given rise to volumes of controversy. Was Lucretius born in the year
named, or is another tradition correct, which, connecting his death with
a particular event in the youth of Virgil, makes him either be born a few
years earlier or die a few years younger? Did he ever, whether from a
poisonous philtre or otherwise, lose his reason? and can a poem which
ranks among the great masterpieces of genius have been built up into its
stately fabric--for this is not a question of brief lyrics like those of
Smart or Cowper--in the lucid intervals of insanity? Did Cicero have
anything to do with the editing of the unfinished poem? If so, which
Cicero--Marcus or Quintus? and why, in either case, is there no record of
the fact in their correspondence, or in any writing of the period? All
these questions are probably insoluble, and the notice of Jerome leaves
the whole life and personality of the poet still completely hidden. Yet
we have little or nothing else to go upon. There is a brief and casual
allusion to him in one of Cicero's letters of the year 54 B.C.: yet it
speaks of "poems," not the single great poem which we know; and most
editors agree that the text of the passage is corrupt, and must be
amended by the insertion of a _non_, though they differ on the important
detail of the particular clause in which it should be inserted. That the
earlier Augustan poets should leave their great predecessor completely
unnoticed is less remarkable, for it may be taken as merely a part of
that curious conspiracy of silence regarding the writers of the
Ciceronian age which, whether under political pressure or not, they all
adopted. Even Ovid, never ungenerous though not always discriminating in
his praise, dismisses him in a list of Latin poets with a single couplet
of vague eulogy. In the reactionary circles of the Empire, Lucretius
found recognition; but the critics who, according to Tacitus, ranked him
above Virgil may be reasonably suspected of doing so more from caprice
than from rational conviction. Had the poem itself perished (and all the
extant manuscripts are copies of a single original), no one would have
thought that such a preference could be anything but a piece of
antiquarian pedantry, like the revival, in the same period, of the plays
of the early tragedians. But the fortunate and slender chance which has
preserved it shows that their opinion, whether right or wrong, is one
which at all events is neither absurd nor unarguable. For in the _De
Rerum Natura_ we are brought face to face not only with an extraordinary
literary achievement, but with a mind whose profound and brilliant genius
has only of late years, and with the modern advance of physical and
historical science, been adequately recognised.
The earliest Greek impulse in Latin poetry had long been exhausted; and
the fashion among the new generation was to admire and study beyond all
else the Greek poets of the decadence, who are generally, and without any
substantial injustice, lumped together by the name of the Alexandrian
school. The common quality in all this poetry was its great learning, and
its remoteness from nature. It was poetry written in a library; it viewed
the world through a highly coloured medium of literary and artistic
tradition. The laborious perfectness of execution which the taste of the
time demanded was, as a rule, lavished on little subjects, patient
carvings in ivory. One side of the Alexandrian school which was largely
followed was that of the didactic poets--Aratus, Nicander, Euphorion, and
a host of others less celebrated. Cicero, in mature life, speaks with
some contempt of the taste for Euphorion among his contemporaries. But he
had himself, as a young man, followed the fashion, and translated the
_Phaenomena_ of Aratus into wonderfully polished and melodious hexameter
verse.
Not unaffected by this fashion of the day, but turning from it to older
and nobler models--Homer and Empedocles in Greek, Ennius in Latin--
Lucretius conceived the imposing scheme of a didactic poem dealing with
the whole field of life and nature as interpreted by the Epicurean
philosophy. He lived to carry out his work almost to completion. It here
and there wants the final touches of arrangement; one or two discussions
are promised and not given; some paragraphs are repeated, and others have
not been worked into their proper place; but substantially, as in the
case of the _Aeneid_, we have the complete poem before us, and know
perfectly within what limits it might have been altered or improved by
fuller revision.
As pure literature, the _Nature of Things_ has all the defects
inseparable from a didactic poem, that unstable combination of
discordant elements, and from a poem which is not only didactic, but
argumentative, and in parts highly controversial. Nor are these
difficulties in the least degree evaded or smoothed over by the poet. As
a teacher, he is in deadly earnest; as a controversialist, his first
object is to refute and convince. The graces of poetry are never for a
moment allowed to interfere with the full development of an argument.
