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Epicurean doctrine, which Lucretius illustrated with So much poetical variety, that from all surfaces are for ever streaming images, 'idols,' thin as films, fine as the gossamer coats which the cicade puts off in summer,' or 'the vesture which the serpent slips among the thorns;' and that these 'idols' account for all that men see or fancy. Or when Empedocles is spoken of as 'the great Sicilian,' the designation gains in point if it serves to recall the famous lines 2 in the De Rerum Natura, where Lucretius is stirred to the praise of Sicily by the mention of her greatest son; and ends by saying that that fair island, 'rich in all good things, guarded by large force of men, yet seems to have held within it nothing more glorious than this man.'3 Again, where Lucretius is speaking of the dream in which his ruling thought took a terrible form,-in which he saw the atom-streams pouring along in tumultuous career, wrecking order, and re-ordering chaos,

That was mine, my dream, I knew itOf and belonging to me, as the dog With inward yelp and restless forefoot plies His function of the woodland :

it is perhaps just possible to read this without perceiving that the comparison intended is with a dog hunting in dreams; but certainly no one will miss the point, or fail to see what 'restless forefoot' means, who remembers that exactly the same idea, the uneasy movement of a dog's feet when he is dreaming, is brought in by Lucretius himself, where he is proving that the visions of sleep merely reflect the waking instincts:

Venantumque canes in molli saepe quiete
Iactant crura tamen subito.4

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horror which is weighing upon him, and then asks,

But who was he, that in the garden snared
Picus and Faunus, rustic Gods?

the question is scarcely likely to be answered or understood by any one who does not know the story in Ovid's Fasti, how King Numa caught Picus and Faunus drowsy with wine in the Aventine grove, made them his prisoners, and drew from them the secret of averting Jove's angry lightnings. So that Lucretius. appears to mean: 'I cannot throw off this horror; but perhaps Picus and Faunus-if I can only catch them, as Numa did-will teach me how to appease the gods.'

1

Such an allusion as this is a riddle which not many people will think of attempting to guess, and it is quite unnecessary that they should; it is enough to feel that, precisely because the allusion is obscure, it is natural in a soliloquy; for a man who is really talking to himself does not take pains to be invariably lucid for the benefit of possible listeners.

The De Rerum Natura leaves with any one who reads it attentively a distinct impression of the personality of Lucretius; for he has no conventional literary reserve, no hesitation about speaking of himself when it is natural to do so. He has the concentrated earnestness of a prophet, who feels only that he has a message, and must speak it; whose self-oblivion is above the fear of self-assertion. Now, Mr. Tennyson seems to us to have been very successful in reproducing that impression of Lucretius which is derived from the Latin poem, and to have effected this, not by direct imitation or allusion; not by the painting of particular striking traits; but by a force of imaginative sympathy which seizes and represents their result. Thus in Mr. Tennyson's poem, as in the De Rerum Natura, one feels intinctively that Lucretius is lonely; lonely not merely in the sense directly indicated,

1Ovid, Fast. iii. 285–328.

a man of retired, studious habits; but one who stands apart from the life of his day, isolated in his attachment to old traditions; with too little flexibility or worldly wisdom to make his way in society, or to be in any sense popular. In the De Rerum Natura this solitariness makes itself felt, primarily and throughout, in a certain sustained intensity, suggestive of an effort carried through in unbroken seclusion; frequently in mannerisms or quaintnesses, such as grow upon a self-wrapt man, unused to adjust himself by external standards. Mr. Tennyson conveys to us this intensity of Lucretius, and performs the difficult task of translating it into a morbid phase; it is shewn labouring and throbbing under a dead weight of oppression; we feel that the agony described is not that of a cold mind stung, but of an eager mind baffled. The same tone of character,ardent, self-absorbed, out of relation with usage,-is further hinted by certain peculiarities of style and language; but these direct imitations are restrained, and in each case make some distinct addition to the total effect. For instance, when Lucretius states incidentally some doctrine which is not to be discussed at present, he sometimes gives the most obvious argument for it in a short parenthesis,muttered over to himself, as it were, to fortify his own conviction; and this sometimes suggests very picturesquely his habit of lonely selfconverse. This characteristic is given in Mr. Tennyson's poem, in the passage where Lucretius touches on the story of the Sun having been wroth for the slaughter of his sacred oxen, whose flesh moved and moaned on the spit as the comrades of Odysseus were preparing to eat them;1 the Sun, he says

