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

by C. H. Herford

II
THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS

II

THE POETRY OF LUCRETIUS

‘Lucretius stands alone in the controversial force and energy with which the genius of negation inspires him, and transforms into sublime reasons for firm act, so long as living breath is ours, the thought that the life of a man is no more than the dream of a shadow.’—Lord Morley’s Recollections.

I

THERE was a time when the title of this essay would have been received as a paradox, if not as a contradiction in terms. Lessing, as is well known, declared roundly that Lucretius was ‘a versifier, not a poet,’ and Lessing is one of the greatest of European critics. It is easy, indeed, to explain in part his trenchant condemnation. It reflects his implicit acceptance of Aristotle’s Poetics—which he said was for him as absolutely valid as Euclid, and therefore of Aristotle’s doctrine that poetry is imitation of human action. Lessing’s insistence on this doctrine was extraordinarily salutary in his day, and definitely lowered the status of the dubious kinds known as descriptive, allegorical, satirical, and didactic poetry, in a century too much given to them all. That phrase of his about the imitation of human action marked out a correct, well-defined, and safe channel for the stream of poetry to pursue, and some of the slender poetic rills of his generation improved their chance of survival by falling into it and flowing between its banks. But Lessing did not reckon with the power of poetic genius to force its own way to the sea through no matter how tangled and tortuous a river-bed,—nay, to capture from the very obstructions it overcomes new splendours of foam and rainbow unknown perhaps to the well-regulated stream. In plain language, he did not reckon with the fact that a prima facie inferior form, such as satire or didactic, may not only have its inferiority outweighed by compensating beauties, but may actually elicit and provoke beauties not otherwise to be had, and thus become not an obstacle, but an instrument of poetry. Nor did he foresee that such a recovery of poetic genius, such an effacement of the old boundaries, such a withdrawal of the old taboos, was to come with the following century, nay, was actually impending when he wrote. Goethe, who read the Laokoon entranced, as a young student at Leipzig, honoured its teaching very much on this side of idolatry when he came to maturity. As a devoted investigator of Nature, who divined the inner continuity of the flower and the leaf with the same penetrating intuition which read the continuity of a man, or of a historic city, in all the phases of their growth, Goethe was not likely to confine poetry within the bounds either of humanity or of the drums and tramplings, the violence, passion, and sudden death, for which human action in poetic criticism has too commonly stood. He himself wrote a poem of noble beauty on the Metamorphosis of Plants (1797)—a poem which suffices to show that it is possible to be poetically right while merely unfolding the inner truth of things in perfectly adequate speech.[4] We cannot wonder, then, that Lucretius and the poem On the Nature of Things excited in the greatest of German poets the liveliest interest and admiration. On the score of subject alone he eagerly welcomed the great example of Lucretius. But he saw that Lucretius had supreme gifts as a poet, which would have given distinction to whatever he wrote, and which, far from being balked by the subject of his choice, found in it peculiarly large scope and play. ‘What sets out Lucretius so high,’ he wrote (1821) to his friend v. Knebel, author of the first German translation, ‘what sets him so high and assures him eternal renown, is a lofty faculty of sensuous intuition, which enables him to describe with power; in addition, he disposes of a powerful imagination, which enables him to pursue what he has seen beyond the reach of sense into the invisible depths of Nature and her most mysterious recesses.’[5] But while Goethe thus led the way in endorsing without reserve the Lucretian conception of what the field of poetry might legitimately include, he contributed to the discussion nothing, so far as I know, so illuminating or so profound as the great saying of Wordsworth: ‘poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.’ For Wordsworth here sweeps peremptorily away the boundary marks set up, for better or worse, by ancient criticism—he knows nothing of a poetry purely of man or purely of action: he finds the differentia of poetry not in any particular choice of subject out of the field of real things, but in the impassioned handling of them whencesoever drawn, and therefore including the impassioned handling of reality as such, or, in the Lucretian phrase, of the nature of things.

