CHAPTER IV LANDSCAPE IN LUCRETIUS, VERGIL, AND OTHER It may here be useful briefly to compare the general tone of Greek and Latin literature, with their remoteness or kinship to our own, as it will be found to have some bearing upon our special task. In one sense the Greek is nearer to us than any literature dating earlier than the sixteenth century. Iliad and Odyssey, which we may with probability regard as three or four hundred years anterior to the epoch 800 B.C. assigned by Herodotus,1 have such a freshness of feeling, so complete a humanity, a force in drawing character or rendering passion so sheer, direct, and simple, that they speak with us, face to face as it were, even nearer at times than some of our latest poets. Plato, in prose more perfect and finished than any one since has mastered, shows a depth of reflection, a penetrative insight revealing soul to soul, such that we feel it true for all time-in advance, one might almost say, of any to-morrow. Yet in Greek literature at all times we come occasionally upon certain elements which divide it more than the Latin from modern thought and feeling. These elements, strangely alien from us, cropping out suddenly in myth and image, thought and passion, I would venture in some degree to refer 1 The Greeks, having no history or clear tradition of their own past, naturally had not the power to look boldly back, when dating their antiquities: as the modern world has a difficulty in accepting the far-off dates now assigned to Egyptian or Assyrian monuments—not to speak of pre-glacial man, to the fact that, unlike any other Western literatures, the sources of Hellenic art and thought, the long centuries of development, the great previous civilisations, are but faintly known to us. That oriental ideas and beliefs were strongly felt we do know; yet they seem to remain inextricably immanent in the Greek mind, despite the labour and the learning which mythologists have devoted to their special province. It may, however, be feared that a greater bar lies between us and Hellenism, especially during its great period, in the very qualities which give their special charm, their magic, to Greek art and Greek poetry,—the dominant sensitiveness, equally delicate and vivid, of the leading Hellenic races; the inseparable presence in their work of grace, of flexibility; the love, the worship, the deification of beauty. The conquest of the ancient civilisations by the Teutonic races, the consequent infusion, wide and deep, of a temper of mind more gloomily serious than the Greek, while far less sensitive to or fruitful in art,—Christianity, with eye and soul set on the further life, the new interests of physical science, ever enlarging, ever more absorbing,—the mechanical tone and ways of the modern world in every region,-all these things are against art, against fruitful repose, against individuality, in a word, against beauty as the sine qua non, the final end of poetry. It is not meant that these hostile elements can wholly exclude a true initiation into the Hellenic spirit, but they narrow the sphere of its influence, but they are a cloud over the sun. An Athenian of the Periclean age, anywhere in modern civilised lands, would feel the sky as iron above him. In Roman literature, on the other hand, as in the Roman mind and character, we feel ourselves at once in the atmosphere of a sterner morality, of more practical aims, of the Roman gravitas, of the Imperial majesty; yet, at the same time, of a greater homeliness, a profounder passion for country life. The beautiful, however, as such, in their poetry is largely derived, not from unknown sources, but from the Grecian fountains, happily still flowing for those who have the good sense and good taste to frequent them. Though in some manner Greek literature in Byzantium really long survived Roman, yet Rome has inevitably become nearer us than Athens; has influenced us, if less in regard to poetry and beauty, yet more deeply-often far more deeply-in law, politics, ethics. "It will," in fact, "be generally conceded that the ideas and "institutions of modern Europe are derived by more direct "filiation from those of Rome than of Greece." 1 Hence, to turn to our own subject, the expression of Nature which appears in Latin poetry is, on the whole, closer to us than the Greek; it touches the heart more intimately; it has even at last, we shall find, a certain accent as if of romanticism before its time. But the loss of almost all nondramatic Roman verse before Lucretius and Catullus, and the rapid declension of poetry after the fifty years (say 44 B.C.-17 A.D.) of Augustan splendour, greatly limits our field when compared with the many centuries of Greek productivity. Yet a somewhat earlier date supplies one little country vignette. It is found in a fragment of the Oenomaus of the dramatist, L. Attius (born 170 B.C.)