Part 27 (2/2)
Rubens, though he felt the influence of southern light and suns.h.i.+ne as much as his fellows who had been in Italy, took his backgrounds from his native land, from parts round Antwerp, Mechlin, and Brussels. Foliage, water, and undulating ground were indispensable to him--were, to a certain extent, the actual bearers of the impression he wished to convey.
Brueghel always kept a childlike att.i.tude, delighting in details, and proud of the clever brush which could carry imitation to the point of deception. Rubens was the first to treat landscape in a bold subjective way. He opened the book of Nature, so to speak, not to spell out the words syllable by syllable, but to master her secret, to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he found there--in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape painter. The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic excitement and tension. Take, for instance, the evening scene with the rainbow in the Louvre, marvellous in its delicate gradations of atmospheric tone, and the equally marvellous thunderstorm in the Belvedere at Vienna, where a rain-cloud bursts under sulphur lightning, and a mountain stream, swollen to a torrent and lashed by the hurricane, carries all before it--trees, rocks, animals, and men.
In France, scarcely a flower had been seen in literature since the Troubadour days, not even in the cla.s.sical poetry of Corneille and Racine. There were idyllic features in Fenelon's _Telemachus_, and Ronsard borrowed motives from antiquity; but it was pastoral poetry which blossomed luxuriantly here as in Italy and Spain.
Honore d'Urfe's famous _Astree_ was much translated; but both his shepherds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of courts and carpet knights was over the whole, with a certain trace of sadness.
The case was different with French painting. After the Netherlands, it was France, by her mediaeval ill.u.s.trated ma.n.u.scripts, who chiefly aided in opening the world's eyes to landscape. Both the Poussins penetrated below the surface of Nature. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of trees in the foreground, a hill with a cla.s.sic building in the middle, and a chain of mountains in the distance, and laid more stress on drawing than colour. There was greater life in the pictures of his brother-in-law, Caspar Doughet, also called Poussin; his gra.s.s is more succulent, his winds sigh in the trees, his storm bends the boughs and scatters the clouds.
It was Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) who brought the ideal style to its perfection. He inspired the very elements with mind and feeling; his valleys, woods, and seas were just a veil through which divinity was visible. All that was ugly, painful, and confused was purified and transfigured in his hands. There is no sadness or dejection in his pictures, but a spirit of serene beauty, free from ostentation, far-fetched contrast, or artificial glitter. Light breezes blow in his splendid trees, golden light quivers through them, drawing the eye to a bright misty horizon; we say with Uhland, 'The sky is solemn, as if it would say ”this is the day of the Lord.”'
Artistic feeling for Nature became a wors.h.i.+p with Claude Lorraine.
The Netherlands recorded all Nature's phases in n.o.ble emulation with ever-increasing delight.
The poetry of air, cloudland, light, the cool freshness of morning, the hazy sultriness of noon, the warm light of evening, it all lives and moves in Cuyp's pictures and Wynant's, while Aart van der Meer painted moonlight and winter snow, and Jan van Goyen the melancholy of mist shot by sunlight. He, too--Jan van Goyen--was very clever in producing effect with very small means, with a few trees reflected in water, or a sand-heap--the art in which Ruysdael excelled all others.
The whole poetry of Nature--that secret magic which lies like a spell over quiet wood, murmuring sea, still pool, and lonely pasture--took form and colour under his hands; so little sufficed to enchant, to rouse thought and feeling, and lead them whither he would. Northern seriousness and sadness brood over most of his work; the dark trees are overhung by heavy clouds and rain, mist and dusky shadows move among his ruins. He had painted, says Carriere, the peace of woodland solitude long before Tieck found the word for it.
Beechwoods reflected in a stream, misty cloud ma.s.ses lighted by the rising sun; he moves us with such things as with a morning hymn, and his picture of a swollen torrent forcing its way between graves which catch the last rays of the sun, while a cloud of rain shrouds the ruins of a church in the background, is an elegy which has taken shape and colour.
Ruysdael marks the culminating point of this period of development, which had led from mere backgrounds and single traits of Nature--even a flower stem or a blade of gra.s.s, up to elaborate compositions imbued by a single motive, a single idea.
To conjure up with slight material a complete little world of its own, and waken responsive feeling, is not this the secret of the charm in the pictures of his school--in the wooded hill or peasant's courtyard by Hobbema, the Norwegian mountain scene of Albert van Everdingen, the dusky fig-trees, rugged crags, and foaming cataract, or the half-sullen, half-smiling sea-pieces of Bakhuysen and Van der Velde?
All these great Netherlander far outstripped the poetry of their time; it was a hundred years later before mountain and sea found their painter in words, and a complete landscape picture was not born in German poetry until the end of the eighteenth century.
