No More Learning

OVID
The gossips at Rome had been busy with
the Art of Love. An apology seemed appro-
priate, and Ovid proceeded cheerfully to re-
cant. He lost no time in so doing. An allusion
to the Parthian expedition as still under way
fixes the date of the Remedia, like that of the
Art of Love, between i b. c. and i a. d. Both
works, therefore, were done within the space
of two years. It is a remarkable achievement,
for though Ovid composed with ease, he must
have spent some time in planning his intri-
cate structures, in elaborating his parodies and
audacities as fast as they occurred to his lively
imagination, and in polishing his first drafts of
verse into the peerless art of its finished form.
The apology, we find somewhat to our sur-
prise, is not to us but to Cupid. Cupid scents
a battle and the poet reassures him that his
object is not to annihilate love, -- in fact he
himself is laboring with a bad attack at the
moment -- but only in case some desperate
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
lover is on the point of suicide, to suggest a
few precepts that may restore his sanity.
Cupid, mollified, puts up his arrows and gives
the work his Imprimatur. So Dr. Ovid, in the
manner of the street-preacher of his day,
gathers youths and maidens about him, to
listen to his message of healing. Come ere it
be too late! Could Phyllis and Dido and even
unhappy Pasiphae have consulted the doctor,
their lives would have been models of felicity
and common sense. Could Helen have come in
time, this same physician would have prevented
the Trojan War! With an invocation to Phoe-
bus the Healer, he writes out his prescriptions.
Begin the cure at once, that is, tomorrow.
Yet even if the disease is well established, call
in the doctor; it may not be too late. Perhaps
he will advise that the fever run its course;
that is well in the more violent cases. Be neither
too fast nor too slow; watch for the psycho-
logical moment! Surely such admonition is
safe, sane and scientific. We are disposed to
trust this expert. Now for the specific cures.
The first and most fatal obstacle to recovery
is too much leisure. So get to work! Go into
politics or law or enlist for service over seas
against the Parthians. Work is the best anti-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
dote for love. Aegisthus was not wholly to
blame for his offence. He was a slacker, true,
and had not joined the troops, but it was just
because Argos was deserted that he devoted his
attention to Agamemnon's wife; there was
nothing else to do! Perhaps your plan for in-
dustry may look towards the country. How
pleasant to see the cattle winding slowly over
the lea, to see trees laden with fruit and sheep
with wool, and, above all, to set out plants with
your own hands. The poet praises country life,
divina gloria ruris, as enthusiastically as Virgil
does in the Georgics or Horace in his epode,
with the underlying strain of light travesty con-
spicuous in the latter poem. But, our physician
adds, do not get a country-place too near to
Rome. Travel abroad. This is bitter medicine,
but efficacious, and far safer than the magic
potion, which he never recommends. In case
the patient cannot get away from town and
can find no engrossing occupation there, he
should apply a psycho-analytical treatment.
Make a list of your darling's imperfections and
rehearse this catalogue constantly.
The more she grabs, the less she is content.
Good-bye, small home, I cannot pay the rent!
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
She swore me oaths and broke whate'er she swore.
All night I've waited at the fast-barred door.
She's tired of me. With me intrigue were sin;
My vulgar rival, with the cash, gets in!
An advanced form of this method is the oppo-
site of the principle laid down in the Art of
Love that the gallant should rename his mis-
tress's defects as though they were virtues; now
he should rename her virtues as though they
were defects.
To ills deflect her virtues, if you can,
And cheat your judgment by this subtle plan.
Obese the buxom, black the brunette call,
And swear the slender has no flesh at all.
Call pert the maiden who is not straight-laced,
And rustic call her, if, perchance, she's chaste.
Really, this cure is so complex that were the
last line quoted by itself, many an expert might
fancy that it was part of the Art of Love and
not of the Remedies.
Thus far, the lover has directed his main
attention to himself. But he should also study
his mistress and plan a new course of action in
his dealings with her. In brief, make her dis-
play her imperfections. If she has no voice,
urge her to sing. If she is gawky, set her to
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
dancing. If her speech is distinguished mainly
by bad grammar, engage her in lengthy con-
versations. If her teeth are uncomely, tell her
funny stories; if her eyes tend to be bleary,
move her to weeping by some tragic tale.
Above all, pay an early morning call, before
she has had time to manufacture a complexion
and array herself in her jewels.
By gems we're captured and the dresser's art;
A girl's own person is her smallest part.