never sware, Unless his wrath were wreak'd on wretched man,

That he would only shine among the dead Hereafter (tales! for never yet on earth Could dead flesh creep, or bits of roasting ox Moan round the spit, nor knows he what he .)

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1 Odyssey xii. 374-396.

Another Lucretian trait is the love for certain favourite words, phrases, epithets, which are repeated again and again. In this way his regular epithet for verse is " sweet,""-and this, with him, is by no means a platitude, but has a special meaning, which is explained by a passage in his poem.1 He says there that, as doctors tempt children to take a dose of wormwood by smearing the edge of the cup with honey, so he has resolved to set forth his unpalatable doctrine 'in sweet-toned Pierian verse, and o'erlay it, as it were, with the pleasant honey of the Muses.' When Mr. Tennyson makes Lucretius speak of

shutting reasons up in rhythm, Or Heliconian honey in living words, To make a truth less harsh,

-this is a true expression of that affectionate, simple-hearted purpose, which avows itself so often in the De Rerum Natura, and is so touching in its guileless pride of cunning,-the purpose to use his very choicest art in coaxing Memmius to take the physic of the soul

Lucretius probably died in 54 B.C. The last years of his life, the years occupied with his unfinished poem, were virtually the last of the Roman republic. Several causes were hastening the disruption of the old framework, and leading up to the rule of one man under republican forms. Meanwhile there was a conservative party, republican in the old sense, with its strength in the Senate; and the so-called popular party, out of which the Dictator was soon to come. It is not doubtful with which side Lucretius sympathized, so far as he troubled himself with politics at all. All his instincts were those of the old Commonwealth, when men lived simply, and worked hard at things in which they believed. If general sensuality and insincerity are always signs of national decay, in the case of Rome they were especially ominous, since hardy simplicity and earnestness were the very groundwork of the normal Roman character. A man of the tem

1 Lucr. ii. 936 ff.

perament of Lucretius would feel this; and from his seclusion would look out on politics, not, perhaps, with much foresight, or with defined anxieties; but with vague uneasiness for an order of things dear and venerable to him, and with nervous dependence on those whom he believed able to save it. At At the beginning of the De Rerum Natura1 he speaks of himself as writing 'patriai tempore iniquo,' and amid troubles which hindered him from working with a quiet mind. This solicitude for the republic is thrice marked in Mr. Tennyson's poem in the dream, springing from a boyish memory of Sulla's massacres nearly thirty years before; in the prayer of Venus to restrain Mars from bloodshed; and very finely in the passage where the spirit of Lucretius rises against the thought that the senses should enslave him,-namesake of her whose blood was given for Roman honour :

And from it sprang the Commonwealth, which breaks

As I am breaking now!

Anxiety for his country was one of the troubles for which Lucretius found some solace in his Epicurean creed. The religion of equanimity had a sort of prescriptive right to console political despair; in its youth it had been the popular creed at Athens in the days of vassalage the days of vassalage to Macedon; and now it was popular with intelligent men in the days when the Roman republic was seen to be breaking up. At a time when men felt that public affairs were in a thoroughly bad state, and that they were powerless to mend it, when they could not see that any career of high activity was open to them, or that they could possibly influence the largest interests of society, they felt the attraction of a philosophy which said of such evils, first, that they could not be helped; and next, that they did not greatly matter. But Lucretius approached Epicureanism in another spirit, and held it with a very different grasp, from the

