LUCRETIUS AND THE EVOLUTION IDEA. 169 



to social pleasure, he chose to lead the retired and contemplative life, 

 'i^he Epicurean ethics, which he accepted, produced diverse practical 

 results according to the natures which received it. In shallower 

 natures, like those of Catullus and Horace, it produced an easy-going 

 life of pleasure-seeking; in deeper natures, like Lucretius, Virgil, 

 Epictetus, the same system showed itself in a sincere and strenuous 

 moral life closely akin to that of the Stoics. We may, therefore, accept 

 as historically true and as being well within the suggestions of the 

 poem, the words which Tennyson puts into the mouth of Lucretius: 



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 neighbors 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. 



We discover, moreover, his absolute sincerity and devotion to truth, 

 liis large and reverential conception of the sum of things — the 

 majestas cognita rerum — his high moral purpose and poetic fervor 

 which sustain him throughout a prolonged and difficult achievement at 

 an unusual elevation of thought and passion. As Professor Sellar 

 remarks, he combines in himself the Greek ardor of speculation and 

 the Eoman's firm hold on reality, the theorizing passion of the dawn 

 of science with the minute observation of its meridian. 



So far as we know Lucretius left but one work, the "De Eerum 

 Xatura,' i. e., 'The Constitution of Things,' but that single work will, 

 as Ovid prophesied, preserve the memory of his genius until the world 

 disparts in its final catastrophe. Certainly in all the record of literary 

 effort, the poem is unmatched in at least one respect: it is a closely 

 reasoned system of natural philosophy in verse. Tennyson's 'Two 

 Voices' has been mentioned as like it in the wealth of poesy enlisted to 

 beautify abstruse argument. But the subject-matter of that striking 

 poem is different and yields itself more kindly to poetic treatment; it 

 seems, moreover, to be but a short 'swallow-flight of song' beside the 

 sustained elevation and wide sweep of the ancient master. Lucretius 

 had the example of Empedocles for the poetic form of his treatise, but 

 that alone would not have determined his choice. Two other considera- 

 tions moved him — first, his own poetic impulse, and, second, the wish 

 to make an unfamiliar doctrine attractive; he would overlay it, as he 

 says, with the pleasant honey of the muses. 



But the purpose of the poem is not the emulation of the Sicilian 

 poet-philosopher, nor yet the gratification of his own sense for beauty. 



