

Sea and stream are used:

Like an unseasonable stormy day Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores As if the world were all dissolved to tears, So high above his limits swells the rage Of Bolingbroke. (Richard II.)

The current that with gentle murmur glides, Thou know'st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage; But when his fair course is not hindered, He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones, Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge He overtaketh on his pilgrimage; And so by many winding nooks he strays With willing sport to the wild ocean. Then let me go, and hinder not my course. (Two Gentlemen of Verona.)

Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought. You are the fount that makes small brooks to flow. And what is Edward but a ruthless sea? (Henry VI.)

If there were reason for these miseries, Then into limits could I bind my woes; When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o'er-flow? If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, Threatening the welkin with his big-swoln face? And wilt thou have a reason for this coil? I am the sea: hark, how her sighs do blow! She is the weeping welkin, I the earth; Then must my sea be moved with her sighs; Then must my earth with her continual tears Become a deluge, overflow'd and drowned. (Titus Andronicus.)

This battle fares like to the morning's war When dying clouds contend with growing light, What time the shepherd blowing of his nails Can neither call it perfect day nor night. Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea Forced by the tide to combat with the wind; Now sways it that way, like the self-same sea Forced to retire by fury of the wind. Sometime the flood prevails and then the wind: Now one the better, then another best; Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast, Yet neither conqueror nor conquered. So is the equal poise of this fell war. (Henry VI.)

In the last five examples the epic treatment and the personifications are noteworthy.

Comparisons from animal life are forcible and striking:

How like a deer, stricken by many princes, Dost thou lie here! (Julius Caesar.)

Richard III. is called:

The wretched bloody and usurping boar That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines, Swills your warm blood like wash and makes his trough In your embowell'd bosoms; this foul swine Lies now even in the centre of this isle. The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind. (Richard III.)

The smallest objects are noted:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport. (King Lear.)

Marcus: Alas! my lord, I have but kill'd a fly.

Titus: But how if that fly had a father and a mother? How would he hang his slender gilded wings, And buzz lamenting doings in the air! Poor harmless fly! That, with his pretty buzzing melody, Came here to make us merry! and thou Hast kill'd him! (Titus Andronicus.)

Shakespeare has abundance of this idyllic miniature painting, for which all the literature of the day shewed a marked taste.

Tamora says:

My lovely Aaron, wherefore look'st thou sad, When everything doth make a gleeful boast? The birds chant melody on every bush, The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun, The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind And make a chequer'd shadow on the ground. (Titus Andronicus.)

And Valentine in Two Gentlemen of Verona:

This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods, I better brook than flourishing peopled towns; Here can I sit alone, unseen of any, And to the nightingale's complaining notes Tune my distresses and record my woes.

Like this, in elegiac sentimentality, is Romeo:

Before the worshipp'd sun Peer'd forth the golden window of the east.... Many a morning hath he there been seen With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew.

Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and As You Like It are particularly rich in idyllic traits; the artificiality of court life is contrasted with life in the open; there are songs, too, in praise of woodland joys:

Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me, And tune his merry note Unto the sweet bird's throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither! Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather. (As You Like It.)

Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man's ingratitude. Thy tooth is not so keen, Because thou art not seen Altho' thy breath be rude. Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho unto the green holly! Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly![4] (As You Like It.)

Turning again to comparisons, we find birds used abundantly:

More pity that the eagle should be mewed While kites and buzzards prey at liberty. (Richard III.)

True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings. (Richard III.)

As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye, Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort Rising and cawing at the gun's report Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky, So at his sight away his fellows fly. (Midsummer Night's Dream.)

And plant life is touched with special tenderness:

All the bystanders had wet their cheeks Like trees bedashed with rain. (Richard III.)

Why grow the branches when the root is gone? Why wither not the leaves that want their sap? (Richard III.)

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, Which in their summer beauty kiss'd each other. (Richard III.)

Ah! my tender babes! My unblown flowers, new appearing sweets. (Richard III.)

Romeo is

To himself so secret and so close ... As is the bud bit with an envious worm, Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.

It is astonishing to see how Shakespeare noted the smallest and most fragile things, and found the most poetic expression for them without any sacrifice of truth to Nature.

Juliet is 'the sweetest flower of all the field.' Laertes says to Ophelia:

For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a moment. The canker galls the infants of the spring Too oft before their buttons be disclosed; And in the morn and liquid dew of youth Contagious blastments are most imminent. (Hamlet.)

Hamlet soliloquizes:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seems to me all the uses of this world. Fie on't, O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.

Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you—this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

But the great advance which he made is seen far more in the sympathetic way in which he drew Nature into the action of the play.

He established perfect harmony between human fate and the natural phenomena around it.

There are moonlight nights for Romeo and Juliet's brief dream, when all Nature, moon, stars, garden, seemed steeped in love together.

