So much then for the first aspect of Lucretius’s poem--the criticism of
the old religions. Most of the recognized and famous ‘poetry’ of the
book is connected, like the passages I have quoted, with this negative
side of his creed. But I am more concerned to show that a different
and not less noble vein of poetry was rooted in the rich positive
appetencies of his nature; in his acute and exquisite senses; in the
vast and sublime ideas which underlay his doctrine of the world; in
his intense apprehension of the zest of life; and, on the other hand,
penetrating, like an invisible but potent spirit, the texture of his
reasoned unconcern, his profound, unconfessed sense of the pathos
of death, his melancholy in the presence of the doom of universal
dissolution which he foresaw for the world and for mankind.
Let us look first at the main constructive idea; the atomic theory
of Leucippus and Democritus, taken over by Epicurus and expounded by
Lucretius.
For this theory was in effect, and probably in intention, a device
for overcoming that antithesis of the One and the Many, of Permanence
and Change, of which I have spoken. The Eleatics had declared that
pure Being was alone real, and denied Change and Motion; Heracleitus
declared that nothing was real but Change, and the only perpetuity
‘flux.’ The founder of atomism, Leucippus, showed that it was possible
to hold, in the phrase of Browning’s philosophic Don Juan, that there
is in ‘all things change, and permanence as well,’ by supposing that
shifting and unstable world of the senses, where all things die and
are born, to be composed of uncreated and indestructible elements.
Underlying the ceaseless fluctuations of Nature, and life as we see
them, lay a continuity of eternal substance, of which they were the
passing modes;--one of the greatest of philosophical conceptions,
Mr. Santayana has called it, but one also appealing profoundly to
the specifically poetic intuition which I have described. Whether
the permanent apprehended through the flux of sense be a spiritual
substance like Plato’s ideas, or Shelley’s ‘white radiance of
eternity,’ or whether it be the constant form and function of the
flowing river, as in Wordsworth’s Duddon sonnet; or whether, as here,
it be a background of material particles perpetually combining and
resolved, we have the kind of intuition which gives the thrill of
poetry; we discover ‘sweep in the concise, and depth in the clear,’
infinite perspectives open out in the moment and in the point, and
however remote the temper of Spinozan mysticism may be, we yet in some
sort see things ‘in the light of eternity.’
In Lucretius this conception found a mind capable of being ravished
by its imaginative grandeur, as well as of pursuing it indefatigably
through the thorniest mazes of mechanical proof. The contagious fervour
which breathes through his poem is no mere ardour of the disciple
bent on winning converts, or the joy of the literary craftsman as
his hexameters leap forth glowing on the anvil; it is the sacred
passion of one who has had a sublime vision of life and nature,
and who bears about the radiance of it into all the work to which
he has set his hand. It is not because of anything that Lucretius
adds to Epicurus--in theory he really adds nothing at all--that the
impression produced by his poem differs so greatly from that of all
we know--in fragments and at second hand, it is true--of Epicurus’s
own writings. The ultimate principles are the same, but the accent is
laid at a different point. The parochial timidities of Epicurus have
left their traces on the Roman’s page, but they appear as hardly more
than rudimentary survivals among the native inspirations of a man of
heroic mettle and valour, Roman tenacity, and native sweep of mind.
He cannot quite break free from some speculative foibles which show
the Master’s shallow opportunism at its worst--such as the dictum that
the sun is about as large as it looks, a lamp hung a little above the
earth, and daily lighted and put out; but he becomes himself when he
lets his imagination soar into the infinities of time and space which
his faith opens out or leaves room for. It is a triumph of poetry as
well as of common sense when he scoffs at the Stoic dogma of a Space
which abruptly comes to an end; when he stations an archer at the
barrier and ironically bids him shoot his arrow into the nothingness
beyond. Or in more sombre mood, how grave an intensity he puts into a
common thought, like that of the end of life, by the sublimely terrible
epithet _immortal_ which he applies to death:
Mortalem vitam Mors cum inmortalis ademit (III. 869).
or into a mere reminder that birth and death are always with us, by
making us feel the endless concomitant succession through the ages
of funeral wailings, and the cry of the new-born child (II. 578).
