Toward which indeed the swift élan of thought
Flies unencumbered forth.
It is also characteristic of Lucretius as a Roman that while he accepted a philosophy that made all creation kin—in this respect Lucretius may be considered the founder of philosophic Romanticism—he refused to abandon the classical humanism that insisted upon seeing in man the master of his own destiny. There is no doubt about the strong drift toward romanticism throughout the poem. Man is here inseparable from nature. The fiery temper of a choleric man, like the ferocity of the lion, is traced to the atomic composition of the soul.[13] The cool-tempered ox partakes of elements that predominate in men of prudence, and cowardice in man is explained physically as akin to the trembling of the deer. In all this, man is removed from the pedestal to which idealistic philosophy had elevated him, and by a back door, as it were, brought back again into Pan’s forest where in the past humans had played with Satyrs and quadrupeds in the happy days of Mythopoeia. That Lucretius fully comprehended the poetic importance of this scientific kinship of all living things is apparent from his proemium where spring is pictured as the mating season, the season of song and joy, for all creation without distinction:
Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres—
Amor omnibus idem.
For soon as the vernal aspect of day is disclosed, and the birth-favouring breeze of Favonius unbarred is blowing fresh, first the fowls of the air, O Venus, show signs of thee and thy entering in, thoroughly smitten in heart by thy power. Next the wild herds bound over the glad pastures and swim the rapid rivers: in such wise, each made prisoner by thy charms, follows thee with desire, whither thou goest to lead it on. Yes, throughout seas and mountains and sweeping rivers and leafy homes of birds and grassy plains, striking fond love into the breasts of all thou constrainest them each after its kind to continue their races with desire.
Here first in literature we get, emerging out of atomic science, the spring poetry of Troubadour song. Lucretius drew out of his science the full value of Romantic poetry.
But when he had done that he did not forget that he was a genuine Roman and that man must be accorded the dignity due his commanding independence. At this point he took full advantage of the Epicurean clinamen and asserted man’s power of self-mastery. In the finest soul-atom lies the germ of a free-will. “Whence I ask, has been wrested from the fates the power by which we go forward whither the will leads each?” And even after explaining temperament by reference to atomic make-up, he hastened to qualify his statement by adding: “traces of the different natures left behind, which reason is unable to expel from us, are so exceedingly slight that there is nothing to hinder us from living a life worthy of the gods.” Indeed his whole life-work was a mission that revealed him a thorough humanist. The man who devoted his days and nights to expel from society the palsy due to superstition, to induce men to use reason in order that they might gain a “life worthy of the gods” was not devoted to naturism in the modern sense of the word. Indeed in some passages Lucretius seems willing to accept human nature at a very high valuation. The ugliness of life is not primarily due to its flaws, but to nature perverted by imposed fears, unreasoned desires, and artificial institutions that enlightened reason might readily dispose of.[14] There is of course in all this some inconsistency, for there lies lurking beneath it all the age-long battle between Determinism and Freedom, and the inconsistency is made the more apparent because, curiously enough, in Lucretius the poet supports the scientist against the humanist. But when one has finished the poem one leaves it with the conviction that, while the poet has not been repressed, the Roman who was conscious of his moral responsibility has held the pen. In that respect the atomic theories of recent years have not demonstrated that Lucretius was in error.
FOOTNOTES
[1] W. Warde Fowler, Religious Experience, chap. XV.