1 Lucr. i. 41.

weary public men or men of society who accepted it as a refuge from practical life. He held it because he believed devoutly that Epicurus had really solved the problem of life; his faith rested primarily on a scientific basis; for him, it was accident,-tending, no doubt, to deepen his conviction, but still an accident, that this faith supplied the kind of fortitude specially needed in his own day. Earnestness and honesty were not, however, the only qualities which distinguished the philosophy of Lucretius from much that passed under the same name. In teaching or hinting the art, so important to the higher Epicureanism, of drawing pleasure from simple things, it had a peculiar and wonderful charm, due to a special characteristic of Lucretius, a characteristic rather rare in antiquity; his feeling for the life and beauty of nature. This sense in him had many moods: sometimes it is roused into sonorous verse by sights of grandeur or terror, by storm or volcano; sometimes it is in sympathy with the farstretching silence of Italian uplands, the 'otia dia pastorum ;' but especially it delights in the happy animation of fields and woods, in the exuberant life of creatures who enjoy the present, and have no care for the future. There is a peculiar buoyancy and blitheness in the rhythm of Lucretius when he speaks of such things; a tone different enough from the mournful majesty of the cadences which unfold his main argument, his protest against the fear of death, against the hope of a life to come. The brisk, joyous movement of these occasional passages is very happily caught in Mr. Tennyson's lines, where Lucretius speaks of the time

when light is large and lambs are glad, Nosing the mother's udder, and the bird Makes his heart voice amid a blaze of flowers.

This instinct of sympathy with the aspects of external nature, this power of being stirred, soothed, or gladdened by them, was especially Italian. Greek, of course, was keenly alive to outward impressions; but his feeling for nature was sensuous, not ideal; he

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enjoyed spring or summer because it was cheerful, and stimulated his sense of life; not because it was beautiful, and set him thinking about its own life. A grave, meditative pleasure in scenery, or in common country sights and sounds, came more easily to the Italian, by instinct a farmer, not a man of cities; and where the capacity for this pleasure was large and free, it might evidently give a calmer, more independent contentedness than any round of artificial pastimes, however refined, which the Greek Epicurean could devise. Epicureanism was a Greek product, matured and long monopolised by Greeks; but the highest form of it historically known to us, the phase shewn in the De Rerum Natura, grew out of the Italian character.

One reason, perhaps, why this feeling towards nature had comparatively slight hold upon the ancients generally, was this polytheism had a strong hold upon them, from which even the sceptics did not escape; and polytheism meant the analysing of nature into a number of persons, each ministrant to a separate province of human needs and wishes. The sympathy of nature with man was, as it were, drawn off into the gods; the moods of the sea became the humours of Poseidon; the way in which mountain solitudes affected the imagination was by suggesting Pan and the Ŏreads. This fact, of course, goes only a little way towards explaining the difference between the ancient and the modern feeling for scenery; a difference due, more perhaps than to any other single cause, to medieval thought having been so long steeped in a tender, melancholy

religious sentiment, favourable to reverie. But, in so far as the impulse to meditate on natural beauty was felt in pagan antiquity, the presence of the gods must have tended to thwart it; their forms must have intercepted and distracted the gaze. There is a vivid, easilystartled fancy to which forest silence or the air of the hills seems to tremble with a mystery of haunting deities; that Greek fancy which thrilled with a presage of apparition on the island shore where dance-loving Pan walks

beside the waves,' or in the shadows of the grotto on the Delphian steep,

κοίλη, φίλορνις, δαιμόνων ἀναστροφή Beneath whose wing-swept dome immortals stray:

but it is very different from the grave imagination which enters into the secret meaning of beautiful places, which likes to pause and rest upon them, penetrated with their charm, and moved by it to an indefinable yearning which seems half regret, half hope, a mood which can almost yield, as to music,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair. Now, it was in this earnest, thoughtful way that Lucretius was accustomed to regard nature; and it seems singular and distinctive of him, that in a temperament so grave, so averse from mere aesthetic dreaming, so unused to a play of sensuous fancy, there should at the same time have lived a feeling, vivid, flexible, artistic, for the Greek poetry of the gods. He rejected the myths that spoke of them; but no one understood the spirit of the myths better, to no one were their outlines clearer. Take, for instance, the passage about Mars in the invocation of Venus,