Much of the poem is a chain of intricate reasoning hammered into verse by
sheer force of hand. The ardent imagination of the poet struggles through
masses of intractable material which no genius could wholly fuse into a
metal pure enough to take perfect form. His language, in the fine
prologue to the fourth book of the poem, shows his attitude towards his
art very clearly.
_Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo; iuvat integros accedere fontes
Atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
Insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
Unde prius milli velarint tempora Musae:
Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus, et artis
Religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo,
Deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
Carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore._
The joy and glory of his art come second in his mind to his passionate
love of truth, and the deep moral purport of what he believes to be the
one true message for mankind. The human race lies fettered by
superstition and ignorance; his mission is to dispel their darkness by
that light of truth which is "clearer than the beams of the sun or the
shining shafts of day." Spinoza has been called, in a bold figure, "a man
drunk with God;" the contemplation of the "nature of things," the
physical structure of the universe, and the living and all but
impersonate law which forms and sustains it, has the same intoxicating
influence over Lucretius. God and man are alike to him bubbles on the
ceaseless stream of existence; yet they do not therefore, as they have so
often done in other philosophies, fade away to a spectral thinness. His
contemplation of existence is no brooding over abstractions; Nature is
not in his view the majestic and silent figure before whose unchanging
eyes the shifting shadow-shapes go and come; but an essential life,
manifesting itself in a million workings, _creatrix, gubernans, daedala
rerum_. The universe is filled through all its illimitable spaces by the
roar of her working, the ceaseless unexhausted energy with which she
alternates life and death.
To our own age the Epicurean philosophy has a double interest. Not only
was it a philosophy of life and conduct, but, in the effort to place life
and conduct under ascertainable physical laws, it was led to frame an
extremely detailed and ingenious body of natural philosophy, which,
partly from being based on really sound postulates, partly from a happy
instinct in connecting phenomena, still remains interesting and valuable.
To the Epicureans, indeed, as to all ancient thinkers, the scientific
method as it is now understood was unknown; and a series of unverified
generalizations, however brilliant and acute, is not the true way towards
knowledge. But it still remains an astonishing fact that many of the most
important physical discoveries of modern times are hinted at or even
expressly stated by Lucretius. The general outlines of the atomic
doctrine have long been accepted as in the main true; in all important
features it is superior to any other physical theory of the universe
which existed up to the seventeenth century. In his theory of light
Lucretius was in advance of Newton. In his theory of chemical affinities
(for he describes the thing though the nomenclature was unknown to him)
he was in advance of Lavoisier. In his theory of the ultimate
constitution of the atom he is in striking agreement with the views of
the ablest living physicists. The essential function of science--to
reduce apparently disparate phenomena to the expressions of a single law
--is not with him the object of a moment's doubt or uncertainty.
Towards real progress in knowledge two things are alike indispensable: a
true scientific method, and imaginative insight. The former is, in the
main, a creation of the modern world, nor was Lucretius here in advance
of his age. But in the latter quality he is unsurpassed, if not
unequalled. Perhaps this is even clearer in another field of science,
that which has within the last generation risen to such immense
proportions under the name of anthropology. Thirty years ago it was the
first and second books of the _De Rerum Natura_ which excited the
greatest enthusiasm in the scientific world. Now that the atomic theory
has passed into the rank of received doctrines, the brilliant sketch,
given in the fifth book, of the beginnings of life upon the earth, the
evolution of man and the progress of human society, is the portion of the
poem in which his scientific imagination is displayed most astonishingly.
