stress upon this aspect of the Commedia, which is indeed prominent in the act under which the original chair was founded. Poor melancholy, wandering Saviozzo found in Dante, not only his political and poetic model, but his guide towards salvation. He compares himself to the little wide-eyed, trembling boy who stands before the kindly master, who at length helps him through his theme in the unknown tongue, 'tanto che del latino il fa contento.' So Dante is the master to one struggling towards the unknown world. 'Così nel nostro debole intelletto A parte a parte mostra e ci soccorre E poi ci acquista un regno alto e perfetto. 'Per questa intera via si saglie e corre 'O vita sua perpetua e felice Vaso d' elezione, esemplo nostro Che così morto vivo anche si dice.' 1 In the process of literary evolution this differentiation of the religious side of Dante's work becomes more marked. Instances may be given of sermons in which are incorporated long passages of the Commedia. But we will conclude with two examples drawn from secular life just beyond the limits of our subject. One Michel Angelo, town trumpeter of Pisa, wrote in 1488 a catalogue of his favourite books; the Commedia finds its place among ‘i libri dell'anima da leggere di quaresima.' The Congrega dei Rozzi was an artisans' literary club in Siena, meeting weekly to read authors usually more gay than grave. But among the statutes of 1531 occurs this clause: Per esser noi del Cristiano gregge professori, ne pare che almeno nel tempo quadragesimale in fra di noi si lega la elegante e dotta Commedia di Dante.' 3 2 The evidence for Dante's popularity is far from being exhausted by these general proofs. Space and the technicality of the subject have prevented the application of the most conclusive test—that is, the direct influence of the poet upon the material and form of the poetry of his successors. A natural consequence of this influence was the prominence given to Dante in the controversy between the champions of Latin and the vernacular which raged for at least a century; 1 Capitolo per la morte di Dante (1404), C. del Balzo, iii. 224. 2 G. L. Passerini, op. cit. Alighieri, 1893. 3 C. Mazzi, La Congrega dei Rozzi di Siena nel secolo xvi. (1883), i. 352. April and in this controversy Florentine patriotism was deeply engaged. Nevertheless sufficient witness has probably been given to acquit the quattrocento of contempt or indifference. Not only were Dante's works a text-book for the lectureroom, a classic for the student of the vernacular, an instrument of political warfare, an inspiration for art and legend, but they had become the stock-in-trade of the Florentine streetsinger and the manual of Tuscan piety. When a poet finds an entry into the song and the prayer of his people, his immortality is assured. ART. XI.-LANDSCAPE IN POETRY. Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson. By F. T. PALGRAVE, late Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. (London, 1897.) THE death of Francis Turner Palgrave removed a critic second to none of his time in taste or judgment, a critic who was also an original poet, but whose justly deserved reputation rested in great degree upon a book to which his own contribution in writing hardly amounted to half a dozen pages. Yet The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics is an anthology so marked by wise critical discernment-so choicely were the poems contained in it chosen, so nobly were they ordered-that the book takes rank as a monument of critical sagacity. If not perfect, it approaches perfection so nearly, that all serious criticism must give way to praise. Perhaps, indeed, only those who have essayed the task of improving it can measure by the difficulty of the task the true worth of a book which has, we believe, done more to teach its readers wherein high excellence in poetry consists than any other published during the century. had been fortunate for Mr. Palgrave's name and fame had he shunned the insidious peril of supplementing that unique book by a second volume attempting to apply the same principles of selection to more recent poetry. Its failure is rendered conspicuous and unequivocal by the extraordinary success of the first, and is probably the best demonstration we possess of the impossibility of framing any final judgment upon contemporary poets and their work. Upon that failure, however, it would be ungracious at the present time to dwell, and it is a more pleasant task to recognise in this book, It Landscape in Poetry, the critical qualities which belonged to the editor of the first volume of the Golden Treasury. Of England Mr. Palgrave speaks as 'long the favourite home' of landscape art, and perhaps it might justly be said that in England poetry, too, has long had its favourite home, since there exists in English a larger body of poetry of the highest order than in any other living language. If this be true, it is true no less of the poetry dealing with Nature than of that more nearly or altogether concerned with human action, man doing and suffering. Whatever be its subject, English poetry exhibits a more absolute harmony of imagination and reality than that of any other language. The imagination of a practical people has been at work in the sphere of real feeling, and busied itself with their near and intimate interests. Poetry like the poetry of Shelley, where the imagination is at work in a sphere aloof from the actual world, is foreign to the English genius. What vitality and power our poetry possesses are due to this, that it makes appeal at once to the intelligence as well as to the imagination, is bound up with the thoughts and feelings of our