Chapter XIV (1)

OF MEDIAEVAL LANDSCAPE:--FIRST, THE FIELDS.

Sec. 1. IN our examination of the spirit of classical landscape, we were obliged to confine ourselves to what is left to us in written description. Some interesting results might indeed have been obtained by examining the Egyptian and Ninevite landscape sculpture, but in nowise conclusive enough to be worth the pains of the inquiry; for the landscape of sculpture is necessarily confined in range, and usually inexpressive of the complete feelings of the workman, being introduced rather to explain the place and circumstances of events, than for its own sake. In the Middle Ages, however, the case is widely different. We have written landscape, sculptured landscape, and painted landscape, all bearing united testimony to the tone of the national mind in almost every remarkable locality of Europe.

Sec. 2. That testimony, taken in its breadth, is very curiously conclusive. It marks the mediaeval mind as agreeing altogether with the ancients, in holding that flat land, brooks, and groves of aspens, compose the pleasant places of the earth, and that rocks and mountains are, for inhabitation, altogether to be reprobated and detested; but as disagreeing with the classical mind totally in this other most important respect, that the pleasant flat land is never a ploughed field, nor a rich lotus meadow good for pasture, but _garden_ ground covered with flowers, and divided by fragrant hedges, with a castle in the middle of it. The aspens are delighted in, not because they are good for "coach-making men" to make cart-wheels of, but because they are shady and graceful; and the fruit-trees, covered with delicious fruit, especially apple and orange, occupy still more important positions in the scenery. Singing-birds--not "sea-crows," but nightingales[71]--perch on every bough; and the ideal occupation of mankind is not to cultivate either the garden or the meadow, but to gather roses and eat oranges in the one, and ride out hawking over the other.

Finally, mountain scenery, though considered as disagreeable for general inhabitation, is always introduced as being proper to meditate in, or to encourage communion with higher beings; and in the ideal landscape of daily life, mountains are considered agreeable things enough, so that they be far enough away.

In this great change there are three vital points to be noticed.

[Sidenote: Sec. 3. Three essential characters: 1. Pride in idleness.]

The first, the disdain of agricultural pursuits by the nobility; a fatal change, and one gradually bringing about the ruin of that nobility. It is expressed in the mediaeval landscape by the eminently pleasurable and horticultural character of everything; by the fences, hedges, castle walls, and masses of useless, but lovely flowers, especially roses. The knights and ladies are represented always as singing, or making love, in these pleasant places. The idea of setting an old knight, like Laertes (whatever his state of fallen fortune), "with thick gloves on to keep his hands from the thorns," to prune a row of vines, would have been regarded as the most monstrous violation of the decencies of life; and a senator, once detected in the home employments of Cincinnatus, could, I suppose, thenceforward hardly have appeared in society.

[Sidenote: Sec. 4. 2. Poetical observance of nature.]

The second vital point is the evidence of a more sentimental enjoyment of external nature. A Greek, wishing really to enjoy himself, shut himself into a beautiful atrium, with an excellent dinner, and a society of philosophical or musical friends. But a mediaeval knight went into his pleasance, to gather roses and hear the birds sing; or rode out hunting or hawking. His evening feast, though riotous enough sometimes, was not the height of his day's enjoyment; and if the attractions of the world are to be shown typically to him, as opposed to the horrors of death, they are never represented by a full feast in a chamber, but by a delicate dessert in an orange grove, with musicians under the trees; or a ride on a May morning, hawk on fist.

This change is evidently a healthy, and a very interesting one.

[Sidenote: Sec. 5. 3. Disturbed conscience.]

The third vital point is the marked sense that this hawking and apple-eating are not altogether right; that there is something else to be done in the world than that; and that the mountains, as opposed to the pleasant garden-ground, are places where that other something may best be learned;--which is evidently a piece of infinite and new respect for the mountains, and another healthy change in the tone of the human heart.

Let us glance at the signs and various results of these changes, one by one.

[Sidenote: Sec. 6. Derivative characters: 1. Love of flowers.]

The two first named, evil and good as they are, are very closely connected. The more poetical delight in external nature proceeds just from the fact that it is no longer looked upon with the eye of the farmer; and in proportion as the herbs and flowers cease to be regarded as useful, they are felt to be charming. Leeks are not now the most important objects in the garden, but lilies and roses; the herbage which a Greek would have looked at only with a view to the number of horses it would feed, is regarded by the mediaeval knight as a green carpet for fair feet to dance upon, and the beauty of its softness and color is proportionally felt by him; while the brook, which the Greek rejoiced to dismiss into a reservoir under the palace threshold, would be, by the mediaeval, distributed into pleasant pools, or forced into fountains; and regarded alternately as a mirror for fair faces, and a witchery to ensnare the sunbeams and the rainbow.

[Sidenote: Sec. 7. 2. Less definite gratitude to God.]