A Roman aristocrat, living among a highly cultivated society, Lucretius
had been yet endowed by nature with the primitive instincts of the
savage. He sees the ordinary processes of everyday life--weaving,
carpentry, metal-working, even such specialised forms of manual art as
the polishing of the surface of marble--with the fresh eye of one who
sees them all for the first time. Nothing is to him indistinct through
familiarity. In virtue of this absolute clearness of vision it costs him
no effort to throw himself back into prehistoric conditions and the wild
life of the earliest men. Even further than this he can pierce the dim
recesses of the past. Before his imagination the earth rises swathed in
tropical forests, and all strange forms of life issuing and jostling one
another for existence in the steaming warmth of perpetual summer. Among a
thousand types that flowered and fell, the feeble form of primitive man
is distinguished, without fire, without clothing, without articulate
speech. Through the midnight of the woods, shivering at the cries of the
stealthy-footed prowlers of the darkness, he crouches huddled in fallen
leaves, waiting for the rose of dawn. Little by little the prospect
clears round him. The branches of great trees, grinding one against
another in the windy forest, break into a strange red flower; he gathers
it and hoards it in his cave. There, when wind and rain beat without, the
hearth-fire burns through the winter, and round it gathers that other
marvellous invention of which the hearth-fire became the mysterious
symbol, the family. From this point the race is on the full current of
progress, of which the remainder of the book gives an account as
essentially true as it is incomparably brilliant. If we consider how
little Lucretius had to go upon in this reconstruction of lost history,
his imaginative insight seems almost miraculous. Even for the later
stages of human progress he had to rely mainly on the eye which saw deep
below the surface into the elementary structure of civilisation. There
was no savage life within the scope of his actual observation. Books
wavered between traditions of an impossible golden age and fragments of
primitive legend which were then quite unintelligible, and are only now
giving up their secret under a rigorous analysis. Further back, and
beyond the rude civilisation of the earlier races of Greece and Italy,
data wholly failed. We have supplemented, but hardly given more life to,
his picture of the first beginnings, by evidence drawn from a thousand
sources then unknown or unexplored--from coal-measures and mud-deposits,
Pictish barrows and lacustrine middensteads, remote tribes of hidden
Africa and islands of the Pacific Sea.
Such are the characteristics which, to one or another epoch of modern
times, give the poem of Lucretius so unique an interest. But for these as
for all ages, its permanent value must lie mainly in more universal
qualities. History and physical science alike are in all poetry ancillary
to ideas. It is in his moral temper, his profound insight into life, that
Lucretius is greatest; and it is when dealing with moral ideas that his
poetry rises to its utmost height. The Epicurean philosophy, in his
hands, takes all the moral fervour of a religion. The depth of his
religious instinct may be measured by the passion of his antagonism to
what he regarded as superstition. Human life in his eyes was made
wretched, mean, and cruel by one great cause--the fear of death and of
what happens after it. That death is not to be feared, that nothing
happens after it, is the keystone of his whole system. It is after an
accumulation of seventeen proofs, hurled one upon another at the reader,
of the mortality of the soul, that, letting himself loose at the highest
emotional and imaginative tension, he breaks into that wonderful passage,
which Virgil himself never equalled, and which in its lofty passion, its
piercing tenderness, the stately roll of its cadences, is perhaps
unmatched in human speech.
_"Iam iam non domus accipiet te Iaeta, neque uxor
Optima, nee dulces occurrent oscula nati
Praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent:
Non poteris factis florentibus esse, tuisque
Praesidium: misero misere" aiunt, "omnia ademit
Una dies infesta tibi tot praemia vitae...."_
"'Now no more shall a glad home and a true wife welcome thee, nor darling
children race to snatch thy first kisses and touch thy heart with a sweet
and silent content; no more mayest thou be prosperous in thy doings and a
defence to thine own: alas and woe!' say they, 'one disastrous day has
taken all these prizes of thy life away from thee'--but thereat they do
not add this, 'and now no more does any longing for these things beset
thee.' This did their thought but clearly see and their speech follow,
they would release themselves from great heartache and fear. 'Thou,
indeed, as thou art sunk in the sleep of death, wilt so be for the rest
of the ages, severed from all weary pains; but we, while close by us thou
didst turn ashen on the awful pyre, made unappeasable lamentation, and
everlastingly shall time never rid our heart of anguish.' Ask we then
this of him, what there is that is so very bitter, if sleep and peace be
the conclusion of the matter, to make one fade away in never-ending
grief?
"Thus also men often do when, set at the feast, they hold their cups and
shade their faces with garlands, saying sadly, 'Brief is this joy for
wretched men; soon will it have been, and none may ever after recall it!'
as if this were to be first and foremost of the ills of death, that
thirst and dry burning should waste them miserably, or desire after
anything else beset them. For not even then does any one miss himself and
his life when soul and body together are deep asleep and at rest; for all
we care, such slumber might go on for ever, nor does any longing after
ourselves touch us then, though then those first beginnings through our
body swerve away but a very little from the movements that bring back the
senses when the man starts up and gathers himself out of sleep. Far less,
therefore, must we think death concerns us, if less than nothing there
can be; for a greater sundering in the mass of matter follows upon death,
nor does any one awake and stand, whom the cold stoppage of death once
has overtaken.
"Yet again, were the Nature of things suddenly to utter a voice, and thus
with her own lips upbraid one of us, 'What ails thee so, O mortal, to let
thyself loose in too feeble grievings? why weep and wail at death? for if
thy past life and overspent has been sweet to thee, and all the good
thereof has not, as if poured into a pierced vessel, run through and
joylessly perished, why dost thou not retire like a banqueter filled with
life, and calmly, O fool, take thy peaceful sleep? But if all thou hast
had is perished and spilt, and thy life is hateful, why seekest thou yet
to add more which shall once again all perish and fall joylessly away?
why not rather make an end of life and labour? for there is nothing more
that I can contrive and invent for thy delight; all things are the same
for ever. Even were thy body not yet withered, nor thy limbs weary and
worn, yet all things remain the same, didst thou go on to live all the
generations down, nay, even more, wert thou never doomed to die'--what do
we answer?"
It is in passages of which the two hundred lines beginning thus are the
noblest instance, passages of profound and majestic broodings over life
and death, that the long rolling weight of the Lucretian hexameter tells
with its full force. For the golden cadence of poesy we have to wait till
Virgil; but the strain that Lucretius breathes through bronze is
statelier and more sonorous than any other in the stately and sonorous
Roman speech. Like Naevius a century and a half before, he might have
left the proud and pathetic saying on his tomb that, after he was dead,
men forgot to speak Latin in Rome. He stands side by side with Julius
Caesar in the perfect purity of his language. The writing of the next
age, whether prose or verse, gathered richness and beauty from alien
sources; if the poem of Lucretius had no other merit, it would be a
priceless document as a model of the purest Latin idiom in the precise
age of its perfection. It follows from this that in certain points of
technique Lucretius kept behind his age, or rather, deliberately held
aloof from the movement of his age towards a more intricate and elaborate
art. The wave of Alexandrianism only touched him distantly; he takes up
the Ennian tradition where Ennius had left it, and puts into it the
immensely increased faculty of trained expression which a century of
continuous literary practice, and his own admirably clear and quick
intelligence, enable him to supply. The only Greek poets mentioned by him
are Homer and Empedocles. His remoteness from the main current of
contemporary literature is curiously parallel to that of Milton. The
Epicurean philosophy was at this time, as it never was either earlier or
later, the predominant creed among the ruling class at Rome: but except
in so far as its shallower aspects gave the motive for light verse, it
was as remote from poetry as the Puritan theology of the seventeenth
century. In both cases a single poet of immense genius was also deeply
penetrated with the spirit of a creed. In both cases his poetical
affinity was with the poets of an earlier day, and his poetical manner
something absolutely peculiar to himself. Both of them under this
strangely mixed impulse set themselves to embody their creed in a great
work of art. But the art did not appeal strongly to sectaries, nor the
creed to artists. The _De Rerum Natura_ and the _Paradise Lost_, while
they exercised a profound influence over later poets, came silently into
the world, and seem to have passed over the heads of their immediate
contemporaries. There is yet another point of curious resemblance between
them. Every student of Milton knows that the only English poet from whom
he systematically borrowed matter and phrase was a second-rate translator
of a second-rate original, who now would be almost forgotten but for the
use Milton made of him. For one imitation of Spenser or Shakespeare in
the _Paradise Lost_ it would be easy to adduce ten--not mere coincidences
of matter, but direct transferences--of Sylvester's Du Bartas. While
Lucretius was a boy, Cicero published the version in Latin hexameters of
the _Phaenomena_ and _Prognostica_ of Aratus to which reference has
already been made. These poems consist of only between eleven and twelve
hundred lines in all, but had, in the later Alexandrian period, a
reputation (like that of the _Sepmaine_ of Du Bartas) far in excess of
their real merit, and were among the most powerful influences in founding
the new style. The many imitations in Lucretius of the extant fragments
of these Ciceronian versions show that he must have studied their
vocabulary and versification with minute care. The increased technical
possibilities shown by them to exist in the Latin hexameter--for in them,
as in nearly all his permanent work, Cicero was mastering the problem of
making his own language an adequate vehicle of sustained expression--may
even have been the determining influence that made Lucretius adopt this
poetical form. Till then it may have been just possible that native
metrical forms might still reassert themselves. Inscriptions of the last
century of the Republic show that the saturnian still lingered in use
side by side with the rude popular hexameters which were gradually
displacing it; and the _Punic War_ of Naevius was still a classic.
