LUCRETIUS.
The age of Cicero, a term familiar to all readers as indicating one of the culminating periods of literary history, while its central and later years are accurately fixed, may be dated in its commencement from varying limits. Cicero was born in 106 B.C., the year of the final conquest of Jugurtha, and the year before the terrible Cimbrian disaster at Orange: he perished in the proscription of the triumvirate in December, 43 B.C. His first appearance in public life was during the dictatorship of Sulla; and either from this date, or from one ten years later when the Sullan constitution was re-established in a modified form by Pompeius and Crassus in their first consulate, the Ciceronian age extends over a space which approximates in the one case to thirty, in the other to forty years. No period in ancient, and few even in more modern history are so pregnant with interest or so fully and intimately known. From the comparative obscurity of the earlier age we pass into a full blaze of daylight. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Rome of Cicero is as familiar to modern English readers as the London of Queen Anne, to readers in modern France as the Paris of Louis Quatorze. We can still follow with unabated interest the daily fluctuations of its politics, the current gossip and scandal of its society, the passing fashions of domestic life as revealed in private correspondence or the disclosures of the law courts. Yet in the very centre of this brilliantly lighted world, one of its most remarkable figures is veiled in almost complete darkness. The poem of Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, though it not only revealed a profound and extraordinary genius, but marked an entirely new technical level in Latin poetry, stole into the world all but unnoticed; and of its author's life, though a pure Roman of one of the great governing families, only one or two doubtful and isolated facts could be recovered by the curiosity of later commentators. The single sentence in St. Jerome's Chronicle which practically sums up the whole of our information runs as follows, under the year 94 B.C:—
Titus Lucretius poeta nascitur, posted amatorio poculo in furorem versus cum aliquot libros per intervalla insaniae conscripsisset quos postea Cicero emendavit, propria se manu interfecit anno aetatis xliiii.
Brief and straightforward as the sentence is, every clause in it has given rise to volumes of controversy. Was Lucretius born in the year named, or is another tradition correct, which, connecting his death with a particular event in the youth of Virgil, makes him either be born a few years earlier or die a few years younger? Did he ever, whether from a poisonous philtre or otherwise, lose his reason? and can a poem which ranks among the great masterpieces of genius have been built up into its stately fabric—for this is not a question of brief lyrics like those of Smart or Cowper—in the lucid intervals of insanity? Did Cicero have anything to do with the editing of the unfinished poem? If so, which Cicero—Marcus or Quintus? and why, in either case, is there no record of the fact in their correspondence, or in any writing of the period? All these questions are probably insoluble, and the notice of Jerome leaves the whole life and personality of the poet still completely hidden. Yet we have little or nothing else to go upon. There is a brief and casual allusion to him in one of Cicero's letters of the year 54 B.C.: yet it speaks of "poems," not the single great poem which we know; and most editors agree that the text of the passage is corrupt, and must be amended by the insertion of a non, though they differ on the important detail of the particular clause in which it should be inserted. That the earlier Augustan poets should leave their great predecessor completely unnoticed is less remarkable, for it may be taken as merely a part of that curious conspiracy of silence regarding the writers of the Ciceronian age which, whether under political pressure or not, they all adopted. Even Ovid, never ungenerous though not always discriminating in his praise, dismisses him in a list of Latin poets with a single couplet of vague eulogy. In the reactionary circles of the Empire, Lucretius found recognition; but the critics who, according to Tacitus, ranked him above Virgil may be reasonably suspected of doing so more from caprice than from rational conviction. Had the poem itself perished (and all the extant manuscripts are copies of a single original), no one would have thought that such a preference could be anything but a piece of antiquarian pedantry, like the revival, in the same period, of the plays of the early tragedians. But the fortunate and slender chance which has preserved it shows that their opinion, whether right or wrong, is one which at all events is neither absurd nor unarguable. For in the De Rerum Natura we are brought face to face not only with an extraordinary literary achievement, but with a mind whose profound and brilliant genius has only of late years, and with the modern advance of physical and historical science, been adequately recognised.
