and at i. 101, by the line of cardinal significance, which ends a passage of most finished power and beauty,—
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
The music of Lucretius is altogether his own. As he was the first among his countrymen who contemplated in a reverential spirit the majesty of Nature and the more solemn meaning of life, so he was the first to call out the full rhythmical majesty and deep organ-tones of the Latin language, to embody in sound the spiritual emotions stirred by that contemplation.
The poetical style of Lucretius is, like his rhythm, a true and powerful symbol of his genius. Though his diction is much less studied than that of Virgil, yet his large use of alliterations, assonances, asyndeta[499], etc., shows that he consciously aimed at producing certain effects by recognised rhetorical means. The attraction which the artifices of rhetoric had for his mind is as noticeable in his style as a similar attraction is in the speeches of Thucydides. But neither Lucretius nor Thucydides can be called the slave of rhetorical forms. In both writers recourse is had to them for the legitimate purpose of emphasising thought, not for that of disguising its insufficiency. The use of such phrases, for instance, as 'sed casta inceste,' 'immortalia mortali sermone notantes,' 'mors immortalis,' etc., is no mere play of words, but rather the tersest phrase in which an impressive antithesis of thought can be presented. The mannerisms of his style, if they show that he was not altogether emancipated from archaic rudeness, afford evidence also of the prolific fertility of his genius. The amplitude and unchecked volume of his diction flow out of the mental conditions, described in the lines,—
Usque adeo largos haustus e fontibu' magnis
Lingua meo suavis diti de pectore fundet.
And he had not only the 'suavis lingua diti de pectore;' he had also the 'daedala lingua,'—the formative energy which shapes words into new forms and combinations. The frequent ἅπαξ λεγόμενα in his poem and his abundant use of compound words, such as fluctifragus, montivagus, altitonans, etc., most of which fell into disuse in the Augustan age, were products of the same creative force which enabled Plautus and Ennius to add largely to the resources of the Latin tongue. In him, more than in any Latin poet before or after him, we meet with phrases too full of imaginative life to be in perfect keeping with the more sober tones and tamer spirit of the national literature. Thus his language never became trite and hackneyed, and, as we read him, no medium of after-associations is interposed between his mind and our own.
But it is not in individual phrases, however fresh and powerful, but in continuous passages, that the power of his style is best seen. The processes of his mind are characterised by continuity, consistency, and a kind of gathering intensity of movement. The periods of Virgil delight us by their intricate harmony; those of Lucretius impress us by their continuous and hurrying impetus. The long drawn out charm of the one is indicative of the deep love which induced him to linger over every detail of his subject: the force and grandeur of the other are the outward signs of the inward wonder and enthusiasm by which his spirit was borne rapidly along. Virgil's movement displays the majesty of grace and serenity; that of Lucretius the majesty of power, and largeness of mind.
Thus although the poetical style of Lucretius shows the traces of labour and premeditation, and of occasional imitation both of foreign and native models, it is more than that of any other Latin poet, the immediate creation of his own genius. The 'ingenuei fontis,' by which his imagination was so abundantly fed, found many spontaneous outlets, and were not checked in their speed or stained in their purity by the artificial channels in which he sometimes forced them to flow. If the loving labour, so prodigally bestowed upon the task of finding words and rhythm[500] adequate to his great theme, explains some peculiarities of his diction, the qualities which have made the work immortal are due to his noble singleness of heart and sincerity of nature, and to the openness and sensibility with which his imagination received impressions, the penetrative force with which it saw into the heart of things, and the creative energy with which it shaped what it received and discerned into vivid pictures and symbols.
He has, in the first place, the freshness of feeling, the living sense of the wonder of the world, which is a great charm in the older poets of all great literatures,—in Homer, Dante, Chaucer;—and this sense he communicates by words used in their simplest and directest meaning. The life which animates and gladdens the familiar face of earth, sea, and sky,—of river, wood, field, and hill-side,—is vividly and immediately reproduced in such lines as these:—