IV
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.).