In this assembly it is unnecessary to recall the little that is told,
on dubious authority, of the life which began a little less than a
hundred years before the Christian era, and ended when he was not much
over forty, when Virgil was a very young man. All that is told of his
life is the story that he went mad after receiving a love-philtre,
composed the books of his great poem, _On the Nature of Things_ in his
lucid intervals, and finally died by his own hand. It is this tradition
which Tennyson with great art has worked up into his noble poem. We
need not here discuss the truth either of the tradition of madness or
of that of suicide. What is certain is that no poem in the world bears
a more powerful impress of coherent and continuous thought. While
the poets of his own time and of the next generation, though deeply
interested in his poetry and in his ideas, know nothing of the tragic
story which first emerges in a testimony four centuries later.
Lucretius called his poem by the bald title _On the Nature of Things_.
But no single term or phrase can describe the aims which, distinct
but continually playing into and through one another, compose the
intense animating purpose of the book. We may say that it is at once
a scientific treatise, a gospel of salvation, and an epic of nature
and man; yet we are rarely conscious of any one of these aims to the
exclusion of the rest. In none of these three aims was Lucretius
wholly original. In each of them he had a great precursor among the
speculative thinkers and poets of Greece. His science roughly speaking
was the creation of Democritus; his gospel of salvation was the work of
Epicurus; and the greatest example of a poem on the nature of things,
before his, had been given by Empedocles, the poet-philosopher of
Agrigentum whom Matthew Arnold made the mouthpiece of his grave and
lofty hymn of nineteenth-century pessimism. In his own country his only
predecessor in any sense was Ennius, the old national poet who had
first cast the hexameter in the stubborn mould of Latin speech, to whom
he pays characteristically generous homage.
The atomic system of Democritus, which explained all things in the
universe as combinations of different kinds of material particles,
was a magnificent contribution to physical science, and the fertility
of its essential idea is still unexhausted. It touched the problems
of mind and life, of ethics and art, only indirectly, in so far as
it resolved mind and all its activities into functions of matter and
motion. Epicurus, on the other hand, a saintly recluse, bent only
upon showing the way to a life of serene and cheerful virtue, took
over the doctrine of the great physicist of Abdêra, without any touch
of dispassionate speculative interest, as that which promised most
effectual relief from disturbing interests and cares, and especially
from the disturbance generated by fear of the gods and of a life
after death. He might have gone to the great Athenian idealists of
the fourth century, the immortal masters not only of those who know,
but of those who think and create, whether in science or in poetry
or in citizenship. But his aim was precisely to liberate from these
distracting energies, and allure a weary generation from the forum and
the workshop, even the studio of letters or of art, and the temples of
the gods, into the choice seclusion of his garden--the garden of a soul
at peace, fragrant with innocent and beautiful things. What Epicurus
added of his own to Democritus’ theory was an accommodation not to
truth but to convenience; and the measure of his scientific ardour is
given by his easy toleration of conflicting explanations of the same
phenomenon, provided they dispense with the intervention of the gods.
While the measure of his attachment to poetry is given by his counsel
to his disciples to go past it with stopped ears, as by the siren’s
deadly song.
It was this scientific doctrine, adopted by Epicurus in the interest
not of science but of his gospel of deliverance from the cares
of superstition, that Lucretius took over with the fervour of
discipleship. He was not, like Pope in the _Essay on Man_, providing
an elegant dress for philosophic ideas which he only half understood
and abandoned in alarm when they threatened to be dangerous. He was the
prophet of Epicureanism, and it is among the prophets of the faiths by
which men live and die that we must seek a parallel to the passionate
earnestness with which he proclaims to Memmius the saving gospel of
Epicurus--to that same Memmius who a few years later showed his piety
to Epicurus’ memory by destroying his house. It was the hope of pouring
the light and joy of saving truth upon the mind of this rather obtuse
Roman, his beloved friend, that Lucretius laboured, he tells us,
through the silent watches of the night, seeking phrase and measure
which might make deep and hidden things clear.[6] But Lucretius felt
and thought also as a poet and in the temper of poetry. He was not
‘lending his pen’ to a good cause, nor turning Greek science into Latin
hexameters in order that they might be more vividly grasped or more
readily remembered. He was conquering a new way in poetry; striking
out a virgin path which no foot before his had trod. For Empedocles
had had far narrower aims. And he calls on the Muses for aid with as
devout a faith in his poetic mission in the great adventure as Milton
had when he summoned Urania or some greater Muse to be his guide while
he attempted ‘things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.’ What we admire
unreservedly in him, declares a great French poet who died only the
other day, Sully-Prudhomme, is the breath of independence which sweeps
through the entire work of this most robust and precise of poets.