If the lover meets with no success in these
and other attempts, some of them pretty des-
perate, let him turn his attention elsewhere.
Let fire drive out fire! If he needs instructions
in selecting a new mistress, the doctor can take
down his standard work on the Art of Love,
temporarily put on the shelf, and refer him to
Part I, Chapter I, on "How to Find Her. "
Fas est et ab hoste doceri! This, then, may be
the best way:
To quench the thirst that hath your stomach fired
Drink from mid-stream until your thirst hath tired.
The poet now comes, with a special invoca-
tion, to the second main division of his rem-
edies. It corresponds to the section on " How
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
to Keep Her" in the Art of Love. It is now
"How to Keep Her Lost. " Again there are
psychological precepts; again the gallant is in-
structed in the treatment of his former darling.
He should court the crowd, avoid solitude, but
likewise avoid contagious society. Particularly,
he must never protest that all is over. Hate her
not; hate and love are desperately contiguous.
Do not bring suit to recover your presents. Be
well prepared for a sudden meeting with her
again. Wear slouchy clothes. Turn a deaf ear
to her flattery and her tears. Above all, do not
argue with her the justice of your case; do not
give her a chance to argue. Burn her letters
and her pictures; avoid reminiscential scenes.
Lose all your money, if you can. Go not to the
theatre. Read no poetry of the softer sort;
never open your copy of Sappho or Tibullus.
Who can read Gallus and stay cool of heart?
My poems, too, have something of that art!
This were impartiality itself, for the physician
to warn the patient from his publications, --
were there not another class of patients, who
would find something of an advertisement here.
The treatment of your rival is the hardest
part of the cure. Do not think of him, or, if
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
you can, think of him as non-existing! When
you can stand his presence, when you can kiss
him, then you are cured. That is the acid test
of convalescence, that and the ability to walk
past your mistress's front door. Incidentally,
cultivate a proper diet. Eat rue and other brain
food. As to wine:
Drink not at all, or drink to drown your woe.
'Tis dangerous in the middle course to go.
So end the Remedia. The critics who ex-
pected a recantation perhaps have found this
remedy indistinguishable from the disease.
Curiously, though Ovid's patients whom he
gathered about him at the beginning of his
discourse included maidens as well as men, the
precepts are all for the latter. Maidens can
v take care of themselves.
2. The Poet of Transformations
metamorphoses
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forward do contend.
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change. . . .
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past.
SHAKESPEARE
Sed ut unda impellitur unda,
Urgueturque eadem veniens urguetque priorem;
Tempora sic fugiunt pariter, pariterque sequuntur.
Animus tamcn omnia vincit.
OVID
The higher theme which Ovid prophesied at
the end of his Amores had found a partial ex-
pression in his tragedy Medea and in the in-
vention of heroines' love-letters. His youthful
impulse to epic, which had shattered on the
rocks of a conventional subject, still moved
him, and though the reader of Ovid's love-
poetry might gasp at the suggestion that it
would lead easily and naturally into epic, such
is the case. It may also seem strange that Ovid
should turn to mythology for a theme; he had
treated the ancient legends as the invention of
lying bards. Still, he could tell a metamorpho-
sis or two himself, if occasion required. The
Ovidian lover can narrate a whole series of
myths to the swollen stream that bars the way
to his mistress. Myths of divine amours are
useful as "ensamples olde;" the gallant is
most learned in quoting such scripture for his
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
purpose. With each succeeding work, Ovid's
facility in narrative increased. In the Art of
Love, the brilliant rapidity of the incidental
tales could hardly be surpassed. It is not sur-
prising that the poet wished to try his wings
in a longer flight through the same realm. The
spirit of metamorphosis, furthermore, was in-
grained in his nature. He relished nothing
better than to set forth a mood or a situation
with utter seriousness and then blithely to pre-
sent the exact opposite. Shifts, set-backs, dis-
appointments, metamorphoses, are the essence
of life in his world of amorous adventure. It is
also a little world of myth, with Corinna at its
centre. Ovid had hugely enjoyed the role of
creator; he is at once properly sceptical of
poets' lies and confident of his own power to
turn the chaos of brute fact into the cosmos of
poetic reality. He had come to his own in an
epic on metamorphosis.
It is unfortunate that none of the ancient
poems on metamorphosis written before Ovid's
time has come down to us in its complete form.
