Part 2 (2/2)

6.

”Fair lady, excellent thy birth; Thou comest from the chief of earth, Of high estate: Ah, G.o.d our Father, that to me Thou hadst been given, fair ladye, My wedded mate!”

Everything here is definite and concrete, and how delightful the picture all is. Such plastic art as the ”rose-bushes three” is not unworthy of the great modern poets of whom its magic and romantic definiteness reminds us,--as the ”five miles meandering of Alph, the sacred river,”

or the ”kisses four” with which the pale loiterer shut the eyes of La Belle Dame sans Merci. The description of the nightingale on its high branches, too, is a noticeably accurate touch, as we compare it, for example, with Coleridge's nightingale descriptions.

The explanation for the usual vague and indefinite description is not found in saying that they could not describe minutely. We meet with abundant details of such material interests as embroideries or armor.

There is artistic emotion in Villehardouin's account of the glorious sight of Constantinople, as it rose before the crusaders, just as distinctly as in Lord Byron's letter. But, to their simple eyes, nature not only failed to suggest a.s.sociated fancies, like Shakespeare's

”Wrinkled pebbles in the brook,”

or Wordsworth's ash,

”A soft eye-music of slow waving boughs,”

but they see natural objects as units, without lingering upon their parts. When we find, for example, a line that marks the jerky flight of a swallow, we are surprised at the specific touch; we look almost in vain for such landscape details as the colors of autumn. Neidhart von Reuenthal is marking his originality, when he speaks of the red tree-tops, falling down yellow.

The want of observation and the shallow sympathy with nature shown by most poets before Dante are much more surprising than their preference for placid effects. It is unusual, for instance, to meet such a suggestive note of a.s.sociation as in the stanza by the Frenchman Gaces Brulles:

The birds of my own land In Brittany I hear, And seem to understand The distant in the near; In sweet Champagne I stand, No longer here.

This paraphrase, indeed, is unworthy of the charming simplicity of the original. Surely, when Matthew Arnold made his sweeping characterization of mediaeval poetry as grotesque, he forgot what a straightforward evolution of narrative or of quiet sentiment, and what a transparent expression, we find in some of these minor poets. They are as direct and unadorned, as they are graceful. It is almost impossible to translate them without subst.i.tuting for the fresh and delicate touch, some metaphysical warping of the idea, or some rhetorical consciousness in words. What for instance could be more elegantly remote from the grotesque than this literal translation of Brulles' expression of his sensibility to the song-birds of his home: ”The birds of my country I have heard in Brittany; by their song I know well that in sweet Champagne I heard them of old.”

We may sum up these outline statements to this effect.

The northern poets described storm, winter, the ocean, and kindred subjects, with considerable force and fulness. In the cultivated literatures to the south, natural description was mainly confined to the agreeable forms of beauty; the grand, awesome, and inspiring were scarcely felt, and the literal fact of their physical expression was hardly ever noticed. The exterior world was not made a subject of close observation, nor was its poetic availability realized as a setting for action, or as an interpreter of emotion.

The people of the north, through being habituated to severer weather, not merely as a fact of climate, but from their rougher, less politely organized habits of living, [we should especially observe their activity on the sea,] regarded the violent seasons and aspects of nature with the sympathetic acquiescence of custom. Moreover, this influence tended to develop st.u.r.dier and more rugged character, race-temperament obviously being in part a geographical result, which acts with the forces of social organization, especially those that affect the moral qualities, such as rude or luxurious living. This vigorous character was more susceptible to impressions of native power, as well as from a.s.sociation more interested in recalling them. Accordingly, we find the early northern poetry an antic.i.p.ation of the seriousness of modern English literature, and, as well, of its unequalled recognition of physical symbolisms of the sublime. Where the northern force blended with more southern lightness and elegance, as it did in the _Mabinogion_, we find a deeper poetic sentiment; where it coincides with moral earnestness, we find such nature sensation as in the poetry of _Sir Gawayn_. But the literature of the Germans and their romance originals, aim at courtly levities; they artificialize sentiment and thought, as well as manner.

The deeper and more spiritually sympathetic minds did not as a rule devote themselves to _belles-lettres_. The Church drew them into her sober service, and even though they wrote, the close theological faith was not favorable to their poetic expansion. Most of all, there was but little individualism, and any artistic sensation of our modern complex inner consciousness was still crude, even when it existed at all.

One point, however, should be observed in any inquiry into the reasons for the inadequateness of these ages' feeling for nature; that many latent sympathies may never have found a voice. Many through the centuries before our later ease of publication, may have felt the modern sensations, without ever thinking of putting them into words. In any new movement, of art as of practice, a great leader of expression is needed.

Men are sheep to their leaders in various admirations, and many genuine aesthetic tastes are acquired, through stages of more or less unconscious imitation. Browning puts this in an acute sentence where Fra Lippo Lippi explains his usefulness as a painter:

”. . . We're made so that we love, First when we see them painted, things we have pa.s.sed Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see.”

There were few new departures, there was little originality, in the methods of mediaeval literature. Descriptions of the physical world as a field of power and sublimity would have fallen dead on the ears of a public who had never dreamed that storm and cliffs were beautiful. What if Wordsworth had tried to support himself and win fame by singing at castles? Nor is it easy, though the taste has been established, to describe a sunset, or the sublimity of the Alps. We say to each other ”How beautiful!” ”How grand!” seldom more. Rare imagination and the tact of genius are necessary to tell what we really need to show. The sense of physical sublimity is complex. Its distinctive element is moral or spiritual emotion. For a full delineation it requires a more subtle, verbal repertory than those popular poets usually possessed. Yet these modifications no longer apply when we come to Dante, and superior as his interpretations are to his predecessors' we miss even in him, as we miss in the great poets for four hundred years afterwards, appreciation of the material world's sublimity.

Macaulay and others have said that it was not until man had become the master of nature that he learned to love its stern and violent aspects.

But thunder storms, for example, are as dangerous now as they ever were, at least to a traveller. Still, Byron wrote of them with raptures amid the Pindus mountains as his predecessors did not.

Winter was scarcely colder or bleaker for mediaeval poets than for Scottish peasants a century ago, yet Burns would sing as they could not:

”E'en winter bleak has charms for me, When winds rave through the naked tree.”

Others have accounted for this change by the era of science, with its close scrutiny of the world, and its enthusiasm for physical knowledge.

But the scientist masters the world as a reality where the poet sees it as a symbol. The two modern tendencies may be the result of a common cause--that recognition of complexity, and disposition to observe, which is a main fact in man's expansion.

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