These scattered notices of the relations of the Italians to natural science, and their interest in the wealth and variety of the products of nature, are only fragments of a great subject.No one is more conscious than the author of the defects in his knowledge on this point.Of the multitude of special works in which the subject is adequately treated, even the names are but imperfectly known to him.
Discovery of the Beauty of Landscape But outside the sphere of scientific investigation, there is another way to draw near to nature.The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful.
The power to do so is always the result of a long and complicated development, and its origin is not easily detected, since a dim feeling of this kind may exist long before it shows itself in poetry and painting and thereby becomes conscious of itself.Among the ancients, for example, art and poetry had gone through the whole circle of human interests, before they turned to the representation of nature, and even then the latter filled always a limited and subordinate place.And yet, from the time of Homer downwards, the powerful impression made by nature upon man is shown by countless verses and chance expressions.
The Germanic races, which founded their States on the ruins of the Roman Empire, were thoroughly and specially fitted to understand the spirit of natural scenery; and though Christianity compelled them for a while to see in the springs and mountains, in the lakes and woods, which they had till then revered, the working of evil demons, yet this transitional conception was soon outgrown.By the year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine, hearty enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found lively expres- sion in the minstrelsy of different nations, which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature --spring with its flowers, the green fields and the woods.But these pictures are all foreground without perspective.Even the crusaders, who travelled so far and saw so much, are not recognizable as such in their poems.The epic poetry, which describes amour and costumes so fully, does not attempt more than a sketch of outward nature; and even the great Wolfram von Eschenbach scarcely anywhere gives us an adequate picture of the scene on which his heroes move.From these poems it would never be guessed that their noble authors in all countries inhabited or visited lofty castles, commanding distant prospects.Even in the Latin poems of the wandering clerks, we find no traces of a distant view--of landscape properly so called-- but what lies near is sometimes described with a glory and splendor which none of the knightly minstrels can surpass.What picture of the Grove of Love can equal that of the Italian poet -- for such we take him to be--of the twelfth century?
'Immortalis fieret Ibi manens homo; Arbor ibi quaelibet Suo gaudet pomo; Viae myrrha, cinnamo Fragrant, et amomo-- Conjectari poterat Dominus ex domo' etc.
To the Italian mind, at all events, nature had by this time lost its taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal powers.Saint Francis of Assisi, in his Hymn to the Sun, frankly praises the Lord for creating the heavenly bodies and the four elements.
But the unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature on the human spirit begin with Dante.Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous lines the sense of the morning air and the trembling light on the distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he makes the ascent of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of enjoying the view--the first man, perhaps, since the days of antiquity who did so.In Boccaccio we can do little more than infer how country scenery affected him; yet his pastoral romances show his imagination to have been filled with it.But the significance of nature for a receptive spirit is fully and clearly displayed by Petrarch--one of the first truly modern men.That clear soul--who first collected from the literature of all countries evidence of the origin and progress of the sense of natural beauty, and himself, in his 'Aspects of Nature,'
achieved the noblest masterpiece of description--Alexander von Humboldt has not done full justice to Petrarch; and following in the steps of the great reaper, we may still hope to glean a few ears of interest and value.
