Chapter II (2)

'One must,' says Leo,[35] 'refer the chief excellence of the poem to the lady who tells the tale, must grant that the irresistible power of the description, the spectacle of the freshly open wounds, the sympathy in the consuming sorrow of a friend, gave unwonted power of the wing to this low-flying pen.' Radegunde is thinking of her only remaining relative, Amalafried:

When the wind murmurs, I listen if it bring me some news, but of
all my kindred not even a shadow presents itself to me.... And
thou, Amalafried, gentle son of my father's brother, does no
anxiety for me consume thy heart? Hast thou forgotten what
Radegunde was to thee in thy earliest years, and how much thou
lovedst me, and how thou heldst the place of the father, mother,
brother, and sister whom I had lost? An hour absent from thee
seemed to me eternal; now ages pass, and I never hear a word from
thee. A whole world now lies betwixt those who loved each other
and who of old were never separate. If others, for pity alone,
cross the Alps to seek their lost slaves, wherefore am I
forgotten?--I who am bound to thee by blood? Where art thou? I
ask the wind as it sighs, the clouds as they pass--at least some
bird might bring me news of thee. If the holy enclosure of this
monastery did not restrain me, thou shouldst see me suddenly
appear beside thee. I could cross the stormy seas in winter if it
were necessary. The tempest that alarms the sailors should cause
no fear to me who love thee. If my vessel were dashed to pieces
by the tempest, I should cling to a plank to reach thee, and if I
could find nothing to cling to, I should go to thee swimming,
exhausted. If I could but see thee once more, I should deny all
the perils of the journey....

There is little about Nature in this beautiful avowal of love and longing, but the whole colouring of the mood forms a background of feeling for his longer descriptions. His very long and tedious poem about the bridal journey of Gelesiuntha, the Spanish princess, who married King Chilperic, shews deep and touching feeling in parts. She left her Toledo home with a heavy heart, crossing the Pyrenees, where 'the mountains shining with snow reach to the stars, and their sharp peaks project over the rain clouds.' In the same vein as Ausonius, when he urged Paulinus to write to him, she begs her sister for news:

By thy name full oft I call thee, Gelesiuntha, sister mine: with
this name fountains, woods, rivers, and fields resound. Art thou
silent, Gelesiuntha? Answer as to thy sister stones and
mountains, groves and waters and sky, answer in language mute.

In troubled thought and care she asked the very breezes, but of her sister's safety all were silent.

Fortunatus, like Ausonius, not only looked at Nature with sympathy, but was a master in description of scenery. His lengthy descriptions of spring are mostly only decorative work, but here and there we find a really poetic idea. For example:

At the first spring, when earth has doffed her frost, the field is clothed with variegated grass; the mountains stretch their leafy heads towards the sky, the shady tree renews its verdant foliage, the lovely vine is swelling with budding branches, giving promise that a weight of grapes shall hang from its prolific stems. While all joys return, the earth is dead and dull.

And:

The soft violets paint the field with their own purple, the
meadows are green with grass, the grass is bright with its fresh
shoots. Little by little, like stars, the bright flowers spring
up, and the sward is joyous and gay with flecks of colour, and
the birds that through the winter cold have been numb and silent,
with imprisoned song, are now recalled to their song.

He describes the cold winter, and a hot summer's day, when

Even in the forests no shade was to be found, and the traveller
almost fainted on the burning roads, longing for shade and cool
drinks. At last the rustle of a crystal stream is heard, he
hurries to it with delight, he lies down and lays his limbs in
the soft kisses of the grass.

His poems about beautiful and noteworthy places include some on the Garonne and Gers (Egircius):

So dried up by heat that it is neither river nor land, and the
grumbling croak of the frog, sole ruler of the realm from which
the fish are banished, is heard in the lonely swamp; but when the
rain pours down, the flood swells, and what was a lake suddenly
becomes a sea.

He has many verses of this sort, written with little wit but great satisfaction.

