Читать книгу The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times - Alfred Biese - Страница 6

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When the heathen world had outlived its faculties, and its creative power had failed, it sank into the ocean of the past--a sphinx, with her riddle guessed,--and mediæval civilization arose, founded upon Christianity and Germanism. There are times in the world's history when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept away and all things made new at a stroke, as if by the world-consuming fire of the old Saga. But, in reality, all change is gradual; the old is for ever failing and passing out of sight, to be taken up as a ferment into the ever emerging new, which changes and remodels as it will. It was so with Christianity. It is easy to imagine that it arose suddenly, like a phoenix, from the ashes of heathendom; but, although dependent at heart upon the sublime personality of its Founder, it was none the less a product of its age, and a result of gradual development--a river with sources partly in Judea, partly in Hellas. And mediæval Christianity never denied the traces of its double origin.

Upon this syncretic soil its literature sprang up, moulded as to matter upon Old Testament and specifically Christian models, as to form upon the great writers of antiquity; but matter and form are only separable in the abstract, and the Middle Ages are woven through and through with both Greco-Roman and Jewish elements.

But these elements were unfavourable to the development of feeling for Nature; Judaism admitted no delight in her for her own sake, and Christianity intensified the Judaic opposition between God and the world, Creator and created.

'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him': by which John meant, raise your eyes to your Heavenly Father, throned above the clouds.

Christianity in its stringent form was transcendental, despising the world and renouncing its pleasures. It held that Creation, through the entrance of sin, had become a caricature, and that earthly existence had only the very limited value of a thoroughfare to the eternal Kingdom.

While joy in existence characterized the Hellenic world until its downfall, and the Greek took life serenely, delighting in its smooth flow; with Christianity, as Jean Paul put it, 'all the present of earth vanished into the future of Heaven, and the Kingdom of the Infinite arose upon the ruins of the finite.'

The beauty of earth was looked upon as an enchantment of the devil; and sin, the worm in the fruit, lurked in its alluring forms.

Classic mythology created a world of its own, dimly veiled by the visible one; every phase of Nature shewed the presence or action of deities with whom man had intimate relations; every form of life, animated by them, held something familiar to him, even sacred--his landscape was absorbed by the gods.

To Judaism and Christianity, Nature was a fallen angel, separated as far as possible from her God. They only recognized one world--that of spirit; and one sphere of the spiritual, religion--the relation between God and man. Material things were a delusion of Satan's; the heaven on which their eyes were fixed was a very distant one.

The Hellenic belief in deities was pandemonistic and cosmic; Christianity, in its original tendency, anti-cosmic and hostile to Nature. And Nature, like the world at large, only existed for it in relation to its Creator, and was no longer 'the great mother of all things,' but merely an instrument in the hands of Providence.

The Greek looked at phenomena in detail, in their inexhaustible variety, rarely at things as a whole; the Christian considered Nature as a work of God, full of wonderful order, in which detail had only the importance of a link in a chain.

As Lotze says, 'The creative artistic impulse could be of no use to a conception of life in which nothing retained independent significance, but everything referred to or symbolized something else.' But yet, the idea of individuality, of the importance of the ego, gained ground as never before through this introspection and merging of material in spiritual, this giving spirit the exclusive sway; and Christianity, while it broke down the barriers of nation, race, and position, and widened the cleft between Nature and spirit, discovered at the same time the worth of the individual.

And this individuality was one of the chief steps towards an artistic, that is, individual point of view about Nature, for it was not possible to consider her freely and for her own sake alone, until the unlimited independence of mind had been recognized.

But the full development of Christianity was only reached when it blended with the Germanic spirit, with the German Gemüth (for which no other language has a word), and intensified, by so doing, the innately subjective temperament of the race.

The northern climate gives pause for the development of the inner life; its long bleak winter, with the heavy atmosphere and slow coming of spring, wake a craving for light and warmth, and throw man back on himself. This inward inclination, which made itself felt very early in the German race, by bringing out the contemplative and independent sides of his character, and so disinclining him for combined action with his fellows, forwarded the growth of the over-ripe seeds of classic culture and vital Christianity.

