even his deficiency in critical and reflective faculty, it came as naturally to him to recreate the stories of gods and nymphs, of heroes, or even peasants, of a primitive time, as it came to Scott to recreate, out of his keen interest and his abundant treasures of reading, the romance and human story of the Middle Ages. He had no belief in the supernatural, but it was as vividly present to his fancy as if his reason had accepted it for a reality. Curiosity, not faith, was the source of his inspiration. The interest appealed to is simply the love of the marvellous and the love of the picturesque in human action and in outward scenes. It was by a rapid and orderly succession of new and vivid surface impressions, not, like Lucretius and Virgil, and, though in a much inferior degree, Propertius, by making one deep concentrated impression, that he spoke to his own and to later times. He is more like Horace in the variety of the aspects of life which he presents. But he has none of Horace's ethical quality. He keeps entirely to observation and intuition. Horace tells a story not so much for its own sake as for the lesson it conveys. Ovid seems absolutely unconscious of having any lesson to impart. If any moral may be drawn from his tales, it is not to take the world too seriously. Punishment is meted out, not for offences against duty, good faith, affection, reverence, but for stupidity, austerity, vanity, and ungraciousness. In his absence of reflexion and any kind of ethical feeling, he was true to his own nature; and he probably satisfied the taste of a shallower, if more light-hearted generation than that for which Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace had written. The gaiety of youth was the ideal for which society lived, and Ovid more than any other Latin poet kept alive in him—till his great misfortune-the spirit of youth and gaiety. It is their 'inconsumpta iuventas' that attracts him to the nymphs and youthful heroes of the ages of romance. us Homer's gods, but with a difference. the spirit of Aristophanes or Lucian, but in a light artistic half-belief that he brings them back again, emptied of all majesty and grandeur. There is probably no intentional, or gods and He gives It is not exactly in at least no systematic satire in this; no thought that the things attributed to them are unworthy of the gods in whom the world had believed. He does not ask whether these light lovers among woods and streams, these sharp avengers of slights to their vanity, are the ultimate powers who determine human destiny for good or evil. He rejoices in their youth and vigour and grace, and their free power of ranging over sea and air, and the beautiful places of the earth. Though in no ancient poem do the old gods play a larger part, no work is more irreligious. If the gods of Olympus first assumed their attributes and took their place in the belief of men through the poems of Homer, in the Metamorphoses of Ovid they seem to reappear again divested both of their original majesty and of all the other attributes which the reverence of the wisest of Greek artists and poets had added to their original endowment. The Metamorphoses, while perpetuating the outward forms and many of the tales of the old mythology, must have been more fatal to any belief in a Divine Providence or a spiritual life than the iconoclasm of Lucretius. The feeling of Lucretius in regard to all the symbols and objects of old religious belief is really nearer to that of Virgil than to that of Ovid. The great gods of Ovid are in all the moral attributes of man much more below the average standard of humanity, than the gods and goddesses of Homer are below his human heroes and heroines. The exercise of power to avenge some slight to their dignity is the mode in which they chiefly make their presence felt in the world. The 'semidei,' the Fauns and Nymphs with their human sensibilities and their life fused in the life of Nature, with their favourite haunts, the spring and river-bank, the lonely mountains of Arcadia, the woods and groves, have a charm which does not belong to his representation of the greater gods. His imagination is more at home in their forests than in the celestial spheres. He cannot conceive what calls for reverence or inspires the spirit of awe. He has no sense of mystery, no feeling of anything sacred either in life or above life. Hence his great gods are merely the old elemental powers, animated with the most elementary of human instincts and passions, but vigorous with the fresh and perennial force of the elements, and superadding vigour and grace of movement to the force that comes from Nature. It was the fashion of the times for ambitious poets to take up some of the great subjects of heroic action and adventure, and reproduce them in elaborate epic poems. Thus Ponticus, the friend of Propertius and of Ovid, aspired to tell over again in a Latin epic the story of the war of Thebes: Macer, the friend with whom Ovid travelled, to tell anew 'the tale of Troy divine.' The ambition of Roman writers, both great and small, inclined them to works 'de grande haleine.' Ovid, though professing in his earlier poems the spirit of a trifler, had abundance both of ambition and industry. He lets us know how he contemplated his completed work of the Metamorphoses. He makes for it as strong a claim to immortality as Horace does for his Odes: Quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris He regarded this as the serious work of his life, and in his despair at not having been able to give the finishing touches to it he endeavoured to destroy it, as Virgil for the same reason had endeavoured to destroy the Aeneid. He never regards it, like his Elegies, as mere pastime. He discarded the form and metre of which he was so practised a master, and adopted that which from the time of Ennius had become the recognised metre for all long and ambitious undertakings. In adopting the metre he did not aim, as later epic poets for the most part did, at reproducing the intricate harmonies of Virgil, but gave an entirely new movement to the hexameter, making it a more fitting medium for the buoyancy of his own spirit, and the variety and rapidity with which his imagination worked. Concentration on any single action and group of figures, and the elaboration of a poem according to the rules of epic art, were repugnant to his versatile genius, with its abhorrence of monotony or satiety. His artistic instinct, as well as his natural liveliness, preserved him from the attempt in which so many of his countrymen failed, to make an epic out of some one of the great themes of epic poetry in the past,—a Thebaid, an Achilleid, or a new version of the adventures of the Argonauts. Lucretius, who added a rich endowment of fancy to his great intellectual gifts and the Roman gravity of his temper, had shown his susceptibility to the charm of the old stories. The taste and instinct of Catullus had taught him to paint one or two idealised pictures from the large world of fancy, in the form of epic idylls. Propertius satisfied himself with recalling to the imagination some poetic aspects of some of the many ancient tales of love, by which he might enhance the glory or the misery of his own. Horace used mythology as an artistic embellishment for his graver or lighter admonitions. Ovid conceived a much more ambitious plan. It was to embrace in a long series of tales, bound together by a thread of connexion and yet each complete in itself, the great mass of tales of supernatural agency and heroic adventure, to tell the story of the world from its origin out of Chaos down to his own day, in so far as it was conceived of as the sphere of supernatural agency. The idea which gives unity and continuity to this great mass of traditional fancy at first sight seems too slight and trivial to give coherence to so vast a work. It is the idea of the transformation of human beings by superhuman power into constellations, stones, trees, plants, birds, beasts, serpents, or insects, and in some cases the reverse process, as in the re-creation of the human race from the stones thrown down by Pyrrha, or the creation of the Myrmidons from ants. Thus, much of what is most familiar in ancient legendary story, especially in the border-land between history and fable, does not come within the scope of his work; yet it is wonderful what a mass of incident and adventure, famous in older story and connected with the great heroic families, comes through some incident within the range of his plan, and also how many representations of homely incidents and personages otherwise unknown he is able to work into his poem. He moves from first to last in ла a region of fable and miracle, and yet through all the phases and vicissitudes of this region he makes us feel that we are in the closest contact with human nature, from heroes and heroines of the great princely houses, to peasants and fishermen. He described his subject as 'mutatae formae.' Both the title and the actual subject were apparently suggested by the work of an Alexandrian poet, known as 'Aλλowσeis1. How far he borrowed his materials and methods from that or any other single work it is needless to inquire. But if the Metamorphoses are the result of large reading and a memory of wonderful retentiveness, no work of ancient or modern literature produces the impression of more prodigal invention, of greater ingenuity in varying the methods of telling a story, of keener observation or greater command over all the details of description. Ovid has the liveliest sympathy with the beings of his fancy, and the keenest curiosity about all they do and feel, and the transformations through which they pass; the keenest enjoyment in all that meets their eyes, and all the environment of wood, mountain, sea, and lake with which he surrounds them. This world of romantic adventure and supernatural agency is not represented either as a mere dream of the imagination or as a thing of the past. The same power which had worked so many miracles in the morning of the world, is again, in these later times, made visible in connexion with the central fact and dominant sentiment of the age, the elevation of Augustus to supreme power and divine honours. This sense of a vital connexion between the world of fancy and the world of reality does not indeed pervade the Metamorphoses as it does the Aeneid. There are only the most incidental allusions to the actual life of the present, as where the dwelling of the Sun-god is called the 'alta Palatia caeli,' where the laurel into which Daphne is changed is said to be destined to adorn the brows of Roman generals, or where the amber into which the tears of the sisters of Phaethon are changed is spoken of as being 'nuribus gestanda 1 Parthenius, Virgil's master and the friend of Gallus, had written a work called Μεταμορφώσεις. |