In the story of Myrrha,
pathos is mingled recklessly with burlesque.
pathos is mingled recklessly with burlesque.
Ovid - 1901 - Ovid and His Influence
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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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
Hellenistic age, but it is told by the daughters
of Minyas in the mythical days of Pentheus of
Thebes. Still, it might have been familiar be-
fore the flood. Who cares? It does not disturb
the reader's sense of the descending sweep of
time. The moment he may feel that he is float-
ing about in a timeless realm of myth, the poet,
with a magic touch, attaches the myth to his-
tory, as when Apollo, flying away after his
victory over Pan, sees Laomedon far beneath
him, building the walls of Troy. We know
where we are and what is coming; the Trojan
War is not far away. When it comes, Ovid
takes care not to enter the lists against either
Homer or Virgil. He tells what metamorphoses
he can at the beginning, and narrates the death
of Achilles at the end. The intervening stretch
of time must be wiped out. With an amusing
sort of illusion, he manages to slide o'er full
nine years
and leave the growth untri'ed
Of that wide gap.
He assembles the heroes at a feast. The after-
dinner talk is restricted to deeds of war.
For of what else could great Achilles tell,
Or others tell with great Achilles there? 19
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Nestor finally has the floor and while Nestor
talks, centuries can slip by. When he has fin-
ished, the war is done. So in the journey of
Aeneas, a brief expanse of paper holds a copi-
ous flow of time. It is a different voyage from
that of Virgil's hero and might have differed
still more; Ovid, poet of the tender loves, shows
remarkable restraint in omitting the various
replicas of the hero's amour with Dido which,
as we learn from the commentary of Servius,
legend contained. But this is not the time for
a travesty of Aeneas; the tone of the poem is
sobering as it approaches the end.
The voyage gets its proper length from the
incidental stories, interspersed with diverting
effect. While we are listening with Galatea to
her monstrous shepherd's serenade, Aeneas is
gliding on to his destination. In the last book,
the poet leaps down the centuries too precipi-
tously, some critics think, as though he were
anxious to wind up his long legend and did not
quite know how. If, however, we perceive the
ideal issues underneath the narrative, the jour-
ney has not been too swift. The poet, with the
meaning of Virgil's epic in mind, sees in Roman
history a composite harmony of the native
sweetness and strength of Italy and the enlight-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
enment brought to Italy from without. In the
fourteenth book, the charm of primitive an-
tiquity is set forth in the stories of Picus and
Pomona. In the last book, we have a vision of
a greater Italy, a new Rome, growing by what
it shall absorb from abroad. First comes the
discourse of Pythagoras in which he reveals to
King Numa his doctrine of metempsychosis
and the ultimate truths of life. Here is a bright
cloud of Greek learning, Greek thought, cast
artfully by the poet about the origins of his
country. In a setting of wide historical per-
spective, with glances back to the cities of
yester-year as well as forward to the majesty
of Rome to come, Ovid inserts a bit of pane-
gyric as impressively sincere as anything in
Virgil:
Famed once was Sparta; once Mycenae throve
And towers of Cecrops and Amphion's towers.
Now dust is Sparta, high Mycenae fell.
Oedipus' Thebes to legend has decayed,
The Athens of Pandion is a name.
Now rise, fame tells, the walls of Dardan Rome;
Where Tiber flows from lordly Apennine,
She lays the great foundations of the world. 20
Now follows the story of Egeria and that of
Hippolytus, a bit of tragedy not unworthy of
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
master Euripides. Next is the legend of Cipus,
an example of that ancient virtus, self-sacrifice
for the state, which is the back-bone of Roman
character and owes nothing to foreign importa-
tion. The next episode marks the appearance
of Greece, as Rome unites with her own re-
ligion the worship of Aesculapius. The previ-
ous stories symbolize remote antiquity; this
one brings us to the third century, the time,
in Horace's profound epigram,
When captive Greece took its rude victor captive.
This is a turning-point in the history of Rome.