More attractive are descriptions of the Rhine and Moselle, recalling Ausonius, and due to love partly of Nature, partly of verbal scene-painting. The best and most famous of these is on his journey by the Moselle from Metz to Andernach on the Rhine. Here he shews a keen eye and fine taste for wide views and high mountains, as well as for the minutiæ of scenery, with artistic treatment. He also blends his own thoughts and feelings with his impressions of Nature, making it clear that he values her not merely for decoration, but for her own sake.

He has been called the last Roman poet; in reality, he belonged not only to the period which directly succeeded his own, when the Roman world already lay in ruins, but to the fully-developed Middle Ages--the time when Christianity and Germanism had mated with Roman minds.

In his best pieces, such as his famous elegy, he caught the classic tone to perfection, feeling himself in vital union with the great of bygone centuries; but in thought and feeling he was really modern and under the influence of the Christian Germanic spirit with all its depth and intensity. His touching friendship with Radegunde is, as it were, a symbol of the blending of the two elements out of which the modern sprang. It was the stimulating influence of the noble Germanic princess, herself Christian in soul, which fanned the dying sparks of classic poetry into a flame.

Fortunatus stood upon a borderland. Literature was retreating further and further from the classic models, and culture was declining to its fall. In Gaul, as in Spain and Italy, the shadows of coming night were broadening over literary activity, thought, and feeling.

It is a characteristic fact in Roman literature, that not only its great lights, but the lesser ones who followed them, were enthusiastically imitated. Latin poetry of the Middle Ages lived upon recollections of the past, or tried to raise itself again by its help; even so late a comer as Fortunatus became in his turn an object of marvel, and was copied by poets who never reached his level.

It is not surprising that feeling for Nature shewed a corresponding shallowness and lassitude.

Not only bucolic but didactic writing was modelled upon the classic. Isodorus and Beda, in their works with identical titles 'concerning the existence of things,' relied on Roman models no less than Alcuin, who had formed himself on the pattern of Augustine's time in his _Conflict between Winter and Spring_, as well as in many single verses, directly inspired by Virgil.[36]

His _Farewell to his Cell_ caught the idyllic tone very neatly:

Beloved cell, retirement's sweet abode!
Farewell, a last farewell, thy poet bids thee!
Beloved cell, by smiling woods embraced,
Whose branches, shaken by the genial breeze,
To meditation oft my mind disposed.
Around thee too, their health-reviving herbs
In verdure gay the fertile meadows spread;
And murmuring near, by flowery banks confined,
Through fragrant meads the crystal streamlets glide,
Wherein his nets the joyful fisher casts,
And fragrant with the apple bending bough,
With rose and lily joined, the gardens smile;
While jubilant, along thy verdant glades
At dawn his melody each songster pours,
And to his God attunes the notes of praise.

These heartfelt effusions express a feeling which certainly inspired many monks when they turned from their gloomy cells to the gardens and woods beyond--a feeling compounded of renunciation of the world with idyllic comfort in their surroundings. If their fundamental feeling was worship and praise of the Creator, their constant outdoor work, which, during the first centuries, was strenuous cultivation of the soil, must have roused a deep appreciation of Nature in the nobler minds among them. Their choice of sites for monasteries and hermitages fully bears out this view.[37]

_The Conflict between Spring and Winter_, with its classic suggestions, is penetrated by a truly German love of spring.[38] It described the time when the cuckoo sings high in the branches, grass clothes earth with many tints, and the nightingale sings untiringly in the red-gold butcher's broom, captivating us with her changing melodies.

Among the savants whom Charlemagne gathered round him was Angilbert. Virgil was his model, but the influence of the lighter fluency of Fortunatus was visible, as in so many of his contemporaries. With a vivid and artistic pen he described the wood and park of Aachen and the Kaiser's brilliant hunt[39]; the great forest grove, the grassy meadows with brooks and all sorts of birds flitting about, the thicket stocked with many kinds of game.

At the same time, his writing betrayed the conventional tone of courts in its praise of his great secular lord, and a 'thoughtful romantic inclination' for the eternal feminine, for the beautiful women with splendid ornaments, and necks shining like milk or snow or glowing like a rose, who, as Ebert puts it, 'lay far from the asceticism of the poetry of the saints.'

Naso Muadorinus in his pastorals took Calpurnius and Nemesianus for his models, just as they had taken Virgil, and Virgil Theocritus. Muadorinus imitated the latter in his pastorals.

In an alternate song of his between an old man and a boy, the old man draws an artistic contrast between the shady coolness of the wood and the mid-day glow of the sun, while the boy praises Him whose songs the creatures follow as once they followed Orpheus with his lute; and at the end, Charlemagne, who was extolled at the beginning as a second Cæsar, is exalted to heaven as the founder of a new Golden Age.

In the Carolingian Renaissance of the Augustine epoch of literature, Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, takes first place. At any rate, he described in a very superior way, and, like Fortunatus, with some humour, the draining of the Larte at Le Mans, Feb. 820; also, in a light and lively strain, the Battle of the Birds, and, with the same strong colouring, Paradise.

The idyll of the cloister garden, so often treated, became famous in the much-read _Hortulus_ of Wahlafried.[40]

Despite classical flourishes from Virgil and Columella, and pharmaceutical handling of plants, there is a good deal of thoughtful observation of Nature in these 444 hexameters.

They contain descriptions of seasons, of recipes, flowers and vegetables, of the gardener's pleasure in digging his fields in spring, clearing them of nettles, and levelling the ground thrown up by the moles, in protecting his seedlings from rain and sun, and, later on, in his gay beds of deciduous plants.

There is a touch here and there which is not unpoetic--for instance:

A bright green patch of dark blue rue paints this shady grove; it
has short leaves and throws out short umbels, and passes the
breath of the wind and the rays of the sun right down to the end
of the stalk, and at a gentle touch gives forth a heavy scent.

and:

With what verse, with what song, can the dry thinness of my
meagre muse rightly extol the shining lily, whose whiteness is as
the whiteness of gleaming snow, whose sweet scent is as the scent
of Sabian woods?

He closes pleasantly too, adjuring Grimald to read the book under the shade of the peach tree, while his school-fellows play round and pick the great delicate fruit which they can barely grasp with one hand. In the poem to the layman Ruodbern (100 hexameters) he described the dangers of Alpine travelling, both from weather and other foes. In those days the difficulties of the road excluded all interest in mountain beauty. There is a tender and expressive poem in Sapphic metre, in which, homesick and cold in winter, he sang his longing for beautiful Reichenau. But even he, like most of his predecessors and all his followers, wielded his pen with labour, expression often failing to keep pace with thought.

It only remains to mention Wandalbert, a monk of the monastery at Prün, who, in a postscript to the _Conclusio des Martyrologium_, gives a charming account of a landowner's life in field, garden, and hunt.

In the cloister, then, idyllic comfort, delighting in Nature and a quiet country life, was quite as much at home as scholarship and classical study. But we shall look there in vain for any trace of the sentimental, the profoundly melancholy attitude of the Fathers of the Church, Basil and Gregory, or for Augustine's deep faith and devout admiration of the works of creation: even the tone of Ausonius and Fortunatus, in their charming descriptions of scenery, was now a thing of the past. Feeling for Nature--sentimental, sympathetic, cosmic, and dogmatic--had dwindled down to mere pleasure in cultivating flowers in the garden, to the level Aachen landscape and such like; and the power to describe the impression made by scenery was, like the impression itself, lame and weary.

It was the night of the decline breaking over Latin literature.

And how did it stand with German literature up to the eleventh century? A German Kingdom had existed from the treaties of Verdun and Mersen (842), but during this period traces of German poetry are few, outweighed by Latin.

