The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times | Page 7

to,
included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the sentimental, and
Shakespeare among the naive, poets--a fact often overlooked.
In line with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for
Nature passed through various stages. These can be clearly traced from
objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic
personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions, in which
scenery was brought into harmony or contrast with man's inner life;
until finally, in Hellenism, Nature was treated for her own sake, and
man reduced to the position of supernumerary both in poetry and
also--so approaching the modern--in landscape-painting.
Greece had her sentimental epoch; she did not, as we have said, long
remain naive. From Sophist days a steady process of decomposition
went on--in other words, a movement towards what we call modern, a
movement which to the classic mind led backward; but from the wider
standpoint of general development meant advance. For the path of
culture is always the same in the nations; it leads first upward and then
downward, and all ripening knowledge, while it enriches the mind,
brings with it some unforeseen loss. Mankind pays heavily for each
new gain; it paid for increased subjectivity and inwardness by a loss in
public spirit and patriotism which, once the most valued of national
possessions, fell away before the increasing individuality, the germ of
the modern spirit. For what is the modern spirit but limitless
individuality?
The greater the knowledge of self, the richer the inner life. Man
becomes his own chief problem--he begins to watch the lightest flutter
of his own feelings, to grasp and reflect upon them, to look upon
himself in fact as in a mirror; and it is in this doubling of the ego, so to
speak, that sentimentality in the modern sense consists. It leads to love
of solitude, the fittest state for the growth of a conscious love of Nature,
for, as Rousseau said 'all noble passions are formed in solitude,' 'tis
there that one recognizes one's own heart as 'the rarest and most
valuable of all possessions.' 'Oh, what a fatal gift of Heaven is a feeling
heart!' and elsewhere he said: 'Hearts that are warmed by a divine fire

find a pure delight in their own feelings which is independent of fate
and of the whole world.' Euripides, too, loved solitude, and avoided the
noise of town life by retiring to a grotto at Salamis which he had
arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his
biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He,
rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. His
morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible that I
should see myself standing face to face, in which case I should have
wept for the sorrows that we suffer'; and in the chorus of The
Suppliants we have: 'This insatiate joy of mourning leads me on like as
the liquid drop flowing from the sun-trodden rock, ever increasing of
groans.' In Euripides we have the first loosening of that ingenuous bond
between Nature and the human spirit, as the Sophists laid the axe to the
root of the old Hellenic ideas and beliefs. Subjectivity had already
gained in strength from the birth of the lyric, that most individual of all
expressions of feeling; and since the lyric cannot dispense with the
external world, classic song now shewed the tender subjective feeling
for Nature which we see in Sappho, Pindar, and Simonides. Yet
Euripides (and Aristophanes, whose painful mad laugh, as Doysen says,
expresses the same distraction and despair as the deep melancholy of
Euripides) only paved the way for that sentimental, idyllic feeling for
Nature which dwelt on her quiet charms for their own sake, as in
Theocritus, and, like the modern, rose to greater intensity in the
presence of the amorous passion, as we see in Kallimachos and the
Anthology. It was the outcome of Hellenism, of which sentimental
introspection, the freeing of the ego from the bonds of race and position,
and the discovery of the individual in all directions of human existence,
were marks. And this feeling developing from Homer to Longos, from
unreflecting to conscious and then to sentimental pleasure in Nature,
was expressed not only in poetry but in painting, although the latter
never fully mastered technique.
The common thoughtless statement, so often supported by quotations
from Schiller, Gervinus, and others, that Greek antiquity was not alive
to the beauty of Nature and her responsiveness to human moods, and
neither painted scenery nor felt the melancholy poetic charm of ruins
and tombs, is therefore a perversion of the truth; but it must be
conceded that the feeling which existed then was but the germ of our

modern one. It was fettered by the