In Lucretius this conception found a mind capable of being ravished by its imaginative grandeur, as well as of pursuing it indefatigably through the thorniest mazes of mechanical proof. The contagious fervour which breathes through his poem is no mere ardour of the disciple bent on winning converts, or the joy of the literary craftsman as his hexameters leap forth glowing on the anvil; it is the sacred passion of one who has had a sublime vision of life and nature, and who bears about the radiance of it into all the work to which he has set his hand. It is not because of anything that Lucretius adds to Epicurus—in theory he really adds nothing at all—that the impression produced by his poem differs so greatly from that of all we know—in fragments and at second hand, it is true—of Epicurus’s own writings. The ultimate principles are the same, but the accent is laid at a different point. The parochial timidities of Epicurus have left their traces on the Roman’s page, but they appear as hardly more than rudimentary survivals among the native inspirations of a man of heroic mettle and valour, Roman tenacity, and native sweep of mind. He cannot quite break free from some speculative foibles which show the Master’s shallow opportunism at its worst—such as the dictum that the sun is about as large as it looks, a lamp hung a little above the earth, and daily lighted and put out; but he becomes himself when he lets his imagination soar into the infinities of time and space which his faith opens out or leaves room for. It is a triumph of poetry as well as of common sense when he scoffs at the Stoic dogma of a Space which abruptly comes to an end; when he stations an archer at the barrier and ironically bids him shoot his arrow into the nothingness beyond. Or in more sombre mood, how grave an intensity he puts into a common thought, like that of the end of life, by the sublimely terrible epithet immortal which he applies to death:
Mortalem vitam Mors cum inmortalis ademit (III. 869).
or into a mere reminder that birth and death are always with us, by making us feel the endless concomitant succession through the ages of funeral wailings, and the cry of the new-born child (II. 578). He accepts without question the swerving of the atoms, devised by Epicurus—child and man of genius at once—to refute the Stoic dogma of necessity; but what possesses his mind and imagination is not these intrusions of caprice, but the great continuities and uniformities of existence, which follow from the perpetual dissolution and remaking of life. ‘Rains die, when father ether has tumbled them into the lap of mother earth; but then goodly crops spring up and trees laden with fruit; and by them we and the beasts are fed, and joyous cities teem with children and the woods ring with the song of young birds’ (I. 250 f.).
Only, as such passages show, Lucretius grasps these uniformities and continuities not as theoretic abstractions, but as underlying conditions of the teeming multiplicity and joyous profusion of living Nature. His senses, imagination, and philosophic intellect, all phenomenally acute and alert, wrought intimately together; and he enters into and exposes the life of the individual thing with an intensity of insight and a realistic precision and power which quicken us with its warm pulse, and burn its image upon our brain, without ever relaxing our consciousness that it is part of an endless process, and the incidental expression of an unalterable law. For him, indeed, as for Dante, individuality is an intrinsic part of law, and law of individuality. Every being has its place and function, its ‘deep fixed boundaries’ (terminus alte haerens). The very stone, for Dante, cleaves to the spot where it lies. And the Roman as well as the philosopher in Lucretius scornfully contrasts with this Nature of minute and ubiquitous law the fluid and chaotic world of myth, where anything might become anything (cf. V. 126 f.).
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.).