What did he mean by impassioned? Something more, certainly, than the enthusiasm of a writer possessed with his theme, or even of one eager, as Lucretius was, to effect by its means a glorious purgation in the clotted soul of a friend. We come nearer when we recall the profound emotion stirred in Wordsworth by ‘earth’s tears and mirth, her humblest mirth and tears,’ or the thought, ‘too deep for tears,’ given him by the lowliest flower of the field. Such passion as this is not easily analysed, but it implies something that we may call participation on the one side and response on the other. The poet finds himself in Nature, finds there something that answers to spiritual needs of his own. The measure of the poet’s mind will be the measure of the value of the response he receives. A small poet will people Nature with fantastic shapes which reflect nothing but his capricious fancy or his self-centred desires. That is not finding a response in Nature, but putting one into her mouth; a procedure like that of the bustling conversationalist who, instead of listening to your explanation, cuts it short with a ‘You mean to say’—whatever it suits him to suppose. But the poet of finer genius will neither seek nor be satisfied with such hollow response as this. If he finds himself in Nature, it will not be his shallow fancies or passing regrets that he finds, but his furthest reach, and loftiest appetency of soul. He will not properly be said to ‘subdue things to the mind,’ as Bacon declared it to be the characteristic aim of poetry to do, instead of, like philosophy, subduing the mind to things. But he will feel after analogies to mind in the universe of things which mind contemplates and interprets.

Such an analogy, for instance, is the sense of continuity underlying the changing show of the material world, corresponding to the continuity of our own self-consciousness through the perpetual variations of our soul states. The doctrine of a permanent substance persisting through the multiplicity of Nature, and giving birth to all its passing modes, belongs as much to poetry as to philosophy, and owes as much to impassioned intuition as to a priori thought. Under the name of the One and the Many the problem of Change and Permanence perplexed and fascinated every department of Greek thought: it provoked the opposite extravagances of Heracleitos, who declared change to be the only form of existence, and of the Eleatics, who denied that it existed at all; but it also inspired the ordered and symmetrical beauty of the Parthenon and the Pindaric ode. ‘When we feel the poetic thrill,’ says Santayana, ‘it is when we find fulness in the concise, and depth in the clear; and that seems to express with felicitous precision the genius of Hellenic art.’

A second such analogy is the discovery of infinity. Common sense observes measure and rule, complies with custom, and takes its ease when its day’s work is done; but we recognize a higher quality in the love that knows no measure, in the spiritual hunger and thirst which are never stilled. Therefore, at the height of our humanity, we find ourselves in the universe in proportion as it sustains and gives scope for an endlessly ranging and endlessly penetrating thought. The Stoics looked on the universe as a globe pervaded by what Munro unkindly calls a rotund and rotatory god; at the circumference of which all existence, including that of space, simply stopped; common sense revolts, but imagination is even more rudely balked, and we glory in the defiant description of Epicurus passing beyond the flaming walls of the world. Yet we are stirred with a far more potent intellectual sympathy when the idea is suggested, say by Spinoza, that space and time themselves are but particular modes of a universe which exists also in an infinite number of other ways; or when, in the final cantos of Dante’s Paradiso, after passing up from Earth, the centre, through the successive ever-widening spheres that circle round it, till we reach the Empyrean, the whole perspective and structure of the universe are suddenly inverted, and we see the real centre, God, as a single point of dazzling intensity, irradiating existence ‘through and through.’ Then we realize that the space we have been laboriously traversing is only the illusive medium of our sense-existence, and without meaning for the Eternity and Infinity of divine reality.

This example has led us to the verge of another class of poetic ideas, those in which poetry discovers in the world not merely analogies of mind, but mind itself. This is the commonest, and in some of its phases the cheapest and poorest, intellectually, of all poetic ideas. It touches at one pole the naive personation which peoples earth and air for primitive man with spirits whom he seeks by ritual and magic to propitiate or to circumvent. The brilliant and beautiful woof of myth is, if we will, poetry as well as religion; the primitive and rudimentary poetry of a primitive and rudimentary religion. Yet it points, however crudely, to the subtler kinds of response which a riper poetic insight may discover. If the glorious anthropomorphism of Olympus and Asgard has faded for ever, the mystery of life, everywhere pulsing through Nature, and perpetually reborn ‘in man and beast and earth and air and sea,’ cries to the poet in every moment of his experience with a voice which will not be put by, and the symbols from soul-life by which he seeks to convey his sense of it, if they often read human personality too definitely into the play of that elusive mystery, yet capture something in it which escapes the reasoned formulas of science, and justify the claim of poetic experience to be the source of an outlook upon the world, of a vision of life, with which, no less than with those reached through philosophy and religion, civilization has to reckon.