Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/299

Rh A brook brawls over pebbles, fishes swim in it, a grove spreads its twigs on the bank, forming a green curtain. And then the birds reappear: ducks, turtle-doves, pheasants and herons; all the birds from here to Babylon, as Villon would say.

The artist and the poet, both striving to render the beauty of nature, both dominated by the tendency to fasten on each detail, nevertheless arrive, because of the diversity of their methods, at a very different result. Unity and simplicity in the picture, in spite of the mass of details, monotony and formlessness in the poem.

But are we right in comparing poetry with painting, with respect to expressive power? Should we not rather take prose, less tied down to obligatory motifs, freer in its choice of means to give an exact vision of reality?

One of the fundamental traits of the mind of the declining Middle Ages is the predominance of the sense of sight, a predominance which is closely connected with the atrophy of