Ovid
perishes
for
his style -- like Cicero among the philosophers
-- no less than for his wit.
his style -- like Cicero among the philosophers
-- no less than for his wit.
Ovid - 1901 - Ovid and His Influence
He furnished many subjects
for drama and opera. Above all, Moliere should
be read from cover to cover by the true
Ovidian, not merely for the abundant imita-
tions, but for the spirit of comedy of which he
and Ovid and the few elect who are chronicled
in Meredith's essay know the inner secrets.
The atmosphere of Carmina Amatoria is con-
[160]
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
stantly about us in Moliere's plays. In his
Amphitryon, for instance, he has avoided
Plautus's daring combination of divine bur-
lesque and divine worship; the comedy of the
gods at the beginning of the play is in the
manner not of Plautus but of Ovid.
Ovid, the master of burlesque, was himself
subjected to that irreverence. Following in
the wake of Scarron's new Aeneid, D'Assoucy
turned the myths of the Metamorphoses
into travesty. Ovid would not have been
shocked, though he might wonder at the
necessity of such performances. All in all, the
seventeenth century in French literature is an-
other aetas Ovidiana. In fact, it may well be
that the qualities which impress us today as
distinctively French were at least partly due to
the deliberate study of antique models, first
during the regime of the Pleiade, at the begin-
ning of the sixteenth century, and again, with
special devotion to Ovid, in the times of the
Grand Monarque. Courtesy, finesse and style
--virtues conspicuously French--would surely
be recognized in Ovid and be fortified by his
example.
Ovid's prestige suffered no diminution in the
eighteenth century, as the names of Gentil-
[ 161 ]
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Bernard and Andre Chenier will serve to sug-
gest. In an elegy on the exile of the poet, Lin-
gendes scorches the barbarian Augustus for
robbing his country of the rarest spirit that it
had ever seen. He consoles the exile with the
hospitality that France extends and with the
French beauties, la belle Renie in particular,
whose like the city of Aeneas never saw. So
then, he exclaims:
Va trouver les Frangais oil le destin t'appelle
Tour finir ton malheur,
Et quitte de bon coeur ta langue maternelle
Pour apprendre la lew.
But Ovid had been speaking French -- and the
French Ovidian -- for some time.
Even during the Romantic revolt, our poet
was too French to be permanently cast aside.
In the year VII of that New Era which the
Disciples Reason established for mankind,
though less solidly than they supposed, there
was printed in Paris, " sous les yeux et par les
soins de" J. C. Poncelin, a translation into
French of the Oevres Complettes d'Ovide, ac-
companied in the different volumes by exquisite
engravings, one of which, reproduced above,
represents a not altogether heart-broken Ovid
[162]
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
in exile. Since the Romantic movement, French
scholarship has made admirable contributions
to our understanding of Ovid, but among men
of letters, few besides Banville and Anatole
France may be numbered among his disciples.
The appearance of a golden little volume on
Ovid by Emile Ripert marks, let us hope, the
beginning of a better era.
In our own literature, after Chaucer and
Gower, we may meet Ovid again in the graceful
fancies of Spenser's Faerie Queene and find a
new pastoral Fasti in his Shephearde's Calen-
dar. There are suggestions of Corinna in Sid-
ney's Stella, though the poet had no need to
fear the reproach " That Plato I have reade for
nought. " A new sort of Heroides is invented
by Drayton, who composes, in his England's
Heroical Epistles, message and answer for
Rosamund and Henry II, Queen Katherine and
Owen Tudor, and other noble (and rather
heavy) characters. In the Elizabethan drama,
Ovid supplies subjects for many of the mytho-
logical plays, including the daring use of the
story of Iphis and Ianthe in the Maid's Meta-
morphosis, an anonymous piece written about
1600. One will discover many a bit of Ovid by
browsing about in Heywood and Lyly and
[163]
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Peele. In Lyly's Endimion, when Sir Tophas
falls in love with a very Ovidian character, the
"old enchantress," Dipsas, he reels off Latin
quotations, mostly from the Art of Love, and
says to his servant: "Epi, I feel all Ovid de
arte amandi lie as heavie at my heart as a
loade of logges. " Ben Jonson, who has not so
many borrowings from Ovid as one might ex-
pect, constructs a sub-plot in the Poetaster
from the poet's life.
