THE MEDIÆVAL FEELING FOR NATURE.
On the 26th April, 1335, Mt. Ventoux, near Avignon, was the scene of a remarkable occurrence. Petrarch was the hero, and on the evening of that day, while the impression was yet strong upon him, he wrote an account of it to a friend. The incident was nothing less than climbing a mountain for æsthetic gratification. That he cared to do it showed that Petrarch was on the outskirts of mediævalism.
The narrative is so interesting that I may translate a part of it; for the great humanist's letters are inaccessible to general readers. He says that he had thought of climbing the mountain for many years, since he had known the country from early boyhood, and the great mass of rocky cliff, entirely rugged and almost inaccessible, was constantly and everywhere visible. He took with him his brother and two servants. As they were starting on the ascent, they fell in with an aged shepherd, who tried to dissuade them. Fifty years before he had climbed to the summit, moved by a boyish impulse--and he supposed himself the only one who had ever done it; his recollections were full of awe and terror. But the poet pressed on, beguiling the weariness, which at times amounted almost to exhaustion, by moralizing on the labor as a type of spiritual attainments. At the summit of the highest peak, "moved deeply at first by that vast spectacle, and affected by the unusual lightness of the air, I stood as if overwhelmed. I looked, and under my feet I saw the clouds." His thoughts turned to the classical myths, and the history of his beloved Italy. He recalled that ten years before, on that same day, he had left Bologna and his studies. How many changes in his ways. His wrong loves--he loved them no longer, or rather he no longer liked to love them. He thought of his future.
"Thus rejoicing in what I had gained, regretful of my weakness, and pitying the common instability of human affections, I seemed to forget where I was and why I had come. At last I turned to the occasion of my expedition. The sinking sun and lengthening shadows admonished me that the hour of departure was at hand, and, as if started from sleep, I turned around and looked to the west. The Pyrenees--the eye could not reach so far, but I saw the mountains of Lyonnais distinctly, and the sea by Marseilles; the Rhone, too, was there before me. Observing these closely, now thinking on the things of earth, and again, as if I had done with the body, lifting my mind on high, it occurred to me to take out the copy of St. Augustine's Confessions that I always kept with me; a little volume, but of unlimited value and charm. And I call God to witness that the first words on which I cast mine eyes were these: 'Men go to wonder at the heights of mountains, the ocean floods, rivers' long courses, ocean's immensity, the revolutions of the stars,--and of themselves they have no care!' My brother asked me what was the matter. I bade him not disturb me. I closed the book, angry with myself for not ceasing to admire things of earth, instead of remembering that the human soul is beyond comparison the subject for admiration. Once and again, as I descended, I gazed back, and the lofty summit of the mountain seemed to me scarcely a cubit high, compared with the sublime dignity of man."[1]
In these sentences we find the new life and the old in the same mind. Such an action would have been impossible for a genuine son of the middle ages, but could Petrarch stand on a mountain top to-day, such an outcome of it would be equally impossible. His feeling for nature was intense even to a sense of the charm of ruggedness in hills, as Burckhardt, who refers to this letter in his work on The Italian Renaissance, shows by ample quotations; but the intense lover of nature in the nineteenth century, though his ethical sense be as deep as Wordsworth's, finds a different influence in such a scene. Indeed, read in Wordsworth himself, the modern contrast:
"Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay Beneath him; far and wide the clouds were touched, And in their silent faces could he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank The spectacle; sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him; they swallowed up His animal being, in them did he live, And by them did he live: they were his life. In such access of mind, in such high hour Of visitation from the living God, Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired. No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request, Rapt into still communion, that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise."
How far apart is the piety of the two poets, how different their absorption. This identification of the human mood with Nature, and the spiritual elation that arises from the union, is thoroughly characteristic of the present century. Wordsworth's peculiar beauty, as Hartley Coleridge told Caroline Fox, "consisted in viewing things as amongst them, mixing himself up in everything that he mentions, so that you admire the man in the thing, the involved man." And Hartley's inspired father uttered a great criticism on the modern feeling for nature, when in the Ode on Dejection he cried,
"Oh, lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth nature live."