Various writers had been fascinated with the
theme. Among the Greeks are Nicander and
"Boeus" in the Hellenistic age; among the
Romans is Aemilius Macer, whose poem on the
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
transformations of humans jnto birds Ovid had
heard from the lips of the composer. Could we
today read these and other such works entire,
we should doubtless learn much about Ovid's
procedure and his originality. Even now it is
safe to say that no such metamorphoses as his
had ever been told before.
The backbone of Ovid's narrative is chro-
nology. He professes to record the complete
history of metamorphosis, as Dryden puts it,
Deduc'd from Nature's birth to Caesar's times.
This plan gives at once the full sweep of epic
and, as Augustan epic might demand, allows
for the tucking in of a bit of panegyric. Ni-
cander's arrangement, so far as we can fathom,
was geographical; but Ovid found small prom-
ise of climax in a Baedeker.
He likewise is not
attracted by the traditional arrangement fol-
lowed in handbooks of mythology, like that of
Apollodorus. The latter starts out with chro-
nology, but interrupts his plan almost at once.
He finds himself tracing the history of various
mythological families and has constantly to
begin again. Jupiter is perpetually interfering;
what can the genealogist do with one who be-
comes his own grandfather? The result is a
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
hodge-podge, a "Who's Who Among the
Gods," without an index.
Ovid is not embarrassed with so inclusive a
plan. Not intending a Summa Mythologiae, he
can more neatly present the semblance of a
history and keep his narrative alive. Though a
sober Apollodorus would find him dreadfully
anachronistic at times, he covers such transgres-
sions with a veil of illusion, and never allows
the delight of the reader to turn to criticism.
The number of myths that he manages to tell
in the rolling course of universal metamorphosis
is amazing. As he proceeded with his work,
he was constantly occupied with the amusing
problem of weaving into the texture of meta-
morphosis stories that had nothing to do with
it. For example, the tale of Ceres and Proser-
pine lies, we should imagine, outside his do-
main, but in virtue of its setting and the tales
of magical transformation told by the way and
at the end, the atmosphere of metamorphosis
is undisturbed. In this way, Ovid both pre-
serves his original design and contrives, after
all, a lexicon of the myths, -- the Golden Leg-
end of antiquity. The latest editor of Apollo-
dorus, no mean authority on myths,15 admires
our poet not only for his exuberant fancy but
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
for his learning and his fidelity to his sources.
Ovid has beaten Apollodorus at his own game.
Ovid's predecessors in poems on metamor-
phosis had secured contrast and variety by in-
fusing large amounts of amatory material into
their narrative. Our poet was not slow to com-
ply with such authority. He could also adopt
the epic poet's familiar device of transporting
the action to Olympus now and then. But what
an Olympus it is! His first metamorphoses,--
the evolution of the world from chaos, the
course of the ages from gold to iron, the battle
of the hosts of light and darkness -- are told
in stately and imaginative verse; it is the long-
est passage of uninterrupted sobriety that Ovid
has given us thus far. With Jove, the curtain
rises for another scene. We are introduced to
a thoroughly Augustan heaven, where plebeian
deities occupy the less desirable quarters and
the upper classes reside in what the poet calls
the Palatine of the Sky, with the Milky Way,
the celestial Fifth Avenue, or "Watlinge
strete," leading up to their mansions. Jupiter,
incensed at the impiety of Lycaon, decides to
destroy mankind with his thunderbolts, -- but
no, the fire might spread and ignite Olympus.
A flood would be safer. As the waters cover
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
the earth, the tone of the narrative becomes
sober once more; the verses flow with liquid
smoothness, and now sparkle again with a light
humor, when the poet imagines some of the
consequences of the flood, -- the boatman
gathering in fishes from the tree-tops, the
nymphs of the sea, suddenly finding their do-
main augmented by houses and towns, the
dolphins butting against tree-trunks as they
swim about. Now comes a touch of pathos, as
the bird after long search for dry land
On wearied pinions drops into the sea.
After history starts again with the rock-born
race of mortals, the jovial deities reappear.
Apollo, in the manner of the pastoral swain,
woos Daphne on the run. Jove is smitten with
the charms of Io, hides her beneath a cloud
from the jealous eye of Juno, who melts the
cloud, -- when, presto! Io has been trans-
formed into a heifer. Pan's sweetheart is the
nymph Syrinx, turned to a reed as the enam-
oured deity is about to embrace her. Mercury
tells this story so soothingly, that Argus, set
by Juno to guard the suspicious heifer, drops
asleep and is promptly put to death. Io begins
her long wanderings, which end in Egypt with
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
her new and glorious metamorphosis into a
goddess. Her boy Epaphus, jesting with his
friend Phaethon, denies the latter's claim to
be the offspring of the Sun. Phaethon runs to
his mother, Clymene, who reassures him and
bids him learn the truth for himself from his
father.
