He may entreat, aspire,He may despair, and she has never heed.She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,Not his desire.
He may entreat, aspire,He may despair, and she has never heed.She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,Not his desire.
He may entreat, aspire,He may despair, and she has never heed.She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,Not his desire.
He may entreat, aspire,
He may despair, and she has never heed.
She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,
Not his desire.
Meredith too sees man, in dread of her, clutching at invisible powers, as Lucretius’s sea-captain in the storm makes vows to the gods. And Meredith’s thought that man rises by ‘spelling at’ her laws is no less Lucretian. But Meredith’s story of Earth is full of hope, like his story of man. It is perpetual advance. With Lucretius it is otherwise.
For the Earth is not only our Mother; she is our tomb (II. 1148 f.). And the eternal energy of creation is not only matched by the eternal energy of dissolution, but here and now is actually yielding ground to it. The Earth, so prolific in her joyous youth, is now like a woman who has ceased to bear, ‘worn out by length of days’ (V. 820 f.). In the whole universe birth and death absolutely balance, the equation of mechanical values is never infringed; the universe has no history, only a continuous substitution of terms. But each living thing has a history, it knows the exultation of onset and the melancholy of decline; and its fear of death is not cancelled by the knowledge that in that very moment, and in consequence of that very fact, some other living thing will be born. And thusLucretius, feeling for our Earth as a being very near to us, and with which the issues of our existence are involved, applies the doctrine to her without shrinking indeed, but not without a human shudder. The Earth had a beginning, and ineluctable reason forces us to conclude that she will have an end, and this not by a gradual evanescence or dispersion, but by a sudden, terrific catastrophe, as in a great earthquake, or world conflagration (V. 95 f.).
And he feels this abrupt extinction of the Earth and its inhabitants to be tragic, notwithstanding that extinction is, by his doctrine, only the condition of creation, and that at the very moment of her ruin, some other earth will be celebrating its glorious birth. Earth has for him a life-history, a biography, and he forgets that she is strictly but a point at which the eternal drift of atoms thickened for a time to a cluster, to be dispersed again. Thus we see how this mechanical system, ardently embraced by a poet, working freely upon him, and itself coloured and transformed by his mind, stirred in him two seemingly opposed kinds of poetic emotion at once: the sublime sense of eternal existence, and the tragic pathos of sudden doom and inexorable passing away.
Hence themelancholythat in Lucretius goes along with an enormous sense of life. To say that he puts the ‘Nevermore’ of romantic sentimentality in the place of that dispassionate ‘give and take’ of mechanics would do wrong to the immense virility which animates every line of this athlete among poets. Of the cheap melancholy of discontent he knows as little as of the cheap satisfaction of complacency, or of that literary melancholy,where the sigh of Horace, or Ronsard, or Herrick, over the passing of roses and all other beautiful things covers a sly diplomatic appeal to the human rosebud to be gathered while still there is time. No, the melancholy of Lucretius is like that of Dürer’s ‘Melancholia,’ the sadness of strong intellect and far-reaching vision as it contemplates the setting of the sun of time and the ebbing of the tides of mortality; or like Wordsworth’s mournful music of dissolution, only to be heard by an ear emancipated from vulgar joys and fears; or like the melancholy of Keats—the veiled goddess who hath her shrine in the very temple of delight—theamari aliquid, in Lucretius’s own yet more pregnant words, which lurks in the very sweetness of the flower.
Thus our ‘scientific poet’ appears in an extraordinary if not unique way to have united the functions and temper and achievement of science and poetry. He ‘knew the causes of things,’ and could set them forth with marvellous precision and resource; and the knowledge filled him with lofty joy as of one standing secure above the welter of doubt and fear in which the mass of men pass their lives. To have reached this serene pinnacle of intellectual security seemed to his greatest follower Virgil a happiness beyond the reach of his own more tender and devout genius, and he commemorated it in splendid verses which Matthew Arnold in our own day applied to Goethe:
And he was happy, if to knowCauses of things, and far belowHis feet to see the lurid flowOf terror and insane distressAnd headlong fate, be happiness.
And he was happy, if to knowCauses of things, and far belowHis feet to see the lurid flowOf terror and insane distressAnd headlong fate, be happiness.
And he was happy, if to knowCauses of things, and far belowHis feet to see the lurid flowOf terror and insane distressAnd headlong fate, be happiness.
And he was happy, if to know
Causes of things, and far below
His feet to see the lurid flow
Of terror and insane distress
And headlong fate, be happiness.
There is, it may be, something that repels us, something slightly inhuman, in this kind of lonely happiness, and Lucretius does little to counteract that impression when he himself compares it, in another famous passage, to the satisfaction of one who watches the struggle of a storm-tost ship from the safe vantage-ground of the shore. Yet Lucretius is far from being the lonely egoist that such a passage might suggest; his poem itself was meant as a helping hand to lift mankind to his own security: he knew what devoted friendship was, and we have pleasant glimpses of him wandering with companions among the mountains,[9]or sharing a rustic meal stretched at ease on the grass by a running brook.[10]Lucretius like his master had no social philosophy, and it is his greatest deficiency as a thinker; but he was not poor in social feeling. His heart went out to men, as a physician, not coldly diagnosing their disease, but eager to cure them.
And so his feeling for Nature, for the universe of things, though rooted in his scientific apprehension, is not bounded by it. He seizes upon the sublime conceptions which his science brought to his view—the permanent substance amid perennial change, the infinity of space and time—and his vivid mind turns these abstractions into the radiant vision of a universe to which the heaven of heavens, as the old poets had conceived it, ‘was but a veil.’ But he went further, and shadowed forth, if half-consciously and in spite of himself, the yet greater poetic thought, of a living power pervading the whole, drawing the elements of being togetherby the might of an all-permeating Love. And thus Lucretius, the culminating expression of the scientific thinking of Democritus and of the gospel of Epicurus, foreshadows Virgil, whom he so deeply influenced, and prophesies faintly but perceptibly of Dante and of Shelley; as his annihilating exposure of the religions founded upon fear insensibly prepared the way for the religions of hope and love.