ordinary life, and is not therefore a mere art product, to appreciate which one must cultivate a particular kind of sensibility, a special sense. The poetry of Chaucer or of Shakespere, of Wordsworth or of Tennyson, appeals to no special sense, but to the wayfaring man, who finds in it his own mental attitude, his own interests. Nothing can compensate for the absence of this intimate association between poetry and life, and to this association the worth of English poetry is, in our judgment, mainly due. If this thesis can be maintained with regard to the poetry which is in any degree concerned with Nature, it may, we think, be regarded as fully established for poetry in general, since the association of the life of external Nature with the life of man is an artistic achievement only possible when imagination serves the practical life, with Wordsworth, rather than escapes it, with Mr. Swinburne. In the main, it must be admitted, the history of poetry shows that the poet has usually introduced landscape into his work merely to serve as background; he has selected a scene expressive of an appropriate sentiment to enhance by emphasis or by contrast the force of the truth, or the situation, with which he was concerned; the poetry occupied exclusively or even largely with Nature is by comparison slight in bulk, and in the main belongs to the modern world. There is in the earlier classic poetry little landscape of any kind, and of that wider, more comprehensive view of Nature, such as latter-day poetry exhibits, there is no trace. What little there is to be found resembles rather a piece of delicate brush-work, a vignette, sketched for the sake of the effect itself, than a picture painted with intention to interpret through it an aspect of human life or passion. A passage like the following, for example, from Sophocles, might be compared to the far-seen portico of a Doric temple shining in its simple sculptured outline against the sky, to which from some busy scene immediately before us we may for a moment lift our eyes. 'Gleaming Kolonus rock, where the thrilling nightingale most loves to sing under the green coverts, remaining constant to the dark-brown ivy and the inviolable foliage of the god; the wood with its thousand fruits and leaves sun-proof, untouchable of any gale.'1 Similarly in Aristophanes we have a passage like this descriptive of the clouds: 'Coming softly through the hollows in the thickets, trailing about in multitudes.' 72 But of man and Nature as parts of an indivisible single unity it was left for modern poetry, such poetry as Wordsworth's or George Meredith's, to conceive. In a poem like that of Wordsworth's: 'Two voices are there ; one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.' or in a poem like Mr. Meredith's Earth and Man, in such stanzas as these : 'For he is in the lists Contentious with the elements, whose dower He builds the soaring spires That sing his soul in stone; of her he draws, In such poetry the sense of a close intimacy with Nature taken by the mind of the poet might be enumerated, but he confines himself to a detailed examination in illustration of a few of these as exhibited in classical and English poetry. These can, says Mr. Palgrave, 'be ranged broadly from simple to complex, forming a development which at the same time answers more or less to the order of date. But,' he continues,' 'it should always be remembered that art is free, that the poets especially do not always confine themselves to a single mode of treatment; that human nature itself remains, as Thucydides long ago said, much the same throughout. The new is latent in the old, the old breathes forth through the new. Hence the various aspects of landscape in which Nature offers herself never wholly disappear from poetry; they revive or they melt into one another, defeating the effort to range them under definite classes or in sharply separated periods.'1 As we follow the treatment of Nature in poetry as exhibited in this volume, it almost seems as if the poets awoke to her charm in proportion as advancing civilisation threw men more and more into groups and the life of cities, and that it was reserved for late centuries and the poets of an industrial and manufacturing country to celebrate the worship of Nature in its fulness. While he was a dweller with her, familiar with her moods, man could hardly be indifferent to her smiles and frowns, her changing seasons affecting as they did his physical life; but it was the significance of natural sights and sounds rather than their beauty that first impressed him. In the life of cities artificially protected from excessive heat or cold, almost indifferent to thunderbolt or tempest, men ceased to view Nature as friend or enemy, as complacent or as angry deity, and learnt to think of her as beautifully various, offering to the observer a new field of enjoyment. Thus the æsthetic instinct found another object; a shifting of the human centre of interest in regard to Nature took place, and she passed into the field of vision of the conscious artist. In sketching the history of Landscape in Poetry, Mr. Palgrave names first 'the simple, almost physical delight in the scenes of the home landscape which seized specially on the early poets of Greece and the Middle Ages. Objects were painted singly and with a few clear touches; the meadow in spring, the living stream, the cool sheltering wood, the flower at their feet, as we see with children, appear to limit their horizon.' He passes then to the landscape, which, taking a wider range, appears as the background to human life, and, as the range still further widens, to the 1 Palgrave, p. 6. 2 Ibid. p. 7. 2 |