He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet

In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.)

What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature in Macbeth! And in Lear, as Jacobi says:

What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and there a lightning flash from God—a flash of Providence, rending the clouds.

One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry, especially in Shakespeare.

With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and illuminated all and everything.

Hense says[5];

The personification is plastic when AEschylus calls the heights the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks of hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did not, and could not, exist in antiquity.

The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his feelings, the more he can see in Nature.

Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors, new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination.

The motive of amorous passion, for instance, was a very divining-rod in his hands, revealing the most delicate relations between Nature and the soul. Ibykos had pointed the contrast between the gay spring time and his own unhappy heart in which Eros raged like 'the Thracian blast.' Theocritus had painted the pretty shepherdess drawing all Nature under the spell of her charms; Akontios (Kallimachos) had declared that if trees felt the pangs and longings of love, they would lose their leaves; all such ideas, modern in their way, had been expressed in antiquity.

This is Shakespeare's treatment of them:

How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December's bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer time, The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ... For summer and his pleasures wait on thee. And thou away the very birds are mute, Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near, (Sonnet 97.)

From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue Could make me any summer's story tell.... Yet seem'd it winter still.... (Sonnet 98.)

Or compare again the cypresses in Theocritus sole witnesses of secret love; or Walther's

One little birdie who never will tell,

with

These blue-veined violets whereon we lean Never can blab, nor know not what we mean. (Venus and Adonis.)

Comparisons of ladies' lips to roses, and hands to lilies, are common with the old poets. How much more modern is:

The forward violet thus did I chide; Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells If not from my love's breath?... The lily I condemned for thy hand, And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair; The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, One blushing shame, another white despair.... More flowers I noted, yet I none could see But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee. (Sonnet 99.)

And how fine the personification in Sonnet 33:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to West with this disgrace: Even so my sun one early morn did shine With all triumphant splendour on my brow; But out, alack! he was but one hour mine; The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now. Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

This is night in Venus and Adonis:

Look! the world's comforter with weary gait His day's hot task hath ended in the West; The owl, night's herald, shrieks 'tis very late; The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest And coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light, Do summon us to part and bid good-night.

And this morning, in Romeo and Juliet:

The grey-ey'd morn smiles on the frowning night, Checkering the Eastern clouds with streaks of light. And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels; Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye, The day to cheer, and night's dank dew to dry ...

Such wealth and brilliance of personification was not found again until Goethe, Byron, and Shelley.

He is unusually rich in descriptive phrases:

The weary sun hath made a golden set, And by the bright track of his golden car Gives token of a goodly day to-morrow.

The worshipp'd Sun Peered forth the golden window of the East.

The all-cheering sun Should in the farthest East begin to draw The shady curtains from Aurora's bed.

The moon:

Like to a silver bow New bent in heaven.

Titania says:

I will wind thee in my arms.... So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. O how I love thee!

That same dew, which sometime on the buds Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls, Stood now within the pretty flow'rets' eyes Like tears. (Midsummer Night's Dream.)

Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty. (Winter's Tale.)

Pale primroses That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength. (Winter's Tale.)

Goethe calls winds and waves lovers. In Troilus and Cressida we have:

The sea being smooth, How many shallow bauble boats dare sail Upon her patient breast, making their way With those of nobler bulk! But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage The gentle Thetis, and anon behold The strong-ribb'd bark through liquid mountains cut, Bounding between two moist elements Like Perseus' horse.

And further on in the same scene:

What raging of the sea! shaking of earth! Commotion in the winds! ... the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores.

The personification of the river in Henry IV. is half mythical:

When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank In single opposition, hand to hand, He did confound the best part of an hour In changing hardiment with great Glendower; Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink, Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood; Who, then affrighted with their bloody looks, Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds, And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank, Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.

Striking instances of personification from Antony and Cleopatra are:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne Burn'd on the water; the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver, Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster As amorous of their strokes.

And Antony, enthron'd in the market-place, sat alone

Whistling to the air, which but for vacancy Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too And made a gap in nature.

Instead of accumulating further instances of these very modern and individual (and sometimes far-fetched) personifications, it is of more interest to see how Shakespeare used Nature, not only as background and colouring, but to act a part of her own in the play, so producing the grandest of all personifications.

At the beginning of Act III. in King Lear, Kent asks:

Who's there beside foul weather?

Gentleman: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.

Kent: Where's the King?

Gent: Contending with the fretful elements. Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea, Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main, That things might change or cease; tears his white hair, Which the impetuous blasts with eyeless rage Catch in their fury and make nothing of; Strives in his little world of men to outscorn The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain.

In the stormy night on the wild heath the poor old man hears the echo of his own feelings in the elements; his daughters' ingratitude, hardness, and cruelty produce a moral disturbance like the disturbance in Nature; he breaks out:

Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunder-bolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once That make ungrateful man.... Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain!

