Chapter XII · (continued 2)
Reading edition
In subjectivity and dreaminess both Chateaubriand and Lamartine were like the German romanticists, but their fundamental note was theism, not pantheism. The storm of the French Revolution, which made radical changes in religion, as in all other things, was followed by a reaction. Christianity acquired new power and inwardness, and Nature was unceasingly praised as the mirror of the divine idea of creation.
In his Génie du Christianisme, Chateaubriand said:
The true God, in entering into His Works, has given his immensity to Nature... there is an instinct in man, which puts him in communication with the scenes of Nature.
Lamartine was a sentimental dreamer of dreams, a thinker of lofty thoughts which lost themselves in the inexpressible. His Meditations shew his ardent though sad worship of Nature; his love of evening, moonlight, and starlight. For instance, L'Isolement:
Ici gronde le fleuve aux vagues écumantes, Il serpente et s'enfonce en un lointain obscur: Là le lac immobile étend ses eaux dormantes Oò l'étoile du soir se lève dans l'azur. An sommet de ces monts couronnés de bois sombres, Le crépuscule encore jette un dernier rayon; Et le char vaporeux de la reine des ombres Monte et blanchit déjà les bords de l'horizon.
Le Soir:
Le soir ramène le silence.... Venus se lève à l'horizon; A mes pieds l'étoile amoureuse De sa lueur mystérieuse Blanchit les tapis de gazon. De ce hêtre au feuillage sombre J'entends frissonner les rameaux; On dirait autour des tombeaux Qu'on entend voltiger une ombre, Tout-à-coup, détaché des cieux, Un rayon de l'astre nocturne, Glissant sur mon front taciturne, Vient mollement toucher mes yeux. Doux reflet d'un globe de flamme Charmant rayon, que me veux-tu? Viens-tu dans mon sein abattu Porter la lumière à mon âme? Descends-tu pour me révéler Des mondes le divin mystére, Ces secrets cachés dans la sphère Où le jour va te rappeler?
In the thought of happy past hours, he questions the lake:
Un soir, t'en souvient-il, nous voguions en silence; On n'entendait au loin, sur l'onde et sous les cieux, Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence Tes flots harmonieux. O lac! rochers muets! grottes! forêt obscure! Vous que le temps épargne ou qu'il peut rajeunir Gardez de cette nuit, gardez, belle nature, Au moins le souvenir!... Que le vent qui gémit, le roseau qui soupire Que les parfums légers de ton air embaumé, Que tout ce qu'on entend, l'on voit, ou l'on respire, Tout dise: 'ils out aimés!
La Prière has:
Le roi brillant du jour, se couchant dans sa gloire, Descend avec lenteur de son char de victoire; Le nuage éclatant qui le cache à nos yeux Conserve en sillons d'or sa trace dans les cieux, Et d'un reflet de pourpre inonde l'étendue. Comme une lampe d'or dans l'azur suspendue, La lune se balance aux bords de l'horizon; Ses rayons affaiblis dorment sur le gazon, Et le voile des nuits sur les monts se déplie. C'est l'heure, où la nature, un moment recueillie, Entre la nuit qui touche et le jour qui s'enfuit S'élève au créateur du jour et de la nuit, Et semble offrir à Dieu dans son brillant langage, De la création le magnifique hommage. Voilà le sacrifice immense, universelle! L'univers est le temple, et la terre est l'autel; Les cieux en sont le dôme et ses astres sans nombre, Ces feux demi-voilés, pâle ornement de l'ombre, Dans la voûte d'azur avec ordre semés, Sont les sacrés flambeaux pour ce temple allumés... Mais ce temple est sans voix... ...Mon coeur seul parle dans ce silence-- La voix de l'univers c'est mon intelligence. Sur les rayons du soir, sur les ailes du vent, Elle s'élève à Dieu...
Le Golfe de Baia:
Vois-tu comme le flot paisible Sur le rivage vient mourir? Mais déjà l'ombre plus épaisse Tombe et brunit les vastes mers; Le bord s'efface, le bruit cesse, Le silence occupe les airs. C'est l'heure où la Mélancholie S'assied pensive et recueillie Aux bords silencieux des mers.
