Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/91

OVID 81 other pleasure, was gone. He recalls the memories of the happy days he had spent at Rome ; and the chief relief to the misery of his exile was the receipt of letters from his friends. M. Gaston Boissier says that he left his genius behind him at Rome ; and it is true that the works written in exile have not the brilliant versatility, the buoyant spirit, or the finished art of his earlier writings. They harp eternally on the same theme. All his faults of diffuseness and self-repetition appear in an exaggerated form. But there is the same power of vivid realization and expression, the same power of making his thought, feeling, and situ ation immediately present to the reader. What they lose in art they gain in personal interest. They have, like the letters of Cicero to Atticus, the fascination exercised by those works which have been given to the world under the title of Confessions ; and they are the sincerest expression in literature of the state of mind produced by a unique experience, that of a man, when well advanced in years, but still retaining extraordinary sensibility to pleasure and pain, withdrawn from a most brilliant position in the centre of social and intellectual life and material civiliza tion, and cast upon his own resources in a place and among people affording the dreariest contrast to all that had gratified his eye, heart, and mind through the whole of his previous life. How far these letters and confidences are to be regarded as equally sincere expressions of his affection or admiration for his correspondents is another question, which need not be pressed. Even in those addressed to his wife, in which he might be supposed to pour out his heart naturally, there may perhaps be detected a certain ring of insincerity. He pays her compliments, addresses her in the studied language of gallantry, and compares her to Penelope and Laodamia and the other famous heroines of ancient legend. Had she been a Penelope or a Laodamia she would have accompanied him in his exile, as we learn from Tacitus was done by other wives l in the more evil days of which he wrote the record. There is a note of truer affection in the one letter to his daughter Perilla, of whose genius and beauty he was proud, and who in her tastes and character was more in sympathy with him. This is one of several points of resemblance in the position, feelings, and fortunes of Ovid with one whose career and character were so essen tially different Cicero. He shows a regard for many of his friends, and dependence on their sympathy and apprecia tion, and he recalls with some bitterness the coldness with which some of those in whom he had trusted treated him when his disgrace first overtook him. He was moved by the persistent hostility of one whom he had regarded as a friend to an act of retaliation for which neither his temper nor his genius was adapted, the composition of a lampoon, the Ibis, in imitation of a poem of Callimachus, called by the same name. His affections, like his genius, were diffused widely rather than strongly concentrated, and he seems to have had rather a large circle of intimate acquaintances than any close friends to whom he was attached as Cicero was to Atticus, Horace to Maecenas, Catullus to Calvus and Verannius. He was evidently a man of gentle and genial manners ; and, as his active mind induced him to learn the language of the new people among whom he was thrown, his active interest in life enabled him to gain their regard and various marks of honour. One of the last acts of his literary career was to revise the Fasti and re-edit it with a dedication to Germanicus. The last lines of the Ex Ponto sound like the despairing sigh of a drowning man who had long struggled alone with the waves : Omnia perdidimus, tan turn modo vita rclicta cst Praebeat ut scnsum materiamque mails. " (Shortly after these words were written the poet died, at the 1 " Comitatfc profugos liberos matres, secutre maritos in exilia conjuges" (Tac. , Hist., i. 3). age of sixty-one, in the year 17 A.D., the third year of the reign of Tiberius. The natural temperament of Ovid, as indicated in his writings, has more in common with the suppleness and finesse of the modern Italian than with the strength and direct force of the ancient Roman. That stamp of her own character and understanding which Rome impressed on the genius of those other races, Italian, Celtic, or Iberian, which she incorporated with herself, is fainter in Ovid than in any other great writer. He ostentatiously dis claims the manliness which in the republican times was regarded as the birthright not of Romans only but of the Sabellian races from which he sprung. He is as devoid of dignity in his abandonment to pleasure as in the weak ness with which he meets calamity. He has no depth of serious conviction, no vein of sober reflexion, and is sus tained by no great or elevating purpose. Although the beings of a supernatural world fill a large place in his writings, they appear stripped of all sanctity and mystery. It is difficult to say whether the tone in which the adven tures of the gods and goddesses of mythology are told, or his prayer offered to the gods of heaven and of the sea, when in danger of shipwreck, " Pro superi viridesque dei, quibus aequora curse," implies a kind of half-believing return to the most childish elements of paganism, or is simply one of mocking unbelief. He has absolutely no reverence, and consequently almost alone among the greater poets of Greece or Rome (the " sancti " of Lucretius, the " pii vates " of Virgil) he inspires no reverence in his reader. With all a poet s feeling fcr the life, variety, and subtlety of nature, he has no sense of her mystery and majesty. Though he can give dramatic expression to pathetic emotion, the profound melancholy of Lucretius, the spiritual sadness, half-relieved by dim spiritual hopes, of Virgil, the thoughtful renunciation with which Horace fronts " the cloud of mortal destiny," are states of mind which were seemingly inconceivable by him. Nor is he more capable of sounding the deeper sources of joy than of sorrow. The love which he celebrates is sensual and superficial a matter of vanity as much as of passion. He prefers the piquant attraction of falsehood and fickleness to the charm of truth and constancy. Even where he follows Roman tendencies in his art he per verts them. Didactic poetry has set before itself many false ends in ancient Roman as in modern English litera ture ; but the pedantry of systematic teaching has never been so strangely misapplied, as it never has been so strangely combined with brilliant power of execution, as in the methodical teaching of the art " corrumpere et corrumpi." The Fasti is a work conceived in the prosaic spirit of Roman antiquarianism. But this conception might have been made poetical had it been penetrated by the religious and patriotic spirit in which Virgil treats the origin of ancient ceremonies, or the serious, half mystic spirit in which he accepts the revelations of science. The contrast between the actual trivialities of ancient science and ancient ceremonial, on the one hand, and the new meaning which both were capable of receiving from a reverential treatment, could not be more effectually enforced than by a comparison of passages in the Georgics and ^ Eneid treating the astronomical fancies and religious ceremonies of early ages with the literal definiteness or the light persiflage of the Fasti. These grave defects in strength and gravity of character had an important effect on the artistic result of Ovid s writings. Though he wanted neither diligence, persever ance, nor literary ambition, he seems incapable of conceiv ing a great and serious whole. Though his mind works very actively in the way of observing and reflecting on XV TTT. TT