The earliest Greek impulse in Latin poetry had long been exhausted; and the fashion among the new generation was to admire and study beyond all else the Greek poets of the decadence, who are generally, and without any substantial injustice, lumped together by the name of the Alexandrian school. The common quality in all this poetry was its great learning, and its remoteness from nature. It was poetry written in a library; it viewed the world through a highly coloured medium of literary and artistic tradition. The laborious perfectness of execution which the taste of the time demanded was, as a rule, lavished on little subjects, patient carvings in ivory. One side of the Alexandrian school which was largely followed was that of the didactic poets—Aratus, Nicander, Euphorion, and a host of others less celebrated. Cicero, in mature life, speaks with some contempt of the taste for Euphorion among his contemporaries. But he had himself, as a young man, followed the fashion, and translated the Phaenomena of Aratus into wonderfully polished and melodious hexameter verse.
Not unaffected by this fashion of the day, but turning from it to older and nobler models—Homer and Empedocles in Greek, Ennius in Latin— Lucretius conceived the imposing scheme of a didactic poem dealing with the whole field of life and nature as interpreted by the Epicurean philosophy. He lived to carry out his work almost to completion. It here and there wants the final touches of arrangement; one or two discussions are promised and not given; some paragraphs are repeated, and others have not been worked into their proper place; but substantially, as in the case of the Aeneid, we have the complete poem before us, and know perfectly within what limits it might have been altered or improved by fuller revision.
As pure literature, the Nature of Things has all the defects inseparable from a didactic poem, that unstable combination of discordant elements, and from a poem which is not only didactic, but argumentative, and in parts highly controversial. Nor are these difficulties in the least degree evaded or smoothed over by the poet. As a teacher, he is in deadly earnest; as a controversialist, his first object is to refute and convince. The graces of poetry are never for a moment allowed to interfere with the full development of an argument. Much of the poem is a chain of intricate reasoning hammered into verse by sheer force of hand. The ardent imagination of the poet struggles through masses of intractable material which no genius could wholly fuse into a metal pure enough to take perfect form. His language, in the fine prologue to the fourth book of the poem, shows his attitude towards his art very clearly.
Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo; iuvat integros accedere fontes
Atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
Insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
Unde prius milli velarint tempora Musae:
Primum quod magnis doceo de rebus, et artis
Religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo,
Deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
Carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore.
The joy and glory of his art come second in his mind to his passionate love of truth, and the deep moral purport of what he believes to be the one true message for mankind. The human race lies fettered by superstition and ignorance; his mission is to dispel their darkness by that light of truth which is "clearer than the beams of the sun or the shining shafts of day." Spinoza has been called, in a bold figure, "a man drunk with God;" the contemplation of the "nature of things," the physical structure of the universe, and the living and all but impersonate law which forms and sustains it, has the same intoxicating influence over Lucretius. God and man are alike to him bubbles on the ceaseless stream of existence; yet they do not therefore, as they have so often done in other philosophies, fade away to a spectral thinness. His contemplation of existence is no brooding over abstractions; Nature is not in his view the majestic and silent figure before whose unchanging eyes the shifting shadow-shapes go and come; but an essential life, manifesting itself in a million workings, creatrix, gubernans, daedala rerum. The universe is filled through all its illimitable spaces by the roar of her working, the ceaseless unexhausted energy with which she alternates life and death.
To our own age the Epicurean philosophy has a double interest. Not only was it a philosophy of life and conduct, but, in the effort to place life and conduct under ascertainable physical laws, it was led to frame an extremely detailed and ingenious body of natural philosophy, which, partly from being based on really sound postulates, partly from a happy instinct in connecting phenomena, still remains interesting and valuable. To the Epicureans, indeed, as to all ancient thinkers, the scientific method as it is now understood was unknown; and a series of unverified generalizations, however brilliant and acute, is not the true way towards knowledge. But it still remains an astonishing fact that many of the most important physical discoveries of modern times are hinted at or even expressly stated by Lucretius. The general outlines of the atomic doctrine have long been accepted as in the main true; in all important features it is superior to any other physical theory of the universe which existed up to the seventeenth century. In his theory of light Lucretius was in advance of Newton. In his theory of chemical affinities (for he describes the thing though the nomenclature was unknown to him) he was in advance of Lavoisier. In his theory of the ultimate constitution of the atom he is in striking agreement with the views of the ablest living physicists. The essential function of science—to reduce apparently disparate phenomena to the expressions of a single law —is not with him the object of a moment's doubt or uncertainty.