The decay of autumn corresponds to his own dolorous feelings:
Oui, dans ces jours d'automne où la nature expire, A ses regards voilés je trouve plus d'attraits; C'est l'adieu d'un ami, c'est le dernier sourire Des lèvres que la mort va fermer pour jamais.
This is from Ischia:
Le Soleil va porter le jour à d'autres mondes; Dans l'horizon désert Phébé monte sans bruit, Et jette, en pénétrant les ténébres profondes, Un voile transparent sur le front de la nuit. Voyez du haut des monts ses clartés ondoyantes Comme un fleuve de flamme inonder les coteaux, Dormir dans les vallons on glisser sur les pentes, Ou rejaillir au loin du sein brillant des eaux.... Doux comme le soupir d'un enfant qui sommeille, Un son vague et plaintif se répand dans les airs.... Mortel! ouvre ton âme à ces torrents de vie, Reçois par tous les sens les charmes de la nuit....
He sees the transitoriness of all earthly things reflected in Nature:
L'onde qui baise ce rivage, De quoi se plaint-elle à ses bords? Pourquoi le roseau sur la plage, pourquoi le ruisseau sous l'ombrage, Rendent-ils de tristes accords? De quoi gémit la tourterelle? Tout naist, tout paise.
Such a depth of sympathy and dreamy dolorous reverie was new to France, but Rousseau had broken the ice, and henceforward feeling flowed freely. To Lamartine the theist, as to the pantheists Goethe, Shelley, and Byron, Nature was a friend and lover.
Victor Hugo was of the same mind, but his poetry is clearer and more plastic than Lamartine's. We quote from his finest poems, the Feuilles d'Automne. He was a true lyrist, familiar both with the external life of Nature and the inner life of man. His beautiful 'Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne' has the spirit of Faust. He imagines himself upon a mountain top, with earth on one side, the sea on the other; and there he hears two voices unlike any ever heard before:
L'une venait des mers, chant de gloire! hymne heureux! C'était la voix des flots qui se parlaient entre eux.... Or, comme je l'ai dit, l'Océan magnifique Epandait une voix joyeuse et pacifique Chantant comme la harpe aux temples de Sion, Et louait la beauté de la création.
while from the other voice:
Pleurs et cris! L'injure, l'anatheme.... C'était la terre et l'homme qui pleuraient!... L'une disait, Nature! et l'autre, Humanité!
The personifications in this poem are beautiful. He, too, like Lamartine, loves sea and stars most of all. These verses from Les Orientales remind one of St Augustine:
J'étais seul près des flots par une nuit d'étoiles, Pas un nuage aux cieux; sur les mers pas de voiles, Et les bois et les monts et toute la nature Semblaient interroger dans confus murmure Les flots des mers, les feux du ciel. Et les étoiles d'or, légions infinies, A voix haute, à voix basse, avec mille harmonies Disaient en inclinant leurs couronnes de feu, Et les flots bleus, que rien gouverne et n'arrête, Disaient en recourbant l'écume de leur crête: C'est le Seigneur Dieu, le Seigneur Dieu! Parfois lorsque tout dort, je m'assieds plein de joie Sous le dôme étoilé qui sur nos fronts flamboie; J'écoute si d'en haut il tombe quelque bruit; Et l'heure vainement me frappe de son aile Quand je contemple ému cette fête eternelle Que le ciel rayonnant donne au monde la nuit! Souvent alors j'ai cru que ces soleils de flamme Dans ce monde endormi n'échauffaient que mon âme; Qu'à les comprendre seul j'étais prédestiné; Que j'étais, moi, vaine ombre obscure et taciturne, Le roi mystérieuse de la pompe nocturne; Que le ciel pour moi seul s'était illuminé!
The necessary condition of delight in Nature is very strikingly given:
Si vous avez en vous, vivantes et pressées, Un monde intérieur d'images, de pensées, De sentimens, d'amour, d'ardente passion Pour féconder ce monde, échangez-le sans cesse Avec l'autre univers visible qui vous presse! Mêlez toute votre âme à la création.... Que sous nos doigts puissans exhale la nature, Cette immense clavier!
His lyrics are rich in fine scenes from Nature, unrolled in cold but stately periods, and the poetic intuition which always divines the spirit life brought him near to that pantheism which we find in all the greatest English and German poets of his time,[16] and which lay, too, at the root of German romanticism.
