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.

III
MOUNTAIN SCENERY IN KEATS

III

MOUNTAIN SCENERY IN KEATS

THE ‘love of mountains’ which plays so large a part in the poetry of the age of Wordsworth, and has so few close analogies in that of any other country or any earlier time, offers matter of still unexhausted interest to the student of poetic psychology. This is not the place to consider how it happened that any mass of boldly crumpled strata, on a certain scale, became in the course of the eighteenth century charged with a kind of spiritual electricity which set up powerful answering excitements in the sensitive beholder. Gray already in 1739 expressed the potential reach and compass of these excitements in our psychical life when he called the scenery of the Grande Chartreuse ‘pregnant with religion and poetry’—a thought which Wordsworth’s sublime verses on the Simplon, sixty years later, only made explicit. Not all the mountain-excitement of the time was of this quality; and we can distinguish easily enough between the ‘picturesque,’ ‘romantic’ mountain sentiment of Scott, to whom the Trossachs and Ben Venue spoke most eloquently when they sounded to the pad of a horseman’s gallop, and the ‘natural religion’ of Wordsworth, to whom the same pass wore the air of a ‘Confessional’ apt for autumnal meditation on the brevity of life. In the younger poets of the age mountain sentiment is less original and profound than in Wordsworth, less breezily elemental than in Scott. The mountain poetry of Wordsworth concurred, as an explicit stimulus to mountain sentiment, with the inarticulate spell of the mountains themselves, transforming in some degree the native feeling and experience of almost all mountain-lovers of the next twenty years, even when they were of the calibre of Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley. Yet even where the Wordsworthian colour is most perceptible, as in The Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni, in Alastor, Mont Blanc, and in the Third Canto of Childe Harold, the younger poet has seen his mountains with his own eyes and through the glamour of his own passions, impregnated them with his own genius and temperament. Shelley’s mountains are no longer the quiet brotherhood of Grasmere, with a listening star atop, but peaks of flamelike aspiration, or embodied protests against men’s code of crime and fraud; Byron’s are warriors calling joyously to one another over the lit lake across the storm. For all these poets—even for Scott when he was a poet—mountain scenery was not so much new matter to be described as a new instrument of expression, a speaking symbol for their own spiritual appetencies and ideal dreams. Of its importance for the poetry of any one of them there cannot be a moment’s doubt. There remains, however, another poet, the youngest, the shortest-lived, but in some respects the most gifted of the whole group. On a general view Keats appears to be sharply distinguished, in regard to the characteristic here in question, from all the rest. Mountains and mountain sentiment seem to have a quite negligible place in his poetry. It may be worth while to consider how far this is really the case.