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[30] 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 sturdier 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 association more interested in recalling them. Accordingly, we find the early northern poetry an
anticipation 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,[31] 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 passed
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[32] 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 interpre-
tations 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.
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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.
A better explanation may be found, I believe, in modern refinement and ethical sensitiveness.[33]
Side by side with the new appreciation of nature may be observed a steady growth in sensibility. Our modern moods of inward contemplation--we are famous for them--our modern zeal for humanity down to its lowest grades; nay, even our tenderness for the brutes, have been distinguishing marks of the poet guides under whom we have learned to appreciate our new physical symbolisms
of human emotion. Modern melancholy, as well, a melancholy more subtle and thoughtful, more poetical too, than that of mediaevalism, has touched men with its pensive fascination. Philosophical pantheism such as Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, feels deity in nature; the new Christianity incarnates divinity in universal man. Man is more than he used to be, his moods are deeper, his thought freer.
He seeks more ardently than of old, because with less constraint, the mystery in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He no longer quails before the majesty and awe of its forever elusive presence. For he knows that though he cannot find it, it enfolds him with love and beauty, it cries back to his passion and pain in winter and storm; from the solemn mountains it reminds him of himself, an unconquerable partner of its own eternity.
[34]
ULRICH VON LIECHTENSTEIN.
THE MEMOIRS OF AN OLD GERMAN GALLANT.
Any one who has read Freytag's excellent studies of German social life will recall a curious illustration in his first volume of the lawless violence of thirteenth-century knighthood, in the imprisonment of Ulrich von Liechtenstein by his liegeman Pilgerin. The account not only proves the author's point, but it goes on to suggest a good deal besides. For the victim's unsophisticated and plaintive manner under his misfortune, the fashion in which he relates what he suffered, his allusions to his own life and character, and most of all to the consolations of his love, are all stimulating to one's curiosity about the writer. When we go to the mediaeval shelves of a German library we find this curiosity satisfied in a long poem by the unfortunate Ulrich, and immediately we are in that chivalric age which wins most of its romantic lustre from its devotion to womanhood.
If our guesses at a truth beneath the stories of widowed ladies rescued from bandits of the forest and recreant knights, or of lovely ladies rescued from worse than death by the capture of castles through the prowess of generous champions--stories which every[35] one knows and incredulously likes--send us to a study of the times when they were composed, we find that the age, when stripped of romantic embellishments, in its actual life felt a sentiment for women unequalled by earlier times. We wonder what caused it. Can it have been the increase in the culture of the Virgin, that beautiful and beneficent phase of mediaeval religion? In
its larger development, this appears rather the parallel expression of some common influence, these adorations of the divine and
human conceptions of woman seeming to be mutually impulsive, and drawn alike from some undetermined tendency of social and spiritual refinement. Or was it the Crusades? For a German essayist has suggested that we may count this increase of sentimentalism among their many influences upon western Europe; the beauty of the women and the more luxurious habits of the East, its more effeminate emotionalism, finding impressionable subjects in the hearts of those stranger knights lying, wakeful for home, beneath southern stars. Perhaps the conjecture