CHAPTER VIII
HUMANISM, ROCOCO, AND PIGTAIL
Many decades pa.s.sed before German feeling for Nature reached the heights attained by the Italian Renaissance and the Netherland landscapists. In the Middle Ages, Germany was engrossed with ecclesiastical dogma--man's relation, not only to G.o.d, but to the one saving Church--and had little interest for Science and Art; and the great achievement of the fifteenth century, the Reformation, called for word and deed to reckon with a thousand years of old traditions and the slavery of intellectual despotism. The new time was born amid bitter throes. The questions at issue--religious and ecclesiastical questions concerned with the liberty of the Christian--were of the most absorbing kind, and though Germany produced minds of individual stamp such as she had never known before, characters of original and marked physiognomy, it was no time for the quiet contemplation of Nature. Mental life was stimulated by the new current of ideas and new delight in life awakened: yet there is scarcely a trace of the intense feeling for Nature which we have seen in Petrarch and aeneas Sylvius.
Largely as it was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, it is certainly a mistake to reckon the Humanist movement in Germany, as Geiger does,[1] as a 'merely imported culture, entirely lacking independence.' The germ of this great movement towards mental freedom was contained in the general trend of the time, which was striving to free itself from the fetters of the Middle Ages in customs and education as well as dogma. It was chiefly a polemical movement, a fight between contentious savants. The writings of the Humanists at this naively sensuous period were full of the joy of life and love of pleasure; but scarcely any simple feeling for Nature can be found in them, and there was neither poet nor poem fit to be compared with Petrarch and his sonnets.
Natural philosophy, too, was proscribed by scholastic wisdom; the real Aristotle was only gradually sh.e.l.led out from under mediaeval accretions. The natural philosopher, Conrad Summenhart[2] (1450-1501) was quite unable to disbelieve the foolish legend, that the appearance of a comet foretold four certain events--heat, wind, war, and the death of princes. At the same time, not being superst.i.tious, he held aloof from the crazy science of astrology and all the fraud connected with it. Indeed, as an observer of Nature, and still more as a follower and furtherer of the scholastic Aristotelian natural philosophy, he shewed a leaning towards the theory of development, for, according to him, the more highly organized structures proceed from those of lower organization, and these again form the inorganic under the influence of meteors and stars. The poet laureate Conrad Celtes (_b_. 1459), a singer of love and composer of four books about it, was a true poet. His incessant wandering, for he was always moving from place to place, was due in part to love of Nature and of novelty, but still more to a desire to spread his own fame. He lacked the naivete and openness to impressions of the true child of Nature; his songs in praise of spring, etc., scatter a colourless general praise, which is evidently the result of arduous thought rather than of direct impressions from without; and his many references to ancient deities shew that he borrowed more than his phrases.
Though geography was then closely bound up with the writing of history, as represented by Beatus Rhena.n.u.s (1485-1547) and Johann Aventinus, and patriotism and the accounts of new lands led men to wish to describe the beauties and advantages of their own, the imposing discoveries across the seas did not make so forcible an impression upon the German humanist as upon savants elsewhere, especially in Italy and Spain. A mystico-theosophical feeling for Nature, or rather a magical knowledge of her, flourished in Germany at this time among the learned, both among Protestants and those who were partially true to Catholicism. One of the strangest exponents of such ideas was Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim of Cologne[3] (1535).
His system of the world abounded in such fantastic caprices as these: everything depends on harmony and sympathy; when one of Nature's strings is struck, the others sound with it: the a.n.a.logical correspondences are at the same time magical: symbolic relations between natural objects are sympathetic also: a true love-bond exists between the elm and vine: the sun bestows life on man; the moon, growth; Mercury, imagination; Venus, love, etc. G.o.d is reflected in the macrocosm, gives light in all directions through all creatures, is adumbrated in man microcosmically, and so forth.
Among others, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim (1541), ranked Nature and the Bible, like Agrippa, as the best books about G.o.d and the only ones without falsehood.
'One must study the elements, follow Nature from land to land, since each single country is only one leaf in the book of creation. The eyes that find pleasure in this true experience are the true professors, and more reliable than all learned writings.'
He held man to be less G.o.d's very image than a microcosmic copy of Nature--the quintessence of the whole world. Other enthusiasts made similar statements. Sebastian Frank of Donauworth (1543) looked upon the whole world as an open book and living Bible, in which to study the power and art of G.o.d and learn His will: everything was His image, all creatures are 'a reflection, imprint, and expression of G.o.d, through knowledge of which man may come to know the true Mover and Cause of all things.'
He shewed warm feeling for Nature in many similes and descriptions[4]-- in fact, much of his pithy drastic writing sounds pantheistic. But he was very far from the standpoint of the great Italian philosophers, Giordano Bruno and Campanella. Bruno, a poet as well as thinker, distinguished Nature in her self-development--matter, soul, and mind--as being stages and phases of the One.
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