"As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to
live in Pythagoras," said Francis Meres, in his
Palladis Tamia, "so the sweet witty soul of
Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued
Shakespeare. " Shakespeare is another of our
poet's reincarnations. There is hardly an as-
pect of Ovid's genius and art that one will not
see reproduced somewhere in Shakespeare.
Ovid's works are a storehouse of ancient lore
for him, and a monument of "the elegancy
and golden cadence of poesy. " Naso he is in-
deed, the man " for smelling out the odorifer-
ous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention. "Ba
But primarily, it is the call of deep unto deep
that Shakespeare hears in Ovid. A brilliant
essayist of our day finds in Shakespeare, as
many have found in Ovid, a lack of religion. 54
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
This analysis leaves something unexplained,
and yet both spirits are free, looking about on
a world of shifting circumstance, and moulding
it into what their fancy wills.
The youthful Milton, Puritan though he was,
consecrated his earliest verse to Ovid. Curious
evidence of his fondness for Ovid has recently
come to light, in the shape of one hundred and
seventy-one stanzas written by Milton at the
age of fifteen to accompany a set of draw-
ings illustrating scenes in the Metamorphoses.
The juvenile phrases here exhibited may
be traced in the poet's later works. 55 Milton's
Latin verse, free and convivial in some of
its specimens, must be read simultaneously
with the Ode on the Nativity, Lycidas and
the other English poems, if we would see
the conflict of Ovid and Virgil in Milton's
mind and art. 58 Ovid leads at the start,
but Virgil wins, and becomes the poet's fore-
most model in Paradise Lost. Yet Ovid is not
flung aside. He furnishes Milton with mat-
ter and with devices, both of which are sub-
limated in the loftier Virgilian air of his epic.
The poetry, both the gay and the sober, of
Herrick and Cowley will take on new meaning
if one come to them fresh from Ovid. Dryden's
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
satire will be found more nearly akin to Ovid
than to the other ancient models that he so
nicely balances in his essay. In his Fables, he
has, perhaps unconsciously, summed up the
course of Mediaeval narrative by selecting as
his typical raconteurs Chaucer, Boccaccio and
Ovid. As master of the stage, Dryden passed
on his sceptre to Congreve, and in Congreve,
Ovid, the Ovid of the Art of Love, lives again.
There has never been a finer monument to
Ovid's placid irony than the Way of the World.
Gay and Prior are worthy masters of Ovid's
comedy. Swift's satire is more bitter, Pope's is
of sharper tang and Addison is a gentler spirit.
And yet the reader of Ovid will find his mas-
ter's presence in them all.
The Romantic movement in England, as in
the other countries of Europe, sounds Ovid's
knell, though not for Byron, who, as author of
Don Juan, often suggests the flavor of Pope.
We should not view Romanticism too narrowly,
for Landor, a discreet admirer of Ovid, lived
through the period, and Shelley carried his
copy of our poet as he travelled about in Italy.
Amongst the Victorians, Tennyson shows some
reading of our poet, particularly in Oenone, and
Browning's omnivorous appetite finds satisfac-
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
tion now and then in the marvels of the Meta-
morphoses or the poet's romantic career. Swin-
burne, whose masters are the Greeks, had
studied Ovid for his Atalanta. But despite such
incidental homage, Ovid had had his day. This
was no aetas Ovidiana, and none has followed
since. It is perhaps about time that our poet's
star should once more take the ascendant.
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? III. OVID THE MODERN
"Les anciens, monsieur, sont les anciens, et nous sommes
les gens de maintenant. "
Prisca iuvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum
Gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis.
