Part 49 (1/2)
The necessary condition of delight in Nature is very strikingly given:
Si vous avez en vous, vivantes et pressees, Un monde interieur d'images, de pensees, De sentimens, d'amour, d'ardente pa.s.sion Pour feconder ce monde, echangez-le sans cesse Avec l'autre univers visible qui vous presse!
Melez toute votre ame a la creation....
Que sous nos doigts puissans exhale la nature, Cette immense clavier!
His lyrics are rich in fine scenes from Nature, unrolled in cold but stately periods, and the poetic intuition which always divines the spirit life brought him near to that pantheism which we find in all the greatest English and German poets of his time,[16] and which lay, too, at the root of German romanticism.
THE GERMAN ROMANTICISTS
Schiller did not possess the intrinsically lyrical genius of Goethe; his strength lay, not in song, but drama, and in a didactic form of epic--the song not of feeling, but of thought.
Descriptions of Nature occur here and there in his epics and dramas; but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his contemporaries, he pa.s.sed through a sentimental period; _Evening_ shews this, and _Melancholy, to Laura_:
Laura, a sunrise seems to break Where'er thy happy looks may glow....
Thy soul--a crystal river pa.s.sing, Silver clear and sunbeam gla.s.sing, Mays into blossom sad autumn by thee: Night and desert, if they spy thee, To gardens laugh--with daylight s.h.i.+ne, Lit by those happy smiles of thine!
With such ecstatic extravagances contrast the excellent descriptions of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems--for instance, the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in _The Diver_, evening in _The Hostage_, and landscape in _William Tell_ and _The Walk_. In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery is made a 'frame for a kind of phenomenology of mankind.'
Flowers of all hue are struggling into glow Along the blooming fields; yet their sweet strife Melts into one harmonious concord. Lo!
The path allures me through the pastoral green And the wide world of fields! The labouring bee Hums round me, and on hesitating wing O'er beds of purple clover, quiveringly Hovers the b.u.t.terfly. Save these, all life Sleeps in the glowing sunlight's steady sheen-- E'en from the west no breeze the lull'd airs bring.
Hark! in the calm aloft I hear the skylark sing.
The thicket rustles near, the alders bow Down their green coronals, and as I pa.s.s, Waves in the rising wind the silvering gra.s.s; Come! day's ambrosial night! receive me now Beneath the roof by shadowy beeches made Cool-breathing, etc.
Schiller's interest in Nature was more a matter of reflection than direct observation; its real tendency was philosophical and ethical.
He called Nature naive (he included naturalness in Nature); those who seek her, sentimental; but he overlooked (as we saw in an earlier chapter) the fact that antiquity did not always remain naive, and that not all moderns are sentimental.
As Rousseau's pupil he drew a sharp distinction between Nature and Art, and felt happy in solitude where 'man with his torment does not come,' lying, as he says in _The Bride of Messina_, like a child on the bosom of Nature.
In Schiller's sense of the word, perhaps no poet has been more sentimental about Nature than Jean Paul.
He was the humorous and satirical idyllist _par excellence_, and laid the scenes of his romances in idyllic surroundings, using the trifling events of daily life to wonderful purpose. There is an almost oriental splendour in his pages, with their audacious metaphors and mixture of ideas. With the exception of Lake Maggiore in _t.i.tan_, he gives no set descriptions of landscape; but all his references to it, all his sunrises and sunsets, are saturated with the temperament of his characters, and they revel in feeling. They all love Nature, and wander indefatigably about their own countryside, finding the reflection of their feelings in her. There is a constant interweaving of the human soul and the universe; therein lies his pantheistic trait. 'To each man,' he said,[17]
'Nature appears different, and the only question is, which is the most beautiful? Nature is for ever becoming flesh for mankind; outer Nature takes a different form in each mind.' Certainly the nature of Jean Paul was different from the Nature of other mortals. Was she more beautiful? He wrote of her in his usual baroque style, with a wealth of thought and feeling, and everywhere the sparkle of genius; but it is all presented in the strangest motley, as exaggerated and unenjoyable as can be. For example, from _Siebenkas_:
I appeared again then on the last evening of the year 1794, on the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to the ocean of eternity.
To the b.u.t.terfly--proboscis of Siebenkas, enough honey--cells were still open in every blue thistle-blossom of destiny.
When they had pa.s.sed the gate--that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it--the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and s.h.i.+ning above the dark green earth, and the ocean-calm of Nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it) up above the world, and down beneath it the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far-reaching darkness.
When it was autumn in his heart:
Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead; above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all Nature, trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths.... But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs of Nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers.
When his married life grew more unhappy, in December:
The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet, as he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of Nature.