No literary contemporaries were ever more apart than Wordsworth and Byron, yet Childe Harold has the same note:
"I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling. . . . . the soul can flee And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle and not in vain."
We discover the same sentiment, more delicately held, in Keats, as in some of his sayings about flowers, and Shelley, speaking of the longing for a response to one's own nature, says:
"The discovery of its antitype, this is the invisible and unattainable point to which love tends.... Hence in solitude, or in that state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, and the grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the motions of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is found a secret correspondence with our heart, that awakens the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and brings tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic rapture, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone."
Yet this spirit, with which our later poetry is almost everywhere touched, "this mysterious analogy between human emotions and the phenomena of the world without us," as von Humboldt expresses it, in its present comprehensiveness is new to literature. To feel for mountains, forests, or the ocean, with mingled awe, love, and ecstasy, seems so natural to us, that we can hardly realize that Gray was striking a novel and significant chord when he wrote at the Grande Chartreuse, "One of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes.... Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry."
In Petrarch's letter we observe the deficiency in absorbing enthusiasm for the grander forms of nature, as well as his sense of the isolation of such sentiment from true spiritual life. Yet this letter is the most significant indication which we possess from the middle ages of a capacity for enjoying the sublimity of heights. In Præterita, Ruskin, while describing his eagerness at the first sight of the Alps, as a boy, has written two or three sentences that we may employ to illustrate the contrast between Petrarch and his predecessors:
"Till Rousseau's time there had been no 'sentimental' love of nature ... St. Bernard of La Fontaine, looking out to Mont Blanc with his child's eyes, sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna; St. Bernard of Talloires, not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta. But for me, the Alps and their people were alike beautiful in their snow, and their humanity; and I wanted, neither for them nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any spirits in heaven but the clouds."
Others, beside the Bernards, men from whose culture and intelligence we should expect fine appreciation, felt nothing august or inspiring in the material world. So far as we have any record, the fourteenth-century laureate was the first of the moderns to climb a mountain for the æsthetic pleasure of the view. Burckhardt's suggestion that this honor belongs to Dante, on the strength of a passage in the fourth canto of the Purgatory, is surely not tenable; for the top of Bismantova possessed a citadel in Dante's time to which business may easily have called him. All through the middle ages, the lofty elevations between central Europe and Italy were constantly being crossed. The most cultivated men were going back and forth as couriers on business of the Church, and the political relations, especially between Italy and Germany, kept up a continual stream of travel. Yet one recalls no lines in any mediæval poem that describe or express sensations of the least interest concerning the sights that have bowed the strongest souls of our era, that have been felt by thousands, and put into words by so many poets.
There is, indeed, in the beginning of a passage from a famous scholar, John of Salisbury, an apparent exception to this strange indifference; but a few clauses correct the hasty judgment. Writing from Lombardy, he explained why he could not send a letter from the Great St. Bernard: "I have been on the mount of Jove: on the one hand looking up to the heaven of the mountains; on the other, shuddering at the hell of the valleys; feeling myself so much nearer to heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would be heard." Yet this was due to no rapture of soul, for--"Lord, I said, restore me to my brethren, that they come not into this place of torment." He goes on to specify the perils of ice, precipice, and cold, and nothing disturbs him so much as that his ink was frozen. But there is not a suggestion of anything worth looking at. Even Cæsar, as von Humboldt reminds us, composed a rhetorical treatise while crossing the Alps. But the poet of Vaucluse did climb a mountain for the love of the view, and the very fact that his æsthetic attention was distracted by ethical introspection is an indication of that serious sensibility which was destined to become such an essential element in our feeling for nature; what for every Wordsworthian is summed up in the second mood of Tintern Abbey.
This incapacity for appreciating mountainous sublimity involved a blindness to the rugged and picturesque on smaller scales. In minor chords, and in combinations of tone superficially discordant, we have learned to recognize some of nature's richest harmonies; this is one of our marks of development. Closely linked, too, with this first of modern passions for nature, indeed unified with it by the qualities of strength and massiveness, is our feeling for the ocean and great woods.
