MR. TENNYSON'S DEATH OF LUCRETIUS.

MR. TENNYSON has not chosen an agreeable subject in treating, in the new number of Macmillan's Magazine, the legend which is told of the death of Lucretius ; but he has treated s very disagreeable subject with great force and grandeur, and com- pelled it to yield up a final moral effect almost the opposite of that which the drift of the poem at first suggests. In one respect at least, there never has been any great poet better qualified to deal with Lucretius in a semi-dramatic form than Mr. Tennyson. All his delineations of character, whether ancient or modern, whether they picture Ulysses in Ithaca restlessly yearning once more for travel and cherishing a secret scorn for the tame, domestic virtues of his -son Telemachus, or /Mnone wailing out to Ida the story of her pain, or Arthur and his Knights living, or failing to live, up to the romantic ideal of honour in the medimval world, or the modern literary man sitting dolefully at the Cock in Fleet Street after his pint of port, and musing rather painfully on the half-crown that he -shall have to pay and the want of pence which bothers public men,- -each and all of these pictures Mr. Tennyson paints and cannot help painting in his own rich, allusive, intellectually modern style, as -of one well versed in all the complex perspectives, far horizons, And thronging associations of modern thought. He makes Ulysses, for instance, say,- " For all experience is an arch whore, thro'

Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades For ever and for ever from man's view,"

—surely a most modern Ulysses. Now, of all ancient poets, Lucretius is, intellectually at least, by far the most modern. The description of Epicurus in the opening of Lucretius's great poem is almost in Tennyson's own style. He tells of the bold and invincible nature " whom neither the fame of the gods, nor thunderbolts, nor the sky with its murmur of menace, kept down, but rather the more excited the keen-edged valour of his mind to desire that he might be the first to burst the strait bars of the gates of nature. Thus the fresh-springing force of his courage -carried the day, and he went forth beyond the far-flaming barriers of the world, and traversed the unmeasured whole in thought and leart,"—but no translation of ours can give the allusive colouring and intimate command of intellectual associations which seem to .connect Lucretius and Tennyson :-

" Qu.em nec Tama defim, nec fulmina, nec minitanti

Murmurs compressit co3lum, sod eo magis acres Virtutem irritat animi confringere ut arcta Naturs3 primus portartun claustra cupiret.

Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra Processit longe flammantia mcenia mundi, Atque mane immensum poragravit mente animoque."

The last two fine lines have, to our ears, a most marked analogy -to Tennyson's intellectual style. Indeed, but for the tongue in which it is written, and occasionally the pressure of childish con- ceptions which he could not throw off,—the poetry of Lucretius -reads as if it might almost have been published by some imagina- tive devotee of modern science,—say, some poetic Tyndall of our own days, in the pages of the Fortnightly Review. What is store close to the form, no less than the spirit, of modern contro- wersies than,— " Cagera, qua3 fieri in tennis cceloque tuentar Mortales, pavidis cum pendent mentibua sa3pe Efficient animos humileis formidine divam Depressosque premunt ad terram ; propterea quod Ignorantia causarum conferre deorum Cogit ad imperium nes, et conceders regnum ; Quorum operum causes nulls rations videre Possunt, lime fieri divino numine rental. 2" 'No one can mistake the modern tone,—the modern philosophical tone,—about such lines as these, nor is the imaginative element in Lucretius less modern than the intellectual. When Mr. Tenny- son makes Lucretius say that in his preluding address to Venus he took "That popular name of thine to shadow forth The all-generating powers and genial heat Of Nature, when she strikes through the thick blood Of cattle, and light is large and lambs are glad, Nosing the mother's udder, and the bird Makes his heart voice amid the blaze of flowers ; Which things appear the work of mighty gods,"

he scarcely adopts a more modern, though, undoubtedly, a richer and more overflowing style than Lucretius, in the passage which probably suggested Mr. Tennyson's

"Nam simul ac species patefacta eat yarns diai Et resonate viget genitabilis aura Favoni, Aerie) primmn volucres, te, diva, tuumque, Significant initum, perculsa3 corda tat vi: ludo farm pecudes persultant pabula laeta Et rapidos tranant amneis ; its capta lopore Illecebrisque tuis omnis nature animantum

Te sequitur cupids, qao, quanacme inducers pergis."

There is, we think, then, a special fitness in Mr. Tennyson's attempt to express the intellectual atmosphere of the mind of Lucretius ; for that large and sensitive intellectual superficies of the modern poet's mind which makes him alive at every pore to every breath of modern theory and tendency on natural influences, is in close relation with the state of mind visible in the philosophy of Lucretius, and Mr. Tennyson is far too great an artist to let his own different faith tinge the thoughts which he puts into the ancient poet's mouth.

