Shakespeare's treatment of love & marriage, and other essays

by C. H. Herford

II

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.