Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/93

OVID 83 poetry were mythological tales, various phases of the passion of love, the popular aspects of science, and some aspects of the beauty of nature. These, too, were the chief subjects of the later Augustan poetry. The higher feelings and ideas which found expression in the poetry of Virgil, Horace, Varius, and the writers of an older generation no longer acted on the Roman world. It was to the private tastes and pleasures of individuals and society that Roman Alexandrinism had appealed both in the poetry of Catullus, Cinna, Calvus, &c., and in that of Gallus, Tibullus, and Propertius. Ovid was the last of this school of writers ; he profited at the very entrance on his poetical career by the artistic accomplishment in form, metre, and diction which had been gained by the slow labours of his predecessors ; his fancy was much more active and brilliant than that of any of them ; and his spirit was more unreservedly satisfied with the condi tions imposed both by the art to which he devoted him self and the political and social circumstances by which he was surrounded. Like all his countrymen, he wanted power to create a new form of art and a new vehicle of expression. But if he could have foreseen his future fame his literary ambition would have been completely satisfied by the consciousness that he had not only immeasurably surpassed, but had, for all after time, practically superseded his Greek models. He has confined himself to two vehicles of expression the elegiac metre and the hexameter. In the first the great mass of his poetry is written, the Heroides, the Amores, the Ars Amatoria, the Remedia Amoris, the Fasti, the Tristia, the Ex Ponto, the Ibis, the Medicamina Faciei ; in the hexameter we have the work which he regarded as that on which his hope of immor tality was based, the Metamorphoses, and a fragment of a didactic poem written in the style of the Alexandrians, probably with the mere desire to kill time in the place of his exile, called the Halieutica. Of the first metre he is the acknowledged master. He brought it to its highest perfection, and all the immense mass of elegiac verse published and written in modern times has merely endeavoured to reproduce the echo of his rhythm and manner. In the direct expression and illustration of feel ing, his elegiac metre has much more ease, vivacity, and sparkle than that of any of his predecessors, while he alone has communicated to it, without altering its essential characteristic of recurrent and regular pauses, a fluidity and rapidity of movement which makes it an admirable vehicle for tales of pathetic and picturesque interest. It was impossible for him to give to the hexameter a greater perfection than it had already attained, but he imparted to it also a new character, wanting indeed the weight, and majesty, and intricate harmonies of Virgil, but rapid, varied, animated, and in complete accord with the swift, versatile, and fervid movement of his imagination. One other proof he gave of his irrepressible energy and vitality by composing, during his exile, a poem in the Gothic language, in praise of Augustus, the loss of which, what ever it may have been to literature, is one much to be regretted in the interests of philological science. Ovid would, in any previous century since the revival of classical studies, have been regarded as a more important representative of ancient life and feeling, and as a greater poet, than he is in the present day. During the earlier period of this revival, the beauty and refinement of ancient literature, and of the life to which that literature is the key, were better appreciated than their moral and intellectual greatness. As the representative writer of an age of great material civilization and luxury, he gained the attention of a time and a class struggling towards a similar civilization and animated by the same love of pleasure. It was in his writings that the world of romance and wonder, created by the early Greek imagination, was first revealed to the modern world. The vivid, sensuous fancy through which he reproduced the tales and beings of mythology, as well as the transparent lucidity, the unfailing liveliness, the ease and directness of the medium through which this is done, made his works the most accessible and among the most attractive of the recovered treasures of antiquity. His in fluence was first felt in the literature of the Italian Renaissance. But in the most creative periods of English literature he seems to have been more read than any other ancient poet, not even except ing Virgil ; and it was on the most creative minds, such as those of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, 1 Milton, and Dryden, that he acted most powerfully. The continuance of his influence is equally unmistakable during the classical era of Addison and Pope. The most successful Latin poetry of modern times has been written in imitation of him ; and the accomplishment by which the faculty of literary composition and the feeling for ancient Roman culture were most developed in the great schools of England and France was the writing of Ovidian elegiacs. His works gave also a powerful stimulus and supplied abundant materials to the great painters who flourished during and immediately subsequent to the Renaissance. The mythological figures and landscapes which crowd the great galleries of Europe reproduce on canvas the forms, life, colour, and spirit which first were clothed in words and metre in his Elegies and Metamorphoses. But, whatever charm individual readers of ancient literature may still find in him, no one would claim for him anything like the same influence on literature, art, and education in the present day as he formerly enjoyed. Judged by the attention given to their works by professional scholars and also in current criticism, not only Virgil and Horace, but Lucretius and Catullus, appear to be more in esteem than Ovid. This may perhaps be due as much to a loss in imagination as to a gain in critical power. Although the spirit of antiquity is better understood now than it was in the 16th and 17th centuries, yet in the capacity of appreciating works of brilliant fancy we can claim no superiority over the centuries which produced Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, nor over those which produced the great Italian, French, and Flemish painters. Still, whatever be the cause of the change in taste, Ovid is not one of those poets who seem to have much to teach us, or much power to move and interest us now. Perhaps the very liveliness and clearness of his style and manner, which made him the most accessible of ancient authors in times of less exact learning, have tended to deaden curiosity about him in the present day. There is no deep or recondite meaning to be extracted from him. The sensuous and more superficial aspects of the later phase of ancient civilization, of which he is the most brilliant exponent, have much less interest for us than the heroic aspects of its earlier phase, and the spiritual, ethical, and political significance of its maturity. The art which chiefly ministers to pleasure, though it had its place in the great ages of antiquity, had then only a subordinate one ; and it is to that place that it has been relegated by the permanent judgment of the world. It is of that art that Ovid is the chief master, and it is that with which he is identified. There miglit almost seem to be some danger of his falling into the neglect which has deservedly overtaken the authors of the epics of the Flavian era. It is therefore perhaps worth while to indicate some of the grounds on which his works must continue to hold an important place in any comprehensive study of Roman literature or human culture. His first claim on the attention of modern readers is that already indicated the influence which he exercised on the earlier develop ment of modern art and literature. Just as certain Greek poets and literary periods (the Alexandrian for instance) claim attention as much on account of their influence on the development of Roman literature as on their own account, so, if for no other reason, the works of Ovid must always retain an importance, second only to those of Virgil and Horace, as one of the chief media through which the stream of ancient feeling and fancy mingled with the great river of modern literature. He is interesting further as the sole contemporary exponent of the last half of the Augustan age. The whole of that age is a time of which the outward show and the inner spirit are known from the works, not of contemporary historians or prose-writers, but of its poets. The successive phases of feeling and experience through which the world passed during the whole of this critical period of human affairs are revealed in the poetry of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Virgil throws an idealizing and religious halo around the hopes and aspirations of the first rise of the empire. His aim seems to be to bring the new regime into living connexion with the past, not of Rome only but of the civilized world. Horace presents the most complete image of his age in its most various aspects, realistic and ideal. Ovid, in all his earlier writings, reflects the life of the world of wealth and fashion under the influence of the new court. It is a life of material prosperity, splendour, refinement, of frivolity and intrigue, of dilettanteism in literature, of decay in all the nobler energies, of servility and adulation. He is the most characteristic painter such a time could have found. For the continuous study 1 The influence of Ovid on Shakespeare is shown conclusively in the interesting papers on "What Shakespeare learned at School," contributed to Fraser s Magazine (1879, 1880) by Prof. Baynes.