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters, I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness; I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children, You owe me no subscription; then, let fall Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man: But yet I call you servile ministers, That will with two pernicious daughters join Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!

How closely here animate and inanimate Nature are woven together, the reasoning with the unreasoning. The poet makes the storm, rain, thunder, and lightning live, and at the same time endues his human figures with a strength of feeling and passion which gives them kinship to the elements. In Othello, too, there is uproar in Nature:

Do but stand upon the foaming shore, The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds.... I never did like molestation view On the enchafed flood.

but even the unruly elements spare Desdemona:

Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds, The gather'd rocks and congregated sands. Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel— As having sense of beauty, do omit Their mortal natures, letting go safely by The divine Desdemona.

Cassio lays stress upon 'the great contention of the sea and skies'; but when Othello meets Desdemona, he cries:

O my soul's joy! If after every tempest come such calms, May the winds blow till they have wakened death! And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas Olympus-high, and duck again as low As hell's from heaven. If it were now to die, 'Twere now to be most happy.

Iago calls the elements to witness his truthfulness:

Witness, you ever-burning lights above, You elements that clip us round about, Witness, that here Iago doth give up The execution of his wit, hands, heart, To wrong'd Othello's service.

Nature is disgusted at Othello's jealousy:

Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks; The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets, Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth And will not hear it.

In terrible mental confusion he cries:

O insupportable, O heavy hour! Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe Should yawn at alteration.

Unhappy Desdemona sings:

The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, Sing all a green willow; Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee, Sing willow, willow, willow; The fresh streams ran by her and murmur'd her moans, Sing willow, willow, willow.

A song in Cymbeline contains a beautiful personification of flowers:

Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chalic'd flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes; With everything that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise; Arise! Arise!

The clearest expression of sympathy for Nature is in Macbeth.

Repeatedly we meet the idea that Nature shudders before the crime, and gives signs of coming disaster.

Macbeth himself says:

Stars, hide your fires! Let not light see my black and deep desires; The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

and Lady Macbeth:

... The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements.... Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry 'Hold! hold!'...

The peaceful castle to which Duncan comes all unsuspectingly, is in most striking contrast to the fateful tone which pervades the tragedy. Duncan says:

This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses.

and Banquo:

This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve By his loved masonry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here; no jetty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle; Where they most breed and haunt I have observ'd The air is delicate.

Perhaps the familiar swallow has never been treated with more discrimination; and at this point of the tale of horror it has the effect of a ray of sunshine in a sky dark with storm clouds.

In Act II. Macbeth describes his own horror and Nature's:

Now o'er the one half world Nature seems dead.... Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts.

Lady Macbeth says:

It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman Which gives the stern'st good-night.

Lenox describes this night:

The night has been unruly: where we lay Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death And prophesying, with accents terrible, Of dire combustion and confus'd events, New hatch'd to the woeful time: the obscure bird Clamour'd the live-long night: some say, the earth Was feverish and did shake.

and later on, an old man says:

Three score and ten I can remember well; Within the volume of which time I have seen Hours dreadful and things strange; but this sore night Hath trifled former knowings.

Rosse answers him:

Ah, good father, Thou see'st the heavens, as troubled with man's act, Threaten his bloody stage; by the clock 'tis day, And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. Is't night's predominance or the day's shame That darkness does the-face of earth entomb When living light should kiss it?

The whole play is a thrilling expression of the sympathy for Nature which attributes its own feelings to her—a human shudder in presence of the wicked—a human horror of crime, most thrilling of all in Macbeth's words:

Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale.

In Hamlet, too, Nature is shocked at man's mis-deeds:

... Such an act (the queen's) That blurs the grace and blush of modesty ... Heaven's face doth glow, Yea, this solidity and compound mass With tristful visage, as against the doom, Is thought-sick at the act.

But there are other personifications in this most wonderful of all tragedies, such as the magnificent one:

But look, the dawn, in russet mantle clad. Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill.

The first player declaims:

But, as we often see, against some storm A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still, The bold winds speechless, and the orb below As hush as death....

Ophelia dies:

When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook.

and Laertes commands:

Lay her i' the earth, And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring.

Thus Shakespeare's great imagination gave life and soul to every detail of Nature, and he obtained the right background for his dramas, not only through choice of scenery, but by making Nature a sharer of human impulse, happy with the happy, shuddering in the presence of wickedness.

He drew every phase of Nature with the individualizing touch which stamps her own peculiar character, and also brings her into sympathy with the inner life, often with that poetic intuition which is so closely allied to mythology. And this holds good not only in dealing with the great elementary forces—storms, thunder, lightning, etc.—but with flowers, streams, the glow of sunlight. Always and everywhere the grasp of Nature was intenser, more individual, and subjective, than any we have met hitherto.

