Part 2 (1/2)

And what a lofty point of view is shewn by the overpowering words which Job puts into the mouth of Jehovah; 'Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof if thou knowest, or who hath stretched the line upon it?

'Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof?

'When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of G.o.d shouted for joy?...

'Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the dayspring to know his place?

'That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it?...

'Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea, or hast thou walked in the search of the deep?...

'Declare, if thou knowest it all!...

'Where is the way where light dwelleth, and as for darkness, where is the place thereof?' etc.

Compare with this _Isaiah_ xl. verse 12, etc.

Metaphors too, though poetic and fine, are not individualized.

'Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy water-spouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.'--_Psalm_ 42.

'Save me, O G.o.d; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.'--_Psalm_ 69.

There are many pictures from the animal world; and these are more elaborate in Job than elsewhere (see _Job_ xl. and xli.).

Personifications, as we have seen, are many, but Nature is only called upon to sympathise with man in isolated cases, as, for instance, in 2 _Samuel_ i.:

'Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the s.h.i.+eld of the mighty is vilely cast away, the s.h.i.+eld of Saul, as if he had not been anointed with oil.'

The Cosmos unfolded itself to the Hebrew[3] as one great whole, and the glance fixed upon a distant horizon missed the nearer lying detail of phenomena. His imagination ranged the universe with the wings of the wind, and took vivid note of air, sky, sea, and land, but only, so to speak, in pa.s.sing; it never rested there, but hurried past the boundaries of earth to Jehovah's throne, and from that height looked down upon creation.

The att.i.tude of the Greek was very different. Standing firmly rooted in the world of sense, his open mind and his marvellous eye for beauty appreciated the glorious external world around him down to its finest detail. His was the race of the beautiful, the first in history to train all its powers into harmony to produce a culture of beauty equal in form and contents, and his unique achievement in art and science enriched all after times with lasting standards of the great and beautiful.

The influence of cla.s.sic literature upon the Middle Ages and modern times has not only endured, but has gone on increasing with the centuries; so that we must know the position reached by Greece and Rome as to feeling for Nature, in order to discover whether the line of advance in the Middle Ages led directly forward or began by a backward movement--a zigzag.

The terms ancient and modern, naive and sentimental, cla.s.sic and romantic, have been s.h.i.+bboleths of culture from Jean Paul, Schiller, and Hegel, to Vischer. Jean Paul, in his _Vorschule zur Aesthetik_, compares the ideally simple Greek poetry, with its objectivity, serenity, and moral grace, with the musical poetry of the romantic period, and speaks of one as the sunlight that pervades our waking hours, the other as the moonlight that gleams fitfully on our dreaming ones. Schiller's epoch-making essay _On Naive and Sentimental Poetry_, with its rough division into the cla.s.sic-naive depending on a harmony between nature and mind, and the modern-sentimental depending on a longing for a lost paradise, is constantly quoted to shew that the Greeks took no pleasure in Nature.

This is misleading. Schiller's Greek was very limited; in the very year (1795) in which the essay appeared in _The Hours_, he was asking Humboldt's advice as to learning Greek, with special reference to Homer and Xenophon.

To him Homer was the Greek _par excellence_, and who would not agree with him to-day?

As in Greek mythology, that naive poem of Nature, the product of the artistic impulse of the race to stamp its impressions in a beautiful and harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in Homer, the feeling for Nature is profound; but the Homeric hero had no personal relations with her, no conscious leaning towards her; the descriptions only served to frame human action, in time or s.p.a.ce.

But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive Homeric time, was short in spite of Schiller, who, in the very essay referred to, included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the sentimental, and Shakespeare among the naive, poets--a fact often overlooked.

In line with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for Nature pa.s.sed through various stages. These can be clearly traced from objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions, in which scenery was brought into harmony or contrast with man's inner life; until finally, in h.e.l.lenism, Nature was treated for her own sake, and man reduced to the position of supernumerary both in poetry and also--so approaching the modern--in landscape-painting.

Greece had her sentimental epoch; she did not, as we have said, long remain naive. From Sophist days a steady process of decomposition went on--in other words, a movement towards what we call modern, a movement which to the cla.s.sic mind led backward; but from the wider standpoint of general development meant advance. For the path of culture is always the same in the nations; it leads first upward and then downward, and all ripening knowledge, while it enriches the mind, brings with it some unforeseen loss. Mankind pays heavily for each new gain; it paid for increased subjectivity and inwardness by a loss in public spirit and patriotism which, once the most valued of national possessions, fell away before the increasing individuality, the germ of the modern spirit. For what is the modern spirit but limitless individuality?

The greater the knowledge of self, the richer the inner life. Man becomes his own chief problem--he begins to watch the lightest flutter of his own feelings, to grasp and reflect upon them, to look upon himself in fact as in a mirror; and it is in this doubling of the ego, so to speak, that sentimentality in the modern sense consists. It leads to love of solitude, the fittest state for the growth of a conscious love of Nature, for, as Rousseau said 'all n.o.ble pa.s.sions are formed in solitude,' 'tis there that one recognizes one's own heart as 'the rarest and most valuable of all possessions.' 'Oh, what a fatal gift of Heaven is a feeling heart!'