The Romanic nations, with their brilliant, sharply-defined landscape and serene skies, always retained something of the objective delight in life which belonged to antiquity; they never felt that mysterious impulse towards dreams and enthusiastic longing which the Northerner draws from his lowering skies and dark woods, his mists on level and height, the grey in grey of his atmosphere, and his ever varying landscape. A raw climate drives man indoors in mind as well as body, and prompts that craving for spring and delight in its coming which have been the chief notes in northern feeling for Nature from earliest times.

Vischer has shewn in his Aesthetik, that German feeling was early influenced by the different forms of plant life around it. Rigid pine, delicate birch, stalwart oak, each had its effect; and the wildness and roughness of land, sea, and animal life in the North combined with the cold of the climate to create the taste for domestic comfort, for fireside dreams, and thought-weaving by the hearth.

Nature schooled the race to hard work and scanty pleasure, and yet its relationship to her was deep and heartfelt from the first. Devoutly religious, it gazed at her with mingled love and fear; and the deposit of its ideas about her was its mythology.

Its gods dwelt in mountain tops, holes in the rocks, and rivers, and especially in dark forests and in the leafy boughs of sacred trees; and the howling of wind, the rustle of leaves, the soughing in the tree tops, were sounds of their presence. The worship of woods lasted far into Christian times, especially among the Saxons and Frisians.^[1]

Wodan was the all-powerful father of gods and men--the highest god, who, as among all the Aryan nations, represented Heaven. Light was his shining helmet, clouds were the dark cap he put on when he spread rain over the earth, or crashed through the air as a wild hunter with his raging pack. His son Donar shewed himself in thunder and lightning, as he rode with swinging axe on his goat-spanned car. Mountains were sacred to both, as plants to Ziu. Freyr and Freya were goddesses of fertility, love, and spring; a ram was sacred to them, whose golden fleece illuminated night as well as day, and who drew their car with a horse's speed.^[2] As with Freya, an image of the goddess Nerthus was drawn through the land in spring, to announce peace and fertility to mortals.

The suggestive myth of Baldur, god of light and spring, killed by blind Hödur, was the expression of general grief at the passing of beauty.

The Edda has a touching picture of the sorrow of Nature, of her trees and plants, when the one beloved of all living things fell, pierced by an arrow. Holda was first the mild and gracious goddess, then a divine being, encompassing the earth. She might be seen in morning hours by her favourite haunts of lake and spring, a beautiful white woman, who bathed and vanished. When snow fell, she was making her bed, and the feathers flew. Agriculture and domestic order were under her care.

Ostara was goddess of bright dawn, of rising light, and awakening spring, as Hel of subterranean night, the darkness of the underworld. Frigg, wife of the highest god, knew the story of existence, and protected marriage. She was the Northern Juno or Hera.

Ravines and hollows in the mountains were the dwelling-places of the dwarfs (Erdmännlein), sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly to man; now peaceful and helpful, now impish spirits of mischief in cloud caps and grey coats, thievish and jolly.

They were visible by moonlight, dancing in the fields; and when their track was found in the dew,^[3] a good harvest was expected. Popular belief took the floating autumn cobwebs for the work of elves and fairies. The spirits of mountain and wood were related to the water-spirits, nixies who sat combing their long hair in the sun, or stretched up lovely arms out of the water. The elves belonged to the more spiritual side of Nature, the giants to the grosser. Rocks and stones were the weapons of the giants; they removed mountains and hills, and boulders were pebbles shaken out of their shoes.

Among animals the horse was sacred to many deities, and gods and goddesses readily transformed themselves into birds. Two ravens, Hugin and Munin, whose names signify thought and memory, were Odin's constant companions. The gift of prophecy was ascribed to the cuckoo, as its monotonous voice heralded the spring: