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

by C. H. Herford

III

Let us then consider from this point of view the subject of Lucretius. This subject, as he conceives it, has two aspects. On the one side it is negative;—an annihilating criticism of all the crude religion founded upon fear—fear of the gods, fear of death and of something after death; criticism delivered with remorseless power and culminating in the sinewy intensity of the terrible line

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,

which transfixes once for all the consecrated principle of tabu everywhere dominant in the primitive faiths, the product of man’s cowardice, as magic is the product of his pride.

The other aspect is constructive; the building up of the intellectual and moral framework of a worthy human life, by setting forth the true nature of the universe, the history of life, and the development of man; in other words, the story of his struggle through the ages, with the obstacles opposed to him by the power of untamed nature, by wild beasts, storms, inundations, by the rivalry and antagonism of other men, and by the wild unreason in his own breast. Lucretius saw as clearly as any modern thinker that man’s conduct of his life, whether in the narrow circle of domestic happiness and personal duty, or in the larger sphere of civic polity, must be based upon a comprehension of the external world and of the past through which we have grown to what we are; and making allowance for his more limited resources and his more confined point of view, he carried it out with magnificent power. So that if his poem remains in nominal intention a didactic treatise, in its inner substance and purport it might better be described as a colossal epic of the universe, with man for its protagonist and the spectres of the gods for its vanquished foes; and wanting neither the heroic exultations nor the tragic dooms, neither the melancholy over what passes nor the triumph in what endures, which go to the making of the greatest poetry.

These two aspects—criticism and construction—are thus most intimately bound together in the poem, but can yet be considered apart. And to each belongs its own peculiar and distinct vein of poetry. On the whole it is the former, at first sight so much less favourable to poetic purposes, which has most enthralled posterity. For the voice of Lucretius is here a distinctive, almost a solitary voice. The poets for the most part have been the weavers of the veil of dreams and visions in whose glamour the races of mankind have walked: but here came a poet, and one of the greatest, who rent the veil asunder and bade men gaze upon the nature of things naked and unadorned. And his austere chaunt of triumph as he pierces illusion and scatters superstition, has in it something more poignant and thrilling than many a song of voluptuous ecstacy or enchanted reverie. For, after all, the passing of an old order of things and the coming of a new has always at least the interest of colossal drama, and cannot leave us unmoved, however baneful we may hold the old order to have been, however we may exult in the deliverance effected by the new. So Milton’s celebration of the birth of Christ only reaches the heights of poetry when he is telling of the passing of the old pagan divinities:

The lonely mountains o’er

And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;

From haunted spring and dale,

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting genius is with sighing sent;

With flower-inwoven tresses torn

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thicket mourn.

Through the Christian’s exultation there sounds, less consciously perhaps, but more clear, the Humanist scholar’s sense of tragedy and pathos. In this sense Milton’s Ode has affinity with poems like Schiller’s Gods of Greece, where grief for the passing of the pagan faith is untouched by Christian sentiment; but precisely its more complex and subtle emotion raises Milton’s poem higher. In Hyperion, even more, we are made to feel the pathos of the passing of the fallen divinity of Saturn and his host; and Hyperion himself, the sun-god of the old order of physical light, is more magnificently presented than Apollo, the sun-god of the new order of radiant intelligence and song. Lucretius, as we shall see, brings back the old divinity in a sublime way of his own; but he feels the beneficence of the new order of scientific vision and inviolable law too profoundly to have any sense of pathos at the passing of the reign of superstition and caprice. He is rather possessed with flaming wrath as he recalls the towering evils of which that old regime had been guilty: the wrath of a prophet, more truly divine in spirit than the divinities he assailed, as Prometheus is more divine than Zeus. Again and again we are reminded, as we read his great invectives, not of the sceptics mocking all gods indiscriminately in the name of enlightened good sense, but of a Hebrew prophet, chastising those who sacrifice to the gods of the Gentiles, in the name of the God of righteousness who refuses to be worshipped with offerings of blood. There is surely a spirit not far remote from this in the indignant pity with which he tells, in a famous and splendid passage, the sacrifice of Iphigenia at the divine bidding, as the price of the liberation of the Grecian fleet on its way to Troy:

How often has fear of the gods begotten impious and criminal acts! What else was it that led the chieftains of Greece, foremost of men, foully to stain the altar of Artemis with the blood of the maiden Iphigenia? Soon as the victim’s band was bound about her virgin locks, and she saw her father grief-stricken before the altar, and at his side the priests concealing the knife, and the onlookers shedding tears at the sight, dumb with fear she sank on her knees to the ground. And it availed her nothing at that hour that she had been the first to call the king by the name of father; for she was caught up by the hands of men, and borne trembling to the altar; not to have a glad wedding hymn sung before her when these sacred rites were over, but to be piteously struck down, a victim, stained with her own stainless blood, by the hand of a father in the very flower of her bridal years; and all in order to procure that a happy deliverance might be granted to the captive fleet. So huge a mass of evils has fear of the gods brought forth! (I. 84-101.)[8]

Thus the crucial proof of the badness of the old religions is derived from the hideous violence done in their name to the natural and beautiful pieties of the family.

Yet, with all his fierce aversion for this baneful fear, Lucretius feels profoundly how natural it is. His intense imagination enters into the inmost recesses of the human heart, and runs counter, as it were, to the argument of his powerful reason; riveting upon our senses with almost intolerable force the beliefs which he is himself seeking to dispel; so that though there is no trace of doubt or obscurity in his own mind, his words need only to be set in a different context to become a plea for that which he is using them to refute. Thus his very derision of the Stoic doctrine of an all-pervading God is conveyed in language of what one is again prompted to call Hebraic magnificence. ‘What power can rule the immeasurable All, or hold the reins of the great deep? who can revolve the heavens and warm the earth with ethereal fires? who can be everywhere present, making dark the sky and thrilling it with clashing sound...?’ (V. 1234 f.) Do we not seem to listen to an echo of the ironical questions of the Jahveh of the Book of Job?

There he feels only scorn for the believer, in spite of his involuntary imaginative hold upon the belief. But in another passage we see the poet himself shudder with the fear that his logic is in the act of plucking up by the roots:

When we gaze upward at the great vault of heaven, and the empyrean fixed above the shining stars, and consider the paths of sun and moon, then the dread will start into life within us lest haply we should find it to be the immeasurable might of the gods which moves the blazing stars along their diverse ways. For dearth of argument tempts us to wonder whether the world was ever begotten, and whether it be destined to perish when its ceaseless movements have worn it out, or endowed with immortal life glide on perpetually, defying all the might of time. And then what man is there whose heart does not shrink with terror of the gods, whose limbs do not creep with fear, when the parched earth trembles at the lightning stroke, and the roar of thunder rolls through the sky! Do not the peoples shudder, and haughty kings quake with fear, lest for some foul deed or arrogant speech a dire penalty has been incurred and the hour be come when it must be paid? For when the might of the hurricane sweeps the commander of a fleet before it along the seas, with all his force of legions and elephants, does he not approach the gods with prayers for their favour and helping winds; and all in vain, for often enough none the less he is caught in the whirlpool and flung into the jaws of death? So utterly is some hidden power seen to consume the works of man, and to trample and deride all the symbols of his glory and his wrath (V. 1204 f.).

But beyond the fear of what the gods may do to us on earth, lay another more insidious and ineluctable fear—the dread of what may befall us after death. It was a main part of Lucretius’s purpose to meet this by showing that death meant dissolution, and dissolution unconsciousness; but men continued to dread, and this is the reasoning, equally inconclusive and brilliant, with which he confronts them:

Therefore since death annihilates, and bars out from being altogether him whom evils might befall, it is plain that in death there is nothing for us to fear, and that a man cannot be unhappy who does not exist at all, and that it matters not a jot whether a man has been born, when death the deathless has swallowed up life that dies.

Therefore, when you see a man bewail himself that after death his body will rot, or perish in flames or in the jaws of beasts, his profession clearly does not ring true, and there lurks a secret sting in his heart, for all his denial that he believes there is any feeling in the dead. For, I take it, he does not fulfil his promise, nor follow out his principle, and sever himself out and out from life, but unconsciously makes something of himself survive. For when as a living man he imagines his future fate, and sees himself devoured by birds and beasts, he pities himself; for he does not distinguish between himself and the other, nor sever himself from the imagined body, but imagines himself to be it, and impregnates it with his own feeling. Hence he is indignant that he has been created mortal, nor sees that there will not in reality be after death another self, to grieve as a living being that he is dead, and feel pangs as he stands by, that he himself is lying there being mangled or consumed.

Then he supposes the dying man’s friends to condole with him:

Now no more thy glad home shall welcome thee, nor a beloved wife, nor sweet children run to snatch kisses, touching thy heart with secret delight. No more wilt thou be prosperous in thy doings, no more be a shelter to thy dear ones. A single, cruel day has taken from thee, hapless man, all the need of life. So they tell you, but they forget to add that neither for any one of these things wilt thou any longer feel desire (III. 863).