etymology justifies, and which is the most philosophical as well, nature
should mean the principle of birth or genesis, the universal mother, the
great cause, or system of causes, that brings phenomena to light. If we
take the word nature in this sense, it may be said that Lucretius, more
than any other man, is the poet of nature. Of course, being an ancient,
he is not particularly a poet of landscape. He runs deeper than that; he
is a poet of the source of landscape, a poet of matter. A poet of
landscape might try to suggest, by well-chosen words, the sensations of
light, movement, and form which nature arouses in us; but in this
attempt he would encounter the insuperable difficulty which Lessing long
ago pointed out, and warned poets of: I mean the unfitness of language
to render what is spatial and material; its fitness to render only what,
like language itself, is bodiless and flowing,--action, feeling, and
thought.
It is noticeable, accordingly, that poets who are fascinated by pure
sense and seek to write poems about it are called not impressionists,
but symbolists; for in trying to render some absolute sensation they
render rather the field of association in which that sensation lies, or
the emotions and half-thoughts that shoot and play about it in their
fancy. They become--against their will, perhaps--psychological poets,
ringers of mental chimes, and listeners for the chance overtones of
consciousness. Hence we call them symbolists, mixing perhaps some shade
of disparagement in the term, as if they were symbolists of an empty,
super-subtle, or fatuous sort. For they play with things luxuriously,
making them symbols for their thoughts, instead of mending their
thoughts intelligently, to render them symbols for things.
A poet might be a symbolist in another sense,--if he broke up nature,
the object suggested by landscape to the mind, and reverted to the
elements of landscape, not in order to associate these sensations lazily
together, but in order to build out of them in fancy a different nature,
a better world, than that which they reveal to reason. The elements of
landscape, chosen, emphasized, and recombined for this purpose, would
then be symbols for the ideal world they were made to suggest, and for
the ideal life that might be led in that paradise. Shelley is a symbolic
landscape poet in this sense. To Shelley, as Francis Thompson has said,
nature was a toy-shop; his fancy took the materials of the landscape and
wove them into a gossamer world, a bright ethereal habitation for
new-born irresponsible spirits. Shelley was the musician of landscape;
he traced out its unrealized suggestions; transformed the things he saw
into the things he would fain have seen. In this idealization it was
spirit that guided him, the bent of his wild and exquisite imagination,
and he fancied sometimes that the grosser landscapes of earth were
likewise the work of some half-spiritual stress, of some restlessly
dreaming power. In this sense, earthly landscape seemed to him the
symbol of the earth spirit, as the starlit crystal landscapes of his
verse, with their pensive flowers, were symbols in which his own fevered
spirit was expressed, images in which his passion rested.
Another sort of landscape poetry is to be found in Wordsworth, for whom
the title of poet of nature might perhaps be claimed. To him the
landscape is an influence. What he renders, beyond such pictorial
touches as language is capable of, is the moral inspiration which the
scene brings to him. This moral inspiration is not drawn at all from the
real processes of nature which every landscape manifests in some aspect
and for one moment. Such would have been the method of Lucretius; he
would have passed imaginatively from the landscape to the sources of the
landscape; he would have disclosed the poetry of matter, not of spirit.
Wordsworth, on the contrary, dwells on adventitious human matters. He is
no poet of genesis, evolution, and natural force in its myriad
manifestations. Only a part of the cosmic process engages his interest,
or touches his soul--the strengthening or chastening of human purposes
by the influences of landscape. These influences are very real; for as
food or wine keeps the animal heart beating, or quickens it, so large
spaces of calm sky, or mountains, or dells, or solitary stretches of
water, expand the breast, disperse the obsessions that cramp a man’s
daily existence, and even if he be less contemplative and less virtuous
than Wordsworth, make him, for the moment, a friend to all things, and a
friend to himself.
Yet these influences are vague and for the most part fleeting.
Wordsworth would hardly have felt them so distinctly and so constantly
had he not found a further link to bind landscape to moral sentiment.
