Part 18 (1/2)

O violets, sweet and fresh and pure indeed, Culled by that hand beyond all others fair!

What rain or what pure air has striven to bear Flowers far excelling those 'tis wont to yield?

What pearly dew, what sun, or sooth what earth Did you with all these subtle charms adorn; And whence is this sweet scent by Nature drawn, Or heaven who deigns to grant it to such worth?

O, my dear violets, the hand which chose You from all others, that has made you fair, 'Twas that adorned you with such charm and worth; Sweet hand! which took my heart altho' it knows Its lowliness, with that you may compare.

To that give thanks, and to none else on earth.

Thus we see that the Italians of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were penetrated through and through by the modern spirit--were, indeed, its pioneers. They recognized their own individuality, pondered their own inner life, delighted in the charms of Nature, and described them in prose and poetry, both as counterparts to feeling and for her own sake.

Over all the literature we have been considering--whether poetic comparison and personification, or sentimental descriptions of pastoral life and a golden age, of blended inner and outer life, or of the finest details of scenery--there lies that bloom of the modern, that breath of subjective personality, so hard to define. The rest of contemporary Europe had no such culture of heart and mind, no such marked individuality, to shew.

The further growth of the Renaissance feeling, itself a rebirth of h.e.l.lenic and Roman feeling, was long delayed.

Let us turn next to Spain and Portugal--the countries chiefly affected by the great voyages of discovery, not only socially and economically, but artistically--and see the effect of the new scenery upon their imagination.

CHAPTER V

ENTHUSIASM FOR NATURE AMONG THE DISCOVERERS AND CATHOLIC MYSTICS

The great achievement of the Italian Renaissance was the discovery of the world within, of the whole deep contents of the human spirit.

Burckhart, praising this achievement, says:

If we were to collect the pearls from the courtly and knightly poetry of all the countries of the West during the two preceding centuries, we should have a ma.s.s of wonderful divinations and single pictures of the inward life, which at first sight would seem to rival the poetry of the Italians. Leaving lyrical poetry out of account, G.o.dfrey of Stra.s.sburg gives us, in his _Tristram and Isolt_, a representation of human pa.s.sion, some features of which are immortal. But these pearls lie scattered in the ocean of artificial convention, and they are altogether something very different from a complete objective picture of the inward man and his spiritual wealth.

The discovery of the beauty of scenery followed as a necessary corollary of this awakening of individualism, this fathoming of the depths of human personality. For only to fully-developed man does Nature fully disclose herself.

This had already been stated by one of the most philosophic minds of the time, Pico della Mirandola, in his speech on the dignity of man.

G.o.d, he tells us, made man at the close of creation to know the laws of the universe, to love its beauty, to admire its greatness. He bound him to no fixed place, to no prescribed form of work, and by no iron necessity; but gave him freedom to will and to move.

'I have set thee,' said the Creator to Adam, 'in the midst of the world, that thou mayest the more easily behold and see all that is therein. I created thee a being neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, only that thou mightest be free to shape and to overcome thyself. Thou mayest sink into a beast, and be born again to the Divine likeness. The brutes bring with them from their mothers'

body what they will carry with them as long as they live; the higher spirits are from the beginning, or soon after, what they will be for ever. To thee alone is given a growth and a development depending on thine own free will. Thou bearest in thee the germs of a universal life.'

The best men of the Renaissance realized this ideal of an all-round development, and it was the glory of Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that she found a new realm in the inner man at the very time that her discoveries across the seas were enlarging the boundaries of the external world, and her science was studying it.

Mixed as the motives of the discoverers must have been, like those of the crusaders before them, and probably, for the most part, self-interested, it is easy to imagine the surprise they must have felt at seeing ignorant people, who, to quote Peter Martyr (de rebus oceanicis):[1]

Naked, without weights or measures or death-dealing money, live in a Golden Age without laws, without slanderous judges, without the scales of the balance. Contented with Nature, they spend their lives utterly untroubled for the future.... Theirs is a Golden Age; they do not enclose their farms with trench or wall or hurdle; their gardens are open. Without laws, without the scales of the balance, without judges, they guard the right by Nature's light.

And their wonder at the novelties in climate and vegetation, the strange forests, brilliant birds, and splendid stars of the tropics, must have been no less.

Yet it is one thing to feel, and another to find words to convey the feeling to others; and the explorers often expressed regret for their lack of skill in this respect.

Also, and this is more important in criticizing what they wrote, these seamen were mostly simple, unlettered folk, to whom a country's wealth in natural products and their practical value made the strongest appeal, and whose admiration of bays, harbours, trees, fields of grain, etc., was measured by the same standard of utility.

Even such unskilled reporters did not entirely fail to refer to the beauty of Nature; but had it not been for the original and powerful mind of Christopher Columbus, we should have had little more in the way of description than 'pleasant,' 'pretty,' and such words.

Marco Polo described his journey to the coast of Cormos[2] in very matter-of-fact fas.h.i.+on, but not without a touch of satisfaction at the peculiarities of the place: