30. Lucretius
Although his poem contains no direct revelations concerning himself, there are few writers whose character is more open to the reader than that of Lucretius. More than a philosophical system, more than a picture of the world conceived by Epicurus, the Rerum Natura is a poignant and often painful psychological document. The facts that are definitely known of the poet may be very briefly stated: born, as it would seem, in 95 and dying about 54, he had lived through a period of terror and bloodshed into one of comparative security. He was acquainted with Cicero: a tradition relates that he died by his own hand in madness.
Though it would be foolish to accept Jerome's statement as literal truth, yet here the mythopoetic faculty of ancient criticism has fabled not without discretion. The poem is the work of an unbalanced mind. No reader can have failed to mark the atmosphere of weirdness and terror which, while it does not prevent him from joining hands in one direction with Wordsworth and Milton, allies Lucretius in another with Edgar Allan Poe or Apuleius. The gods are down: dreams, magic, and portents have had their fangs drawn. But the old evil is not banished so far that it cannot continually disturb the peace of the saints. Lucretius must watch and pray lest he enter again into religion. Reason must fight a ceaseless hardly triumphant battle against the old terrors. And even inside the garden of Epicurus we are not safe. How significant is his sudden parenthesis when in the midst of explaining the world's mortality he suddenly turns aside with a hysterical prayer that the awful proof may not even then descend upon them. His account of love, again, is not that of a whole or happy mind: alternating between passages of rich sensuality and brutal satire and intolerable revulsion he reveals a mind torn with overwhelming passions and equally overwhelming disgust. One feels the presence of some great tragedy, some terrible disillusion. Here as elsewhere the Rerum Natura is a photograph of Hell.
It has always been difficult to account for the extraordinary violence of Lucretius's attack on the degrading terrors of religion. If his work had been lost we should have scarcely thought it possible that educated men in the Ciceronian age could entertain such feelings. Probably they did not. We may suppose that Plutarch's reply to the Epicureans gives a truer account of the universal feeling of paganism. With Lucretius, however, to exaggerate the horrors of supernatural dogma and the relief of atheism was partly a tradition inherited from his master, partly a polemical device. But when we have made full allowance for both these reasons, there remains a passionate sincerity in his indictment which can be accounted for only by the sensitive melancholy of an abnormal mind to whom the cold safety of Epicureanism represented a very real and necessary salvation.
Yet Lucretius was not mad: the lucid disposition and sustained power of his work is sufficient proof to the contrary. His moments of noble calm and even of holy ecstasy are not less but more admirable because he has come through fire to find them. Yet even here the old spectres survive, transformed in the light of attainment
His highest joy is an emotional thrill of awe that recalls the nightmare horror of an earlier state. He is still swayed by the majestic force of nature and prostrates himself before the ‘élan vital’, the ‘rerum natura creatrix’, the ‘hominum divumque voluptas’, rising to his highest poetry while he sings of a life for which his mechanism really found no place. One sees that he was ill fitted to be an Epicurean: but the intensity of feeling which drove him for very safety into the garden, preserved his poet's heart even within. As a man he represents a tortured and troubled spirit rising by sheer strength of will above persistent melancholia and fear: as a poet he is an artist who surmounts with all the success possible the difficulties of an abstract subject, a newly-tamed language, and a scarcely naturalized metre. His character excites the strongest feelings of sympathy and admiration. None felt more keenly the burden of mortality, the old ‘weltschmerz’, yet he will seek no solace elsewhere. Annihilation is the cold Nirvana of his system. Hopelessly inadequate as the Epicurean doctrine was to his great tho’ sombre genius, it was a defence against worse evils: his first step out of the garden must be into terror, perhaps into madness. Clinging desperately to the one teacher who seemed to offer peace, he went no further and produced a poem where the earnest devotion of the poet almost ennobles the paltry creed upon which it was lavished.