Such a link exists. The landscape is the scene of human life. Every
spot, every season, is associated with the sort of existence which falls
to men in that environment. Landscape for Wordsworth’s age and in his
country was seldom without figures. At least, some visible trace of man
guided the poet and set the key for his moral meditation. Country life
was no less dear to Wordsworth than landscape was; it fitted into every
picture; and while the march of things, as Lucretius conceived it, was
not present to Wordsworth’s imagination, the revolutions of society--the
French Revolution, for instance--were constantly in his thoughts. In so
far as he was a poet of human life, Wordsworth was truly a poet of
nature. In so far, however, as he was a poet of landscape, he was still
fundamentally a poet of human life, or merely of his personal
experience. When he talked of nature he was generally moralizing, and
altogether subject to the pathetic fallacy; but when he talked of man,
or of himself, he was unfolding a part of nature, the upright human
heart, and studying it in its truth.
Lucretius, a poet of universal nature, studied everything in its truth.
Even moral life, though he felt it much more narrowly and coldly than
Wordsworth did, was better understood and better sung by him for being
seen in its natural setting. It is a fault of idealists to misrepresent
idealism, because they do not view it as a part of the world. Idealism
_is_ a part of the world, a small and dependent part of it. It is a
small and dependent part even in the life of men. This fact is nothing
against idealism taken as a moral energy, as a faculty of idealization
and a habit of living in the familiar presence of an image of what
would, in everything, be best. But it is the ruin of idealism taken as a
view of the central and universal power in the world. For this reason
Lucretius, who sees human life and human idealism in their natural
setting, has a saner and maturer view of both than has Wordsworth, for
all his greater refinement. Nature, for the Latin poet, is really
nature. He loves and fears her, as she deserves to be loved and feared
by her creatures. Whether it be a wind blowing, a torrent rushing, a
lamb bleating, the magic of love, genius achieving its purpose, or a
war, or a pestilence, Lucretius sees everything in its causes, and in
its total career. One breath of lavish creation, one iron law of change,
runs through the whole, making all things kin in their inmost elements
and in their last end. Here is the touch of nature indeed, her largeness
and eternity. Here is the true echo of the life of matter.
Any comprehensive picture of nature and destiny, if the picture be
credited, must arouse emotion, and in a reflective and vivid mind must
inspire poetry--for what is poetry but emotion, fixing and colouring the
objects from which it springs? The sublime poem of Lucretius, expounding
the least poetical of philosophies, proves this point beyond a doubt.
Yet Lucretius was far from exhausting the inspiration which a poet might
draw from materialism. In the philosophy of Epicurus, even, which had
but a sickly hold on materialism, there were two strains which Lucretius
did not take up, and which are naturally rich in poetry, the strain of
piety and the strain of friendship. It is usual and, in one sense,
legitimate to speak of the Epicureans as atheists, since they denied
providence and any government of God in the world. Yet they admitted the
existence of gods, living in the quiet spaces between those celestial
whirlpools which form the various worlds. To these gods they attributed
the human form, and the serene life to which Epicurus aspired. Epicurus
himself was so sincere in this belief, and so much affected by it, that
he used to frequent the temples, keep the feasts of the gods, and often
spend hours before their images in contemplation and prayer.
In this, as in much else, Epicurus was carrying out to its logical
conclusion the rational and reforming essence of Hellenism. In Greek
religion, as in all other religions, there was a background of vulgar
superstition. Survivals and revivals of totem-worship, taboo, magic,
ritual barter, and objectified rhetoric are to be found in it to the
very end; yet if we consider in Greek religion its characteristic
tendency, and what rendered it distinctively Greek, we see that it was
its unprecedented ideality, disinterestedness, and aestheticism. To the
Greek, in so far as he was a Greek, religion was an aspiration to grow
like the gods by invoking their companionship, rehearsing their story,
feeling vicariously the glow of their splendid prerogatives, and placing
them, in the form of beautiful and very human statues, constantly before
his eyes. This sympathetic interest in the immortals took the place, in
the typical Greek mind, of any vivid hope of human immortality; perhaps
it made such a hope seem superfluous and inappropriate. Mortality
belonged to man, as immortality to the gods; and the one was the
complement of the other. Imagine a poet who, to the freedom and
simplicity of Homer, should have added the more reverent idealism of a
later age; and what an inexhaustible fund of poetry might he not have
found in this conception of the immortals leading a human life, without
its sordid contrarieties and limitations, eternally young, and frank,
and different!