THE GERMAN ROMANTICISTS
Schiller did not possess the intrinsically lyrical genius of Goethe; his strength lay, not in song, but drama, and in a didactic form of epic--the song not of feeling, but of thought.
Descriptions of Nature occur here and there in his epics and dramas; but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his contemporaries, he passed through a sentimental period; Evening shews this, and Melancholy, to Laura:
Laura, a sunrise seems to break Where'er thy happy looks may glow.... Thy soul--a crystal river passing, Silver clear and sunbeam glassing, Mays into blossom sad autumn by thee: Night and desert, if they spy thee, To gardens laugh--with daylight shine, Lit by those happy smiles of thine!
With such ecstatic extravagances contrast the excellent descriptions of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems--for instance, the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in The Diver, evening in The Hostage, and landscape in William Tell and The Walk. In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery is made a 'frame for a kind of phenomenology of mankind.'
Flowers of all hue are struggling into glow Along the blooming fields; yet their sweet strife Melts into one harmonious concord. Lo! The path allures me through the pastoral green And the wide world of fields! The labouring bee Hums round me, and on hesitating wing O'er beds of purple clover, quiveringly Hovers the butterfly. Save these, all life Sleeps in the glowing sunlight's steady sheen-- E'en from the west no breeze the lull'd airs bring. Hark! in the calm aloft I hear the skylark sing. The thicket rustles near, the alders bow Down their green coronals, and as I pass, Waves in the rising wind the silvering grass; Come! day's ambrosial night! receive me now Beneath the roof by shadowy beeches made Cool-breathing, etc.
Schiller's interest in Nature was more a matter of reflection than direct observation; its real tendency was philosophical and ethical. He called Nature naive (he included naturalness in Nature); those who seek her, sentimental; but he overlooked (as we saw in an earlier chapter) the fact that antiquity did not always remain naive, and that not all moderns are sentimental.
As Rousseau's pupil he drew a sharp distinction between Nature and Art, and felt happy in solitude where 'man with his torment does not come,' lying, as he says in The Bride of Messina, like a child on the bosom of Nature.
In Schiller's sense of the word, perhaps no poet has been more sentimental about Nature than Jean Paul.
He was the humorous and satirical idyllist par excellence, and laid the scenes of his romances in idyllic surroundings, using the trifling events of daily life to wonderful purpose. There is an almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious metaphors and mixture of ideas. With the exception of Lake Maggiore in Titan, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all his references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated with the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling. They all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own countryside, finding the reflection of their feelings in her. There is a constant interweaving of the human soul and the universe; therein lies his pantheistic trait. 'To each man,' he said,[17] 'Nature appears different, and the only question is, which is the most beautiful? Nature is for ever becoming flesh for mankind; outer Nature takes a different form in each mind.' Certainly the nature of Jean Paul was different from the Nature of other mortals. Was she more beautiful? He wrote of her in his usual baroque style, with a wealth of thought and feeling, and everywhere the sparkle of genius; but it is all presented in the strangest motley, as exaggerated and unenjoyable as can be. For example, from Siebenkâs:
I appeared again then on the last evening of the year 1794, on the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to the ocean of eternity.
To the butterfly--proboscis of Siebenkäs, enough honey--cells were still open in every blue thistle-blossom of destiny.
When they had passed the gate--that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it--the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and shining above the dark green earth, and the ocean-calm of Nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it) up above the world, and down beneath it the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far-reaching darkness.
When it was autumn in his heart:
Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead; above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all Nature, trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths.... But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs of Nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers.
When his married life grew more unhappy, in December:
The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet, as he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of Nature.
and in spring
it seemed to him as if his life dwelt, not in a bodily heart, but in some warm and tender tear, as if his heavy-laden soul were expanding and breaking away through some chink in its prison, and melting into a tone of music, a blue ether wave.