And this change of feeling involves two others, very important. When the flowers and grass were regarded as means of life, and therefore (as the thoughtful laborer of the soil must always regard them) with the reverence due to those gifts of God which were most necessary to his existence; although their own beauty was less felt, their proceeding from the Divine hand was more seriously acknowledged, and the herb yielding seed, and fruit-tree yielding fruit, though in themselves less admired, were yet solemnly connected in the heart with the reverence of Ceres, Pomona, or Pan. But when the sense of these necessary uses was more or less lost, among the upper classes, by the delegation of the art of husbandry to the hands of the peasant, the flower and fruit, whose bloom or richness thus became a mere source of pleasure, were regarded with less solemn sense of the Divine gift in them; and were converted rather into toys than treasures, chance gifts for gaiety, rather than promised rewards of labor; so that while the Greek could hardly have trodden the formal furrow, or plucked the clusters from the trellised vine, without reverent thoughts of the deities of field and leaf, who gave the seed to fructify, and the bloom to darken, the mediaeval knight plucked the violet to wreathe in his lady's hair, or strewed the idle rose on the turf at her feet, with little sense of anything in the nature that gave them, but a frail, accidental, involuntary exuberance; while also the Jewish sacrificial system being now done away, as well as the Pagan mythology, and, with it, the whole conception of meat offering or firstfruits offering, the chiefest seriousness of all the thoughts connected with the gifts of nature faded from the minds of the classes of men concerned with art and literature; while the peasant, reduced to serf level, was incapable of imaginative thought, owing to his want of general cultivation. But on the other hand, exactly in proportion as the idea of definite spiritual presence in material nature was lost, the mysterious sense of _unaccountable_ life in the things themselves would be increased, and the mind would instantly be laid open to all those currents of fallacious, but pensive and pathetic sympathy, which we have seen to be characteristic of modern times.

[Sidenote: Sec. 3. Gloom caused by enforced solitude.]

Farther: a singular difference would necessarily result from the far greater loneliness of baronial life, deprived as it was of all interest in agricultural pursuits. The palace of a Greek leader in early times might have gardens, fields, and farms around it, but was sure to be near some busy city or sea-port: in later times, the city itself became the principal dwelling-place, and the country was visited only to see how the farm went on, or traversed in a line of march. Far other was the life of the mediaeval baron, nested on his solitary jut of crag; entering into cities only occasionally for some grave political or warrior's purpose, and, for the most part, passing the years of his life in lion-like isolation; the village inhabited by his retainers straggling indeed about the slopes of the rocks at his feet, but his own dwelling standing gloomily apart, between them and the uncompanionable clouds, commanding, from sunset to sunrise, the flowing flame of some calm unvoyaged river, and the endless undulation of the untraversable hills. How different must the thoughts about nature have been, of the noble who lived among the bright marble porticos of the Greek groups of temple or palace,--in the midst of a plain covered with corn and olives, and by the shore of a sparkling and freighted sea,--from those of the master of some mountain promontory in the green recesses of Northern Europe, watching night by night, from amongst his heaps of storm-broken stone, rounded into towers, the lightning of the lonely sea flash round the sands of Harlech, or the mists changing their shapes forever, among the changeless pines, that fringe the crests of Jura.

[Sidenote: Sec. 9. And frequent pilgrimage.]

Nor was it without similar effect on the minds of men that their journeyings and pilgrimages became more frequent than those of the Greek, the extent of ground traversed in the course of them larger, and the mode of travel more companionless. To the Greek, a voyage to Egypt, or the Hellespont, was the subject of lasting fame and fable, and the forests of the Danube and the rocks of Sicily closed for him the gates of the intelligible world. What parts of that narrow world he crossed were crossed with fleets or armies; the camp always populous on the plain, and the ships drawn in cautious symmetry around the shore. But to the mediaeval knight, from Scottish moor to Syrian sand, the world was one great exercise ground, or field of adventure; the staunch pacing of his charger penetrated the pathlessness of outmost forest, and sustained the sultriness of the most secret desert. Frequently alone,--or, if accompanied, for the most part only by retainers of lower rank, incapable of entering into complete sympathy with any of his thoughts,--he must have been compelled often to enter into dim companionship with the silent nature around him, and must assuredly sometimes have talked to the wayside flowers of his love, and to the fading clouds of his ambition.

[Sidenote: 4. Dread of mountains.]

Sec. 10. But, on the other hand, the idea of retirement from the world for the sake of self-mortification, of combat with demons, or communion with angels, and with their King,--authoritatively commended as it was to all men by the continual practice of Christ Himself,--gave to all mountain solitude at once a sanctity and a terror, in the mediaeval mind, which were altogether different from anything that it had possessed in the un-Christian periods. On the one side, there was an idea of sanctity attached to rocky wilderness, because it had always been among hills that the Deity had manifested himself most intimately to men, and to the hills that His saints had nearly always retired for meditation, for especial communion with Him, and to prepare for death. Men acquainted with the history of Moses, alone at Horeb, or with Israel at Sinai,--of Elijah by the brook Cherith, and in the Horeb cave; of the deaths of Moses and Aaron on Hor and Nebo; of the preparation of Jephthah's daughter for her death among the Judea Mountains; of the continual retirement of Christ Himself to the mountains for prayer, His temptation in the desert of the Dead Sea, His sermon on the hills of Capernaum, His transfiguration on the crest of Tabor, and his evening and morning walks over Olivet for the four or five days preceding His crucifixion,--were not likely to look with irreverent or unloving eyes upon the blue hills that girded their golden horizon, or drew upon them the mysterious clouds out of the height of the darker heaven. But with this impression of their greater sanctity was involved also that of a peculiar terror. In all this,--their haunting by the memories of prophets, the presences of angels, and the everlasting thoughts and words of the Redeemer,--the mountain ranges seemed separated from the active world, and only to be fitly approached by hearts which were condemnatory of it. Just in so much as it appeared necessary for the noblest men to retire to the hill-recesses before their missions could be accomplished or their spirits perfected, in so far did the daily world seem by comparison to be pronounced profane and dangerous; and to those who loved that world, and its work, the mountains were thus voiceful with perpetual rebuke, and necessarily contemplated with a kind of pain and fear, such as a man engrossed by vanity feels at being by some accident forced to hear a startling sermon, or to assist at a funeral service. Every association of this kind was deepened by the practice and the precept of the time; and thousands of hearts, which might otherwise have felt that there was loveliness in the wild landscape, shrank from it in dread, because they knew that the monk retired to it for penance, and the hermit for contemplation. The horror which the Greek had felt for hills only when they were uninhabitable and barren, attached itself now to many of the sweetest spots of earth; the feeling was conquered by political interests, but never by admiration; military ambition seized the frontier rock, or maintained itself in the unassailable pass; but it was only for their punishment, or in their despair, that men consented to tread the crocused slopes of the Chartreuse, or the soft glades and dewy pastures of Vallombrosa.

Sec. 11. In all these modifications of temper and principle there appears much which tends to passionate, affectionate, or awe-struck observance of the features of natural scenery, closely resembling, in all but this superstitious dread of mountains, our feelings at the present day. But _one_ character which the mediaevals had in common with the ancients, and that exactly the most eminent character in both, opposed itself steadily to all the feelings we have hitherto been examining,--the admiration, namely, and constant watchfulness, of human beauty. Exercised in nearly the same manner as the Greeks, from their youth upwards, their countenances were cast even in a higher mould; for, although somewhat less regular in feature, and affected by minglings of Northern bluntness and stolidity of general expression, together with greater thinness of lip and shaggy formlessness of brow, these less sculpturesque features were, nevertheless, touched with a seriousness and refinement proceeding first from the modes of thought inculcated by the Christian religion, and secondly from their more romantic and various life. Hence a degree of personal beauty, both male and female, was attained in the Middle Ages, with which classical periods could show nothing for a moment comparable; and this beauty was set forth by the most perfect splendor, united with grace, in dress, which the human race have hitherto invented. The strength of their art-genius was directed in great part to this object; and their best workmen and most brilliant fanciers were employed in wreathing the mail or embroidering the robe. The exquisite arts of enamelling and chasing metal enabled them to make the armor as radiant and delicate as the plumage of a tropical bird; and the most various and vivid imaginations were displayed in the alternations of color, and fiery freaks of form, on shield and crest; so that of all the beautiful things which the eyes of men could fall upon, in the world about them, the most beautiful must have been a young knight riding out in morning sunshine, and in faithful hope.

"His broad, clear brow in sunlight glowed;
On burnished hooves his war-horse trode;
From underneath his helmet flowed
His coal-black curls, as on he rode.
All in the blue, unclouded weather,
Thick jewelled shone the saddle leather;
The helmet and the helmet feather
Burned like one burning flame together;
And the gemmy bridle glittered free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden galaxy."

[Sidenote: Sec. 12. 5. care for human beauty.]

Now, the effect of this superb presence of human beauty on men in general was, exactly as it had been in Greek times, first, to turn their thoughts and glances in great part away from all other beauty but that, and to make the grass of the field take to them always more or less the aspect of a carpet to dance upon, a lawn to tilt upon, or a serviceable crop of hay; and, secondly, in what attention they paid to this lower nature, to make them dwell exclusively on what was graceful, symmetrical, and bright in color. All that was rugged, rough, dark, wild, unterminated, they rejected at once, as the domain of "salvage men" and monstrous giants: all that they admired was tender, bright, balanced, enclosed, symmetrical--only symmetrical in the noble and free sense: for what we moderns call "symmetry," or "balance," differs as much from mediaeval symmetry as the poise of a grocer's scales, or the balance of an Egyptian mummy with its hands tied to its sides, does from the balance of a knight on his horse, striking with the battle-axe, at the gallop; the mummy's balance looking wonderfully perfect, and yet sure to be one-sided if you weigh the dust of it,--the knight's balance swaying and changing like the wind, and yet as true and accurate as the laws of life.

[Sidenote: Sec. 13. 6. Symmetrical government of design.]

And this love of symmetry was still farther enhanced by the peculiar duties required of art at the time; for, in order to fit a flower or leaf for inlaying in armor, or showing clearly in glass, it was absolutely necessary to take away its complexity, and reduce it to the condition of a disciplined and orderly pattern; and this the more, because, for all military purposes, the device, whatever it was, had to be distinctly intelligible at extreme distance. That it should be a good imitation of nature, when seen near, was of no moment; but it was of highest moment that when first the knight's banner flashed in the sun at the turn of the mountain road, or rose, torn and bloody, through the drift of the battle dust, it should still be discernible what the bearing was.