Hints of such poetry are to be found in Plato, myths that present the
ideal suggestions of human life in pictures. These he sometimes leaves
general and pale, calling them ideas; but at other times he embodies
them in deities, or in detailed imaginary constructions, like that of
his _Republic_. This Platonic habit of mind might have been carried
further by some franker and less reactionary poet than Plato was, or
tended to become, as the years turned his wine into vinegar. But the
whole world was then getting sour. Imagination flagged, or was diverted
from the Greek into the Hebrew channel. Nevertheless, the hymns of
modern poets to the ancient gods, and the irrepressible echoes of
classic mythology in our literature, show how easy it would have been
for the later ancients themselves, had they chosen, to make immortal
poetry out of their dying superstitions. The denials of Epicurus do not
exclude this ideal use of religion; on the contrary, by excluding all
the other uses of it--the commercial, the mock-scientific, and the
selfish--they leave the moral interpretative aspect of religion standing
alone, ready to the poet’s hand, if any poet could be found pure and
fertile enough to catch and to render it. Rationalized paganism might
have had its Dante, a Dante who should have been the pupil not of Virgil
and Aquinas, but of Homer and Plato. Lucretius was too literal,
positivistic, and insistent for such a delicate task. He was a Roman.
Moral mythology and ideal piety, though his philosophy had room for
them, formed no part of his poetry.
What the other neglected theme, friendship, might have supplied, we may
see in the tone of another Epicurean, the poet Horace. Friendship was
highly honoured in all ancient states; and the Epicurean philosophy, in
banishing so many traditional forms of sentiment, could only intensify
the emphasis on friendship. It taught men that they were an accident in
the universe, comrades afloat on the same raft together with no fate not
common to them all, and no possible helpers but one another. Lucretius
does speak, in a passage to which I have already referred,[8] about the
hope of sweet friendship that supports him in his labours; and
elsewhere[9] he repeats the Epicurean idyl about picnicking together on
the green grass by a flowing brook; but the little word “together” is
all he vouchsafes us to mark what must be the chief ingredient in such
rural happiness.
Horace, usually so much slighter than Lucretius, is less cursory here.
Not only does he strike much oftener the note of friendship, but his
whole mind and temper breathe of friendliness and expected agreement.
There is, in the very charm and artifice of his lines, a sort of
confidential joy in tasting with the kindred few the sweet or pungent
savour of human things. To be brief and gently ironical is to assume
mutual intelligence; and to assume mutual intelligence is to believe in
friendship. In Lucretius, on the other hand, zeal is mightier than
sympathy, and scorn mightier than humour. Perhaps it would be asking too
much of his uncompromising fervour that he should have unbent now and
then and shown us in some detail what those pleasures of life may be
which are without care and fear. Yet, if it was impossible for him not
to be always serious and austere, he might at least have noted the
melancholy of friendship--for friendship, where nature has made minds
isolated and bodies mortal, is rich also in melancholy. This again we
may find in Horace, where once or twice he lets the “something bitter”
bubble up from the heart even of this flower, when he feels a vague need
that survives satiety, and yearns perversely for the impossible.[10]
Poor Epicureans, when they could not learn, like their master, to be
saints!
