Omissions in the poems quoted are marked by small groups of full stops; a line of which indicates that the part omitted is of some length. CHAPTER I PREFATORY FROM primaeval days it is impossible that man can have looked without interest, awe, and pleasure on the mysteriously alluring scene around him-mountains, rivers, plains, sea, sky : stars, moon, sun, their rising and setting. Nor could these great features of nature fail of being in some way represented, so soon as poetry and painting reached any true grasp of expression. Those so remote efforts, however, whatever they may have been, are lost; and centuries probably went by before Palestine and Hellas gave us the earliest extant delightful examples of Landscape in Words. But the case was different with Landscape in Colours, in which scarce any relic has survived for some two thousand years after the probable date of the poems that have reached us under the awe-striking names of David and of Homer. The first interest, then, which may be claimed for our subject is that, in its limited degree, poetry does enable us to feel how the book of Nature, with its many-coloured pages, affected the three gifted literary races of the Mediterranean world-Hebrew, Hellenic, Latin-during years when, if landscape art in some sense may have existed, the evidence of it has barely survived in a few crumbling Graeco-Roman frescoes. Literature (in which we must here include prose) has hence singly Landscape for her portion, broadly speaking, between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D. After that date, more or less, first as a B background to human figures, then in Titian's work to Turner's,1 Landscape appears as, itself and by itself, an unfailing source of pure, lasting pleasure. To trace landscape in colour through its parallel course to landscape in words would be a most interesting essay. This cannot be here attempted; but it may help to clear up our main subject if we cast a prefatory glance at the characteristics of the two arts; so far as words can render the silent inner effect which picture or poem, in proportion to their merit in art, leave on the sensitive spectator. In common, both, it is almost a truism to say, are bound to exhibit Nature as seen through, coloured, penetrated by the poet's or the painter's soul; whilst they, in turn, if genuinely gifted for art, frame their ideal landscape on the great lines, and after the laws and inner intention of Nature herself: reverting thus to realism in its real essence through the union of observation and individual genius. In varying degrees Nature must thus be generalised or modified; bare realistic photography, or a mere catalogue of details,—each fails to give the landscape, rendered in words or colours, that union with human feeling which, whether by way of sympathy or of contrast, art itself and the human soul always imperatively call for. The absence of this marriage of Man and Nature is what leaves us cold, we hardly know why, before many a skilful landscape picture, and is what tempts us to skip the poet's descriptive passages.—Thus far for what is common between the rival arts; we may now compare them. Poetry, rendering the scene or subject chosen in successive verbal pictures, and bringing before us images of scent and sound and movement, has at first sight vast advantages over painting, confined, as the artist is, in regard to form, to a single instant, and unable to do more than barely suggest motion; whilst his colours, with the light and shade, available as materials, cannot go beyond one octave, as it were, in the long scale 1 I allude to the magnificent specimen, said to be a view from Friuli, in the Buckingham Palace collection. This, the faded frescoes in the Scuola del Santo, Padua, and the backgrounds to some of his figure-pictures, show a depth and truth of sentiment not always found in Titian's subject-inventions, and suggest that had the due season arrived, he might have ranked easily among the very greatest of the landscapists.' of Nature, ranging from absolute darkness to midday splendour. Add to this that the poet can prepare the reader's mind for his landscape, connecting it easily with the always underlying human sentiment, whilst the painter must produce his effect almost wholly by the canvas presented. Yet, on the other hand, who can question that colours, even a single colour, shall place the scene before eye and mind with a vivid truth, a realisation, which the genius of the Muse herself, concentrating all the skill of all the poets who have ever been, cannot even approach? -And it adds to the interest of this comparison, that among the different races of mankind it will often be found that one has been gifted most for the pen, another for the palette. The task before us is sufficiently large, and it will be best to sketch its limitations at once. My scheme does not aim to cover the whole field even of Western poetry. Both in extent and in the varied command of language requisite for such an anthology, it would be beyond my powers; and far more, such a world-wide gathering as that which the distinguished German Herder attempted in his Popular Songs.2 Thus, in the first portion of my work, I can only allude to the singular development of Landscape in Poetry displayed, according to Humboldt, long before the Christian era, in the Indian Vedas, in the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, and with greater fullness in the poems of Kalidasa, contemporaneous with Vergil and Horace. Amongst Kalidasa's, Humboldt especially praises the landscapes in the Megadhuta or Cloud Messenger, so named from the drifting vapour to which the lover confides his grief. We find here a meditative dreamlike sentiment, a sympathetic nearness to Nature, which, in contrast with the Greek apartness from her, the Greek definiteness of outline, may be truly called romantic. The poem "paints with admir"able truth to nature, the joyful welcome which . . . hails the "first appearance of the rising cloud, showing that the looked 1 Almost wholly, because a landscape known to the spectator, or one obviously dealing with some familiar human incident or passage in literature (like the names affixed to " 'programme" music), may more or less dispose the spectator to grasp the painter's idea. 2 Volks Lieder, 1778. |