In gremium qui saepe tuum se Peicit, aeterno devictus vulnere amoris, Atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta Pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus, Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore :1 this picture has nothing of the woodenness, the pompous conventionality, into which most of the Latin poets (with the signal exception of Catullus) are apt to fall, when they deal with the commonplaces of the popular faith; as far as

the thought is concerned, it might have come from a Greek of the time of Pericles, to whom the gods were very real persons; whose idea of them was in harmony with all the beauty of form, and bright with the glow, amid which he lived. Again, in the passage where Lucretius describes the Phrygian pageant of Cybele,-though the Roman sympathy with pomp, the triumphal instinct, is perhaps uppermost,—a true Greek feeling comes out, where it is

1 Lucr. i. 33 ff.

said that the Idaean Mother, as she is borne in procession through great cities—

Munificat tacita mortales muta salute: 1
Gives mute largess of benison to men.

It would be easy to multiply instances of the force and truth with which Lucretius realized what was beautiful or stately in the popular religion which he had renounced. It is one of his characteristics, and demanded recognition in any portrait of him which was to be historically true. Mr. Tennyson has expressed it in the apostrophe of Lucretius to the Sun :

Nor knows he what he sees, King of the East altho' he seem, and girt With song and flame and fragrance, slowly

lifts

His golden feet on those empurpled stairs
That climb into the windy halls of heaven.

This image of the sun moving upward in his worshipped majesty has a specially Roman stateliness; the lines which follow touch a feeling, or rather the disappointment of a feeling, more distinctively Greek; they speak of the sun looking down with the same blank splendour on all phases of human hope or suffering, on the new-born, on old age and death; never sympathizing with what he sees, never pausing in his -as Ajax in Sophocles asks him to pause, checking his golden rein' over Telamon's sorrow-stricken home in Salamis. As for the Epicurean gods,

who haunt

course,

The lucid interspace of world and world,— tranquil, immortal, careless of men,Lucretius accepted the dogma of their existence as he found it in Epicurus: My master held

That gods there are, since all men so believe. This is the only ground assigned by Lucretius himself for the belief; viz., that all men have seen, either in waking hours or (oftener) in dreams, forms of more than human stature, beauty, and might; and have rightly inferred the existence of beings, immortal, because for ever haunting men, and blessed, because greatly strong; though it was

1 Lucr. ii. 626.

wrong to infer that these beings trouble themselves about men.1 But Lucretius, like Epicurus, is silent on the difficulties of reconciling such a belief with the atomic theory. Did the gods exist from all eternity, or did they come into existence? Are they to exist for ever, or to pass away when the atoms, which have formed, shall dissolve all else that man knows of? There is, indeed, in the De Rerum Natura an unfulfilled promise to explain more fully the nature of the sphere in which these divine beings move; but the grand difficulty of their existence is never even touched. It is strange if Lucretius did not feel the difficulty,-if doubts and misgivings did not sometimes visit him; they may have been silenced, partly by loyalty to his master, partly by a poet's sympathy with the grandeur of immortal

sinecurism. It seems to us one of the finest touches in Mr. Tennyson's poem, that it represents these doubts as starting up just when the laws of the man's inner life have been unsettled, the old balance of his faculties disturbed. Anhitherto so strongly self-ruled; the faith archy begins to reign in the nature which love and reverence for a great master had consecrated, and around which subtle fancies have long been suffered to twine, is rudely shaken; the intellect, at the very moment that it is tottering, and while but half conscious of its own treason, is insurgent:

The Gods! the Gods!
If all be atoms, how then should the Gods
Being atomic not be dissoluble,
Not follow the great law?

But, for Lucretius, the loss of this part of his faith was only a sentimental loss; it could not add to the reality of his anguish, or furnish a distinct motive for desiring death. He dies because he has lost the tranquil mind which alone, in his belief, can make life tolerable :

But now it seems some unseen monster lays
His vast and filthy hands upon my will,
Wrenching it backward into his, and spoils
My bliss in being.

1 Lucr. v. 1161-1193. 2 Lucr. v. 155.

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