The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times | Page 8

specific national beliefs concerning
the world and deities, by the undeveloped state of the natural sciences,
which, except botany, still lay in swaddling-clothes, by the new
influence of Christendom, and by that strict feeling for style which,
very much to its advantage, imposed a moderation that would have
excluded much of our senseless modern rhapsody.
It was not unnatural that Schiller, in distaste for the weak riot of feeling
and the passion for describing Nature which obtained in his day, was
led to overpraise the Homeric naïvete and overblame the sentimentality
which he wrongly identified with it.
In all that is called art, the Romans were pupils of the Greek, and their
achievements in the region of beauty cannot be compared with his. But
they advanced the course of general culture, and their feeling--always
more subjective, abstract, self-conscious, and reflective--has a
comparatively familiar, because modern, ring in the great poets.
The preference for the practical and social-economic is traceable in
their feeling for Nature. Their mythology also lay too much within the
bounds of the intelligible; shewed itself too much in forms and
ceremonies, in a cult; but it had not lost the sense of awe--it still heard
the voices of mysterious powers in the depths of the forest.
The dramatists wove effective metaphors and descriptions of Nature
into their plays.
Lucretius laid the foundations of a knowledge of her which refined both
his enjoyment and his descriptions; and the elegiac sentimental style,
which we see developed in Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil, and
Horace, first came to light in the great lyrist Catullus. In Imperial times
feeling for Nature grew with the growth of culture in general; men
turned to her in times of bad cheer, and found comfort in the great sky
spaces, the constant stars, and forests that trembled with awe of the
divine Numen.
It was so with Seneca, a pantheist through and through. Pliny the
younger was quite modern in his choice of rural solitudes, and his
appreciation of the views from his villa. With Hadrian and Apuleius the
Roman rococo literature began; Apuleius was astonishingly modern,
and Ausonius was almost German in the depth and tenderness of his
feeling for Nature. Garden-culture and landscape-painting shewed the
same movement towards the sympathetic and elegiac-sentimental.

Those who deny the Roman feeling for Nature might learn better from
a glance at the ruins of their villas. As H. Nissen says in his _Italische
Landeskunde_:
'It was more than mere fashion which drew the Roman to the sea-side,
and attracted so strongly all those great figures, from the elder Scipio
Africanus and his noble daughter, Cornelia, down to Augustus and
Tiberius and their successors, whenever their powers flagged in the
Forum. There were soft breezes to cool the brow, colour and outline to
refresh the eye, and wide views that appealed to a race born to
extensive lordship.
'In passing along the desolate, fever-stricken coasts of Latium and
Campania to-day, one comes upon many traces of former splendour,
and one is reminded that the pleasure which the old Romans took in the
sea-side was spoilt for those who came after them by the havoc of the
time.'
In many points, Roman feeling for Nature was more developed than
Greek. For instance, the Romans appreciated landscape as a whole, and
distance, light and shade in wood and water, reflections, the charms of
hunting and rowing, day-dreams on a mountain side, and so forth.
That antiquity and the Middle Ages had any taste for romantic scenery
has been energetically denied; but we can find a trace of it. The
landscape which the Roman admired was level, graceful, and gentle; he
certainly did not see any beauty in the Alps. Livy's 'Foeditas Alpinum'
and the dreadful descriptions of Ammian, with others, are the
much-quoted vouchers for this. Nor is it surprising; for modern
appreciation, still in its youth, is really due to increased knowledge
about Nature, to a change of feeling, and to the conveniences of
modern travelling, unknown 2000 years ago.
The dangers and hardships of those days must have put enjoyment out
of the question; and only served to heighten the unfavourable contrast
between the wildness of the mountain regions and the cultivation of
Italy.
Lucretius looked at wild scenery with horror, but later on it became a
favourite subject for description; and Seneca notes, as shewing a
morbid state of mind, in his essay on tranquillity of mind, that
travelling not only attracts men to delightful places, but that some even
exclaim: 'Let us go now into Campania; now that delicate soil

delighteth us, let us visit the wood countries, let us visit the forest of
Calabria, and let us seek some pleasure amidst the deserts, in such sort
as these wandering eyes of ours may be relieved in beholding, at