"En verite Ovide est encore, en ce debut du XX0 siecle,
un poete d'actualite. "
O eminent authorities on Dante have
"It would hardly be an exaggeration
to say that distinctly modern literature has its
springs in the French poets of the twelfth cen-
tury, and that these poets were inspired and
(paradox as it may seem) ' modernized' by the
inspiration they drew from Ovid. " 67
There is nothing paradoxical here, for Ovid
is a modern of the moderns. It is curious how
we change our views about modernity as we
push back our studies into the past. We begin
by setting the highest values on things modern.
We rightly reject what is antiquated and mean-
ingless in favor of what is contemporary and
OVID
RIPERT
declared:
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? OVID THE MODERN
real. Then, by chance, we discover something
that immediately concerns us in Thucydides or
Plato or Horace, and we say: "How modern
these ancients were! " At the time when they
wrote, they thought themselves modern too. If
they can speak to us today, they are more alive
than one whose heart and lungs are still in
operation, but whose brain perished centuries
ago. As our studies proceed and the writers of
old seem more and more like human beings, all
of a sudden our perspective is reversed, as when
the planetary system of Ptolemy changed to
that of Copernicus. History no longer revolves
egocentrically about us; we begin to know our
place in the shifting panorama of time. We no
longer congratulate the ancients on being mod-
ern, but ourselves on our new-found ability to
appreciate living thought by whomsoever it has
been expressed. Literature has taught us how
to tell the quick from the dead. We embark on
a voyage of discovery, prepared to make our-
selves contemporary with the best of the past,
and to recognize modernity wherever there is
life.
To be contemporary with every age, a writer
must, first of all, seem modern to his own. One
whose imagination is fed merely by the past,
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
one who believes that the count of mighty poets
is made up and the scroll of them folded in the
Muse's hands, has, to the best of his ability,
sounded the death-knell of his own poetry. The
root of his fancy is strong, but the flower is
weak. Unless, like Keats, he belies his words
in his practice, he will soon be swept aside by
the living thought of his times. Something is
lacking in his sanity and in his sense of humor,
if he cannot exclaim with our poet:
Let others praise the hoary past. But how
I thank my stars I was not born till now!
The present age is suited to my ways. 58
To understand our debt to Ovid, we may, to
be sure, follow the course of his posthumous
fame and the manner of his appeal to the dif-
ferent ages. Irrespective of his own attain-
ments, we must ever be grateful to the writer
who saved for literature the stories of Midas,
of Alcyone, of Atalanta's race, of Pyramus and
Thisbe, of Philemon and Baucis, -- jewels that
have sparkled in diverse settings of pure gold.
We must also acknowledge the genius of a
writer who invented a new literary form like
the Heroides that proved prolific of emulation
in most of the subsequent periods of literature.
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? OVID THE MODERN
But it is even more essential to know the man
himself and his art. We owe a debt only to
those who can speak to our own times. The
Classics live today not because the ancient
authors became famous, -- magnorum no mi-
lium umbrae -- but because they were modern.
Ovid was modern, first, in his art of inter-
preting the past in terms of his own age, in
making his heroes Augustan, in pushing back
the boundary of his times to include the first
moments of history. It is the god Janus, once
a shapeless mass in the sea of primeval chaos,
who gives Ovid the maxim:
We praise old times but use the present age.
Yet, after all, this is modernity in the less im-
portant sense; it accounts for the poet's popu-
larity in his life-time but not for his appeal to
posterity. Ovid will remain modern so long as
the universal qualities that make him great are
valued by mankind, -- his wit, his art, his cre-
ative fancy, the mastery of his own moods and
of his plastic world. Wit was his ruin, but we
may pardon its excess. The exile's misery is his
atonement and perpetually a moral for sober-
minded folk to draw. It is profitable to draw
the moral, yet we need not emblazon it forever
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
in letters of lead, -- ingerao periit. Fatal to
him, his wit is no disaster to mankind, so long
as a spark of comedy survives.
