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, And the son of man 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,1 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— ... as Some images there are spontaneously generated and formed by themselves in this lower heaven which is called air: 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 Again, speaking of the effect of habit in weakening wonder, he has a fine passage How splendid would be, when seen for the first time, the clear pure colour of the open sky, and what it contains, the wandering stars everywhere, and the moon and the sun dazzling above all.. which now man's satiated eye never cares to look up at.1 Even the cultivated landscape of Italy had something of the charm for this stern philosopher which it held over the gracious-souled Vergil. He tells how mankind began to pass from the state of savagery until land cultivation began They would force the forests to recede daily higher up the mountain side and yield the ground below to culture, so that on upland and plain they might have meadows, tanks, streamlets, cornfields, and rejoicing vineyards; and they allowed a graygreen strip of olives to run between as a bound-mark stretching over hillock and valley and level: as you now may see, how all the space that the countrymen decorate with sweet fruit-trees in rows, and all round wall it in by fair plantations, is mapped out with a varied beauty.2 But I must put a limit to illustrations of this great landscape painter, which might easily be multiplied tenfold, with one 1 suspicito caeli clarum purumque colorem, . quam tibi iam nemo, fessus satiate videndi, 2 inque dies magis in montem succedere silvas How characteristic still of the Tuscan landscape is this picture! II, 1030. V, 1370. passage more, worthy perhaps to be called Lucretius' Hymn to Nature We are all sprung from heavenly seed: all have that same father, by whom mother earth rendered fruitful, when she has received the rainfall, bears goodly crops and happy trees and the race of man,-bearing also all kinds of brute creatures; then supplying the food upon which all are nourished, and lead dear life and continue their race whence with good cause she has gained the name Mother.1 Despite the deserts of weary argument and guess-work into which the Epicurean philosophy leads Lucretius, despite the blankness of his atomic creed, the iron heaven of fatalism always above him, his poetry has a fascination unique in literature ancient or modern. May we not truly say, that by no poet has sheer didactic material, and that mainly of plain physical order, been so permeated and vitalised by the might of genius? His genius and he would not have disdained the comparison -is like that electric flame which can subdue platinum. As it were, indeed, despite himself, he obeys the common lawonce a poet always a poet. The examples I have given in prose, however feebly representing the solemn and determined march of his verses, like the tramp of the Roman legion advancing to battle, will, I would hope, have also displayed his vast power in the region of landscape; the freshness and force of lines, which once read, can scarce be forgotten. The attitude of Vergil (70-19 B.C.) toward his great predecessor, I have already noted as one of blended admiration and protest. It was doubtless the latter feeling-that of a certain opposition in religion and in philosophy—which led 1 caelesti sumus omnes semine oriundi ; omnibus ille idem pater est, unde alma liquentis feta parit nitidas fruges arbustaque laeta et genus humanum, parit omnia saecla ferarum, II, 991. |