So far the decadent materialism of Epicurus might have carried a poet;
but a materialist in our days might find many other poetic themes to
weave into his system. To the picture which Lucretius sketches of
primitive civilization, we might add the whole history of mankind. To a
consistent and vigorous materialism all personal and national dramas,
with the beauties of all the arts, are no less natural and interesting
than are flowers or animal bodies. The moral pageantry of this world,
surveyed scientifically, is calculated wonderfully to strengthen and
refine the philosophy of abstention suggested to Epicurus by the flux of
material things and by the illusions of vulgar passion. Lucretius
studies superstition, but only as an enemy; and the naturalistic poet
should be the enemy of nothing. His animus blinds him to half the
object, to its more beautiful half, and makes us distrust his version of
the meaner half he is aware of. Seen in its totality, and surrounded by
all the other products of human imagination, superstition is not only
moving in itself, a capital subject for tragedy and for comedy, but it
reinforces the materialistic way of thinking, and shows that it may be
extended to the most complex and emotional spheres of existence. At the
same time, a naturalism extended impartially over moral facts brings
home a lesson of tolerance, scepticism, and independence which, without
contradicting Epicurean principles, would very much enlarge and
transform Epicurean sentiment. History would have opened to the
Epicurean poet a new dimension of nature and a more varied spectacle of
folly. His imagination would have been enriched and his maxims
fortified.
The emotions which Lucretius associated with his atoms and void, with
his religious denials and his abstentions from action, are emotions
necessarily involved in life. They will exist in any case, though not
necessarily associated with the doctrines by which this poet sought to
clarify them. They will remain standing, whatever mechanism we put in
the place of that which he believed in,--that is, if we are serious, and
not trying to escape from the facts rather than to explain them. If the
ideas embodied in a philosophy represent a comprehensive survey of the
facts, and a mature sentiment in the presence of them, any new ideas
adopted instead will have to acquire the same values, and nothing will
be changed morally except the language or euphony of the mind.
Of course one theory of the world must be true and the rest false, at
least if the categories of any theory are applicable to reality; but the
true theory like the false resides in imagination, and the truth of it
which the poet grasps is its truth to life. If there are no atoms, at
least there must be habits of nature, or laws of evolution, or
dialectics of progress, or decrees of providence, or intrusions of
chance; and before these equally external and groundless powers we must
bow, as Lucretius bowed to his atoms. It will always be important and
inevitable to recognize _something_ external, something that generates
or surrounds us; and perhaps the only difference between materialism and
other systems in this respect is that materialism has studied more
scrupulously the detail and method of our dependence.
Similarly, even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is
nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions. Our
lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled
Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as
if we are to face only one. The gradual losing of what we have been and
are, Emerson says:
_This losing is true dying;_
_This is lordly maris down-lying,_
_This his slow but sure reclining,_
_Star by star his world resigning._
The maxim of Lucretius, that nothing arises save by the death of
something else, meets us still in our crawling immortality. And his art
of accepting and enjoying what the conditions of our being afford also
has a perennial application. Dante, the poet of faith, will tell us that
we must find our peace in the will that gives us our limited portion.
Goethe, the poet of romantic experience, will tell us that we must
renounce, renounce perpetually. Thus wisdom clothes the same moral
truths in many cosmic parables. The doctrines of philosophers disagree
where they are literal and arbitrary,--mere guesses about the unknown;
but they agree or complete one another where they are expressive or
symbolic, thoughts wrung by experience from the hearts of poets. Then
all philosophies alike are ways of meeting and recording the same flux
of images, the same vicissitudes of good and evil, which will visit all
generations, while man is man.
* * * * *
[1] Lucretius, iv. 834, 835:
Nil ... natumst in corpore, ut uti
Possemus, sed quod natumst id procreat usum.
[2] Ibid., I. 1115-18:
Alid ex alio clarescet, nec tibi caeca
Nox iter eripiet, quin ultima naturai
Pervideas: ita res accendent lumina rebus.
[3] Lucretius, i. 264, 265:
Alid ex alio reficit natura, nec ullam
Rem gigni patitur, nisi morte adiuta aliena.
[4] An excellent expression of this view is put by Plato into the mouth
of the physician Eryximachus in the _Symposium_, pp. 186-88.
