The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 445 pages of information about The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times.

The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 445 pages of information about The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times.

Vivid feeling for Nature is not among the characteristic features of either Scandinavian or old German poetry.

It is naive and objective throughout, and seldom weighty or forcible.

The Waltharius shews the influence of Virgil’s language, in highly-coloured and sympathetic descriptions like those of the Latin poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance.

Animal saga probably first arose just before the twelfth century, and their home was probably Franconia.

Like the genial notices of plant life in the Latin poems of the Carlovingian period, the animal poems shewed interest in the animal world—­the interest of a child who ponders individual differences and peculiarities, the virtues and failings so closely allied to its own.  It was a naive ‘hand-and-glove’ footing between man and the creatures, which attributed all his wishes and weaknesses to them, wiped out all differences between them with perfect impartiality, and gave the characteristics of each animal with exactness and poetry.

The soil for the cultivation of poetry about animals was prepared by the symbolic and allegorical way of looking at Nature which held sway all through the Middle Ages.

The material was used as a symbolic language for the immaterial, the world of sense conceived of as a great picture-book of the truths of salvation, in whose pages God, the devil, and, between them man, figured:  thus plant life suggested the flower of the root of Jesse, foretold by Isaiah, red flowers the Saviour’s wounds, and so forth.  In the earliest Christian times, a remarkable letter existed in Alexandria, the so-called ‘Physiologus,’ which has affected the proverbial turns of speech in the world’s literature up to the present day to an almost unequalled degree.

It gave the symbolic meanings of the different animals.  The lamb and unicorn were symbols of Christ; sheep, fish, and deer, of his followers; dragons, serpents, and bears, of the devil; swine, hares, hyenas, of gluttony; the disorderly luxuriance of snow meant death, the phoenix the resurrection, and so forth, indeed, whole categories of animals were turned into allegories of the truths of salvation.[41] The cleverest fables of animals were in Isengrimen, published in Ghent about 1140 in Latin verse—­the story of the sick lion and his cure by the fox, and the outwitting of the wolf.  Such fables did not remain special to German national literature, but became popular subjects in the literature of the whole world; and it is a significant fact that they afterwards took root especially in Flanders, where the taste for still life and delight in Nature has always found a home, and which became the nursery, in later times, of landscape, animal, and genre painting.

CHAPTER III

THE NAIVE FEELING AT THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES

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The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.