He heard her joyfully and bounded forth
Fast Aethiopia and the Indians' land
That lies beneath the stars. Then up the sky
He mounted dauntless to his sire's realm.
We are at the end of the first book, with prom-
ise of some excitement in the continuation of
the tale, -- a device appreciated by Ovid long
before the invention of the serial novel.
It were ungracious to notice all the adven-
tures of the amorous gods who figure in Ovid's
poem. Never was Aristotle's dictum better jus-
tified that the persons of comedy are worse
than those in every-day life. Jupiter is easily
the protagonist, smitten with each fair face and
thwarted by Nemesis in the form of Juno. But
nothing daunts him. He espies the beautiful
huntress Callisto and exclaims:
My spouse will know not of these stolen sweets,
Or, if she know, the sweets are worth the scolding.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Phoebus and Mercury are worthy seconds to
Jove. The messenger of the gods, who in this
poem is invariably sent on some errand of
gallantry, has many a chance to pick a damsel
for himself. Fresh from his theft, of Apollo's
cattle, he takes his aerial way over Athens at
the moment when the basket-bearing maidens
are winding up the Acropolis in solemn proces-
sion to pay homage to the virgin goddess's
shrine. Mercury likes the sight. He wheels
round and round in the air, like a greedy kite
above the entrails at a sacrifice; this is not a
reverent comparison. Old Sol enters the field
for a display of epic valor, -- dpioTeia, Homer
would call it, Ipureia is perhaps the word --
and he is quadruply victorious. The only inno-
cent among the divinities is the virgin huntress.
When Callisto rejoins Diana's troop after her
adventure with Jove,
Silent she blushed with shame for virtue gone.
Were Dian not a virgin, she had seen
A thousand proofs of guilt. The nymphs, 'tis said,
Observed them. 19
So runs this irreverent comedy for five books,
alternating with Phaethon's mad race in the
chariot of the Sun, the founding of Thebes by
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
the dragon-slayer Cadmus, the triumph of the
Wine-God, the rescue of a princess by the
knightly Perseus, and his boastful story of his
exploits that leads to a free and mock-heroic
fight over the cups, till Perseus flashes the
Gorgon's head at his assailants and turns them
into statues. At the beginning of the sixth
book, the escapades of the gods culminate in
the story of Arachne, who blasphemously in-
vites Minerva to a contest in spinning and
covers her web with the most scandalous
amours of the gods. It is the grand finale of
Ovid's Divine Comedy. Arachne is promptly
turned into a spider; what condign metamor-
phosis should be decreed to the poet, Diana
might decide. He deserves a prize for ridicul-
ing an outworn theology with a fine pungency
beside which Lucian's diatribes seem primitive
and tame.
Though the gods are off the stage, heroes are
given their share of burlesque, particularly
when they figure in the hunt of the Calydonian
boar. One trips over a stump, one hides in the
background, Nestor escapes the beast by per-
forming a pole-vault into a tree, and the honor
of drawing the first blood falls to a woman.
The action is also diversified by innumerable
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
stories of love. There is the wild and vengeful
love of the witch Medea, the unfilial love
of Scylla for her father's foe, the all-too-filial
love of Myrrha for her father, the chivalrous
love of Meleager for Atalanta, the incestuous
love of Byblis for her brother, the love of the
young Centaur for his bride, the love of Narcis-
sus, -- most complicated case of all -- for him-
self. What next? Why, the love of Cephalus
for his wife, a tragic story deep and true, giv-
ing "serious relief" amidst these distressing
amorosities. Ovid had used it for this purpose
in the Art of Love. He tells it again, and he
tells it even better. Ovid reveals his inner
depths of reverence when he writes:
I fondly dwell, oh son of Aeacus,
On those blest days of wedlock new,
Then when we each to each were all in all}''
Ovid is not responsible for all of his stories
of unhallowed love. He is following an unpleas-
ant tradition set by his Greek predecessors, who
had gone to greater lengths than he. Ovid has
selected and refined. He is not the victim of
morbid curiosity; he uses pathological matter
for different effects. He begins the tale of Byb-
lis with a shiver of horror, and sustains tragic
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
feeling to the end. In the story of Myrrha,
pathos is mingled recklessly with burlesque.