The two great Messianic poems, _Heliand_ and _Krist_, stand out alone. In the _Heliand_ the storm on the lake of Gennesaret is vividly painted:

Then began the power of the storm; in the whirlwind the waves
rose, night descended, the sea broke with uproar, wind and water
battled together; yet, obedient to the command and to the
controlling word, the water stilled itself and flowed serenely.

In _Krist_ there is a certain distinction in the description of the Ascension, as the rising figures soar past the constellations of stars, which disappear beneath their feet; for the rest, the symbolic so supplants the direct meaning, that in place of an epic we have a moralizing sermon. But there are traces of delight in the beauty of the outer world, in the sunshine, and sympathy is attributed to Nature:

She grew very angry at such deeds.

The poem _Muspilli_ (the world fire) shews the old northern feeling for Nature; still more the few existing words of the _Wessobrunner Prayer_:

This I heard as the greatest marvel among men,
That once there was no earth nor heaven above,
The bright stars gave no light, the sun shone not,
Nor the moon, nor the glorious sea.

How plainly 'the bright stars' and the 'glorious sea' shew joy in the beauty of the world!

In the oldest Scandinavian poems the inflexible character of the Northerner and the northern landscape is reflected; the descriptions are short and scanty; it is not mountain, rock, and sea which count as beautiful, but pleasant, and, above all, fruitful scenery. The imagery is bold: (Kenninger) the wind is the wolf of wood or sail, the sea the pathway of the whale, the bath of the diving bird, etc.

The Anglo-Saxon was especially distinguished by his forcible images and epithets. In Rynerwulf we have 'night falls like a helmet, dark brown covers the mountains.' 'The sky is the fortress of the storm, the sun the torch of the world, the jewel of splendour.' 'Fire is eager, wild, blind, and raging; the sea is the gray sea, and the sparkling splendid sea; waves are graves of the dead,' etc.

Vivid feeling for Nature is not among the characteristic features of either Scandinavian or old German poetry.

It is naive and objective throughout, and seldom weighty or forcible.

The Waltharius shews the influence of Virgil's language, in highly-coloured and sympathetic descriptions like those of the Latin poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance.

Animal saga probably first arose just before the twelfth century, and their home was probably Franconia.

Like the genial notices of plant life in the Latin poems of the Carlovingian period, the animal poems shewed interest in the animal world--the interest of a child who ponders individual differences and peculiarities, the virtues and failings so closely allied to its own. It was a naive 'hand-and-glove' footing between man and the creatures, which attributed all his wishes and weaknesses to them, wiped out all differences between them with perfect impartiality, and gave the characteristics of each animal with exactness and poetry.

The soil for the cultivation of poetry about animals was prepared by the symbolic and allegorical way of looking at Nature which held sway all through the Middle Ages.

The material was used as a symbolic language for the immaterial, the world of sense conceived of as a great picture-book of the truths of salvation, in whose pages God, the devil, and, between them man, figured: thus plant life suggested the flower of the root of Jesse, foretold by Isaiah, red flowers the Saviour's wounds, and so forth. In the earliest Christian times, a remarkable letter existed in Alexandria, the so-called 'Physiologus,' which has affected the proverbial turns of speech in the world's literature up to the present day to an almost unequalled degree.

It gave the symbolic meanings of the different animals. The lamb and unicorn were symbols of Christ; sheep, fish, and deer, of his followers; dragons, serpents, and bears, of the devil; swine, hares, hyenas, of gluttony; the disorderly luxuriance of snow meant death, the phoenix the resurrection, and so forth, indeed, whole categories of animals were turned into allegories of the truths of salvation.[41] The cleverest fables of animals were in _Isengrimen_, published in Ghent about 1140 in Latin verse--the story of the sick lion and his cure by the fox, and the outwitting of the wolf. Such fables did not remain special to German national literature, but became popular subjects in the literature of the whole world; and it is a significant fact that they afterwards took root especially in Flanders, where the taste for still life and delight in Nature has always found a home, and which became the nursery, in later times, of landscape, animal, and genre painting.