Idyllic feeling for Nature became sympathetic in his hands.



CHAPTER VII

THE DISCOVERY OF THE BEAUTY OF LANDSCAPE IN PAINTING

The indispensable condition of landscape-painting—painting, that is, which raises the representation of Nature to the level of its main subject and paints her entirely for her own sake—is the power to compose separate studies into a whole and imbue that with an artistic idea. It was therefore impossible among people like the Hebrews,[1] whose eyes were always fixed on distance and only noted what lay between in a cursory way, and among those who considered detail without relation to a whole, as we have seen in mediaeval poetry until the Renaissance. But just as study of the laws of aerial and linear perspective demands a trained and keen eye, and therefore implies interest in Nature, so the artistic idea, the soul of the picture, depends directly upon the degree of the artist's feeling for her Literature and painting are equal witnesses to the feeling for Nature, and so long as scenery was only background in poetry, it had no greater importance in painting. Landscape painting could only arise in the period which produced complete pictures of scenery in poetry—the sentimental idyllic period.

We have seen how in the Italian Renaissance the fetters of dogma, tradition, and mediaeval custom were removed, and servility and visionariness gave place to healthy individuality and realism; how man and the world were discovered anew; and further, how among the other Romanic nations a lively feeling for Nature grew up, partly idyllic, partly mystic; and finally, how this feeling found dramatic expression in Shakespeare.

Natural philosophy also, in the course of its search for truth, as it threw off both one-sided Christian ideas and ancient traditions, came gradually to feel an interest in Nature; not only her laws, but her beauty, became an object of enthusiastic study. By a very long process of development the Hellenic feeling for Nature was reached again in the Renaissance; but it always remained, despite its sentimental and pantheistic elements, sensual, superficial, and naive, in comparison with Christian feeling, which a warmer heart and a mind trained in scholastic wisdom had rendered more profound and abstract. Hence Nature was sometimes an object of attention in detail, sometimes in mass.[2]

As we come to the first landscape painters and their birthplace in the Netherlands, we see how steady and orderly is the development of the human mind, and how factors that seem isolated are really links in one chain.

In the Middle Ages, landscape was only background with more or less fitness to the subject. By the fifteenth century it was richer in detail, as we see in Pisanello and the Florentines Gozzoli and Mantegna. The poetry of earth had been discovered; the gold grounds gave way to field, wood, hill, and dale, and the blue behind the heads became a dome of sky. In the sixteenth century, Giorgione shewed the value of effects of light, and Correggio's backgrounds were in harmony with his tender, cheerful scenes. Titian loved to paint autumn; the sunny days of October with blue grapes, golden oranges, and melons; and evening with deep harmonies of colour over the sleeping earth. He was a great pioneer in the realm of landscape. With Michael Angelo not a blade of grass grew; his problem was man alone. Raphael's backgrounds, on the other hand, are life-like in detail: his little birds could fly out of the picture, the stems of his plants seem to curve and bend towards us, and we look deep into the flower they hold out.[3]

In the German Renaissance too, the great masters limited themselves to charming framework and ingenious arabesques for their Madonnas and Holy Families. But, as Luebke says,[4] one soon sees that Duerer depended on architecture for borders and backgrounds far less than Holbein; he preferred landscape.

'The charm of this background is so great, the inwardness of German feeling for Nature so strongly expressed in it, that it has a special value of its own, and the master through it has become the father of landscape painting.'[5]

This must be taken with a grain of salt; but, at all events, it is true that Duerer combined 'keen and devoted study of Nature (in the widest sense of the word) with a penetration which aimed at tracing her facts up to their source.'[6] It is interesting to see how these qualities overcame his theoretical views on Nature and art.[7] Duerer's deep respect for Nature proved him a child of the new era. Melanchthon relates that he often regretted that he had been too much attracted in his younger days by variety and the fantastic, and had only understood Nature's simple truth and beauty later in life.

His riper judgment preferred her to all other models. Nature, in his remarks on the theory of art, includes the animate and the inanimate, living creatures as well as scenery, and it is interesting to observe that his admiration of her as a divine thing was due to deep religious feeling. In his work on Proportion[8] he says:

'Certainly art is hidden in Nature, and he who is able to separate it by force from Nature, he possesses it. Never imagine that you can or will surpass Nature's achievements; human effort cannot compare with the ability which her Creator has given her. Therefore no man can ever make a picture which excels Nature's; and when, through much copying, he has seized her spirit, it cannot be called original work, it is rather something received and learnt, whose seeds grow and bear fruit of their own kind. Thereby the gathered treasure of the heart, and the new creature which takes shape and form there, comes to light in the artist's work.'