You cannot take that sort of thing seriously
twice! But Centaur-love he treats without a
flicker of burlesque. The beauty of Cyllara,
half-brute though she is, is set forth in lines of
epic dignity. If we smile at her feminine pro-
pensity
On her left shoulder or her side to hang
Becoming beast-skins in the latest style,18
it is no smile of derision, and it changes to pity
and sorrow when the lovers meet their death.
Will the love of the half-brute Polyphemus be
treated by our poet in the same fashion?
Hardly. This most uncouth swain is hero in an
entertaining travesty of the pastoral. He combs
his locks with a rake and performs a serenade
to his Galatea on a Pan's pipe of an hundred
reeds, a veritable church-organ; the serenade
is arranged elaborately into strophes and anti-
strophes and is set to loud music with ponder-
ous rhymes and grating dissonance.
Our poet's love of variety is no less manifest
in the other strands of which the story is
woven. Every book has its contrasts of grave
and gay, and these elements are never mixed
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
in the same proportion or occupy the same
places in a book. For variety's sake, one whole
book is devoted to love, and the songs are by
one singer, Orpheus, who reveals the kind of
songs to which the oaks gave ear, -- no wonder
that the Maenads tore him to bits! Devices for
introducing the stories are invented with an
apparently inexhaustible ease. They are nar-
rated as the pieces rendered in a contest in
song or described in the works of contestants
in weaving; they form after-dinner speeches,
or the tales that soldiers swap; they are parts
of the experiences of long-separated friends,
told to each other as they meet again; they
are parts of women's gossip, -- no better nar-
rator of the deeds of the infant Hercules than
Alcmene, his mother, and no better auditor
than Iole, his latest love. Glaucus woos his
maiden with the story of his own metamorpho-
sis; Vertumnus assumes a metamorphosis in
wooing his. A brilliant device is the setting of
the amorous stories of the daughters of Minyas
in an atmosphere of horror; while all Thebes
celebrates the rites of the new god of the vine,
they blasphemously stay at home and as they
spin, blasphemously regale themselves with
scandal; vengeance is gathering for them, and
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
at the return of the god, the spinsters' woof
grows into the ivy and the vine that they had
despised; the maidens themselves turn into
chattering bats. Boccaccio, helped doubtless by
Ovid's art, effects a similar contrast between
the gay tales of the Decamerone and their
grewsome occasion.
As we glide along the varied course of Ovid's
story, with changes in moods and colors,
changes in the music of the verse, changes in
the settings, changes in the actors at the end of
the tale, we become gradually aware that the
spirit of the poem is constantly changing as it
moves. It starts as epic and is epic throughout.
It has not the nobility of Virgil's poem, which
only Milton among the countless imitators of
Virgil could reproduce. Ovid, avoiding what he
knew was impossible for him, invented what
was impossible for Virgil, an epic that with the
easy, romantic flow of the Odyssey, takes on
different colors in its course. Now it seems
comedy, now elegy, now pastoral. Now it be-
comes a hymn, now tragedy. Now the poet,
with some daring, shifts the scene to the rostra,
where Ajax and Ulysses debate the right to
wear the armour of the slain Achilles. Ovid
lavishes on this debate his full store of rhetori-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
cal subtleties and psychological observation. It
is drama of a high order and oratory that
Cicero might envy; it also impressed Landor,
a critic hard to please, as more epic than the
Aeneid. Didactic poetry in the vein of Lucre-
tius appears in the first book of the poem and
in the last. Panegyric is sounded, not too
loudly, at the beginning and again at the end.
Every book in the poem is different, and every
one the same, like the faces of the nymphs
whose images Vulcan wrought in the palace of
the Sun,
Like and unlike, as sister-nymphs beseems.
In adjusting his narrative, Ovid has many
nice problems to solve, many impossibilities
to make real by the art of illusion. Roughly
speaking, the poem falls into three parts. The
action is first in the world of the gods, then in
that of the heroes, and lastly in that of men.
It is the time-honored division of Pindar's ode,
and Horace's:
tLvcl 0e6v, t'lv' ? ipu>a, riva d'avSpa x^^V^o^v.
But these divisions shade into one another and
each contains matter that belongs elsewhere.
"Pyramus and Thisbe " is a love-story of the
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