"At length, the freshening western blast
Aside the shroud of battle cast;
And first the ridge of mingled spears
Above the brightening cloud appears;
And in the smoke the pennons flew,
As in the storm the white sea-mew;
Then marked they, dashing broad and far
The broken billows of the war.
Wide raged the battle on the plain;
Spears shook, and falchions flashed amain,
Fell England's arrow-flight like rain;
Crests rose, and stooped, and rose again,
Wild and disorderly.
Amidst the scene of tumult, high,
_They saw Lord Marmion's falcon fly,
And stainless Tunstall's banner white,
And Edmund Howard's lion bright._"

It was needed, not merely that they should see it was a falcon, but Lord Marmion's falcon; not only a lion, but the Howard's lion. Hence, to the one imperative end of _intelligibility_, every minor resemblance to nature was sacrificed, and above all, the _curved_, which are chiefly the confusing lines; so that the straight, elongated back, doubly elongated tail, projected and separate claws, and other rectilinear unnaturalnesses of form, became the means by which the leopard was, in midst of the mist and storm of battle, distinguished from the dog, or the lion from the wolf; the most admirable fierceness and vitality being, in spite of these necessary changes (so often shallowly sneered at by the modern workman), obtained by the old designer.

Farther, it was necessary to the brilliant harmony of color, and clear setting forth of everything, that all confusing shadows, all dim and doubtful lines should be rejected: hence at once an utter denial of natural appearances by the great body of workmen; and a calm rest in a practice of representation which would make either boar or lion blue, scarlet, or golden, according to the device of the knight, or the need of such and such a color in that place of the pattern; and which wholly denied that any substance ever cast a shadow, or was affected by any kind of obscurity.

[Sidenote: Sec. 14. 7. Therefore, inaccurate rendering of nature.]

All this was in its way, and for its end, absolutely right, admirable, and delightful; and those who despise it, laugh at it, or derive no pleasure from it, are utterly ignorant of the highest principles of art, and are mere tyros and beginners in the practice of color. But, admirable though it might be, one necessary result of it was a farther withdrawal of the observation of men from the refined and subtle beauty of nature; so that the workman who first was led to think _lightly_ of natural beauty, as being subservient to human, was next led to think _inaccurately_ of natural beauty, because he had continually to alter and simplify it for his practical purposes.

Sec. 15. Now, assembling all these different sources of the peculiar mediaeval feeling towards nature in one view, we have:

1st. Love of the garden instead of love of the farm, leading
to a sentimental contemplation of nature, instead of a
practical and agricultural one. (Sec.Sec. 3. 4. 6.)

2nd. Loss of sense of actual Divine presence, leading to
fancies of fallacious animation, in herbs, flowers, clouds,
&c. (Sec. 7.)

3rd. Perpetual, and more or less undisturbed, companionship
with wild nature. (Sec.Sec. 8. 9.)

4th. Apprehension of demoniacal and angelic presence among
mountains, leading to a reverent dread of them. (Sec. 10.)

5th. Principalness of delight in human beauty, leading to
comparative contempt of natural objects. (Sec. 11.)

6th. Consequent love of order, light, intelligibility, and
symmetry, leading to dislike of the wildness, darkness, and
mystery of nature. (Sec. 12.)

7th. Inaccuracy of observance of nature, induced by the
habitual practice of change on its forms. (Sec. 13.)

From these mingled elements, we should necessarily expect to find resulting, as the characteristic of mediaeval landscape art, compared with Greek, a far higher sentiment about it, and affection for it, more or less subdued by still greater respect for the loveliness of man, and therefore subordinated entirely to human interests; mingled with curious traces of terror, piety, or superstition, and cramped by various formalisms,--some wise and necessary, some feeble, and some exhibiting needless ignorance and inaccuracy.

Under these lights, let us examine the facts.

Sec. 16. The landscape of the Middle Ages is represented in a central manner by the illuminations of the MSS. of Romances, executed about the middle of the fifteenth century. On one side of these stands the earlier landscape work, more or less treated as simple decoration; on the other, the later landscape work, becoming more or less affected with modern ideas and modes of imitation.

These central fifteenth century landscapes are almost invariably composed of a grove or two of tall trees, a winding river, and a castle, or a garden: the peculiar feature of both these last being _trimness_; the artist always dwelling especially on the fences; wreathing the espaliers indeed prettily with sweet-briar, and putting pots of orange-trees on the tops of the walls, but taking great care that there shall be no loose bricks in the one, nor broken stakes in the other,--the trouble and ceaseless warfare of the times having rendered security one of the first elements of pleasantness, and making it impossible for any artist to conceive Paradise but as surrounded by a moat, or to distinguish the road to it better than by its narrow wicket gate, and watchful porter.

Sec. 17. One of these landscapes is thus described by Macaulay: "We have an exact square, enclosed by the rivers Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates, each with a convenient bridge in the centre; rectangular beds of flowers; a long canal neatly bricked and railed in; the tree of knowledge, clipped like one of the limes behind the Tuileries, standing in the centre of the grand alley; the snake turned round it, the man on the right hand, the woman on the left, and the beasts drawn up in an exact circle round them."

All this is perfectly true; and seems in the description very curiously foolish. The only curious folly, however, in the matter is the exquisite _naivete_ of the historian, in supposing that the quaint landscape indicates in the understanding of the painter so marvellous an inferiority to his own; whereas, it is altogether his own wit that is at fault, in not comprehending that nations, whose youth had been decimated among the sands and serpents of Syria, knew probably nearly as much about Eastern scenery as youths trained in the schools of the modern Royal Academy; and that this curious symmetry was entirely symbolic, only more or less modified by the various instincts which I have traced above. Mr. Macaulay is evidently quite unaware that the serpent with the human head, and body twisted round the tree, was the universally accepted symbol of the evil angel, from the dawn of art up to Michael Angelo; that the greatest sacred artists invariably place the man on the one side of the tree, the woman on the other, in order to denote the enthroned and balanced dominion about to fall by temptation; that the beasts are ranged (when they _are_ so, though this is much more seldom the case,) in a circle round them, expressly to mark that they were then not wild, but obedient, intelligent, and orderly beasts; and that the four rivers are trenched and enclosed on the four sides, to mark that the waters which now wander in waste, and destroy in fury, had then for their principal office to "water the garden" of God. The description is, however, sufficiently apposite and interesting, as bearing upon what I have noted respecting the eminent _fence_-loving spirit of the mediaevals.