Elsewhere Duerer says 'a good painter's mind is full of figures,' and he repeatedly remarks upon the superabundant beauty of all living things which human intelligence rarely succeeds in reproducing.

The first modern landscapes in which man was only accessory were produced in the Netherlands. Quiet, absorbed musing on the external world was characteristic of the nation; they studied the smallest and most trifling objects with care, and set a high value on minutiae.

The still-life work of their prime was only possible to such an easy-going, life-loving people; the delightful animal pictures of Paul Potter and Adrian van de Velde could only have been painted in the land of Reineke Fuchs. Carriere says about these masters of genre painting[9]: 'Through the emphasis laid upon single objects, they not only revealed the national characteristics, but penetrated far into the soul of Nature and mirrored their own feelings there, so producing works of art of a kind unknown to antiquity. That divine element, which the Greek saw in the human form, the Germanic race divined in all the visible forms of Nature, and so felt at one with them and able to reveal itself through them.

'Nature was studied more for her own sake than in her relation to man, and scenery became no longer mere background, but the actual object of the picture. Animals, and even men, whether bathing in the river, lying under trees, or hunting in the forest, were nothing but accessories; inorganic Nature was the essential element. The greatest Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible crevasses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or tropical luxuriance, but to common objects of everyday life. But these they grasped with a precision and depth of feeling which gave charm to the most trifling—it was the life of the universe divined in its minutiae. In its treatment of landscape their genre painting displayed the very characteristics which had brought it into being.'[10]

The physical characters of the country favoured landscape painting too. No doubt the moist atmosphere and its silvery sheen, which add such freshness and brilliance to the colouring, influenced the development of the colour sense, as much as the absence of sharp contrasts in contour, the suggestive skies, and abundance of streams, woods, meadows, and dales.

But it was in devotional pictures that the Netherlanders first tried their wings; landscape and scenes from human life did not free themselves permanently from religion and take independent place for more than a century later. The fourteenth-century miniatures shew the first signs of the northern feeling for Nature in illustrations of the seasons in the calendar pictures of religious manuscripts. Beginnings of landscape can be clearly seen in that threshold picture of Netherland art, the altar-piece at Ghent by the brothers Van Eyck, which was finished in 1432. It shews the most accurate observation: all the plants, grasses, flowers, rose bushes, vines, and palms, are correctly drawn; and the luxuriant valley in which the Christian soldiers and the knights are riding, with its rocky walls covered by undergrowth jutting stiffly forward, is very like the valley of the Maas.

One sees that the charm of landscape has dawned upon the painters.

Their skies are no longer golden, but blue, and flecked with cloudlets and alive with birds; wood and meadow shine in sappy green; fantastic rocks lie about, and the plains are bounded by low hills. They are drinking deep draughts from a newly-opened spring, and they can scarcely have enough of it. They would like to paint all the leaves and fruit on the trees, all the flowers on the grass, even all the dewdrops. The effect of distance too has been discovered, for there are blue hill-tops beyond the nearer green ones, and a foreground scene opens back on a distant plain (in the Ghent altar-piece, the scene with the pilgrims); but they still possess very few tones, and their overcrowded detail is almost all, from foreground to furthest distance, painted in the same luminous strong dark-green, as if in insatiable delight at the beauty of their own colour. The progress made by Jan van Eyck in landscape was immense.

To the old masters Nature had been an unintelligible chaos of detail, but beauty, through ecclesiastical tradition, an abstract attribute of the Holy Family and the Saints, and they had used their best powers of imagination in accordance with this view. Hence they placed the Madonna upon a background of one colour, generally gilded. But now the great discovery was made that Nature was a distinct entity, a revelation and reflection of the divine in herself. And Jan van Eyck introduced a great variety of landscapes behind his Madonnas. One looks, for instance, through an open window to a wide stretch of country with fields and fortresses, and towns with streets full of people, all backed by mountains. And whether the scene itself, or only its background, lies in the open, the landscape is of the widest, enlivened by countless forms and adorned by splendid buildings.

Molanus, the savant of Loewen, proclaimed Dierick Bouts, born like his predecessor Ouwater at Haarlem, to be the inventor of landscape painting (claruit inventor in describendo rare); but the van Eycks were certainly before him, though he increased the significance of landscape painting and shewed knowledge of aerial perspective and gradations of tone. Landscape was a distinct entity to him, and could excite the mood that suited his subject, as, for instance, in the side picture of the Last Supper, where the foreground is drawn with such exactness that every plant and even the tiny creatures crawling on the grass can be identified.

The scenery of Roger van der Weyden of Brabant—river valleys surrounded by jagged rocks and mountains, isolated trees, and meadows bright with sappy green—is clearly the result of direct Nature study; it has a uniform transparent atmosphere, and a clear green shimmer lies over the foreground and gradually passes into blue haze further back.