Lucretius' choice of the hexameter, and his definite conquest of it as a
medium of the richest and most varied expression, placed the matter
beyond recall. The technical imperfections which remained in it were now
reduced within a visible compass; its power to convey sustained argument,
to express the most delicate shades of meaning, to adjust itself to the
greatest heights and the subtlest tones of emotion, was already acquired
when Lucretius handed it on to Virgil. And here, too, as well as in the
wide field of literature with which his fame is more intimately
connected, from the actual impulse given by his own early work and
heightened by admiration of his brilliant maturity, even more than from
the dubious tradition of his critical revision of the poem, the glory of
the Ciceronian age is in close relation to the personal genius of Cicero.
V.
LYRIC POETRY: CATULLUS.
Contemporary with Lucretius, but, unlike him, living in the full whirl
and glare of Roman life, was a group of young men who were professed
followers of the Alexandrian school. In the thirty years which separate
the Civil war and the Sullan restoration from the sombre period that
opened with the outbreak of hostilities between Caesar and the senate,
social life at Rome among the upper classes was unusually interesting and
exciting. The outward polish of Greek civilisation was for the first time
fully mastered, and an intelligent interest in art and literature was the
fashion of good society. The "young man about town," whom we find later
fully developed in the poetry of Ovid, sprang into existence, but as the
government was still in the hands of the aristocracy, fashion and
politics were intimately intermingled, and the lighter literature of the
day touched grave issues on every side. The poems of Catullus are full of
references to his friends and his enemies among this group of writers.
Two of the former, Cinna and Calvus, were poets of considerable
importance. Gaius Helvius Cinna--somewhat doubtfully identified with the
"Cinna the poet" who met such a tragical end at the hands of the populace
after Caesar's assassination--carried the Alexandrian movement to its
most uncompromising conclusions. His fame (and that fame was very great)
rested on a short poem called _Zmyrna_, over which he spent ten years'
labour, and which, by subject and treatment alike, carried the method of
that school to its furthest excess. In its recondite obscurity it outdid
Lycophron himself. More than one grammarian of the time made a reputation
solely by a commentary on it. It throws much light on the peculiar
artistic position of Catullus, to bear in mind that this masterpiece of
frigid pedantry obtained his warm and evidently sincere praise.
The other member of the triad, Gaius Licinius Macer Calvus, one of the
most brilliant men of his time, was too deeply plunged in politics to be
more than an accomplished amateur in poetry. Yet it must have been more
than his intimate friendship with Catullus, and their common fate of too
early a death, that made the two names so constantly coupled afterwards.
By the critics of the Silver Age, no less than by Horace and Propertius,
the same idea is frequently repeated, which has its best-known expression
in Ovid's beautiful invocation in his elegy on Tibullus--
Obvius huic venias, hedera iuvenilia cinctus
Tempora, cum Calvo, docte Catulle, tuo._
We must lament the total loss of a volume of lyrics which competent
judges thought worthy to be set beside that of his wonderful friend.