Sec. 18. Together with this peculiar formality, we find an infinite delight in drawing pleasant flowers, always articulating and outlining them completely; the sky is always blue, having only a few delicate white clouds in it, and in the distance are blue mountains, very far away, if the landscape is to be simply delightful; but brought near, and divided into quaint overhanging rocks, if it is intended to be meditative, or a place of saintly seclusion. But the whole of it always,--flowers, castles, brooks, clouds, and rocks,--subordinate to the human figures in the foreground, and painted for no other end than that of explaining their adventures and occupations.

Sec. 19. Before the idea of landscape had been thus far developed, the representations of it had been purely typical; the objects which had to be shown in order to explain the scene of the event, being firmly outlined, usually on a pure golden or chequered color background, not on sky. The change from the golden background, (characteristic of the finest thirteenth century work) and the colored chequer (which in like manner belongs to the finest fourteenth) to the blue sky, gradated to the horizon, takes place early in the fifteenth century, and is the _crisis_ of change in the spirit of mediaeval art. Strictly speaking, we might divide the art of Christian times into two great masses--Symbolic and Imitative;--the symbolic, reaching from the earliest periods down to the close of the fourteenth century, and the imitative from that close to the present time; and, then, the most important circumstance indicative of the culminating point, or turn of tide, would be this of the change from chequered background to sky background. The uppermost figure in Plate 7. opposite, representing the tree of knowledge, taken from a somewhat late thirteenth century Hebrew manuscript (Additional 11,639) in the British Museum, will at once illustrate Mr. Macaulay's "serpent turned round the tree," and the mode of introducing the chequer background, will enable the reader better to understand the peculiar feeling of the period, which no more intended the formal walls or streams for an imitative representation of the Garden of Eden, than these chequers for an imitation of sky.

Sec. 20. The moment the sky is introduced (and it is curious how perfectly it is done _at once_, many manuscripts presenting, in alternate pages, chequered backgrounds, and deep blue skies exquisitely gradated to the horizon)--the moment, I say, the sky is introduced, the spirit of art becomes for evermore changed, and thenceforward it gradually proposes imitation more and more as an end, until it reaches the Turnerian landscape. This broad division into two schools would therefore be the most true and accurate we could employ, but not the most convenient. For the great mediaeval art lies in a cluster about the culminating point, including symbolism on one side, and imitation on the other, and extending like a radiant cloud upon the mountain peak of ages, partly down both sides of it, from the year 1200 to 1500; the brightest part of the cloud leaning a little backwards, and poising itself between 1250 and 1350. And therefore the most convenient arrangement is into Romanesque and barbaric art, up to 1200,--mediaeval art, 1200 to 1500,--and modern art, from 1500 downwards. But it is only in the earlier or symbolic mediaeval art, reaching up to the close of the fourteenth century, that the peculiar modification of natural forms for decorative purposes is seen in its perfection, with all its beauty, and all its necessary shortcomings; the minds of men being accurately balanced between that honor for the superior human form which they shared with the Greek ages, and the sentimental love of nature which was peculiar to their own. The expression of the two feelings will be found to vary according to the material and place of the art; in painting, the conventional forms are more adopted, in order to obtain definition, and brilliancy of color, while in sculpture the life of nature is often rendered with a love and faithfulness which put modern art to shame. And in this earnest contemplation of the natural facts, united with an endeavor to simplify, for clear expression, the results of that contemplation, the ornamental artists arrived at two abstract conclusions about form, which are highly curious and interesting.

Sec. 21. They saw, first, that a leaf might always be considered as a sudden expansion of the stem that bore it; an uncontrollable expression of delight, on the part of the twig, that spring had come, shown in a fountain-like expatiation of its tender green heart into the air. They saw that in this violent proclamation of its delight and liberty, whereas the twig had, until that moment, a disposition only to grow quietly forwards, it expressed its satisfaction and extreme pleasure in sunshine by springing out to right and left. Let _a b_, Fig. 1. Plate 8., be the twig growing forward in the direction from _a_ to _b_. It reaches the point _b_, and then--spring coming,--not being able to contain itself, it bursts out in every direction, even springing backwards at first for joy; but as this backward direction is contrary to its own proper fate and nature, it cannot go on so long, and the length of each rib into which it separates is proportioned accurately to the degree in which the proceedings of that rib are in harmony with the natural destiny of the plant. Thus the rib _c_, entirely contradictory, by the direction of his life and energy, of the general intentions to the tree, is but a short-lived rib; _d_, not quite so opposite to his fate, lives longer; _e_, accommodating himself still more to the spirit of progress, attains a greater length still; and the largest rib of all is the one who has not yielded at all to the erratic disposition of the others when spring came, but, feeling quite as happy about the spring as they did, nevertheless took no holiday, minded his business, and grew straightforward.