He accepts without question the swerving of the atoms, devised by
Epicurus--child and man of genius at once--to refute the Stoic dogma
of necessity; but what possesses his mind and imagination is not these
intrusions of caprice, but the great continuities and uniformities of
existence, which follow from the perpetual dissolution and remaking
of life. ‘Rains die, when father ether has tumbled them into the lap
of mother earth; but then goodly crops spring up and trees laden with
fruit; and by them we and the beasts are fed, and joyous cities teem
with children and the woods ring with the song of young birds’ (I. 250
f.).
Only, as such passages show, Lucretius grasps these uniformities
and continuities not as theoretic abstractions, but as underlying
conditions of the teeming multiplicity and joyous profusion of
living Nature. His senses, imagination, and philosophic intellect,
all phenomenally acute and alert, wrought intimately together; and
he enters into and exposes the life of the individual thing with
an intensity of insight and a realistic precision and power which
quicken us with its warm pulse, and burn its image upon our brain,
without ever relaxing our consciousness that it is part of an endless
process, and the incidental expression of an unalterable law. For
him, indeed, as for Dante, individuality is an intrinsic part of law,
and law of individuality. Every being has its place and function, its
‘deep fixed boundaries’ (_terminus alte haerens_). The very stone, for
Dante, cleaves to the spot where it lies. And the Roman as well as
the philosopher in Lucretius scornfully contrasts with this Nature of
minute and ubiquitous law the fluid and chaotic world of myth, where
anything might become anything (cf. V. 126 f.).
V
None the less, his conception of the nature of the process itself does
insensibly undergo a change. In the mind of an exponent so richly
endowed and so transparently sincere, the hidden flaw in his system
could not but at some point disturb its imposing coherence. Atomism
could not at bottom explain life, and life poured with too abounding a
tide through the heart and brain of Lucretius not to sap in some degree
the authority of his mechanical calculus, and to lend a surreptitious
persuasiveness to inconsistent analogies derived from the animated
soul. Without ostensibly disturbing the integrity of his Epicurean
creed, such analogies have, in two ways, infused an alien colour into
his poetry and alien implications into his thought. In the first
place, he feels, as such abounding natures will, that life--‘the mere
living’--is somehow very good, in spite of all the evils it brings in
its train, and death pathetic in spite of all the evils from which
it sets us free. When he is demonstrating that the world cannot have
been made by gods, he set forth its grave inherent flaws of structure
and arrangement with merciless trenchancy--_tantâ stat praedita culpâ_
(V. 199); and like Lear, he makes the new-born child wail because he
is come into a world where so many griefs await him. And no one ever
urged with more passionate eloquence that it is unreasonable to fear to
die. None the less, phrases charged with a different feeling about life
continually escape him. He speaks of the _praeclara mundi natura_ (V.
157). To begin to live is to ‘rise up into the divine borders of light’
(I. 20). And secondly, despite his philosophical assurance, incessantly
repeated, that birth and death are merely different aspects of the same
continuous mechanical process, and that nothing receives life except by
the death of something else, ‘Alid ex alio reficit natura, nec ullam
Rem gigni patitur, nisi morte adiuta aliena’ (I. 264, etc.), he cannot
suppress suggestions that the creative energy of the world is akin to
that which with conscious desire and will brings forth the successive
generations of Man. And so, in the astonishing and magnificent opening
address, the poet who was about to demonstrate that the gods lived
eternally remote from the life of men, calls upon Venus, the legendary
mother of his own race, as the divine power ever at work in this
teeming universe, the giver of increase, bringing all things to birth,
from the simplest corn blade to the might and glory of the Roman Empire:
Mother of the Roman race, delight of gods and men, benign Venus, who
under the gliding constellations of heaven fillest with thy presence
the sea with its ships and the earth with its fruits, seeing that by
thy power all the races of living things are conceived and come to
being in the light of day; before thee, O goddess, the winds take
flight, and the clouds of heaven at thy coming; at thy feet the brown
earth sheds her flowers of a thousand hues, before thee the sea breaks
into rippling laughter, and the sky rejoicing glows with radiant light
(I. 1 f.).
