This all-creating Earth is far enough no doubt from the benign Nature of Wordsworth, who moulds her children by silent sympathy. But it is not so remote from the Earth of Meredith, the Mother who brings Man ‘her great venture’ forth, bears him on her breast and nourishes him there, but ‘more than that embrace, that nourishment, she cannot give.’
He may entreat, aspire,
He may despair, and she has never heed.
She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,
Not his desire.
Meredith too sees man, in dread of her, clutching at invisible powers, as Lucretius’s sea-captain in the storm makes vows to the gods. And Meredith’s thought that man rises by ‘spelling at’ her laws is no less Lucretian. But Meredith’s story of Earth is full of hope, like his story of man. It is perpetual advance. With Lucretius it is otherwise.
For the Earth is not only our Mother; she is our tomb (II. 1148 f.). And the eternal energy of creation is not only matched by the eternal energy of dissolution, but here and now is actually yielding ground to it. The Earth, so prolific in her joyous youth, is now like a woman who has ceased to bear, ‘worn out by length of days’ (V. 820 f.). In the whole universe birth and death absolutely balance, the equation of mechanical values is never infringed; the universe has no history, only a continuous substitution of terms. But each living thing has a history, it knows the exultation of onset and the melancholy of decline; and its fear of death is not cancelled by the knowledge that in that very moment, and in consequence of that very fact, some other living thing will be born. And thus Lucretius, feeling for our Earth as a being very near to us, and with which the issues of our existence are involved, applies the doctrine to her without shrinking indeed, but not without a human shudder. The Earth had a beginning, and ineluctable reason forces us to conclude that she will have an end, and this not by a gradual evanescence or dispersion, but by a sudden, terrific catastrophe, as in a great earthquake, or world conflagration (V. 95 f.).
And he feels this abrupt extinction of the Earth and its inhabitants to be tragic, notwithstanding that extinction is, by his doctrine, only the condition of creation, and that at the very moment of her ruin, some other earth will be celebrating its glorious birth. Earth has for him a life-history, a biography, and he forgets that she is strictly but a point at which the eternal drift of atoms thickened for a time to a cluster, to be dispersed again. Thus we see how this mechanical system, ardently embraced by a poet, working freely upon him, and itself coloured and transformed by his mind, stirred in him two seemingly opposed kinds of poetic emotion at once: the sublime sense of eternal existence, and the tragic pathos of sudden doom and inexorable passing away.
Hence the melancholy that in Lucretius goes along with an enormous sense of life. To say that he puts the ‘Nevermore’ of romantic sentimentality in the place of that dispassionate ‘give and take’ of mechanics would do wrong to the immense virility which animates every line of this athlete among poets. Of the cheap melancholy of discontent he knows as little as of the cheap satisfaction of complacency, or of that literary melancholy, where the sigh of Horace, or Ronsard, or Herrick, over the passing of roses and all other beautiful things covers a sly diplomatic appeal to the human rosebud to be gathered while still there is time. No, the melancholy of Lucretius is like that of Dürer’s ‘Melancholia,’ the sadness of strong intellect and far-reaching vision as it contemplates the setting of the sun of time and the ebbing of the tides of mortality; or like Wordsworth’s mournful music of dissolution, only to be heard by an ear emancipated from vulgar joys and fears; or like the melancholy of Keats—the veiled goddess who hath her shrine in the very temple of delight—the amari aliquid, in Lucretius’s own yet more pregnant words, which lurks in the very sweetness of the flower.
Thus our ‘scientific poet’ appears in an extraordinary if not unique way to have united the functions and temper and achievement of science and poetry. He ‘knew the causes of things,’ and could set them forth with marvellous precision and resource; and the knowledge filled him with lofty joy as of one standing secure above the welter of doubt and fear in which the mass of men pass their lives. To have reached this serene pinnacle of intellectual security seemed to his greatest follower Virgil a happiness beyond the reach of his own more tender and devout genius, and he commemorated it in splendid verses which Matthew Arnold in our own day applied to Goethe: