The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times | Page 2

the artist in reproducing
the impressions she makes upon him.
Probably it has always been common to healthy minds to take some
pleasure in her; but it needs no slight culture of heart and mind to grasp
her meaning and make it clear to others. Her book lies open before us,

but the interpretations have been many and dissimilar. A fine statue or
a richly-coloured picture appeals to all, but only knowledge can
appreciate it at its true value and discover the full meaning of the artist.
And as with Art, so with Nature.
For Nature is the greatest artist, though dumb until man, with his
inexplicable power of putting himself in her place, transferring to her
his bodily and mental self, gives her speech.
Goethe said 'man never understands how anthropomorphic he is.' No
study, however comprehensive, enables him to overstep human limits,
or conceive a concrete being, even the highest, from a wholly
impersonal point of view. His own self always remains an encumbering
factor. In a real sense he only understands himself, and his measure for
all things is man. To understand the world outside him, he must needs
ascribe his own attributes to it, must lend his own being to find it again.
This unexplained faculty, or rather inherent necessity, which implies at
once a power and a limit, extends to persons as well as things. The
significant word sympathy expresses it. To feel a friend's grief is to put
oneself in his place, think from his standpoint and in his mood--that is,
suffer with him. The fear and sympathy which condition the action of
tragedy depend upon the same mental process; one's own point of view
is shifted to that of another, and when the two are in harmony, and only
then, the claim of beauty is satisfied, and æsthetic pleasure results.
By the well-known expression of Greek philosophy, 'like is only
understood by like,' the Pythagoreans meant that the mathematically
trained mind is the organ by which the mathematically constructed
cosmos is understood. The expression may also serve as an æsthetic
aphorism. The charm of the simplest lyrical song depends upon the
hearer's power to put himself in the mood or situation described by the
poet, on an interplay between subject and object.
Everything in mental life depends upon this faculty. We observe,
ponder, feel, because a kindred vibration in the object sets our own
fibres in motion.
'You resemble the mind which you understand.'
It is a magic bridge from our own mind, making access possible to a
work of art, an electric current conveying the artist's ideas into our
souls.
We know how a drama or a song can thrill us when our feeling vibrates

with it; and that thrill, Faust tells us, is the best part of man.
If inventive work in whatever art or science gives the purest kind of
pleasure, Nature herself seeming to work through the artist, rousing
those impulses which come to him as revelations, there is pleasure also
in the passive reception of beauty, especially when we are not content
to remain passive, but trace out and rethink the artist's thoughts,
remaking his work.
'To invent for oneself is beautiful; but to recognise gladly and treasure
up the happy inventions of others is that less thine?' said Goethe in his
_Jahreszeiten_; and in the Aphorisms, confirming what has just been
said: 'We know of no world except in relation to man, we desire no art
but that which is the expression of this relation.' And, further, 'Look
into yourselves and you will find everything, and rejoice if outside
yourselves, as you may say, lies a Nature which says yea and amen to
all that you have found there.'
Certainly Nature only bestows on man in proportion to his own inner
wealth. As Rückert says, 'the charm of a landscape lies in this, that it
seems to reflect back that part of one's inner life, of mind, mood, and
feeling, which we have given it.' And Ebers, 'Lay down your best of
heart and mind before eternal Nature; she will repay you a thousandfold,
with full hands.'
And Vischer remarks, 'Nature at her greatest is not so great that she can
work without man's mind.' Every landscape can be beautiful and
stimulating if human feeling colours it, and it will be most so to him
who brings the richest endowment of heart and mind to bear: Nature
only discloses her whole self to a whole man.
But it is under the poet's wand above all, that, like the marble at
Pygmalion's breast, she grows warm and breathes and answers to his
charm; as in that symbolic saga, the listening woods and waters and the
creatures followed Orpheus with his lute. Scientific knowledge, optical,
acoustical, meteorological, geological, only widens and