OVID’S ART OF MAKING LOVE
Gross and malicious also are the ideas of the female sex and the passion frequently encountered in the poems of Ovid; not so coarse and cynical, indeed, as in Martial and Catullus, but sufficiently so to have confounded the æsthetic judgment of the present generation, and spread the notion that Virgil and Horace are greater poets than Ovid, whereas, from the point of view of originality and imaginativeness, by far the greatest of the three is Ovid, who also had much more influence on the great writers of the best period of English literature than his rivals, as Professor W. Y. Sellar has pointed out.
Both these circumstances are to be regretted—the undervaluation of Ovid’s genius as well as his frequent frivolity on which it is based. For Ovid was unquestionably the first poet who had a conception of the higher possibilities of Love; in fact he was the greatest, and the only great, Love-poet before Dante. His rare genius enabled him to anticipate and depict the modern imaginative side of Love, even while he seemed wholly devoted to the ancient sensual side. And, in reading his poems, great caution is necessary, lest these emotional anticipations of his quasi-modern genius be supposed to have been common and prevalent among less gifted Romans of his time.
Ovid was a profound observer and psychologist, and had a most subtle knowledge of contemporary feminine nature; Although the principal object of his Ars Amoris is to teach men how to out-trump the natural cunning of women, yet he does not forget his feminine readers, but gives them numerous hints regarding the best way of fascinating fickle men. In the Remedia Amoris he describes various remedies for healing Cupid’s wounds, most of which are approved to the present day; and the Elegies and Heroides, too, are full of pretty modern touches and flashes of insight. A few of these points may be briefly alluded to.
Coyness, although often manifested by the Roman women in almost as crude a manner as among savages, does not appear to have been appreciated by all of them at its full value; so the poet frequently counsels them as to the more subtle ways of exercising it; one of his rules for women being, that if they have offended an admirer, the best way to make him forget it is to pretend to be offended themselves, which will restore the equilibrium. How the consciousness of being beautiful makes a woman courageous, coy, and cruel is shown in another place. That eyes have a language plainer than speech is not a modern discovery; and that a short absence favours, long absence kills, passion was also known to Ovid. He warns men against the danger of feigning love, because this may end in arousing genuine passion. Men are informed that courage and confidence in one’s ability to win a woman are half the battle. And disappointed lovers are assured that failure sometimes turns into an advantage, for it may arouse pity, and love enter in the guise of friendship.
The emotional hyperbole and mixed feelings of Love are not strangers to Ovid. He compares the tortures of Love to the berries on the trees in number, to the shells on the sea-beach; for true Love, he says, always creates anguish and pain; and “the sweetest torment on earth is woman.” Among the companions of Cupid are “flattery and illusion.” But “even if the beloved deceives me with false words, hope itself will yield me great enjoyment,” could only have been written by one who realised the imaginative side of love. And in another passage the poet directly enjoins the necessity of intellectual culture to take the place of the faded charms of youth.
Hero’s Letter to Leander in the Heroides contains some pretty touches. Leander has informed his love that when the storm prevents him from swimming over to her, his mind yet hastens to meet her. But Hero is in great trouble at his prolonged absence, and her deepest anguish is Jealousy of a possible rival: in the absence of real grounds of apprehension, her imagination invents them, as in a modern lover’s mind. She suspects that his passion has lost the ardour which sustained him in his difficult feat; and, too weak to quite swim over to him and back again, and anxious to save him the double journey, she suggests that they should meet in the middle of the sea, exchange a kiss, and each return to the shore whence they came.
Is there anything more exquisitely romantic or pathetic in all modern Love-poetry—in Shakspere, Heine, Burns, or Byron?