And Titan expresses that inner enfranchisement which Nature bestows upon us:
Exalted Nature! when we see and love thee, we love our fellow-men more warmly, and when we must pity or forget them, thou still remainest with us, reposing before the moist eye like a verdant chain of mountains in the evening red. Ah! before the soul in whose sight the morning dew of its ideals has faded to a cold, grey drizzle ... thou remainest, quickening Nature, with thy flowers and mountains and cataracts, a faithful comforter; and the bleeding son of the gods, cold and speechless, dashes the drop of anguish from his eyes, that they may rest, far and clear, on thy volcanoes, and on thy springs and on thy suns.
This is sunset in his abstruse artistic handling:
The sun sinks, and the earth closes her great eye like that of a dying god. Then smoke the hills like altars; out of every wood ascends a chorus; the veils of day, the shadows, float around the enkindled transparent tree-tops, and fall upon the gay, gem-like flowers. And the burnished gold of the west throws back a dead gold on the east, and tinges with rosy light the hovering breast of the tremulous lark--the evening bell of Nature.
And this sunrise:
The flame of the sun now shot up ever nearer to the kindled morning clouds; at length in the heavens, in the brooks and ponds, and in the blooming cups of dew, a hundred suns rose together, while a thousand colours floated over the earth, and one pure dazzling white broke from the sky. It seemed as if an almighty earthquake had forced up from the ocean, yet dripping, a new-created blooming plain, stretching out beyond the bounds of vision, with all its young instincts and powers; the fire of earth glowed beneath the roots of the immense hanging garden, and the fire of heaven poured down its flames and burnt the colours into the mountain summits and the flowers. Between the porcelain towers of white mountains the coloured blooming heights stood as thrones of the Fruit-Goddess; over the far-spread camp of pleasure blossom-cups and sultry drops were pitched here and there like peopled tents; the ground was inlaid with swarming nurseries of grasses and little hearts, and one heart detached itself after another with wings, or fins, or feelers, from the hot breeding-cell of Nature, and hummed and sucked and smacked its little lips, and sung: and for every little proboscis some blossom-cup of; joy was already open. The darling child of the infinite mother, man, alone stood with bright joyful eyes upon the market-place of the living city of the sun, full of brilliance and noise, and gazed, delighted, around him into all its countless streets; but his eternal mother rested veiled in immensity, and only by the warmth which went to his heart did he feel that he was lying upon hers.
For very overflow of thought and imagery and ecstasy of feeling, Jean Paul never achieved a balanced beauty of expression.
The ideal classic standard which Winckelmann and Lessing had laid down--simple and plastic, calm because objective, crystal-clear in thought and expression--and which Goethe and Schiller had sought to realize and imbue with modern ideas, was too strictly limited for the Romanticists. Hyperion's words expressed their taste more accurately: 'O, man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks!' and they laid stress upon restless movement, fantastic, highly-coloured effects, a crass subjectivity, a reckless licence of the imagination.
Actual and visible things were disregarded; they did not accord with this claim for infinity and the nebulous, for exploring the secret depths of the soul.
It was perhaps a necessary reaction from Goethe's classicism; but it passed like a bad dream, after tending, thanks to its heterogeneous elements, now to the mediæval period, now to that of Storm and Stress, and now to Goethe, Herder, and Winckelmann. It certainly contained germs of good, which have grown and flourished in our own day.
In keeping with its whole character, the Romantic feeling for Nature was subjective and fantastic to excess, mystically enthusiastic, often with a dreamy symbolism at once deep and naive; its inmost core was pantheistic, with a pantheism shading off imperceptibly into mysticism.
After Werther, there is perhaps no work of modern fiction in which Nature plays so artistic a part as in Holderlin's Hyperion.
Embittered by life's failure to realize his ideals, he cries: 'But thou art still visible, sun in the sky! Thou art still green, sacred earth! The streams still rush to the sea, and shady trees rustle at noon. The spring's song of joy sings my mortal thoughts to sleep. The abundance of the universe nourishes and satiates my famished being to intoxication.'
This mystical pantheism could not be more clearly expressed than here:
O blessed Nature! I know not how it happens when I lift my eyes to your beauty; but all the joy of the sky is in the tears which I shed before you--a lover before the lady of his love. When the soft waves of the air play round my breast, my whole being is speechless and listens. Absorbed in the blue expanse, I often look up to the ether and down to the holy sea; and it seems as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of loneliness were lost in the divine life. To be one with all that lives, in blessed self-forgetfulness to return to the All of Nature, that is the height of thought and bliss--the sacred mountain height, the place of eternal rest, where noon loses its sultriness and thunder its voice, and the rough sea is like the waves in a field of wheat.