His pupil, Memling, shews the same fine gradations of tone. The composition of his richest picture, 'The Marriage of St Catherine,' did not allow space for an unbroken landscape, but the lines of wood and field converge to a vista in such a way that the general effect is one of unity.

Joachim de Patenir, who appeared in 1515, was called a landscape painter by his contemporaries, because he reduced his sacred figures to a modest size, enlarged his landscape, and handled it with extreme care. He was very far from grasping it as a whole, but his method was synthetical; his river valleys, with masses of tree and bush and romantic rocks, fantastic and picturesque, with fortresses on the river banks, all shew this.

Kerry de Bles was like him, but less accurate; with all the rest of the sixteenth-century painters of Brabant and Flanders, he did not rise to the idea of landscape as a whole.

The most minute attention was given to the accurate painting of single objects, especially plants; the Flemings caring more for perfect truth to life, the Dutch for beauty. The Flemings generally sought to improve their landscape by embellishing its lines, while the Dutch gave its spirit, but adhered simply and strictly to Nature. The landscapes of Peter Brueghel the elder, with their dancing peasants surrounded by rocks, mills, groups of trees, are painful in their thoroughness; and Jan Brueghel carried imitation of Nature so far that his minutise required a magnifying-glass—it was veritable miniature work. He introduced fruit and flower painting as a new feature of art.

Rubens and Brueghel often painted on each other's canvas, Brueghel supplying landscape backgrounds for Rubens' pictures, and Rubens the figures for Brueghel's landscapes. Yet Rubens himself was the best landscapist of the Flemish school. He was more than that. For Brueghel and his followers, with all their patience and industry, their blue-green landscape with imaginary trees, boundless distance and endless detail, were very far from a true grasp of Nature. It was Rubens and his school who really made landscape a legitimate independent branch of art. They studied it in all its aspects, quiet and homely, wild and romantic, some taking one and some the other: Rubens himself, in his large way, grasping the whole without losing sight of its parts. They all lifted the veil from Nature and saw her as she was (Falke).

Brueghel put off the execution of a picture for which he had a commission from winter to spring, that he might study the flowers for it from Nature when they came out, and did not grudge a journey to Brussels now and then to paint flowers not to be had at Antwerp. There is a characteristic letter which he sent to the Archbishop of Milan with a picture:

'I send your Reverence the picture with the flowers, which are all painted from Nature. I have painted in as many as possible. I believe so many rare and different flowers have never been painted before nor so industriously. It will give a beautiful effect in winter; some of the colours almost equal Nature. I have painted an ornament under the flowers with artistic medallions and curiosities from the sea. I leave it to your reverence to judge whether the flowers do not far exceed gold and jewels in colour.'

He also painted landscapes in which people were only accessory, sunny valleys with leafage, golden cornfields, meadows with rows of dancing country folk or reapers in the wheat.

Rubens, though he felt the influence of southern light and sunshine as much as his fellows who had been in Italy, took his backgrounds from his native land, from parts round Antwerp, Mechlin, and Brussels. Foliage, water, and undulating ground were indispensable to him—were, to a certain extent, the actual bearers of the impression he wished to convey.

Brueghel always kept a childlike attitude, delighting in details, and proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the point of deception. Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold subjective way. He opened the book of Nature, so to speak, not to spell out the words syllable by syllable, but to master her secret, to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he found there—in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape painter. The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic excitement and tension. Take, for instance, the evening scene with the rainbow in the Louvre, marvellous in its delicate gradations of atmospheric tone, and the equally marvellous thunderstorm in the Belvedere at Vienna, where a rain-cloud bursts under sulphur lightning, and a mountain stream, swollen to a torrent and lashed by the hurricane, carries all before it—trees, rocks, animals, and men.

In France, scarcely a flower had been seen in literature since the Troubadour days, not even in the classical poetry of Corneille and Racine. There were idyllic features in Fenelon's Telemachus, and Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain.

Honore d'Urfe's famous Astree was much translated; but both his shepherds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of courts and carpet knights was over the whole, with a certain trace of sadness.

The case was different with French painting. After the Netherlands, it was France, by her mediaeval illustrated manuscripts, who chiefly aided in opening the world's eyes to landscape. Both the Poussins penetrated below the surface of Nature. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of trees in the foreground, a hill with a classic building in the middle, and a chain of mountains in the distance, and laid more stress on drawing than colour. There was greater life in the pictures of his brother-in-law, Caspar Doughet, also called Poussin; his grass is more succulent, his winds sigh in the trees, his storm bends the boughs and scatters the clouds.

