Introductory statement INTRODUCTION. The general theme of the treatment of nature in literature is not a new one. Schiller's essay entitled "Ueber die Naive und Sentimentale Dichtung" (1794), was the first attempt to state and explain the difference between the classical way of looking at nature and the modern way. The externality, the lack of heart, in the classical attitude towards nature, he attributed to the fact that the Greeks were in their thoughts and habits of life so a part of nature that they felt no impulse to seek her with the passionate longing of the modern poet, whose ardent and heartfelt love of nature is but the result of a mode of thought and life out of harmony with her. This essay, however inadequate as a presentation of the Greek attitude towards nature,' determined the lines on which much of succeeding study was made. Alexander von Humboldt in his Kosmos (1845-58), in the midst of his scientific generalizations and his encyclopædic accumulation of natural facts takes occasion to discuss the treatment of nature in poetry and landscape painting. The chapter on landscape painting is chiefly confined to such topographical, botanical, and other pictorial representations as serve to add to our knowledge of distant lands. The boundaries of the whole question are enlarged by a representation of the profound feeling for nature in Semitic and Indo-European races. There is a brief study of the medieval feeling for nature as it appears in Dante, and finally of the treatment of nature in some prose writers of I Humboldt was the first to attack Schiller's view. He said that after a full reading of Greek and Roman authors he found himself unable to accept Schiller's statement without many reservations. Later Biese spoke of Schiller's Essay as "jener bahnbrechende Aufsatz," but showed that the statement of the case was inadequate because it was based on the poetry of a single period and thus failed entirely to take account of many phases of nature presented in the poetry after the brief “reflexionslose naive homerische Zeit." V the eighteenth century. The only English poets mentioned are Shakespeare, Thomson, and Byron, the whole subject of English poetry being disposed of in less than a page. In Ruskin's Modern Painters (1843-60) are several most interesting chapters on Landscape in classical, mediæval, and modern times. "Of the Pathetic Fallacy" and "The Moral of Landscape" are also suggestive though misleading studies. Victor de Laprade's La Sentiment de la Nature (1866, 1868) contains in full the theories already suggested in the preface to his Les Symphones. In the introductory chapters he outlines his conception of the development of art. He regards architecture. as essentially the expression of man's interest in religion; sculpture of his interest in the demi-god or hero; painting of his interest in the complex and varied life of man as man; while the characteristic art of the present age is music with which the love of nature is closely allied, since both affect the mind indirectly through indeterminate and vaguely suggestive harmonies, and both tend by their complexity and subtlety to rouse sweet reveries, luxurious emotion, nameless longings, ineffectual aspirations, but leave the conscience and the will untouched. No one can read these critical studies of Laprade or his earlier poems without feeling his enthusiastic joy in the presence of But he feared this joy and counted it a part of the concupiscence of the flesh except as it became an avenue to communion with the divine spirit. His indictment against the passion for nature in modern music, painting, poetry, fiction, science, is that the material is everywhere exalted at the expense of the spiritual. To be of value the presentation of the external world in whatever realm of art must subordinate its appeal to the senses, and emphasize its appeal to man's inner life. 'Laprade's work is a plea for idealism as against realism. In all his brilliant presentation of the attitude towards external nature of different races in different epochs, this point of view must be taken into account. In his rapid survey of English poetry the poets to receive closest attention are Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. In later times the most significant of the poets who "gravitent antour de Lord Byron" are Wordsworth and Shelley, nature. |