To such feeling as this the actualities are but fetters, hindering aspiration.
'O, if great Nature be the daughter of a father, is the daughter's heart not his heart? Is not he her deepest feeling? But have I found it? Do I know it?'
He tries to discern the 'soul of Nature,' hears 'the melody of morning light begin with soft notes.' He says to the flower, 'You are my sister,' and to the springs, 'We are of one race': he finds symbolic resemblance between his heart and all the days and seasons: he feels the beauty of the 'land like paradise,' while scarcely ever, except in the poem Heidelberg, giving a clear sketch of scenery. A number of fine comparisons from Nature are scattered through his writings [18]:
The caresses of the charming breezes. She light, clear, flattering sea. Sacred air, the sister of the mind which moves and lives in us with fiery force, present everywhere immortal. Earth, 'one of the flowers of the sky.' Heaven, 'the unending garden of life.' Beauty, that 'which is one and all.'
He describes his love in a mystical form:
We were but one flower, and our souls lived in each other as flowers do, when they love and hide their joy within a closed calyx.... The clear starry night had now become my element, for the beautiful life of my love grew in the stillness as in the depths of earth gold grows mysteriously.
He delights 'thus to drink the joy of the world out of one cup with the lady of his love.'
'Yea, man is a sun, seeing all and transfiguring all when he loves; and when he does not love, he is like a dark dwelling in which a little smelly lamp is burning.' All this is soft and feminine, but it has real poetic charm.
Beautiful too, though sad and gloomy, is his Song of Fate:
Nowhere may man abide, But painfully from hour to hour He stumbles blindly on to the unknown, As water falls from rock to rock The long year through.
His pantheism finds expression in the odes--in To Nature, for instance:
Since my heart turneth upward to the sun As one that hears her voice, Hailing the stars as brothers, and the spring As melody divine; Since in the breath that stirs the wood thy soul, The soul of joy, doth move On the still waters of my heart--therefore, O Nature! these are golden days to me!
Tieck, too, was keenly alive to Nature. Spring[19]:
Look all around thee how the spring advances! New life is playing through the gay green trees! See how in yonder bower the light leaf dances To the bird's tread and to the quivering breeze! How every blossom in the sunlight glances! The winter frost to his dark cavern flees, And earth, warm wakened, feels through every vein The kindling influence of the vernal rain. Now silvery streamlets, from the mountain stealing, Dance joyously the verdant vales along; Cold fear no more the songster's tongue is sealing, Down in the thick dark grove is heard his song. And all their bright and lovely hues revealing, A thousand plants the field and forest throng; Light comes upon the earth in radiant showers, And mingling rainbows play among the flowers.
All his writings seem intoxicated with Nature. The hero of his novel William Lovell, scamp though he is, a man of criminal egotism whose only law is licence, is deeply in love with Nature.
He wrote from Florence:
Nature refreshes my soul with her endless beauty. I am often full of enthusiasm at the thousand charms of Nature and Art ... at last my longing to travel to wonderful distant places is satisfied. Even as a child, when I stood outside my father's country-house, and gazed at the distant mountains and discovered a windmill on the very line of the horizon, it seemed to beckon me as it turned, my blood pulsed more quickly, my mind flew to distant regions, a strange longing often filled my eyes with tears.
Often it seems to me as if the enigma in ourselves were about to be unriddled, as if we were suddenly to see the transformation of all our feelings and strange experiences. Night surrounded me with a hundred terrors, the transparent moonlight sky was like a crystal dome overhead--in this world the most unusual feelings were as shadows.
'Franz Sternbald' had the same intoxicated feeling for Nature:
I should like to fill the whole world with songs of love, to move moonrise and sunrise to echo back my joys and sorrows; and trees, twigs, leaves, grasses to catch the melody and all repeat my music with a thousand tongues.[20]
To the Romantic School, Music and Nature were a passion; they longed to resolve all their feelings, like Byron, at one flash, into music. 'For thought is too distant.' Night and the forest, moonlight and starlight, were in all their songs.
There is a background of landscape all through Franz Sternbald's Wanderings.