Sec. 22. Fig. 6. in the same plate, which shows the disposition of the ribs in the leaf of an American Plane, exemplifies the principle very accurately; it is indeed more notably seen in this than in most leaves, because the ribs at the base have evidently had a little fraternal quarrel about their spring holiday; and the more gaily-minded ones, getting together into trios on each side, have rather pooh-poohed and laughed at the seventh brother in the middle, who wanted to go on regularly, and attend to his work. Nevertheless, though thus starting quite by himself in life, this seventh brother, quietly pushing on in the right direction, lives longest, and makes the largest fortune, and the triple partnerships on the right and left meet with a very minor prosperity.

Sec. 23. Now if we inclose Fig. 1. in Plate 8. with two curves passing through the extremities of the ribs, we get Fig. 2., the central type of all leaves. Only this type is modified of course in a thousand ways by the life of the plant. If it be marsh or aquatic, instead of springing out in twigs, it is almost certain to expand in soft currents, as the liberated stream does at its mouth into the ocean, Fig. 3. (Alisma Plantago); if it be meant for one of the crowned and lovely trees of the earth, it will separate into stars, and each ray of the leaf will form a ray of light in the crown, Fig. 5. (Horsechestnut); and if it be a commonplace tree, rather prudent and practical than imaginative, it will not expand all at once, but throw out the ribs every now and then along the central rib, like a merchant taking his occasional and restricted holiday, Fig. 4. (Elm).

Sec. 24. Now in the bud, where all these proceedings on the leaf's part are first imagined, the young leaf is generally (always?) doubled up in embryo, so as to present the profile of the half-leaves, as Fig. 7., only in exquisite complexity of arrangement; Fig. 9., for instance, is the profile of the leaf-bud of a rose. Hence the general arrangement of line represented by Fig. 8. (in which the lower line is slightly curved to express the bending life in the spine) is everlastingly typical of the expanding powers of joyful vegetative youth; and it is of all simple forms the most exquisitely delightful to the human mind. It presents itself in a thousand different proportions and variations in the buds and profiles of leaves; those being always the loveliest in which, either by accidental perspective of position, or inherent character in the tree, it is most frequently presented to the eye. The branch of bramble, for instance, Fig. 10. at the bottom of Plate 8., owes its chief beauty to the perpetual recurrence of this typical form; and we shall find presently the enormous importance of it, even in mountain ranges, though, in these, _falling_ force takes the place of _vital_ force.

Sec. 25. This abstract conclusion the great thirteenth century artists were the first to arrive at; and whereas, before their time, ornament had been constantly refined into intricate and subdivided symmetries, they were content with this simple form as the termination of its most important features. Fig. 3., which is a scroll out of a Psalter executed in the latter half of the thirteenth century, is a sufficient example of a practice at that time absolutely universal.

Sec. 26. The second great discovery of the Middle Ages in floral ornament, was that, in order completely to express the law of subordination among the leaf-ribs, two ribs were necessary, _and no more_, on each side of the leaf, forming a series of three with the central one, because proportion is between three terms at least.

That is to say, when they had only three ribs altogether, as _a_, Fig. 4., no _law_ of relation was discernible between the ribs, or the leaflets they bore; but by the addition of a third on each side as at _b_, proportion instantly was expressible, whether arithmetical or geometrical, or of any other kind. Hence the adoption of forms more or less approximating to that at _c_ (young ivy), or _d_ (wild geranium), as the favorite elements of their floral ornament, those leaves being in their disposition of masses, the simplest which can express a perfect law of proportion, just as the outline Fig. 7. Plate 8. is the simplest which can express a perfect law of growth.

Plate 9. opposite gives, in rude outline, the arrangement of the border of one of the pages of a missal in my own possession, executed for the Countess Yolande of Flanders,[72] in the latter half of the fourteenth century, and furnishing, in exhaustless variety, the most graceful examples I have ever seen of the favorite decoration at the period, commonly now known as the "Ivy leaf" pattern.

Sec. 27. In thus reducing these two everlasting laws of beauty to their simplest possible exponents, the mediaeval workmen were the first to discern and establish the principles of decorative art to the end of time, nor of decorative art merely, but of mass arrangement in general. For the members of any great composition, arranged about a centre, are always reducible to the law of the ivy leaf, the best cathedral entrances having five porches corresponding in proportional purpose to its five lobes (three being an imperfect, and seven a superfluous number); while the loveliest groups of lines attainable in any pictorial composition are always based on the section of the leaf-bud, Fig. 7. Plate 8., or on the relation of its ribs to the convex curve enclosing them.

