CHAPTER VIII

HUMANISM, ROCOCO, AND PIGTAIL

Many decades passed before German feeling for Nature reached the heights attained by the Italian Renaissance and the Netherland landscapists.  In the Middle Ages, Germany was engrossed with ecclesiastical dogma—­man’s relation, not only to God, but to the one saving Church—­and had little interest for Science and Art; and the great achievement of the fifteenth century, the Reformation, called for word and deed to reckon with a thousand years of old traditions and the slavery of intellectual despotism.  The new time was born amid bitter throes.  The questions at issue—­religious and ecclesiastical questions concerned with the liberty of the Christian—­were of the most absorbing kind, and though Germany produced minds of individual stamp such as she had never known before, characters of original and marked physiognomy, it was no time for the quiet contemplation of Nature.  Mental life was stimulated by the new current of ideas and new delight in life awakened:  yet there is scarcely a trace of the intense feeling for Nature which we have seen in Petrarch and AEneas Sylvius.

Largely as it was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, it is certainly a mistake to reckon the Humanist movement in Germany, as Geiger does,[1] as a ’merely imported culture, entirely lacking independence.’  The germ of this great movement towards mental freedom was contained in the general trend of the time, which was striving to free itself from the fetters of the Middle Ages in customs and education as well as dogma.  It was chiefly a polemical movement, a fight between contentious savants.  The writings of the Humanists at this naively sensuous period were full of the joy of life and love of pleasure; but scarcely any simple feeling for Nature can be found in them, and there was neither poet nor poem fit to be compared with Petrarch and his sonnets.

Natural philosophy, too, was proscribed by scholastic wisdom; the real Aristotle was only gradually shelled out from under mediaeval accretions.  The natural philosopher, Conrad Summenhart[2] (1450-1501) was quite unable to disbelieve the foolish legend, that the appearance of a comet foretold four certain events—­heat, wind, war, and the death of princes.  At the same time, not being superstitious, he held aloof from the crazy science of astrology and all the fraud connected with it.  Indeed, as an observer of Nature, and still more as a follower and furtherer of the scholastic Aristotelian natural philosophy, he shewed a leaning towards the theory of development, for, according to him, the more highly organized structures proceed from those of lower organization, and these again form the inorganic under the influence of meteors and stars.  The poet laureate Conrad Celtes (b. 1459), a singer of love and composer of four books about it, was a true poet.  His incessant wandering,