In the novels of the eighteenth century landscape had had no place; Hermes once gave a few lines to sunset, but excused it as an extravagance, and begged readers and critics not to think that he only wanted to fill up the page.
Rousseau altered this; Sophie la Roche, in her Freundschaftlichen Frauenzimmerbriefen, introduced ruins, moonlight scenery, hills, vales, and flowering hedges, etc., into scenes of thought and feeling; and most of all, Goethe in Werther tunes scenery and soul to one key. In his later romances he avoided descriptions of scenery. Jean Paul, like Tieck in Franz Sternbald, never spares us one sunset or sunrise. Some of Tieck's concise descriptions are very telling, like Theodore Storm's at the present day:
Rosy light quivered on the blades of grass, and morning moved in waves along them.
The redder the evening grew, the heavier became his dreams; the darkened trees, the shadows lengthening across the fields, the smoke from the roofs of a little village, and the stars coming into view one by one in the sky--all this moved him deeply, moved him to a wistful compassion for himself.
As Franz wanders about the wood:
He observes the trees reflected in a neighbouring pond. He had never looked at landscape with this pleasure, it had never been given to him to discern the various colours and their shadows, the charm of the stillness, the effect of the foliage, as now in the clear water. Till now he had never drawn a landscape, only looked at it as a necessary adjunct to many historical pictures, had never felt that lifeless Nature could herself compose something whole and complete in itself, and so worthy to be represented.
Tieck's shorter stories, fairy tales and others, shew taste for the mysterious and indefinite aspects of Nature--reflections in water, rays of light, cloud forms:
They became to him the most fitting characters in which to record that indefinite inexpressible feeling which gave its special colour to his spiritual life.[21]
The pantheism of Boehme, with whom he was closely associated, always attracted him, and in Jena he came under the influence of Steffens, and also of Schelling, whose philosophy of Nature called Nature a mysterious poem, a dreaming mind. This mind it became the chief aim of Novalis, as well as Tieck, to decipher.
From simple descriptions of Nature he went on to read mystic meanings into her, seeking, psychologically in his novels and mystically in his fairy tales, to fathom the connection between natural phenomena and elementary human feeling. Blond Egbert was the earliest example of this:
Night looked sullenly through the windows, and the trees without rustled in the wet cold ... the moon looked fitfully through breaks in the driving clouds.[22]
In the same book Bertha describes the horror of loneliness, the vague longings, and then the overwhelming delight in new impressions, which seized her when she fled from home as a child and lost herself among the mountains.
The Runenberg gives in a very powerful way the idea of the weird fascination which the subterranean powers were supposed to exert over men, alluring and befooling them, and rousing their thirst for gold.
The demoniacal elements in mountain scenery, its crags and abysses, are contrasted with idyllic plains. The tale is sprinkled over with descriptions of Nature, which give it a fairy-like effect.[23]
The most extraordinary product of this School was Novalis. With him everything resolved itself into presentiment, twilight, night, into vague longings for a vague distant goal, which he expressed by the search for 'the blue flower.' This is from Heinrich von Ofterdingen:
'The cheerful pageant of the glorious evening rocked him in soft imaginings; the flower of his heart was visible now and then as by sheet lightning.' He looked at Nature with the mystic's eye, and described her fantastically:
I am never tired of looking minutely at the different plants. Growing plants are the direct language of the earth; each new leaf, each remarkable flower, is a mystery which projects itself, and because it cannot move with love and longing, nor attain to words, is a dumb, quiet plant. When in solitude one finds such a flower, does it not seem as if all around it were brightened, and, best of all, do not the little feathered notes around it remain near? One could weep for joy, and there, far from the world, stick hands and feet into the earth, to take root, and never more leave so delightful a spot. This green mysterious carpet of love is drawn over the whole earth.
It is not surprising that night should attract this unnaturally excited imagination most of all:
Sacred, inexpressible, mysterious Night, delicious balsam drops from thy hands, from the poppy sheaf; thou upliftest the heavy wings of the Spirit.[24]
Night and death are delight and bliss.