The next and last for our poet to record is the
Augustan age, with its culminating metamor-
phosis, the exaltation of Julius Caesar to god-
head. History, like geography, is plastic in
Ovid's hands. Every island is a floating Delos
to him, and centuries may be compressed into
decades if he will.
The ending of the last book is thus a monu-
ment to Rome. The beginning of that book is
a monument of the poet's temperament. His is
a philosophy of metempsychosis in a world of
flux and flow. Ovid is speaking with gravity
again, as at the commencement of the poem.
His burlesques of the gods are passing pleas-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
antries and no more reveal his judgment of the
deeper verities of life than the pictures of
Olympus in the Aeneid show us the religion of
Virgil. If this is all of Ovid, his poem is indeed,
as Sellar would have it, the most irreligious in
history. But in the Aeneid no less than in the
Metamorphoses, Olympus can be a stage for
comedy; Virgil's tragedies are for humankind.
The twilight of the gods was settling before
Ovid's time. As early as Aeschylus, reverent
spirits brooded over the conflict of primitive
and immoral myths with new and higher con-
ceptions of the divine. And apart from that,
burlesque can run side by side with worship,
except in some cold and colorless creed. Both
moods are found in Plautus's Amphitryo, which
at the beginning presents a most Ovidian Jove,
and ends in a lowly adoration of the Divine
Benefactor. Both moods are found in Homer.
Puritans will find much to shock them in
Mediaeval parodies of sacred things, and yet
the Middle Ages were the ages of faith. Both
Virgil and Ovid bow to something sacred
behind the myth. Both reverence the simple
piety of simple folk; the beautiful legend of
Philemon and Baucis, who entertained deities
unawares, is told to silence a scoffer.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
It were rash to define Ovid's theology. A
vague monotheism may underlie his story of
creation. He trusts in the gentleness of heaven,
-- mite deum numen. At the same time, there
is more than one Euripidean protest against the
injustice of the gods; what is revelry for them
is bitter fate for human beings. Still, these are
the gods of myth; the poet tacitly appeals to
a principle of justice above them.
Varer ingiusta la nostra giustizia
Negl' occhi del mortali ed argomento
Di fede e non d'eretica nequizia.
Ovid's mind is too subtle, too nomadic, to at-
tach itself to a science. He is too keenly alive
to human realities to profess an ultimate scep-
ticism. In the world of magic in which he
freely moves, it were hazardous to say what
miracles may not come to pass. He can have
a fling at scepticism. Orpheus, on entering the
world of shades, remarks to Proserpine that he
supposes Love is omnipotent there as else-
where:
1/ Pluto's theft of thee is not a myth.
This is the ne plus ultra of incredulity, the
uncertainty of one mythicality about the genu-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
Ineness of another. I call this a fling at scep-
ticism, -- perhaps it is something else.
Ovid is likewise no cynic. For that, he has
too lively a sympathy with humble things, with
impossible things, like Centaurs. His imagina-
tion loves to make the most of a small domain,
Parva sed apta. He has the skill of a French
house-wife faire des petites Economies. He
would applaud Herrick's maxim:
A little saint best fits a little shrine,
A little prop best fits a little vine,
As my small cruse best fits my little wine? 1
After all our attempts at analysis, Ovid's
spirit eludes us. If we call him this or that, he
quickly performs a metamorphosis and shows
another face. He loves shadings, the slanting
intermediates, in Meredith's phrase, the twi-
lights of nature and of the mind, -- tenues
parvi discriminis umbrae. But in the midst of
the flowing circumstance of time and space, his
spirit, like Shakespeare's, dwells master of it-
self and creator of whatever world he will. He
has written himself into his poem, which not
only tells of changing forms but is metamor-
phosis itself, riding on like a supple river-god,
a Proteus of a stream, with a clearness, as
Landor says, that shows the depths, passing
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
through different lights and shades and rippling
with a different music at every turn, forever
changing and forever the same.
The work had not received its author's fin-
ishing touches; it was " still growing and still
rude," he declares, when Augustus banished
him from Rome.
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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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
Hellenistic age, but it is told by the daughters
of Minyas in the mythical days of Pentheus of
Thebes. Still, it might have been familiar be-
fore the flood. Who cares? It does not disturb
the reader's sense of the descending sweep of
time. The moment he may feel that he is float-
ing about in a timeless realm of myth, the poet,
with a magic touch, attaches the myth to his-
tory, as when Apollo, flying away after his
victory over Pan, sees Laomedon far beneath
him, building the walls of Troy. We know
where we are and what is coming; the Trojan
War is not far away. When it comes, Ovid
takes care not to enter the lists against either
Homer or Virgil. He tells what metamorphoses
he can at the beginning, and narrates the death
of Achilles at the end. The intervening stretch
of time must be wiped out. With an amusing
sort of illusion, he manages to slide o'er full
nine years
and leave the growth untri'ed
Of that wide gap.
He assembles the heroes at a feast. The after-
dinner talk is restricted to deeds of war.
For of what else could great Achilles tell,
Or others tell with great Achilles there? 19
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Nestor finally has the floor and while Nestor
talks, centuries can slip by. When he has fin-
ished, the war is done. So in the journey of
Aeneas, a brief expanse of paper holds a copi-
ous flow of time. It is a different voyage from
that of Virgil's hero and might have differed
still more; Ovid, poet of the tender loves, shows
remarkable restraint in omitting the various
replicas of the hero's amour with Dido which,
as we learn from the commentary of Servius,
legend contained. But this is not the time for
a travesty of Aeneas; the tone of the poem is
sobering as it approaches the end.
The voyage gets its proper length from the
incidental stories, interspersed with diverting
effect. While we are listening with Galatea to
her monstrous shepherd's serenade, Aeneas is
gliding on to his destination. In the last book,
the poet leaps down the centuries too precipi-
tously, some critics think, as though he were
anxious to wind up his long legend and did not
quite know how. If, however, we perceive the
ideal issues underneath the narrative, the jour-
ney has not been too swift. The poet, with the
meaning of Virgil's epic in mind, sees in Roman
history a composite harmony of the native
sweetness and strength of Italy and the enlight-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
enment brought to Italy from without. In the
fourteenth book, the charm of primitive an-
tiquity is set forth in the stories of Picus and
Pomona. In the last book, we have a vision of
a greater Italy, a new Rome, growing by what
it shall absorb from abroad. First comes the
discourse of Pythagoras in which he reveals to
King Numa his doctrine of metempsychosis
and the ultimate truths of life. Here is a bright
cloud of Greek learning, Greek thought, cast
artfully by the poet about the origins of his
country. In a setting of wide historical per-
spective, with glances back to the cities of
yester-year as well as forward to the majesty
of Rome to come, Ovid inserts a bit of pane-
gyric as impressively sincere as anything in
Virgil:
Famed once was Sparta; once Mycenae throve
And towers of Cecrops and Amphion's towers.
Now dust is Sparta, high Mycenae fell.
Oedipus' Thebes to legend has decayed,
The Athens of Pandion is a name.
Now rise, fame tells, the walls of Dardan Rome;
Where Tiber flows from lordly Apennine,
She lays the great foundations of the world. 20
Now follows the story of Egeria and that of
Hippolytus, a bit of tragedy not unworthy of
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
master Euripides. Next is the legend of Cipus,
an example of that ancient virtus, self-sacrifice
for the state, which is the back-bone of Roman
character and owes nothing to foreign importa-
tion. The next episode marks the appearance
of Greece, as Rome unites with her own re-
ligion the worship of Aesculapius. The previ-
ous stories symbolize remote antiquity; this
one brings us to the third century, the time,
in Horace's profound epigram,
When captive Greece took its rude victor captive.
This is a turning-point in the history of Rome.