We see the temper of the poet at the outset, in the wonderful
transfiguration which the gentle recluse Epicurus undergoes in
the ardent brain of his Roman disciple. For it was of this enemy
of disturbing emotion, this quietist of paganism, this timid and
debonnaire humanitarian, that Lucretius drew the magnificent and
astonishing portrait which immediately follows the prologue of the _De
Rerum Natura_. The Lucretian Epicurus is a Prometheus--the heroic Greek
who first of mortals dared to defy and withstand the monstrous tyrant
Religion to her face. No fabled terror could appal him, no crashing
thunder, nor the anger of heaven; these only kindled the more the eager
courage of his soul, to be the first to break the bars of Nature’s
gates. So the living might of his soul prevailed; and he passed beyond
the flaming walls of the world and traversed in mind and spirit the
immeasurable universe; returning thence in triumph to tell us what can,
and what cannot, come into being; having trampled under foot Religion
who once crushed mankind, and lifted mankind in turn by his victory up
to the height of heaven.
One might well surmise that a philosophy which a poet could thus
ardently proclaim was itself, after all, not without the seeds and
springs of poetry; and that Lucretius in choosing to expound it in
verse was not staking everything on his power of making good radical
defects of substance by effective surface decoration or brilliant
digressions. He recognized, no doubt, a difference in popular appeal
between his substance and his form, and in a famous and delightful
passage compares himself to the physician who touches the edge of the
bitter cup with honey, ensnaring credulous childhood to its own good.
So, he tells Memmius, he is spreading the honey of the Muses over his
difficult matter, that he may hold him by the charm of verse until
the nature of things have grown clear to his sight. But Lucretius is
here putting himself at the point of view of the indifferent layman,
and especially of the rather obtuse layman whose interest he was with
almost pathetic eagerness seeking to capture. One guesses that Memmius,
like the boy, was by no means reconciled to the wormwood because it was
prefaced with honey; and modern critics who, like Mommsen, condemn his
choice of subject as a blunder, come near to adopting the resentful
boy’s point of view. But in the splendid lines which immediately
precede, though they form part of the same apology to Memmius, the
poet involuntarily betrays his own very different conception of the
matter. The hope of glory, he says, has kindled in his breast the
love of the Muses, ‘whereby inspired I am exploring a virgin soil of
poetry hitherto untrodden by any foot. O the joy of approaching the
unsullied springs, and quaffing them, O the joy of culling flowers
unknown, whence may be woven a splendid wreath for my head, such as the
Muses have arrayed no man’s brows withal before; first because I am
reporting on a great theme, and undoing the tight knot of superstition
from the minds of men; and then because I convey dark matters in such
transparent verse, touching everything with the Muses’ charm.’[7]
Here, in spite of the last words, Lucretius clearly feels that his
matter is something more than the wormwood which he overlays with
honey; it is a vast region of implicit poetry which he, first of poets,
is going to discover and annex; and he rests his claim to the poetic
wreath he expects to win, in the first place upon this greatness of
the subject matter itself, and secondly, not as the wormwood and
honey theory would suggest, on the ingenious fancy which decorates or
disguises it, but on the lucid style which allows it to shine in, as
through a window, upon the ignorant mind.