dusky fig-trees, rugged crags, and foaming cataract,
or the half-sullen, half-smiling sea-pieces of Bakhuysen and Van der
Velde?

All these great Netherlander far outstripped the poetry of their
time; it was a hundred years later before mountain and sea found
their painter in words, and a complete landscape picture was not born
in German poetry until the end of the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER VIII

HUMANISM, ROCOCO, AND PIGTAIL

Many decades passed before German feeling for Nature reached the
heights attained by the Italian Renaissance and the Netherland
landscapists. In the Middle Ages, Germany was engrossed with
ecclesiastical dogma--man's relation, not only to God, but to the one
saving Church--and had little interest for Science and Art; and the
great achievement of the fifteenth century, the Reformation, called
for word and deed to reckon with a thousand years of old traditions
and the slavery of intellectual despotism. The new time was born amid
bitter throes. The questions at issue--religious and ecclesiastical
questions concerned with the liberty of the Christian--were of the
most absorbing kind, and though Germany produced minds of individual
stamp such as she had never known before, characters of original and
marked physiognomy, it was no time for the quiet contemplation of
Nature. Mental life was stimulated by the new current of ideas and
new delight in life awakened: yet there is scarcely a trace of the
intense feeling for Nature which we have seen in Petrarch and AEneas
Sylvius.

Largely as it was influenced by the Italian Renaissance, it is
certainly a mistake to reckon the Humanist movement in Germany, as
Geiger does,[1] as a 'merely imported culture, entirely lacking
independence.' The germ of this great movement towards mental freedom
was contained in the general trend of the time, which was striving to
free itself from the fetters of the Middle Ages in customs and
education as well as dogma. It was chiefly a polemical movement, a
fight between contentious savants. The writings of the Humanists at
this naively sensuous period were full of the joy of life and love of
pleasure; but scarcely any simple feeling for Nature can be found in
them, and there was neither poet nor poem fit to be compared with
Petrarch and his sonnets.

Natural philosophy, too, was proscribed by scholastic wisdom; the
real Aristotle was only gradually shelled out from under mediaeval
accretions. The natural philos