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 "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.1 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. heavens, because through the heavens night and the moon seem to revolve, moon and day and night and the stern constellations of night and the night-roving torches of heaven and flying flames; cloud, sun, rain, snow, winds, lightning, hail, and the rapid rattle, the huge murmurs of threatening thunder.1 Murmura magna minarum—the electric roll seems to pervade the stern, sonorous Latin. But the poet must presently set forth, in the lines that follow, the ghastly moral to which his soul compelled him, imprisoned in the materialistic network of fatalism O miserable race of men, when they ascribed such things to the gods, and coupled them with bitter wrath! what groanings for themselves did they then beget, what wounds for us, what tears for our children's children! 2 The terrors which the aweful spectacle of the skies rouse in the thoughtful mind, he proceeds, are, not the weakness of humanity, but The fear that we may haply find the power of the gods to be unlimited, and able to wheel the white stars in their varied motion, and so to overthrow this universe.3 Compare with this-to anticipate for a moment-the words of the poet David What is man, That Thou art mindful of him, That Thou visitest him? What a gulf is here, between the corrosive gloom of the proud, hopeless Lucretius, and the consoling, animating humility of the rapt theist ! Nothing is more characteristic of Lucretius than the movement which he everywhere impresses on his descriptive scenes: true, in this, both to Homer and to poetry itself, which vindicates its place in landscape against painting, confined to a single moment-nowhere more than in the capacity to render successive situations. His preference, Sellar notes, was for the force and life of Nature, in contrast to mere form and colour. This, doubtless, was one reason for the marked interest which he shows in all the phenomena of cloud and tempest; although another reason we may find in the fact that this region lifted the soul from our small world toward the infinite stellar spaces around from Terra to Mundus. Here he stands alone among classical poets, and in literature (our own, at least), we have to wait for Wordsworth and Shelley before cloud-land is so freely and accurately painted. The first specimen I give may recall Wordsworth's splendid landscape in the Excursion, with its Fantastic pomp of structure without name, In fleecy clouds voluminous enwrapp'd. Lucretius is speaking of the ghost-like shapes cast off from material things, which, in his philosophy, frequent space. Beside them, he says— Some images there are spontaneously generated and formed by themselves in this lower heaven which is called air: . . . as at times we see clouds gather together easily into masses on high, and blot the calm, clear sky-face, fanning the air as they move. Thus often the countenances of Giants are seen flying along and carrying after them a broad shadow: sometimes great 1 Book II. mountains and rocks torn from the mountains advance and pass across the sun, and then a huge creature in its train will drag on other storm-clouds.1 These last grand figures have a parallel in Turner's splendid Ulysses landscape. In similar style (and with similar Turnerlike power) the formation and burst of a thunderstorm is painted in Book vi. 189, and again 256; so deep a fascination had these half chaotic scenes over the poet's mind, unsympathetic in some degree to the Greek devotion to beauty, although perhaps akin to Aeschylus and Pindar. But, in fact, every natural phenomenon seized upon Lucretius with one undying passionate interest—At all such, he says, a certain divine pleasure and shuddering awe possesses me.2 Yet he could also see the beauty of a calmer landscape. Thus we find him painting how a cloud is formed; how The golden morning light of the radiant sun reddens first over the grass, gemmed with dew, and the pools and ever-running rivers exhale a mist as the earth herself at times seems to smoke. And when these mists are all gathered together above, clouds now joining in a body on high, weave a veil below the heaven.3 |