So grave and impassioned an appeal cannot be treated as mere rhetorical
ornament. If we call it figure, it is figure of the kind which is not
a ‘poetical’ substitute for prose, but conveys something for which
no other terms are adequate. Lucretius, the exponent of Epicurus,
doubtless intended no heresy against the Epicurean theology; but
Lucretius, the poet, was carried by his vehement imagination to an
apprehension of the creative energies of the world so intense and acute
that the great symbol of Venus rendered it with more veracity than all
that calculus of atomic movements which he was about to expound, and by
which his logical intellect with perfect sincerity believed it to be
adequately explained.
Far less astonishing than his bold rehabilitation of the goddess of
Love is his fetishistic feeling for the Earth, the legendary mother of
men. For him too, as for primeval myth, she is the ‘universal mother,’
who in her fresh youth brought forth flower and tree, and bird and
beast; from whose body sprang finally the race of man itself; nay,
he tells us how the infants crept forth, ‘from wombs rooted in the
soil,’ and how, wherever this happened, earth yielded naturally through
her pores a liquor most like to milk, ‘even as nowadays every woman
when she has given birth is filled with sweet milk, because all that
current of nutriment streams towards the breast’ (V. 788 f.).
It is true that elsewhere Lucretius speaks with rationalistic
condescension of the usage which calls the Earth a mother and divine,
as a phrase like Bacchus for wine or Ceres for corn, permissible so
long as no superstitious fear is annexed to it (II. 652 f.). But
it is plain that the Earth’s motherhood had a grip upon his poet’s
imagination quite other than could be exerted by any such tag of poetic
diction. Doubtless the fervour with which he insists on it--‘Therefore
again and again Earth is rightly called Mother, seeing that she brought
forth the race of men and every beast and bird in its due season’--is
not wholly due to poetic motives. He is eager to refute the Stoic
doctrine that men were sprung from heaven. But the poet in him is, all
the same, entranced by the sublimity of the conception he is urging,
and he describes it with an afflatus which dwarfs that Stoic doctrine,
and makes the splendid legend of Cybele the Earth Mother, elaborated by
the Greek poets, seem puerile with all its beauty. ‘In the beginning
Earth hath in herself the elements whence watersprings pouring forth
their coolness perpetually renew the boundless Sea, and whence fires
arise, making the ground in many places hot, and belching forth the
surpassing flames of Ætna. Then she bears shining corn and glad
woodlands for the support of men, and rivers and leaves and shining
pastures for the beasts that haunt the hills. Wherefore she is called
the mother of the gods and mother of beasts and men’ (II. 589 f.).
This all-creating Earth is far enough no doubt from the benign Nature
of Wordsworth, who moulds her children by silent sympathy. But it is
not so remote from the Earth of Meredith, the Mother who brings Man
‘her great venture’ forth, bears him on her breast and nourishes him
there, but ‘more than that embrace, that nourishment, she cannot give.’
He may entreat, aspire,
He may despair, and she has never heed.
She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,
Not his desire.
Meredith too sees man, in dread of her, clutching at invisible powers,
as Lucretius’s sea-captain in the storm makes vows to the gods. And
Meredith’s thought that man rises by ‘spelling at’ her laws is no less
Lucretian. But Meredith’s story of Earth is full of hope, like his
story of man. It is perpetual advance. With Lucretius it is otherwise.
For the Earth is not only our Mother; she is our tomb (II. 1148 f.).
And the eternal energy of creation is not only matched by the eternal
energy of dissolution, but here and now is actually yielding ground to
it. The Earth, so prolific in her joyous youth, is now like a woman
who has ceased to bear, ‘worn out by length of days’ (V. 820 f.). In
the whole universe birth and death absolutely balance, the equation
of mechanical values is never infringed; the universe has no history,
only a continuous substitution of terms. But each living thing has
a history, it knows the exultation of onset and the melancholy of
decline; and its fear of death is not cancelled by the knowledge that
in that very moment, and in consequence of that very fact, some other
living thing will be born. And thus Lucretius, feeling for our Earth
as a being very near to us, and with which the issues of our existence
are involved, applies the doctrine to her without shrinking indeed, but
not without a human shudder. The Earth had a beginning, and ineluctable
reason forces us to conclude that she will have an end, and this not
by a gradual evanescence or dispersion, but by a sudden, terrific
catastrophe, as in a great earthquake, or world conflagration (V. 95
f.).