The next and last for our poet to record is the
Augustan age, with its culminating metamor-
phosis, the exaltation of Julius Caesar to god-
head. History, like geography, is plastic in
Ovid's hands. Every island is a floating Delos
to him, and centuries may be compressed into
decades if he will.
The ending of the last book is thus a monu-
ment to Rome. The beginning of that book is
a monument of the poet's temperament. His is
a philosophy of metempsychosis in a world of
flux and flow. Ovid is speaking with gravity
again, as at the commencement of the poem.
His burlesques of the gods are passing pleas-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
antries and no more reveal his judgment of the
deeper verities of life than the pictures of
Olympus in the Aeneid show us the religion of
Virgil. If this is all of Ovid, his poem is indeed,
as Sellar would have it, the most irreligious in
history. But in the Aeneid no less than in the
Metamorphoses, Olympus can be a stage for
comedy; Virgil's tragedies are for humankind.
The twilight of the gods was settling before
Ovid's time. As early as Aeschylus, reverent
spirits brooded over the conflict of primitive
and immoral myths with new and higher con-
ceptions of the divine. And apart from that,
burlesque can run side by side with worship,
except in some cold and colorless creed. Both
moods are found in Plautus's Amphitryo, which
at the beginning presents a most Ovidian Jove,
and ends in a lowly adoration of the Divine
Benefactor. Both moods are found in Homer.
Puritans will find much to shock them in
Mediaeval parodies of sacred things, and yet
the Middle Ages were the ages of faith. Both
Virgil and Ovid bow to something sacred
behind the myth. Both reverence the simple
piety of simple folk; the beautiful legend of
Philemon and Baucis, who entertained deities
unawares, is told to silence a scoffer.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
It were rash to define Ovid's theology. A
vague monotheism may underlie his story of
creation. He trusts in the gentleness of heaven,
-- mite deum numen. At the same time, there
is more than one Euripidean protest against the
injustice of the gods; what is revelry for them
is bitter fate for human beings. Still, these are
the gods of myth; the poet tacitly appeals to
a principle of justice above them.
Varer ingiusta la nostra giustizia
Negl' occhi del mortali ed argomento
Di fede e non d'eretica nequizia.
Ovid's mind is too subtle, too nomadic, to at-
tach itself to a science. He is too keenly alive
to human realities to profess an ultimate scep-
ticism. In the world of magic in which he
freely moves, it were hazardous to say what
miracles may not come to pass. He can have
a fling at scepticism. Orpheus, on entering the
world of shades, remarks to Proserpine that he
supposes Love is omnipotent there as else-
where:
1/ Pluto's theft of thee is not a myth.
This is the ne plus ultra of incredulity, the
uncertainty of one mythicality about the genu-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
Ineness of another. I call this a fling at scep-
ticism, -- perhaps it is something else.
Ovid is likewise no cynic. For that, he has
too lively a sympathy with humble things, with
impossible things, like Centaurs. His imagina-
tion loves to make the most of a small domain,
Parva sed apta. He has the skill of a French
house-wife faire des petites Economies. He
would applaud Herrick's maxim:
A little saint best fits a little shrine,
A little prop best fits a little vine,
As my small cruse best fits my little wine? 1
After all our attempts at analysis, Ovid's
spirit eludes us. If we call him this or that, he
quickly performs a metamorphosis and shows
another face. He loves shadings, the slanting
intermediates, in Meredith's phrase, the twi-
lights of nature and of the mind, -- tenues
parvi discriminis umbrae. But in the midst of
the flowing circumstance of time and space, his
spirit, like Shakespeare's, dwells master of it-
self and creator of whatever world he will. He
has written himself into his poem, which not
only tells of changing forms but is metamor-
phosis itself, riding on like a supple river-god,
a Proteus of a stream, with a clearness, as
Landor says, that shows the depths, passing
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
through different lights and shades and rippling
with a different music at every turn, forever
changing and forever the same.
The work had not received its author's fin-
ishing touches; it was " still growing and still
rude," he declares, when Augustus banished
him from Rome.
