The way in which animals are handled in the fables demanded a far slighter familiarity between them and men; so exact a knowledge as we see in the German fables, often involving knowledge of their natural history, such insight into the ’privacy of the animal world,’ belonged to quite another kind of men.  Antiquity did not delight in Nature, and delight in Nature is the very foundation of these poems.  Remote antiquity neither knew nor sought to know any natural history; but only wondered at Nature.  The art of hunting and the passion for it, often carried to excess in the Middle Ages, was unknown to it.  It is a bold remark of Grimm’s that he could smell the old smell of the woods in the German animal poems, but it is one whose truth every one will feel, who turns to this simple poetry with an open mind, who cares for Nature and life in the open.

This is a very tangle of empty phrases and misstatements.  No people stood in more heartfelt and naive relation to Nature, especially to the animal world, than the Hindoos and Persians.  In earlier enquiries[6] we have reviewed the naive feeling displayed in Homer and the sentimental in Hellenism, and have seen that the taste for hunting increased knowledge of Nature in the open in Hellenic days far more than in the Middle Ages.  We shall see now that the level of feeling reached in those and imperial Roman days was not regained in European literature until long after the fall of Latin poetry, and that it was the fertilizing influence of that classic spirit, and that alone, which enabled the inborn German taste for Nature, and for hunting, and plant and animal life, to find artistic expression.  It was a too superficial knowledge of classic literature, and an inclination to synthesis, and clever a priori argument (a style impressed upon his day by Hegel’s method, and fortunately fast disappearing), which led Gervinus to exalt the Middle Ages at the expense of antiquity.  It sounds like a weak concession when he says elsewhere: 

Joy in Nature, which is peculiar to modern times, in contrast to antiquity, which is seen in the earliest mediaeval poems, and in which, moreover, expiring antiquity came to meet the German—­this joy in Nature, in dwelling on plant and animal life, is the very soul of this (animal) poetry.  As in its plastic art, so in all its poetry, antiquity only concerned itself with gods and heroes; its glance was always turned upwards.

But, as a fact, no one has ever stood with feet more firmly planted on this earth than the Greek, enjoying life and undeterred by much scruple or concern as to the powers above; and centuries of development passed before German literature equalled Greek in love of Nature and expressive representation of her beauty.

To rank the two national epics of Germany, the Nibelungenlied and Gudrun, side by side with the Iliad and Odyssey is to exaggerate their value.  And here, as ever, overstraining the comparison is mischievous.