And he feels this abrupt extinction of the Earth and its inhabitants to
be tragic, notwithstanding that extinction is, by his doctrine, only
the condition of creation, and that at the very moment of her ruin,
some other earth will be celebrating its glorious birth. Earth has for
him a life-history, a biography, and he forgets that she is strictly
but a point at which the eternal drift of atoms thickened for a time
to a cluster, to be dispersed again. Thus we see how this mechanical
system, ardently embraced by a poet, working freely upon him, and
itself coloured and transformed by his mind, stirred in him two
seemingly opposed kinds of poetic emotion at once: the sublime sense of
eternal existence, and the tragic pathos of sudden doom and inexorable
passing away.
Hence the _melancholy_ that in Lucretius goes along with an enormous
sense of life. To say that he puts the ‘Nevermore’ of romantic
sentimentality in the place of that dispassionate ‘give and take’ of
mechanics would do wrong to the immense virility which animates every
line of this athlete among poets. Of the cheap melancholy of discontent
he knows as little as of the cheap satisfaction of complacency, or
of that literary melancholy, where the sigh of Horace, or Ronsard,
or Herrick, over the passing of roses and all other beautiful things
covers a sly diplomatic appeal to the human rosebud to be gathered
while still there is time. No, the melancholy of Lucretius is like
that of Dürer’s ‘Melancholia,’ the sadness of strong intellect and
far-reaching vision as it contemplates the setting of the sun of time
and the ebbing of the tides of mortality; or like Wordsworth’s mournful
music of dissolution, only to be heard by an ear emancipated from
vulgar joys and fears; or like the melancholy of Keats--the veiled
goddess who hath her shrine in the very temple of delight--the _amari
aliquid_, in Lucretius’s own yet more pregnant words, which lurks in
the very sweetness of the flower.
Thus our ‘scientific poet’ appears in an extraordinary if not unique
way to have united the functions and temper and achievement of science
and poetry. He ‘knew the causes of things,’ and could set them forth
with marvellous precision and resource; and the knowledge filled him
with lofty joy as of one standing secure above the welter of doubt
and fear in which the mass of men pass their lives. To have reached
this serene pinnacle of intellectual security seemed to his greatest
follower Virgil a happiness beyond the reach of his own more tender and
devout genius, and he commemorated it in splendid verses which Matthew
Arnold in our own day applied to Goethe:
And he was happy, if to know
Causes of things, and far below
His feet to see the lurid flow
Of terror and insane distress
And headlong fate, be happiness.
There is, it may be, something that repels us, something slightly
inhuman, in this kind of lonely happiness, and Lucretius does little
to counteract that impression when he himself compares it, in another
famous passage, to the satisfaction of one who watches the struggle
of a storm-tost ship from the safe vantage-ground of the shore. Yet
Lucretius is far from being the lonely egoist that such a passage
might suggest; his poem itself was meant as a helping hand to lift
mankind to his own security: he knew what devoted friendship was,
and we have pleasant glimpses of him wandering with companions among
the mountains,[9] or sharing a rustic meal stretched at ease on the
grass by a running brook.[10] Lucretius like his master had no social
philosophy, and it is his greatest deficiency as a thinker; but he was
not poor in social feeling. His heart went out to men, as a physician,
not coldly diagnosing their disease, but eager to cure them.
And so his feeling for Nature, for the universe of things, though
rooted in his scientific apprehension, is not bounded by it. He seizes
upon the sublime conceptions which his science brought to his view--the
permanent substance amid perennial change, the infinity of space and
time--and his vivid mind turns these abstractions into the radiant
vision of a universe to which the heaven of heavens, as the old poets
had conceived it, ‘was but a veil.’ But he went further, and shadowed
forth, if half-consciously and in spite of himself, the yet greater
poetic thought, of a living power pervading the whole, drawing the
elements of being together by the might of an all-permeating Love. And
thus Lucretius, the culminating expression of the scientific thinking
of Democritus and of the gospel of Epicurus, foreshadows Virgil, whom
he so deeply influenced, and prophesies faintly but perceptibly of
Dante and of Shelley; as his annihilating exposure of the religions
founded upon fear insensibly prepared the way for the religions of hope
and love.