[5] Lucretius, i. 1-13:
Æneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
Alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
Concelebras; per te quoniam genus omne animantum
Concipitur, visitque exortum lumina solis:
Te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli,
Adventumque tuum: tibi suaves daedala tellus
Submittit flores; tibi rident aequora ponti,
Placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum.
Nam simul ac species patefactast verna diei,
Et reserata viget genitabilis aura favoni;
Aëriae primum volucres te, diva, tuumque
Significant initum, perculsae corda tua vi.
[6] Lucretius, i. 24, 28-30, 41-43, 140-44:
Te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse....
Quo magis aeternum da dictis, diva, leporem:
Effice, ut interea fera moenera militiai
Per maria ac terras omnes sopita quiescant....
Nam neque nos agere hoc patriai tempore iniquo
Possumus aequo animo, nec Memmi clara propago
Talibus in rebus communi desse saluti....
Sed tua me virtus tamen, et sperata voluptas
Suavis amicitiae, quemvis sufferre laborem
Suadet, et inducit noctes vigilare serenas,
Quaerentem, dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti.
[7] Lucretius, ii. 1139-41, 1148-49, 1164-74:
Omnia debet enim cibus integrare novando,
Et fulcire cibus, cibus omnia sustentare.
Nequidquam,...
Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi
Expugnata dabunt labem putrisque ruinas....
Iamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator
Crebrius incassum manuum cecidisse laborem:
Et cum tempora temporibus praesentia confert
Praeteritis, laudat fortunas saepe parentis,...
Nec tenet, omnia paulatim tabescere et ire
Ad capulum, spatio aetatis defessa vetusto.
[8] Cf. pages 41, 49.
[9] Lucretius, ii. 29-33:
Inter se prostrati in gramine molli
Propter aquae rivum, sub ramis arboris altae,
Non magnis opibus iucunde corpora curant:
Praesertim cum tempestas arridet, et anni
Tempa conspergunt viridantis floribus herbas.
[10] Horace, _Odes_, iv. 1:
Iam nec spes animi credula mutui...
Sed cur, heu! Ligurine, cur
Manat rara meas lacrima per genas?
III
DANTE
In the _Phaedo_ of Plato there is an incidental passage of supreme
interest to the historian. It foreshadows, and accurately defines, the
whole transition from antiquity to the middle age, from naturalism to
supernaturalism, from Lucretius to Dante. Socrates, in his prison, is
addressing his disciples for the last time. The general subject is
immortality; but in a pause in the argument Socrates says: “In my youth
... I heard some one reading, as he said, from a book of Anaxagoras,
that Reason was the disposer and cause of all, and I was delighted at
this notion, which appeared quite admirable, and I said to myself: ‘If
Reason is the disposer, Reason will dispose all for the best, and put
each particular in the best place;’ and I argued that if any desired to
find out the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of
anything, he must find out what ... was best for that thing.... And I
rejoiced to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes
of existence such as I desired, and I imagined that he would tell me
first whether the earth is flat or round; and whichever was true, he
would proceed ... to show the nature of the best, and show that this was
best; and if he said that the earth was in the centre [of the universe],
he would further explain that this position was the best, and I should
be satisfied with the explanation given, and not want any other sort of
cause.... For I could not imagine that when he spoke of Reason as the
disposer of things, he would give any other account of their being,
except that this was best.... These hopes I would not have sold for a
large sum of money, and I seized the books and read them as fast as I
could, in my eagerness to know the better and the worse.
“What expectations I had formed and how grievously was I disappointed!
As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking Reason or
any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and
water, and other eccentricities.... Thus one man makes a vortex all
round, and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as a
support to the earth, which is a sort of broad trough. Any power which
in arranging them as they are arranges them for the best never enters
into their minds; and instead of finding any superior strength in it,
they rather expect to discover another Atlas of the world who is
stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good; of the
obligatory and containing power of the good they think nothing; and yet
this is the principle which I would fain learn if anyone would teach
me.”[1]