Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/399

 in feudal poetry. Modern science has gifted the literary artist with thoughts of Nature's unity, in which all individual and social distinctions lose themselves—are "made one with Nature;" but the narrowly local associations of feudal life prevented even the coarsest sense of Nature's unity. Only local aspects of Nature—those of their own neighbourhood—could have presented any charm for the seigneur and his retainers; and even these, far from being gilded with any halo like the local divinities of Hellas, were spoiled by associations of villeinage. The fields were for the serfs to till; the forest glades were beautiful only as the haunts of the deer. The Chanson de Roland might offer many an opportunity for descriptions of the Pyrenees, but what pleasure would a glowing picture of the Valley of Roncevaux have afforded the audience of a castle hall? Would they, who cared for Nature even round their walls only as the purveyor of the chase, have listened to descriptions, however beautiful, of a place they had never seen? No; the feudal minstrel suited his lyre to the common feelings of his feudal audiences; and, if he sang of Nature at all, only introduced her general features, without aiming at. truth of local description or even variety of expression, and even these general touches as mere adjuncts of feudal life—"the greyhounds glancing through the groves," and "bow-men bickering on the bent."

Still feudal life and the poetry it created are by no means to be overlooked in the development of our European sentiments of Nature. Such images of Nature as are scattered through feudal songs, though only taken to throw into greater relief the charms of a mistress or the pleasures of the chase, are at least in the main truthful. It was something to have freed Nature from the load of tangled myths under which early barbarism had buried