Sec. 28. These discoveries of ultimate truth are, I believe, never made philosophically, but instinctively; so that wherever we find a high abstract result of the kind, we may be almost sure it has been the work of the penetrative imagination, acting under the influence of strong affection. Accordingly, when we enter on our botanical inquiries, I shall have occasion to show with what tender and loving fidelity to nature the masters of the thirteenth century always traced the leading lines of their decorations, either in missal-painting or sculpture, and how totally in this respect their methods of subduing, for the sake of distinctness, the natural forms they loved so dearly, differ from the iron formalisms to which the Greeks, careless of all that was not completely divine or completely human, reduced the thorn of the acanthus, and softness of the lily. Nevertheless, in all this perfect and loving decorative art, we have hardly any careful references to other landscape features than herbs and flowers; mountains, water, and clouds are introduced so rudely, that the representations of them can never be received for anything else than letters or signs. Thus the _sign_ of clouds, in the thirteenth century, is an undulating band, usually in painting, of blue edged with white, in sculpture, wrought so as to resemble very nearly the folds of a curtain closely tied, and understood for clouds only by its position, as surrounding angels or saints in heaven, opening to souls ascending at the Last Judgment, or forming canopies over the Saviour or the Virgin. Water is represented by zigzag lines, nearly resembling those employed for clouds, but distinguished, in sculpture, by having fish in it; in painting, both by fish and a more continuous blue or green color. And when these unvaried symbols are associated under the influence of that love of firm fence, moat, and every other means of definition which we have seen to be one of the prevailing characteristics of the mediaeval mind, it is not possible for us to conceive, through the rigidity of the signs employed, what were the real feelings of the workman or spectator about the natural landscape. We see that the thing carved or painted is not intended in any wise to imitate the truth, or convey to us the feelings which the workman had in contemplating the truth. He has got a way of talking about it so definite and cold, and tells us with his chisel so calmly that the knight had a castle to attack, or the saint a river to cross dryshod, without making the smallest effort to describe pictorially either castle or river, that we are left wholly at fault as to the nature of the emotion with which he contemplated the real objects. But that emotion, as the intermediate step between the feelings of the Grecian and the Modern, it must be our aim to ascertain as clearly as possible; and, therefore, finding it not at this period completely expressed in visible art, we must, as we did with the Greeks, take up the written landscape instead, and examine this mediaeval sentiment as we find it embodied in the poem of Dante.

Sec. 29. The thing that must first strike us in this respect, as we turn our thoughts to the poem, is, unquestionably, the _formality_ of its landscape.

Milton's effort, in all that he tells us of his Inferno, is to make it indefinite; Dante's, to make it _definite_. Both, indeed, describe it as entered through gates; but, within the gate, all is wild and fenceless with Milton, having indeed its four rivers,--the last vestige of the mediaeval tradition,--but rivers which flow through a waste of mountain and moorland, and by "many a frozen, many a fiery Alp." But Dante's Inferno is accurately separated into circles drawn with well-pointed compasses; mapped and properly surveyed in every direction, trenched in a thoroughly good style of engineering from depth to depth, and divided in the "_accurate_ middle" (dritto mezzo) of its deepest abyss, into a concentric series of ten moats and embankments, like those about a castle, with bridges from each embankment to the next; precisely in the manner of those bridges over Hiddekel and Euphrates, which Mr. Macaulay thinks so innocently designed, apparently not aware that he is also laughing at Dante. These larger fosses are of rock, and the bridges also; but as he goes further into detail, Dante tells us of various minor fosses and embankments, in which he anxiously points out to us not only the formality, but the neatness and perfectness, of the stonework. For instance, in describing the river Phlegethon, he tells us that it was "paved with stone at the bottom, and at the sides, and _over the edges of the sides_," just as the water is at the baths of Bulicame; and for fear we should think this embankment at all _larger_ than it really was, Dante adds, carefully, that it was made just like the embankments of Ghent or Bruges against the sea, or those in Lombardy which bank the Brenta, only "not so high, nor so wide," as any of these. And besides the trenches, we have two well-built castles; one like Ecbatana, with seven circuits of wall (and surrounded by a fair stream), wherein the great poets and sages of antiquity live; and another, a great fortified city with walls of iron, red-hot, and a deep fosse round it, and full of "grave citizens,"--the city of Dis.

Sec. 30. Now, whether this be in what we moderns call "good taste," or not, I do not mean just now to inquire--Dante having nothing to do with taste, but with the facts of what he had seen; only, so far as the imaginative faculty of the two poets is concerned, note that Milton's vagueness is not the sign of imagination, but of its absence, so far as it is significative in the matter. For it does not follow, because Milton did not map out his Inferno as Dante did, that he _could_ not have done so if he had chosen; only, it was the easier and less imaginative process to leave it vague than to define it. Imagination is always the seeing and asserting faculty; that which obscures or conceals may be judgment, or feeling, but not invention. The invention, whether good or bad, is in the accurate engineering, not in the fog and uncertainty.

Sec. 31. When we pass with Dante from the Inferno to Purgatory, we have indeed more light and air, but no more liberty; being now confined on various ledges cut into a mountain side, with a precipice on one hand and a vertical wall on the other; and, lest here also we should make any mistake about magnitudes, we are told that the ledges were eighteen feet wide,[73] and that the ascent from one to the other was by steps, made like those which go up from Florence to the church of San Minieto.[74]

Lastly, though in the Paradise there is perfect freedom and infinity of space, though for trenches we have planets, and for cornices constellations, yet there is more cadence, procession, and order among the redeemed souls than any others; they fly, so as to describe letters and sentences in the air, and rest in circles, like rainbows, or determinate figures, as of a cross and an eagle; in which certain of the more glorified natures are so arranged as to form the eye of the bird, while those most highly blessed are arranged with their white crowds in leaflets, so as to form the image of a white rose in the midst of heaven.

Sec. 32. Thus, throughout the poem, I conceive that the first striking character of its scenery is intense definition; precisely the reflection of that definiteness which we have already traced in pictorial art. But the second point which seems noteworthy is, that the flat ground and embanked trenches are reserved for the Inferno; and that the entire territory of the Purgatory is a mountain, thus marking the sense of that purifying and perfecting influence in mountains which we saw the mediaeval mind was so ready to suggest. The same general idea is indicated at the very commencement of the poem, in which Dante is overwhelmed by fear and sorrow in passing through a dark forest, but revives on seeing the sun touch the top of a hill, afterwards called by Virgil "the pleasant mount--the cause and source of all delight."

