These remarks, familiar to students, form a proper prelude to the criticism of Lucretius: for in Lucretius the Roman character found its most perfect literary incarnation. He is at all points a true Roman, gifted with the strength, the conquering temper, the uncompromising haughtiness, and the large scale of his race. Holding, as it were, the thought of Greece in fee, he administers the Epicurean philosophy as though it were a province, marshalling his arguments like legionaries, and spanning the chasms of speculative insecurity with the masonry of hypotheses. As the arches of the Pont du Gard, suspended in their power amid that solitude, produce an overmastering feeling of awe; so the huge fabric of the Lucretian system, hung across the void of Nihilism, inspires a sense of terror, not so much on its own account as for the Roman sternness of the mind that made it. 'Le retentissement de mes pas dans ces immenses voûtes me faisait croire entendre la forte voix de ceux qui les avait bâties. Je me perdais comme un insecte dans cette immensité.' This is what Rousseau wrote about the aqueduct of Nismes. This is what we feel in pacing the corridors of the Lucretian poem. Sometimes it seems like walking through resounding caves of night and death, where unseen cataracts keep plunging down uncertain depths, and winds 'thwarted and forlorn' swell from an unknown distance, and rush by, and wail themselves to silence in the unexplored beyond. At another time the impression left upon the memory is different. We have been following a Roman road from the gate of the Eternal City, through field and vineyard, by lake and river-bed, across the broad intolerable plain and the barren tops of Alps, down into forests where wild beasts and barbarian tribes wander, along the marge of Rhine or Elbe, and over frozen fens, in one perpetual straight line, until the sea is reached and the road ends because it can go no further. All the while, the iron wheel-rims of our chariot have jarred upon imperishable paved work; there has been no stop nor stay; the visions of things beautiful and strange and tedious have flown past; at the climax we look forth across a waste of waves and tumbling wilderness of surf and foam, where the storm sweeps and hurrying mists drive eastward close above our heads. The want of any respite, breathing-space, or intermission in the poem, helps to force this image of a Roman journey on our mind. From the first line to the last there is no turning-point, no pause of thought, scarcely a comma, and the whole breaks off:—
rixantes potius quam corpora desererentur:
as though a scythe-sweep from the arm of Death had cut the thread of singing short.
Is, then, this poem truly song? Indeed it is. The brazen voice of Rome becomes tunable; a majestic rhythm sustains the progress of the singer, who, like Milton's Satan,
O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.
It is only because, being so much a Roman, he insists on moving ever onward with unwavering march, that Lucretius is often wearisome and rough. He is too disdainful to care to mould the whole stuff of his poem to one quality. He is too truth-loving to condescend to rhetoric. The scoriæ, the grit, the dross, the quartz, the gold, the jewels of his thought are hurried onward in one mighty lava-flood, that has the force to bear them all with equal ease—not altogether unlike that hurling torrent of the world painted by Tintoretto in his picture of the Last Day, which carries on its breast cities and forests and men with all their works, to plunge them in a bottomless abyss.
Poems of the perfect Hellenic type may be compared to bronze statues, in the material of which many divers metals have been fused. Silver and tin and copper and lead and gold are there: each substance adds a quality to the mass; yet the whole is bronze. The furnace of the poet's will has so melted and mingled all these ores, that they have run together and filled the mould of his imagination. It is thus that Virgil chose to work. He made it his glory to realise artistic harmony, and to preserve a Greek balance in his style. Not so Lucretius. In him the Roman spirit, disdainful, uncompromising, and forceful, had full sway. We can fancy him accosting the Greek masters of the lyre upon Parnassus, deferring to none, conceding nought, and meeting their arguments with proud indifference:—
tu regere imperio populos Romane memento.
The Roman poet, swaying the people of his thoughts, will stoop to no persuasion, adopt no middle course. It is not his business to please, but to command; he will not wait upon the καιρός, or court opportunity; Greeks may surprise the Muses in relenting moods, and seek out 'mollia tempora fandi;' all times and seasons must serve him; the terrible, the discordant, the sublime, and the magnificent shall drag his thundering car-wheels, as he lists, along the road of thought.
At the very outset of the poem we feel ourselves within the grasp of the Roman imagination. It is no Aphrodite, risen from the waves and white as the sea-foam, that he invokes:—