Part 6 (2/2)

There is little about Nature in this beautiful avowal of love and longing, but the whole colouring of the mood forms a background of feeling for his longer descriptions. His very long and tedious poem about the bridal journey of Gelesiuntha, the Spanish princess, who married King Chilperic, shews deep and touching feeling in parts. She left her Toledo home with a heavy heart, crossing the Pyrenees, where 'the mountains s.h.i.+ning with snow reach to the stars, and their sharp peaks project over the rain clouds.' In the same vein as Ausonius, when he urged Paulinus to write to him, she begs her sister for news:

By thy name full oft I call thee, Gelesiuntha, sister mine: with this name fountains, woods, rivers, and fields resound. Art thou silent, Gelesiuntha? Answer as to thy sister stones and mountains, groves and waters and sky, answer in language mute.

In troubled thought and care she asked the very breezes, but of her sister's safety all were silent.

Fortunatus, like Ausonius, not only looked at Nature with sympathy, but was a master in description of scenery. His lengthy descriptions of spring are mostly only decorative work, but here and there we find a really poetic idea. For example:

At the first spring, when earth has doffed her frost, the field is clothed with variegated gra.s.s; the mountains stretch their leafy heads towards the sky, the shady tree renews its verdant foliage, the lovely vine is swelling with budding branches, giving promise that a weight of grapes shall hang from its prolific stems.

While all joys return, the earth is dead and dull.

And:

The soft violets paint the field with their own purple, the meadows are green with gra.s.s, the gra.s.s is bright with its fresh shoots. Little by little, like stars, the bright flowers spring up, and the sward is joyous and gay with flecks of colour, and the birds that through the winter cold have been numb and silent, with imprisoned song, are now recalled to their song.

He describes the cold winter, and a hot summer's day, when

Even in the forests no shade was to be found, and the traveller almost fainted on the burning roads, longing for shade and cool drinks. At last the rustle of a crystal stream is heard, he hurries to it with delight, he lies down and lays his limbs in the soft kisses of the gra.s.s.

His poems about beautiful and noteworthy places include some on the Garonne and Gers (Egircius):

So dried up by heat that it is neither river nor land, and the grumbling croak of the frog, sole ruler of the realm from which the fish are banished, is heard in the lonely swamp; but when the rain pours down, the flood swells, and what was a lake suddenly becomes a sea.

He has many verses of this sort, written with little wit but great satisfaction.

More attractive are descriptions of the Rhine and Moselle, recalling Ausonius, and due to love partly of Nature, partly of verbal scene-painting. The best and most famous of these is on his journey by the Moselle from Metz to Andernach on the Rhine. Here he shews a keen eye and fine taste for wide views and high mountains, as well as for the minutiae of scenery, with artistic treatment. He also blends his own thoughts and feelings with his impressions of Nature, making it clear that he values her not merely for decoration, but for her own sake.

He has been called the last Roman poet; in reality, he belonged not only to the period which directly succeeded his own, when the Roman world already lay in ruins, but to the fully-developed Middle Ages--the time when Christianity and Germanism had mated with Roman minds.

In his best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the cla.s.sic tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all its depth and intensity. His touching friends.h.i.+p with Radegunde is, as it were, a symbol of the blending of the two elements out of which the modern sprang. It was the stimulating influence of the n.o.ble Germanic princess, herself Christian in soul, which fanned the dying sparks of cla.s.sic poetry into a flame.

Fortunatus stood upon a borderland. Literature was retreating further and further from the cla.s.sic models, and culture was declining to its fall. In Gaul, as in Spain and Italy, the shadows of coming night were broadening over literary activity, thought, and feeling.

It is a characteristic fact in Roman literature, that not only its great lights, but the lesser ones who followed them, were enthusiastically imitated. Latin poetry of the Middle Ages lived upon recollections of the past, or tried to raise itself again by its help; even so late a comer as Fortunatus became in his turn an object of marvel, and was copied by poets who never reached his level.

It is not surprising that feeling for Nature shewed a corresponding shallowness and la.s.situde.

Not only bucolic but didactic writing was modelled upon the cla.s.sic.

Isodorus and Beda, in their works with identical t.i.tles 'concerning the existence of things,' relied on Roman models no less than Alcuin, who had formed himself on the pattern of Augustine's time in his _Conflict between Winter and Spring_, as well as in many single verses, directly inspired by Virgil.[36]

His _Farewell to his Cell_ caught the idyllic tone very neatly:

Beloved cell, retirement's sweet abode!

Farewell, a last farewell, thy poet bids thee!

Beloved cell, by smiling woods embraced, Whose branches, shaken by the genial breeze, To meditation oft my mind disposed.

Around thee too, their health-reviving herbs In verdure gay the fertile meadows spread; And murmuring near, by flowery banks confined, Through fragrant meads the crystal streamlets glide, Wherein his nets the joyful fisher casts, And fragrant with the apple bending bough, With rose and lily joined, the gardens smile; While jubilant, along thy verdant glades At dawn his melody each songster pours, And to his G.o.d attunes the notes of praise.

These heartfelt effusions express a feeling which certainly inspired many monks when they turned from their gloomy cells to the gardens and woods beyond--a feeling compounded of renunciation of the world with idyllic comfort in their surroundings. If their fundamental feeling was wors.h.i.+p and praise of the Creator, their constant outdoor work, which, during the first centuries, was strenuous cultivation of the soil, must have roused a deep appreciation of Nature in the n.o.bler minds among them. Their choice of sites for monasteries and hermitages fully bears out this view.[37]

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