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: