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

by C. H. Herford

When we gaze upward at the great vault of heaven, and the empyrean fixed above the shining stars, and consider the paths of sun and moon, then the dread will start into life within us lest haply we should find it to be the immeasurable might of the gods which moves the blazing stars along their diverse ways. For dearth of argument tempts us to wonder whether the world was ever begotten, and whether it be destined to perish when its ceaseless movements have worn it out, or endowed with immortal life glide on perpetually, defying all the might of time. And then what man is there whose heart does not shrink with terror of the gods, whose limbs do not creep with fear, when the parched earth trembles at the lightning stroke, and the roar of thunder rolls through the sky! Do not the peoples shudder, and haughty kings quake with fear, lest for some foul deed or arrogant speech a dire penalty has been incurred and the hour be come when it must be paid? For when the might of the hurricane sweeps the commander of a fleet before it along the seas, with all his force of legions and elephants, does he not approach the gods with prayers for their favour and helping winds; and all in vain, for often enough none the less he is caught in the whirlpool and flung into the jaws of death? So utterly is some hidden power seen to consume the works of man, and to trample and deride all the symbols of his glory and his wrath (V. 1204 f.).

But beyond the fear of what the gods may do to us on earth, lay another more insidious and ineluctable fear—the dread of what may befall us after death. It was a main part of Lucretius’s purpose to meet this by showing that death meant dissolution, and dissolution unconsciousness; but men continued to dread, and this is the reasoning, equally inconclusive and brilliant, with which he confronts them:

Therefore since death annihilates, and bars out from being altogether him whom evils might befall, it is plain that in death there is nothing for us to fear, and that a man cannot be unhappy who does not exist at all, and that it matters not a jot whether a man has been born, when death the deathless has swallowed up life that dies.

Therefore, when you see a man bewail himself that after death his body will rot, or perish in flames or in the jaws of beasts, his profession clearly does not ring true, and there lurks a secret sting in his heart, for all his denial that he believes there is any feeling in the dead. For, I take it, he does not fulfil his promise, nor follow out his principle, and sever himself out and out from life, but unconsciously makes something of himself survive. For when as a living man he imagines his future fate, and sees himself devoured by birds and beasts, he pities himself; for he does not distinguish between himself and the other, nor sever himself from the imagined body, but imagines himself to be it, and impregnates it with his own feeling. Hence he is indignant that he has been created mortal, nor sees that there will not in reality be after death another self, to grieve as a living being that he is dead, and feel pangs as he stands by, that he himself is lying there being mangled or consumed.

Then he supposes the dying man’s friends to condole with him:

Now no more thy glad home shall welcome thee, nor a beloved wife, nor sweet children run to snatch kisses, touching thy heart with secret delight. No more wilt thou be prosperous in thy doings, no more be a shelter to thy dear ones. A single, cruel day has taken from thee, hapless man, all the need of life. So they tell you, but they forget to add that neither for any one of these things wilt thou any longer feel desire (III. 863).

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.’