It was Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) who brought the ideal style to its perfection. He inspired the very elements with mind and feeling; his valleys, woods, and seas were just a veil through which divinity was visible. All that was ugly, painful, and confused was purified and transfigured in his hands. There is no sadness or dejection in his pictures, but a spirit of serene beauty, free from ostentation, far-fetched contrast, or artificial glitter. Light breezes blow in his splendid trees, golden light quivers through them, drawing the eye to a bright misty horizon; we say with Uhland, 'The sky is solemn, as if it would say "this is the day of the Lord."'

Artistic feeling for Nature became a worship with Claude Lorraine.

The Netherlands recorded all Nature's phases in noble emulation with ever-increasing delight.

The poetry of air, cloudland, light, the cool freshness of morning, the hazy sultriness of noon, the warm light of evening, it all lives and moves in Cuyp's pictures and Wynant's, while Aart van der Meer painted moonlight and winter snow, and Jan van Goyen the melancholy of mist shot by sunlight. He, too—Jan van Goyen—was very clever in producing effect with very small means, with a few trees reflected in water, or a sand-heap—the art in which Ruysdael excelled all others. The whole poetry of Nature—that secret magic which lies like a spell over quiet wood, murmuring sea, still pool, and lonely pasture—took form and colour under his hands; so little sufficed to enchant, to rouse thought and feeling, and lead them whither he would. Northern seriousness and sadness brood over most of his work; the dark trees are overhung by heavy clouds and rain, mist and dusky shadows move among his ruins. He had painted, says Carriere, the peace of woodland solitude long before Tieck found the word for it.

Beechwoods reflected in a stream, misty cloud masses lighted by the rising sun; he moves us with such things as with a morning hymn, and his picture of a swollen torrent forcing its way between graves which catch the last rays of the sun, while a cloud of rain shrouds the ruins of a church in the background, is an elegy which has taken shape and colour.

Ruysdael marks the culminating point of this period of development, which had led from mere backgrounds and single traits of Nature—even a flower stem or a blade of grass, up to elaborate compositions imbued by a single motive, a single idea.

To conjure up with slight material a complete little world of its own, and waken responsive feeling, is not this the secret of the charm in the pictures of his school—in the wooded hill or peasant's courtyard by Hobbema, the Norwegian mountain scene of Albert van Everdingen, the dusky fig-trees, rugged crags, and foaming cataract, or the half-sullen, half-smiling sea-pieces of Bakhuysen and Van der Velde?

All these great Netherlander far outstripped the poetry of their time; it was a hundred years later before mountain and sea found their painter in words, and a complete landscape picture was not born in German poetry until the end of the eighteenth century.



CHAPTER VIII

HUMANISM, ROCOCO, AND PIGTAIL

Many decades passed before German feeling for Nature reached the heights attained by the Italian Renaissance and the Netherland landscapists. In the Middle Ages, Germany was engrossed with ecclesiastical dogma—man's relation, not only to God, but to the one saving Church—and had little interest for Science and Art; and the great achievement of the fifteenth century, the Reformation, called for word and deed to reckon with a thousand years of old traditions and the slavery of intellectual despotism. The new time was born amid bitter throes. The questions at issue—religious and ecclesiastical questions concerned with the liberty of the Christian—were of the most absorbing kind, and though Germany produced minds of individual stamp such as she had never known before, characters of original and marked physiognomy, it was no time for the quiet contemplation of Nature. Mental life was stimulated by the new current of ideas and new delight in life awakened: yet there is scarcely a trace of the intense feeling for Nature which we have seen in Petrarch and AEneas Sylvius.

Largely as it was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, it is certainly a mistake to reckon the Humanist movement in Germany, as Geiger does,[1] as a 'merely imported culture, entirely lacking independence.' The germ of this great movement towards mental freedom was contained in the general trend of the time, which was striving to free itself from the fetters of the Middle Ages in customs and education as well as dogma. It was chiefly a polemical movement, a fight between contentious savants. The writings of the Humanists at this naively sensuous period were full of the joy of life and love of pleasure; but scarcely any simple feeling for Nature can be found in them, and there was neither poet nor poem fit to be compared with Petrarch and his sonnets.

Natural philosophy, too, was proscribed by scholastic wisdom; the real Aristotle was only gradually shelled out from under mediaeval accretions. The natural philosopher, Conrad Summenhart[2] (1450-1501) was quite unable to disbelieve the foolish legend, that the appearance of a comet foretold four certain events—heat, wind, war, and the death of princes. At the same time, not being superstitious, he held aloof from the crazy science of astrology and all the fraud connected with it. Indeed, as an observer of Nature, and still more as a follower and furtherer of the scholastic Aristotelian natural philosophy, he shewed a leaning towards the theory of development, for, according to him, the more highly organized structures proceed from those of lower organization, and these again form the inorganic under the influence of meteors and stars. The poet laureate Conrad Celtes (b. 1459), a singer of love and composer of four books about it, was a true poet. His incessant wandering, for he was always moving from place to place, was due in part to love of Nature and of novelty, but still more to a desire to spread his own fame. He lacked the naivete and openness to impressions of the true child of Nature; his songs in praise of spring, etc., scatter a colourless general praise, which is evidently the result of arduous thought rather than of direct impressions from without; and his many references to ancient deities shew that he borrowed more than his phrases.