The fairy-like tale of Hyacinth and Little Rose, with its charming personifications, is refreshing after all this:
The violet told the strawberry in confidence, she told her friend the gooseberry, who never ceased to jeer when Hyacinth went, so the whole garden and wood soon knew it, and when Hyacinth went out, voices from all sides cried out, 'Little Rose is my favourite.' When he goes into the wide world to find the land of Isis, he asks the way of the animals, and of springs, rocks, and trees, and the flowers smile at him, the springs offer him a fresh drink, and there is wonderful music when he comes home. 'O that men could understand the music of Nature!' cries the listener in the tale. Then follows a description of 'the sweet passion for the being of Nature and her enchanting raptures,' and the charm of the poetic imagination which finds 'a great sympathy with man's heart' in all the external world. For example, in the breath of wind, which 'with a thousand dark and dolorous notes seems to dissolve one's quiet grief into one deep melodious sigh of all Nature.'
'And am I myself other than the stream when I gaze gloomily down into its waters and lose my thoughts in its flow?' And in ecstasy the youth exclaims: 'Whose heart does not leap for joy, when he feels Nature's innermost life in its fulness, when that powerful feeling, for which language has no other name than love and bliss, spreads like a vapour through his being, and he sinks, palpitating, on the dark alluring breast of Nature, and his poor self is lost in the overwhelming waves of joy?'[25]
Here we have the key to the romantic feeling for Nature--communion of the soul with Nature in a twilight mood of dreamy absorption.
Yet amidst all this, real delight in romantic scenery was not quite lacking: witness Hulsen's[26] Observations on Nature on a Journey through Switzerland; and the genuine lyric of Nature, untainted by mystic and sickly influences, was still to be heard, as in Eichendorff's beautiful songs and his Tautgenichts.
The Romantic School, in fact, far as it erred from the path, did enlarge the life of feeling generally, and with that, feeling for Nature, and modern literature is still bound to it by a thousand threads.
Our modern rapture has thus been reached by a path which, with many deviations in its course, has come to us from a remote past, and is still carrying us farther forward.
Its present intensity is due to the growth of science, for although feeling has become more realistic and matter-of-fact in these days of electricity and the microscope, love for Nature has increased with knowledge. Science has even become the investigator of religion, and the pantheistic tendency of the great poets has passed into us, either in the idea of an all-present God, or in that of organic force working through matter--the indestructible active principle of life in the region of the visible. Our explorers combine enthusiasm for Nature with their tireless search for truth--for example, Humboldt, Haeckel, and Paul Güssfeldt; and though, as the shadow side to this light, travelling and admiration of Nature have become a fashion, yet who nowadays can watch a great sunset or a storm over the sea, and remain insensible to the impression?
Landscape painting and poetry shew the same deviations from the straight line of development as in earlier times. Our garden craft, like our architecture, is eclectic; but the English park style is still the most adequate expression of prevalent taste: spaces of turf with tree groups, a view over land or sea, gradual change from garden to field; to which has been added a wider cultivation of foreign plants. In landscape painting the zigzag course is very marked: landscapes such as Bocklin's, entirely projected by the imagination and corresponding to nothing on earth, hang together in our galleries with the most faithful studies from Nature. It is the same with literature. In fiction, novels which perpetuate the sentimental rhapsodies of an early period, and open their chapters with forced descriptions of landscape, stand side by side with the masterly work of great writers--for example, Spielhagen, Wilhelmine von Hillern, and Theodore Storm.
In poetry, the lyric of Nature is inexhaustible. Heine, the greatest lyrist after Goethe, though his poetry has, like the Nixie, an enchantingly fair body with a fish's tail, wrote in the Travels in the Harz: 'How infinitely blissful is the feeling when the outer world of phenomena blends and harmonizes with the inner world of feeling; when green trees, thoughts, birds' songs, sweet melancholy, the azure of heaven, memory, and the perfume of flowers, run together and form the loveliest of arabesques.'
But his delight in Nature was spoilt by irony and straining after effect--for example, in The Fig Tree; and although The Lotos Flower is a gem, and the North Sea Pictures shew the fine eye of a poet who, like Byron and Shelley, can create myths, his personifications as a whole are affected, and his personal feeling is forced upon Nature for the sake of a witty effect.
Every element of Nature has found skilled interpreters both in poetry and painting, and technical facility and truth of representation now stand on one level with the appreciation of her charms.