The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times | Page 6

the mouth of Jehovah; 'Where wast thou when I
laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof if thou knowest, or who hath
stretched the line upon it?
'Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the
corner stone thereof?
'When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted
for joy?...
'Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; and caused the
dayspring to know his place?
'That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might
be shaken out of it?...
'Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea, or hast thou walked in the
search of the deep?...
'Declare, if thou knowest it all!...
'Where is the way where light dwelleth, and as for darkness, where is
the place thereof?' etc.
Compare with this Isaiah xl. verse 12, etc.
Metaphors too, though poetic and fine, are not individualized.
'Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy water-spouts: all thy waves
and thy billows are gone over me.'--Psalm 42.
'Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in
deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into deep waters,
where the floods overflow me.'--Psalm 69.
There are many pictures from the animal world; and these are more
elaborate in Job than elsewhere (see Job xl. and xli.). Personifications,
as we have seen, are many, but Nature is only called upon to
sympathise with man in isolated cases, as, for instance, in 2 Samuel i.:
'Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain
upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the mighty is
vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as if he had not been anointed with
oil.'
The Cosmos unfolded itself to the Hebrew[3] as one great whole, and
the glance fixed upon a distant horizon missed the nearer lying detail of
phenomena. His imagination ranged the universe with the wings of the
wind, and took vivid note of air, sky, sea, and land, but only, so to

speak, in passing; it never rested there, but hurried past the boundaries
of earth to Jehovah's throne, and from that height looked down upon
creation.
The attitude of the Greek was very different. Standing firmly rooted in
the world of sense, his open mind and his marvellous eye for beauty
appreciated the glorious external world around him down to its finest
detail. His was the race of the beautiful, the first in history to train all
its powers into harmony to produce a culture of beauty equal in form
and contents, and his unique achievement in art and science enriched
all after times with lasting standards of the great and beautiful.
The influence of classic literature upon the Middle Ages and modern
times has not only endured, but has gone on increasing with the
centuries; so that we must know the position reached by Greece and
Rome as to feeling for Nature, in order to discover whether the line of
advance in the Middle Ages led directly forward or began by a
backward movement--a zigzag.
The terms ancient and modern, naive and sentimental, classic and
romantic, have been shibboleths of culture from Jean Paul, Schiller,
and Hegel, to Vischer. Jean Paul, in his Vorschule zur Aesthetik,
compares the ideally simple Greek poetry, with its objectivity, serenity,
and moral grace, with the musical poetry of the romantic period, and
speaks of one as the sunlight that pervades our waking hours, the other
as the moonlight that gleams fitfully on our dreaming ones. Schiller's
epoch-making essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, with its rough
division into the classic-naive depending on a harmony between nature
and mind, and the modern-sentimental depending on a longing for a
lost paradise, is constantly quoted to shew that the Greeks took no
pleasure in Nature. This is misleading. Schiller's Greek was very
limited; in the very year (1795) in which the essay appeared in The
Hours, he was asking Humboldt's advice as to learning Greek, with
special reference to Homer and Xenophon.
To him Homer was the Greek par excellence, and who would not agree
with him to-day?
As in Greek mythology, that naive poem of Nature, the product of the
artistic impulse of the race to stamp its impressions in a beautiful and
harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in Homer, the feeling
for Nature is profound; but the Homeric hero had no personal relations

with her, no conscious leaning towards her; the descriptions only
served to frame human action, in time or space.
But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive Homeric
time, was short in spite of Schiller, who, in the very essay referred