Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/92

OVID the superficial aspects of life, yet he has added no great thoughts or maxims to the moral or intellectual heritage of the world. With a more versatile dramatic faculty than any of his countrymen, he has created no great character, comparable either with the grand impersonations of Greek tragedy, or with the Dido and Turnus of Virgil. He has both the psychological power of reading and the rhetorical power of expressing passion and emotion of different kinds ; but he has not a genuine and consistent sense of human greatness or heroism. He represents with impartial sympathy the noble heart of Laodamia and the unhallowed lust of Myrrha. His spirit seems thoroughly ironical or indifferent in regard to the higher ideals or graver convic tions of men. But with all the laxity and levity of his character he must have had qualities which made him, if not much esteemed, yet much liked in his own day, and which have perpetuated themselves in the genial amiability of his writings. He claims for himself two social virtues, highly prized by the Romans, " fides " and " candor," the quali ties of social honour and kindly sincerity, the qualities which made a man a pleasant member of society and a friend who might be relied on in the ordinary relations of life. There is no indication of anything base, anything ungenerous, or anything morose in his relations to others. The literary quality of " candor," the generous appreciation of all sorts of excellence, he possesses in a remarkable degree. He heartily admires everything in the literature of the past, Greek or Roman, that had any merit. In him more than in a..y of the other Augustan poets we find words of admiration more than once applied to the rude genius of Ennius and the high spirit of Accius. It is by him, not by Virgil or Horace, that Lucretius is first named and the sublimity of his genius is first acknowledged. The image of Catullus that most haunts the imagination is that of the poet who died so early .... " hedera juvenalia cinctus Tempora," as he is represented by Ovid coming to meet the shade of the young Tibullus in Elysium. To his own contempor aries, known and unknown to fame, he is as liberal in his words of recognition. He enjoyed society too in a thoroughly amiable and unenvious spirit. He lived on a friendly footing with a large circle of men of letters, poets, critics, grammarians, c., but he showed none of that sense of superiority which is manifest in Horace s estimate of the " tribes of grammarians " and the poetasters of his day. Like Horace, too, he courted the society of the great, and probably he did not maintain an equally independent attitude towards it ; but unlike Horace he expresses no contempt for the profane world outside. With his gifts of irony and knowledge of the world one might have expected him to be the social satirist of the later phase of the Augustan age. But he wanted the censorious and critical temper necessary for a social, and the admixture of gall in his disposition necessary for a successful personal satirist. " Candidas a salibus suflusis felle rcfugi" is a claim on our regard which he is fully justified in making. In his exile, and in imitation of his model Callimachus, he did retaliate on one enemy and persistent detractor; but the Ibis is a satire more remarkable for irrelevant learning than for epigrammatic sting. But his chief personal endowment was his vivacity, and his keen interest in and enjoyment of life. He had no grain of discontent in his composition. He had no regrets for an ideal past nor longings for an imaginary future. The age in which his lot was cast was, as he tells us, that in which more than any other he would have wished to live. 1 1 Ars Amatoria, iii. 121, &c. He is its most gifted representative, but he does not rise above it. The great object of his art was to amuse and delight it by the vivid picture he presented of its actual fashions and pleasures, and by creating a literature of romance which reflected these fashions and pleasures, and which could stimulate the curiosity arid fascinate the fancy of a society too idle and luxurious for serious intellectual effort. The sympathy which he felt with the love adven tures and intrigues of his contemporaries, to which he probably owed his fall, quickened his creative power to the composition of the Heroides and the romantic tales of the Metamorphoses. Catullus, by his force of concentration, makes the actual life of his age more immediately present; but none of the Roman poets can people a purely imaginary world with such spontaneous fertility of fancy as Ovid. In heart and mind he is inferior to Lucretius and Catullus, to Virgil and Horace, perhaps to Tibullus and Propertius ; but in the power and range of imaginative vision he is surpassed by no ancient and by few modern poets. This power of vision is the counterpart of his lively sensuous nature. He has a keener eye for the apprehension of out ward beauty, for the life and colour and forms of nature, than any Roman or perhaps than any Greek poet. This power, acting upon the wealth of his varied reading, gathered with eager curiosity and received into a singu larly retentive mind, has enabled him to body forth scenes of the most varied and picturesque beauty in all the lands of Europe and Asia famous in ancient song and story. If his tragedy the Medea, highly praised by ancient critics, had been preserved, we should have been able to judge whether Roman art was capable of producing a great drama. In many of the Heroides, and in several speeches attributed to his imaginary personages, he gives evidence of true dramatic creativeness. Catullus, in his Ariadne and his Attis, has given a voice to deeper and more powerful feeling, and he presents an idyllic picture of the heroic age with a purer charm. But the range and variety of his art were limited by the shortness as well as the turmoil of his life. Catullus is unsurpassed as the author of an epic idyll. Ovid is not idyllic in his art, or whatever there is of idyllic in it is lost in the rapid movement of his narrative. But he is one, among the poets of all times, who can imagine a story with most vivid inventiveness and tell it with most unflagging animation. An ideal world, poetical and supernatural, but never fantastic or grotesque, of beings rich with the beauty and fulness of youth, play ing their part in scenes of picturesque beauty, is brought before us in verse and diction of apparently inexhaustible resource and unimpeded flow, partly created or rising up spontaneously for the occasion, partly borrowed boldly and freely from all his predecessors in Latin poetry, but always full of genuine life and movement. The faults of his verse and diction are those which arise from the vitality of his temperament, too facile a flow, too great exuber ance of illustration. He has as little sense of the need of severe restraint in his art as in his life. He is not without mannerism, but he is quite unaffected, and, however far short he might fall of the highest excellence of verse or style, it was not possible for him to be rough or harsh, dull or obscure. As regards the school of art to which he belongs, he may be described as the most brilliant representative of Roman Alexandrinism. The latter half of the Augustan age was, in its social and intellectual aspects, more like the Alexandrian age than any other era of antiquity. The Alexandrian age was like the Augustan, one of refine ment and luxury, of outward magnificence and literary dilettanteism flourishing under the fostering influence of an absolute monarchy. Poetry was the only important branch of literature cultivated, and the chief subjects of