What a picture of primeval breadth and vastness! The vice égrillard of Voltaire, the coarse animalism of Rabelais, even the large comic sexuality of Aristophanes, are in another region: for the forest is the world, and the bodies of the lovers are things natural and unashamed, and Venus is the tyrannous instinct that controls the blood in spring. Only a Roman poet could have conceived of passion so mightily and so impersonally, expanding its sensuality to suit the scale of Titanic existences, and purging from it both sentiment and spirituality as well as all that makes it mean.
[88] See, for instance, his meeting of Ixion with the phantom of Juno, or his design for Leda and the Swan.
In like manner, the Lucretian conception of Ennui is wholly Roman:—
Si possent homines, proinde ac sentire videntur
pondus inesse animo quod se gravitate fatiget,
e quibus id fiat causis quoque noscere et unde
tanta mali tamquam moles in pectore constet,
haut ita vitam agerent, ut nunc plerumque videmus
quid sibi quisque velit nescire et quærere semper
commutare locum quasi onus deponere possit.
exit sæpe foras magnis ex ædibus ille,
esse domi quem pertæsumst, subitoque revertit,
quippe foris nilo melius qui sentiat esse.
currit agens mannos ad villam præcipitanter,
auxilium tectis quasi ferre ardentibus instans;
oscitat extemplo, tetigit cum limina villæ,
aut abit in somnum gravis atque oblivia quærit,
aut etiam properans urbem petit atque revisit,
hoc se quisque modo fugit (at quem scilicet, ut fit,
effugere haut potis est, ingratis hæret) et odit
propterea, morbi quia causam non tenet æger;
quam bene si videat, iam rebus quisque relictis
naturam primum studeat cognoscere rerum,
temporis æterni quoniam, non unius horæ,
ambigitur status, in quo sit mortalibus omnis
ætas, post mortem quæ restat cumque manenda.
Virgil would not have written these lines. A Greek poet could not have conceived them: unless we imagine to ourselves what Æschylus or Pindar, oppressed by long illness, and forgetful of the gods, might possibly have felt. In its sense of spiritual vacancy, when the world and all its uses have become flat, stale, unprofitable, and the sentient soul oscillates like a pendulum between weariful extremes, seeking repose in restless movement, and hurling the ruins of a life into the gulf of its exhausted cravings, we perceive already the symptoms of that unnamed malady which was the plague of imperial Rome. The tyrants and the suicides of the Empire expand before our eyes a pageant of their lassitude, relieved in vain by festivals of blood and orgies of unutterable lust. It is not that ennui was a specially Roman disease. Under certain conditions it is sure to afflict all overtaxed civilisation; and for the modern world no one has expressed its nature better than the slight and feminine De Musset.[[89]] Indeed, the Latin language has no one phrase denoting Ennui;—livor and fastidium, and even tædium vitæ, meaning something more specific and less all-pervasive as a moral agency. This in itself is significant, since it shows the unconsciousness of the race at large, and renders the intuition of Lucretius all the more remarkable. But in Rome there were the conditions favourable to its development—imperfect culture, vehement passions unabsorbed by commerce or by political life, the habituation to extravagant excitement in war and in the circus, and the fermentation of an age foredestined to give birth to new religious creeds. When the infinite but ill-assured power of the Empire was conferred on semi-madmen, Ennui in Rome assumed colossal proportions. Its victims sought for palliatives in cruelty and crime elsewhere unknown, except perhaps in Oriental courts. Lucretius, in the last days of the Republic, had discovered its deep significance for human nature. To all the pictures of Tacitus it forms a solemn tragic background, enhancing, as it were, by spiritual gloom the carnival of passions which gleam so brilliantly upon his canvas. In the person of Caligula, Ennui sat supreme upon the throne of the terraqueous globe. The insane desires and the fantastic deeds of the autocrat who wished one head for humanity that he might cut it off, sufficiently reveal the extent to which his spirit had been gangrened by this ulcer. There is a simple paragraph in Suetonius which lifts the veil from his imperial unrest more ruthlessly than any legend:—'Incitabatur insomniis maxime; neque enim plus tribus horis nocturnis quiescebat, ac ne his quidem placidâ quiete, at pavidâ, miris rerum imaginibus ... ideoque magnâ parte noctis, vigiliæ cubandique tædio, nunc toro residens, nunc per longissimas porticus vagus, invocare identidem atque expectare lucem consueverat.' This is the very picture of Ennui that has become mortal disease. Nor was Nero different. 'Néron,' says Victor Hugo, 'cherche tout simplement une distraction. Poë;te, comédien, chanteur, cocher, épuisant la férocité pour trouver la volupté, essayant le changement de sexe, époux de l'eunuque Sporus et épouse de l'esclave Pythagore, et se promenant dans les rues de Rome entre sa femme et son mari; ayant deux plaisirs: voir le peuple se jeter sur les pièces d'or, les diamants et les perles, et voir les lions se jeter sur le peuple; incendiaire par curiosité et parricide par désoeuvrement.' Nor need we stop at Nero. Over Vitellius at his banquets, over Hadrian in his Tiburtine villa calling in vain on Death, over Commodus in the arena, and Heliogabalus among the rose-leaves, the same livid shadow of imperial Ennui hangs. We can even see it looming behind the noble form of Marcus Aurelius, who, amid the ruins of empire and the revolutions of belief, penned in his tent among the Quadi those maxims of endurance which were powerless to regenerate the world.
[89] See the prelude to Les Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle and Les Nuits.
Roman again, in the true sense of the word, is the Lucretian philosophy of Conscience. Christianity has claimed the celebrated imprecation of Persius upon tyrants for her own, as though to her alone belonged the secret of the soul-tormenting sense of guilt. Yet it is certain that we owe to the Romans that conception of sin bearing its own fruit of torment which the Latin Fathers—Augustine and Tertullian— imposed with such terrific force upon the mediæval consciousness. There is no need to conclude that Persius was a Christian because he wrote—
Magne pater divum, sævos punire tyrannos, etc.,
when we know that he had before his eyes that passage in the third book of the 'De Rerum Naturâ,' (978-1023) which reduces the myths of Tityos and Sisyphus and Cerberus and the Furies to facts of the human soul:—
sed metus in vita poenarum pro male factis
est insignibus insignis, scelerisque luella,
carcer et horribilis de saxo iactu' deorsum,
verbera carnifices robur pix lammina tædæ;
quæ tamen etsi absunt, at mens sibi conscia facti
præmetuens adhibet stimulos terretque flagellis
nec videt interea qui terminus esse malorum
possit nec quæ sit poenarum denique finis
atque eadem metuit magis hæc ne in morte gravescant.