And the disagreeable legend with regard to the end of Lucre- tius which he has taken for his subject even heightens the artistic force of the picture. The legend is, that the wife (or, perhaps, mistress) of Lucretius, fancying (as Mr. Tennyson suggests, from his undemonstrative coldness, his frequent reveries, and philosophic abstraction) that she had lost his love, gave him some love-potion prepared by a witch, which caused alienation of mind, and ulti- mately suicide. Mr. Tennyson, in some of his finest detail,—quite Shakespearian in its compressed imagery,—supposes that

" the wicked broth Confused the ohmic labour of the blood, And tickling the brute brain within the man's, Made havoek among those tender cells, and checked His power to shape."

(How fine is "the wicked broth," and how imaginatively scientific " confused the chemic labour of the blood "!) The main conception of the poem can at once be inferred. Mr. Tennyson supposes Lucretius haunted by the foul nightmare images which a coarse drug intended to excite appetite would be apt to produce, and distracted between the cold intellectual system which had so long possessed his mind, and the loathsome images called up by artificially stimulated passions. Racked by the torture of these contending forces, humiliated at the loss of his own moral and intellectual dignity, fighting with the grossest form of insanity, and looking for his refuge to the coldest, most impersonal, least helpful of all creeds, he asks,

" Why should I, boastliko as I find myself, Not manlike end myself ?—our privilege— What beast has heart to do it ? And what man, What Roman would be dragged in triumph thus?"

He recalls to himself that he

"bears one name with her

Whose death-blow struck the dateless doom of kings, When, brooking not the Tarquin in her veins, Sho made her blood in sight of Collatine, And all his peers, flushing the guiltless air, Spout from the maiden fountain in her heart."

And if Lucretia " brooked not the Tarquin in her veins," why should he, a devotee of calm Epicurean; philosophy, whose pride it had hitherto been to woo " divine tranquillity," brook the newly inoculated grossness in his veins which was foreign to his true nature and to all his yearnings ? Hence;the suicide.

It will be seen at once that the :subject is not a pleasant one, but it is a grand one, treated with perfect purity and wonderful power. It is this contrast—between the fiercely animal nature of the delirium, and Lucretius's calm theory of the concurrence of atoms as the cause of Nature, and his sublimated view of love as the attractive power pervading the whole universe, which shows itself as much in terminating wars and bringing peace among the nations, as in the new birth of spring and the tender brood of fresh natural beauties,—that the strange and painful power of the poem consists. Lucretius had transfigured Venus into the mild and beneficent prin- ciple of sympathy, of mutual attraction, of new generation, and of the light and joy these bring :—he finds her bringing a loathsome swarm of evil dreams, and oppressing his mind with raging con- flict, instead of filling it with serenity and peace. He had held, again, that a nature at war with itself is no nature,—or, as Mr. Tennyson finely puts it,— " A satyr, a satyr, see— Follows ! but him I proved impossible :

1'wy-natured is no nature ;"

and yet here is a double nature warring in himself, till his reason

fails beneath the shock. He had believed in serenity of soul and contemplative peace as the highest condition of a being capable of knowledge ; yet here was his mind, after reaching the highest point yet obtained, as he believed, by human contemplation, a mere prey to the grossest of earthly compulsions :-

" 0 ye gods !

I know you careless, yet behold to you, From childly wont and ancient use, I call— I thought I lived securely as yourselves,— No lewdness, narrowing envy, monkey spite, No madness of ambition, avarice none ; No larger feast than under plane or pine, With neighbours laid along the grass to take Only such cups as left us friendly-warm, Affirming each his own philosophy,— Nothing to mar the sober majesties Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life.

But now it seems some unseen monster lays His vast and filthy hands upon my will, Wrenching it backwards into his, and spoils My bliss in being."

On the whole, it is a grand poem, which will live with Mr. Ten- nyson's finest creations,—with his "Ulysses,"—with his "Northern Farmer,"—equally different from each, and showing remarkably the wonderful grasp and scope of his genius. The interweaving of calm philosophic theory and a drugged imagination in the poem is -wonderful. The piteous attempts of the thinker to resume his broken train of thought, and to account even for this new and unappre- hended calamity by his former theories, are grandly painted, as when, for instance, be seizes on the accidental variations of volume in a fall of snow, or the variations of density in a crowd of atoms, to account for gross thoughts thronging in on him as they had never done before, in a suddei crowd of base conceptions :—

12 ,cti

"How should the mi except it loved them, clasp

These idols to herself ? Or do they fly, Now thinner, and now thicker, like the flakes In a fall of snow, and so press in, perforce Of multitude, as crowds that in an hour Of civic tumult jam the doors, and bear The keepers down, and throng, their rags and they, The basest, far into that Counoil-Hall Whore sit the best and stateliest of the land?"

We should call it the drift of the poem to show that the most serene and intellectual philosophy, which will not brook even a per- sonal religion as too lowering to the dignity of reason, is apt to be suddenly invaded by the most humiliating assaults from the grossest forces below, and to look to death, in spite of itself, as liberation from nature, instead of a mere change in the natural order of things. Lucretius turns witness against himself that there is something touching the verge of nature which is really beneath nature, and from which he implores release by death ; and the reader there- fore closes this fine poem with a new intensity of conviction that there is also something touching the verge of nature which is really above nature, and to which it is no dream of superstition to hold that he shall gain access by death.