She and her wave-worn love had made their bower."
It would be easy to parallel these two situations; the older by no means ends with the middle ages, for Eden's "blissful bower" is no exception in modern poetry before the romantic age: while in our own century counterparts to this conception of untrained and strenuous natural surroundings for even the happiest of emotions will occur to every one.[3] The idle triteness in those inevitable scenes of spring, was manifest to some of the poets themselves. So the Comte de Champagne declares foliage and flowers of no service to poets, except for rhyming and to amuse commonplace people. The great Wolfram himself derides the conventionality of all romance narratives falling in spring and early summer:
Arthur is the man of May; Each event in every lay, Happened or at Whitsuntide
Or when the May was blooming wide.
And Uhland cites from the lives of the troubadours the contemporaneous criticism upon a minor poet of[15] the twelfth century, who wrote in the old style about leaves, and flowers, and the song of birds,--nothing of any account. We may recollect that such criticisms go far back of the middle ages: Horace glances at his contemporaries' conventional descriptions of a stream hastening through pleasant fields.
In the widely popular romances of Enid we find illustrations of Welsh, French, and German treatment in the hands of leading authors, and there is one point in the narrative where we may compare their feeling for the natural environment. Readers of Tennyson will recall the passage in the wandering, where, after one of Geraint's struggles with bandits, he comes upon a lad carrying provisions. Chrestien's treatment of the episode is clear and straightforward; the youth and two comrades are taking cheese, cakes,
8
and wine to the count's meadows for the haymakers. The young man notices the travellers' worn appearance, and invites them to sit down "in this fair meadow, under these ironwood trees," to rest and eat.
Hartmann von Aue (whose paraphrase of the French poem is, by the way, far from the merit of his Iwein) narrates the incident in the same manner, omitting the poetically specific touches of the haymaking, and the shady spot in the field; but characteristically inserting some courteous concern on the part of the young man, for the comfort of Enid. But if we turn to the Mabinogion we come upon something very different:
"And early in the day they left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand, and mowers mowing the meadows; and there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a lofty steep, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck, and they saw that there [16]was something in the satchel, but they knew not what it was. And he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher."
How charming it is, even to the lovely touch of color. We know here that the unremembered writer saw nature and cared for it as we
do. Indeed, this mediaeval Welshman satisfies us quite as well as does even Tennyson's transcript:
"So through the green gloom of the wood they passed, And issuing under open heavens beheld
A little town with towers, upon a rock:
And close beneath, a meadow gemlike chased In the brown wild, and mowers mowing in it: And down a rocky pathway from the place There came a fair-hair'd youth, that in his hand Bare victual for the mowers."
There we have a simplicity treated with Tennysonian artifice, which "victual" does not succeed in correcting; beautiful in its way,
though its way is perhaps not so fine as the prose. Yet we notice the modern spirit in the appreciation of the "brown wild" as well as
the meadow, and out of the more general and evasive "steep" is developed the picturesque "rocky pathway."
Except for the interest in establishing these forms of nature-appreciation from such older and more original sources, we might have satisfied ourselves with illustrations of them from Chaucer's early poems, where his descriptions are almost wholly derivative. His feeling for "the smale, softe, swote gras," that was sweetly embroidered with flowers; the earth's joyous oblivion of the cold, in her enthusiasm of May; his constant delight in the "smale foules," and the[17] like, are purely conventional, though the unction with which he writes shows his real enjoyment. There are touches in Chaucer, however, that we miss in his romance predecessors, such as his eye for delicate effects--most interesting as marking the growth of accurate observation and sensitive rendering, like the description of twilight in Troylus and Creyseyde, when
"White thynges wexen dymme and donne
For lakke of lyght,"
or the graceful illustration in the same poem of a sudden troubling of one's mood:
"But right as when the sonne shyneth brighte In March that chaungeth ofte tyme his face, And that a cloude is put with wynde to flyght, Which overspret the sonne, as for a space,
A cloudy thought gan through his soule pace."
Such a touch makes us feel how modern he is. Yet he does not love the picturesque. Under the influence of a Breton lay, he writes in the loveliest of all his tales, of the rugged sea-coast on whose high bank Dorigen and her friends used to walk (since "stood hire cas-tel faste by the see") and look down upon "the grisly rokkes blake," which, in her apprehension for her lord's safe return, she would call "these grisly, feendly rokkes blake." But we feel that even had Arviragus been at her side she would never have regarded the coast as we should regard it. Still we observe the advance in observation and literary expression. In the Knight's Tale, the wild picturesque
is employed again to connote the terrible, but no poet, from Statius to Boccaccio, his guides in the passage,[18] had written such lines as his setting for the temple of the God of War:
"First on the wal was peynted a forest
In which there dwelleth neither man nor best, With knotty, knarry, bareyne trees olde
Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to biholde, In which ther ran a rumbel and a swough,
9
As though a storm sholde bresten every bough."
Nothing even in Childe Roland sketches desolating natural effects with more power. Yet Chaucer had a superior, in the sympathetic eye and adequate expression for the stern and stormy phases of nature, in a countryman of whom perhaps he never heard. We do not know the name of the author of Sir Gawayn and the Grene Knyght. But the poem marks on the whole the noblest conception in our literature before Spenser. It possesses moral dignity, romantic interest, simplicity, and directness, united with deep seriousness of style, creative imagination in dealing both with character and with nature. Chaucer wrote nothing so spiritual, though much of
course more artistic and poetically valuable. In regard to this one matter of the interpretation of nature, it would be difficult to point
out passages in the whole range of mediaeval literature so fine and so remarkable as such descriptions as follow, of the northern
winter scenes through which Gawayn passed on his weird mission.
A forest full deep, and wild to a wonder,
High hills on each side, and crowded woods under, Of oaks hoar and huge, a hundred together.
The hazel and hawthorne were grown altogether
Everywhere coated by moss ragged, rough; Many birds on bare branches, unhappy enough; That piteously piped there, for pain of the cold. [19]
Wondrous fair was the earth, for the frost lay thereby; On the mist ruddy gleams the sun cast, as on high
He coasted full clearly the clouds of the sky.
They beat along banks where the branches are bare, They climbed along cliffs where clingeth the cold, The clouds yet held up, but 'twas ugly beneath.
Mist lowered on the moor, dissolved on the mountains. Each hill had a hat, a huge misty cloak.
Brooks boiling and breaking dashed on the banks, Shattered brightly on shore.