aided in dethroning the divinities of Nature; and when the free clans had sunk into the serfdom of feudal villages, it was less likely than ever that their old songs should attract the attention of the monks.[1] If new sympathies with Nature were to arise, clearly they must find their source in a material life more hopeful than that of feudal serfs, a life in which men might again become in some degree joyous pagans pleased with the odours of earth-flowers, and not for ever peering through their short-lived beauty into the unknown and eternal.
Such a life of material pleasure was now only possible in the feudal castle; and here, accordingly, the return to paganism took place. But this feudal paganism was something widely different from either the classical or the tribal. A coarsely objective individualism, almost equally removed from the individualism of the Alexandrian age, aware of its own pettiness in the presence of vast masses of men, and from the clan merger of individual in social being, had now assumed a gigantic and almost grotesque significance in the person of the seigneur. It might be anticipated that before the eyes of this feudal personage Nature, if she attracted attention at all, would assume a dress curiously contrasting with that which she had worn for the poets of Alexandria or the bards of the clan.
§ 96. Feudal song neither humanises Nature, as the Alexandrian had done, nor spiritualises her life—worships in her neither the life of man nor that of God. It would seem as if Christian associations, without doing much to lessen the prodigious self-importance of the seigneur, had been able to drive from his halls the
- ↑ On the monks as subduers of Nature's marshes and forests see Montalembert's Monks of the West. Their conflict with Nature seems rather to have confirmed their contempt for the material world than created any sympathy with Nature's life.