Though geography was then closely bound up with the writing of history, as represented by Beatus Rhenanus (1485-1547) and Johann Aventinus, and patriotism and the accounts of new lands led men to wish to describe the beauties and advantages of their own, the imposing discoveries across the seas did not make so forcible an impression upon the German humanist as upon savants elsewhere, especially in Italy and Spain. A mystico-theosophical feeling for Nature, or rather a magical knowledge of her, flourished in Germany at this time among the learned, both among Protestants and those who were partially true to Catholicism. One of the strangest exponents of such ideas was Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Cologne[3] (1535). His system of the world abounded in such fantastic caprices as these: everything depends on harmony and sympathy; when one of Nature's strings is struck, the others sound with it: the analogical correspondences are at the same time magical: symbolic relations between natural objects are sympathetic also: a true love-bond exists between the elm and vine: the sun bestows life on man; the moon, growth; Mercury, imagination; Venus, love, etc. God is reflected in the macrocosm, gives light in all directions through all creatures, is adumbrated in man microcosmically, and so forth.

Among others, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim (1541), ranked Nature and the Bible, like Agrippa, as the best books about God and the only ones without falsehood.

'One must study the elements, follow Nature from land to land, since each single country is only one leaf in the book of creation. The eyes that find pleasure in this true experience are the true professors, and more reliable than all learned writings.'

He held man to be less God's very image than a microcosmic copy of Nature—the quintessence of the whole world. Other enthusiasts made similar statements. Sebastian Frank of Donauwoerth (1543) looked upon the whole world as an open book and living Bible, in which to study the power and art of God and learn His will: everything was His image, all creatures are 'a reflection, imprint, and expression of God, through knowledge of which man may come to know the true Mover and Cause of all things.'

He shewed warm feeling for Nature in many similes and descriptions[4]— in fact, much of his pithy drastic writing sounds pantheistic. But he was very far from the standpoint of the great Italian philosophers, Giordano Bruno and Campanella. Bruno, a poet as well as thinker, distinguished Nature in her self-development—matter, soul, and mind—as being stages and phases of the One.

The material of all things issues from the original womb, For Nature works with a master hand in her own inner depths; She is art, alive and gifted with a splendid mind. Which fashions its own material, not that of others, And does not falter or doubt, but all by itself Lightly and surely, as fire burns and sparkles. Easily and widely, as light spreads everywhere, Never scattering its forces, but stable, quiet, and at one, Orders and disposes of everything together.

Campanella, even in a revolting prison, sang in praise of the wisdom and love of God, and His image in Nature. He personified everything in her; nothing was without feeling; the very movements of the stars depended on sympathy and antipathy; harmony was the central soul of all things.

The most extraordinary of all German thinkers was the King of Mystics, Jacob Boehme. Theist and pantheist at once, his mind was a ferment of different systems of thought. It is very difficult to unriddle his Aurora, but love of Nature, as well as love of God, is clear in its mystical utterances:

God is the heart or source of Nature. Nature is the body of God.

'As man's mind rules his whole body in every vein and fills his whole being, so the Holy Ghost fills all Nature, and is its heart and rules in the good qualities of all things.'

'But now heaven is a delightful chamber of pleasure, in which are all the powers, as in all Nature the sky is the heart of the waters.'

In another place he calls God the vital power in the tree of life, the creatures His branches, and Nature the perfection and self-begotten of God.

Nature's powers are explained as passion, will, and love, often in lofty and beautiful comparisons:

'As earth always bears beautiful flowers, plants, and trees, as well as metals and animate beings, and these finer, stronger, and more beautiful at one time than another; and as one springs into being as another dies, causing constant use and work, so it is in still greater degree with the begetting of the holy mysteries[5] ... creation is nothing else than a revelation of the all-pervading superficial godhead ... and is like the music of many flutes combined into one great harmony.'

But the most representative man, both of the fifteenth century and, in a sense, of the German race, was Luther. That maxim of Goethe's for teaching and ethics,' Cheerfulness is the mother of all virtues, might well serve as a motto for Luther;

The two men had much in common.

The one, standing half in the Middle Ages, had to free himself from mental slavery by strength of will and courage of belief.

The other, as the prophet of the nineteenth century, the incarnation of the modern man, had to shake off the artificiality and weak sentimentality of the eighteenth.

To both alike a healthy joy in existence was the root of being. Luther was always open to the influence of Nature, and, characteristically, the Psalter was his favourite book. 'Lord, how manifold are Thy works, in wisdom hast Thou made them all!'