Sec. 33. While, however, we find this greater honor paid to mountains, I think we may perceive a much greater dread and dislike of woods. We saw that Homer seemed to attach a pleasant idea, for the most part, to forests; regarding them as sources of wealth and places of shelter; and we find constantly an idea of sacredness attached to them, as being haunted especially by the gods; so that even the wood which surrounds the house of Circe is spoken of as a sacred thicket, or rather, as a sacred glade, or labyrinth of glades (of the particular word used I shall have more to say presently); and so the wood is sought as a kindly shelter by Ulysses, in spite of its wild beasts; and evidently regarded with great affection by Sophocles, for, in a passage which is always regarded by readers of Greek tragedy with peculiar pleasure, the aged and blind Oedipus, brought to rest in "the sweetest resting-place" in all the neighborhood of Athens, has the spot described to him as haunted perpetually by nightingales, which sing "in the green glades and in the dark ivy, and in the thousand-fruited, sunless, and windless thickets of the god" (Bacchus); the idea of the complete shelter from wind and sun being here, as with Ulysses, the uppermost one. After this come the usual staples of landscape,--narcissus, crocus, plenty of rain, olive trees; and last, and the greatest boast of all,--"it is a good country for horses, and conveniently by the sea;" but the prominence and pleasantness of the thick wood in the thoughts of the writer are very notable; whereas to Dante the idea of a forest is exceedingly repulsive, so that, as just noticed, in the opening of his poem, he cannot express a general despair about life more strongly than by saying he was lost in a wood so savage and terrible, that "even to think or speak of it is distress,--it was so bitter,--it was something next door to death;" and one of the saddest scenes in all the Inferno is in a forest, of which the trees are haunted by lost souls; while (with only one exception,) whenever the country is to be beautiful, we find ourselves coming out into open air and open meadows.

It is quite true that this is partly a characteristic, not merely of Dante, or of mediaeval writers, but of _southern_ writers; for the simple reason that the forest, being with them higher upon the hills, and more out of the way than in the north was generally a type of lonely and savage places; while in England, the "greenwood," coming up to the very walls of the towns, it was possible to be "merry in the good greenwood," in a sense which an Italian could not have understood. Hence Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakspere send their favorites perpetually to the woods for pleasure or meditation; and trust their tender Canace, or Rosalind, or Helena, or Silvia, or Belphoebe, where Dante would have sent no one but a condemned spirit. Nevertheless, there is always traceable in the mediaeval mind a dread of thick foliage, which was not present to that of a Greek; so that, even in the north, we have our sorrowful "children in the wood," and black huntsmen of the Hartz forests, and such other wood terrors; the principal reason for the difference being that a Greek, being by no means given to travelling, regarded his woods as so much valuable property; and if he ever went into them for pleasure expected to meet one or two gods in the course of his walk, but no banditti; while a mediaeval, much more of a solitary traveller, and expecting to meet with no gods in the thickets, but only with thieves, or a hostile ambush, or a bear, besides a great deal of troublesome ground for his horse, and a very serious chance, next to a certainty, of losing his way, naturally kept in the open ground as long as he could, and regarded the forests, in general, with anything but an eye of favor.

Sec. 34. These, I think, are the principal points which must strike us, when we first broadly think of the poem as compared with classical work. Let us now go a little more into detail.

As Homer gave us an ideal landscape, which even a god might have been pleased to behold, so Dante gives us, fortunately, an ideal landscape, which is specially intended for the terrestrial paradise. And it will doubtless be with some surprise, after our reflections above on the general tone of Dante's feelings, that we find ourselves here first entering a _forest_, and that even a _thick_ forest. But there is a peculiar meaning in this. With any other poet than Dante, it might have been regarded as a wanton inconsistency. Not so with him: by glancing back to the two lines which explain the nature of Paradise, we shall see what he means by it. Virgil tells him, as he enters it, "Henceforward, take thine own pleasure for guide; thou art beyond the steep ways, and beyond all Art;"--meaning, that the perfectly purified and noble human creature, having no pleasure but in right, is past all effort, and past all _rule_. Art has no existence for such a being. Hence, the first aim of Dante, in his landscape imagery, is to show evidence of this perfect liberty, and of the purity and sinlessness of the new nature, converting pathless ways into happy ones. So that all those fences and formalisms which had been needed for him in imperfection, are removed in this paradise; and even the pathlessness of the wood, the most dreadful thing possible to him in his days of sin and shortcoming, is now a joy to him in his days of purity. And as the fencelessness and thicket of sin led to the fettered and fearful order of eternal punishment, so the fencelessness and thicket of the free virtue lead to the loving and constellated order of eternal happiness.

Sec. 35. This forest, then, is very like that of Colonos in several respects--in its peace and sweetness, and number of birds; it differs from it only in letting a light breeze through it, being therefore somewhat thinner than the Greek wood; the tender lines which tell of the voices of the birds mingling with the wind, and of the leaves all turning one way before it, have been more or less copied by every poet since Dante's time. They are, so far as I know, the sweetest passage of wood description which exists in literature.