— By chance [it was] before Dawn, harbinger of burning rays, when husbandmen pack off the horned creatures from their sleep to the meadow, to cleave the red dew-sprinkled earth with the ploughshare, and turn up the clods from the soft soil.2 The fresh breath of an Italian-of a Devon-daybreak (note the red soil) is truly in these simple rustic lines. Passing now to that splendid outburst above named, among the four first-rate poets of the period-Catullus, Horace, Lucretius, Vergil 3—I shall mainly take the last two for our brief survey. Indeed, this may be called a prescribed and natural order, owing to the peculiar relation of Vergil to Lucretius—a relation, as we shall see, at once of indebtedness and of protest. 1 Merivale, History of the Romans. And we may just note that it is the same in regard to architecture. 2 forte ante Auroram, radiorum ardentum indicem, ut rorulentas terras ferro rufidas proscindant, glebasque arvo ex molli exsuscitent. 3 Why not correct a long-established blunder, and spell the name as he assuredly spelt it—the sound remaining unchanged? The distinct expression of religious sentiment, wonder, and love for Nature on her own account-in these points the Roman landscape poetry is often most clearly contrasted with the Hellenic. How much Lucretius (born c. 100 B.C.) derived from Greek philosophy we scantly know. But at least he revealed to the world Nature as a power omnipresent, creative, regulative of the whole Cosmos-a conception, as Sellar finely remarks,1 which is not so much pantheistic as 66 an unconscious, half-realised theism." To this power, Man, for whom she has no sympathy, must submit; with this only Divine force recognised by the poet our destiny is to struggle. Yet the struggle is itself doomed to fail. Earth is progressively losing her fertility, the destructive powers are gaining superiority over the restorative. The world is preparing for the "single day" which will end all. This profound melancholy, pervading the great poem On the Nature of Things, is doubtless partly due to the convulsed state of Roman politics and the decline of Lucretius' own party, partly to the "blot upon the blood," alluded to by early tradition, and set forth by Tennyson with truly Lucretian intensity of power. But by that tyrannous gloom the vital force of his soul, vivida vis animi (to use his powerful phrase), seems to have been only quickened to the observation of Nature; driving him, one may believe, as his poem sets before us, into wastes and wild woods and caverns-the world of what we call prehistoric man. Yet, meanwhile, the poet's deep sense of a contrasted beauty in Nature never fails, breaking out in many brief hints and unexpected pictorial flashes; all which he rendered "with a clearness of "outline and a startling vividness," in which "he is unrivalled "in antiquity save by Homer."2 Intensity and condensation, these are the notes of his singular genius; akin in these to Archilochus and Pindar, to Tacitus and Dante. I will try to give a few examples. In his opening verses Nature, figured in her creative aspect as Alma Venus, moves through seas and mountains and 1 The Roman Poets of the Republic, to which I am here much indebted. 2 Sellar, ut ante. hurrying rivers and the leafy homes of birds and the green meadows. So, again, a charming vision, not rejecting aid from the mythology which the poet disbelieved, personifies the approach of the "sweet season " in four lovely lines, which remind us of the old English song, Sumer is i-cumen in— Spring is coming and Venus, and her winged herald [Cupido] goes before, whilst, close on the footsteps of Zephyr, Flora, mother of flowers, scatters her blossoms before them, and fills all the path with glorious scents and colours.2 How completely is this in the style of the Italian Renaissance !-the words may indeed have been before the mind of her great artists from Botticelli to Guido.3 With an insight, broad and subtle and at once, he thus paints the cave-dwellers of prehistoric man— Finally, the wanderers would make their dwelling in the familiar woodland haunts of the Nymphs, whence they marked how the running waters slipping over the moistened rocks washed them with liberal overflow, trickling over green mossy beds, while part escaped to break forth over the level plain.1 But the terrible side of Nature-figured as Mavors in the opening lines of the poem-is always also before the soul of Lucretius, when he sets forth those natural aspects which dominated and crushed the early races of mankind— They placed the mansions and temples of the gods in the 1 per maria ac montis fluviosque rapacis frondiferasque domos avium camposque virentis. i. 17 (text of Munro, whose English version has also been 2 it ver et Venus, et Veneris praenuntius ante 3 The editio princeps was printed c. 1473 at Brescia. et partim plano scatere atque erumpere campo. V, 737 v, 948. |