Nor does Ovid fail to give us that criticism
of life which to Matthew Arnold is the essence
of literature. Gilbert Murray, who has come
nobly to Ovid's defence, finds, after all, that
our poet's criticism of life is slight. It is such
as is "passed by a child, playing alone and
peopling the summer evening with delightful
shapes, upon the stupid nurse who drags it off
to bed. " 58 I venture to see in Ovid a spirit
more mature than this. His mimic world is no
toy fancy, a thing apart. He rather has ab-
sorbed life into it as into the only verity that
remains eternal amid the flux and flow. Ovid
dwells in his mind rather than in the images
that it creates. His thought is so little obtru-
sive, his art is so careful that we too hastily
circumscribe its limits instead of stretching our
own imaginations by its aid.
Ovid perishes for
his style -- like Cicero among the philosophers
-- no less than for his wit.
As we glance back at the periods of history
that have valued Ovid most, -- that aetas Ovi-
diana in? the Ages of Faith, the Renaissance
in all the countries of Europe, the times of
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? OVID THE MODERN
Louis XIV in French literature, those of Eliz-
abeth, the Restoration and Queen Anne -- we
become aware that these are very eminent
periods in human civilization. The horrible
thought may occur that possibly our own age,
despite its triumphs in the natural sciences and
in creature comforts, may somewhat have
slipped from the heights of literary taste. We
are a restless race, not having time to live even
in the present, much less in the past. Would
Ovid's ghost have again to exclaim, as in the
darker part of the Middle Ages:
I'm barbarous here, whom none can understand?
Ovid was too modern for the Dark Age; per-
haps he is too modern for ours. Who would
think that? Away with such blasphemy! It is
mere chance that our eyes have turned a blind
spot towards Ovid. Books have their fates.
How else could Meredith nicely describe the
spirit of Ovid's comedy without mentioning his
name? He could not have read him with care.
Otherwise, he would have made Naso toast-
master at his famous symposium on Noses in
Diana of the Crossways and have raised his
glass at Shakespeare's eulogy and Herrick's
toast:
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
A Goblet next Vie drink
To Ovid; and suppose
Made he the pledge, he'd think
The world had all one Nose. 60
The Dark Age had the disadvantage of not
possessing Ovid's works. We who have erred
can easily make amends. It is a comfortable
penance; open his books and read.
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? NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
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? NOTES
1. F. L. Lucas, Euripides and his Influence, p. 69,
Boston, 1923, in the Series, Our Debt to Greece and Rome.
2. Controversies, ii. 2. 12.
3. Tristia, iv. 10. S3 ff.
4. Amores, iii. 15. 7.
5. Tristia, iv. 10. 59:
Moverat ingenium totam cantata per urbem
Nomine non vero dicta Corinna mihi.
Tristia, ii. 427:
Sic sua lascivo cantata est saepe Catullo
Femma, cui falsum Lesbia nomen erat.
6. Carmen, 85.
7. Tristia, ii. 340.
8. Introduction to the Annus Mirabilis (ed. G. R. Noyes,
P- 25)-
9. Voyage autour de ma Chambre, chapter xxv.
10. Romance of the Rose, vv. 10692 ff. The edition of
Michel is cited, as more generally accessible than the criti-
cal edition by Langlois.
11. Romance of the Rose, vv. 9090 ff. The whole passage
shows a close study of Ovid.
12. In "The Padlock. "
13. Ripert, Ovide, p. 43.
14. House of Fame, vv. 627 ft.
15. Sir James G. Frazer, with an English translation (in
The Loeb Classical Library), ii. p. 394.
16. Met. , ii. 450 ff.
17. Met. , vii. 797 ff.
18. Met. , xii. 414 ff.
19. Met. , xii. 162 ff.
20. Met. , xv. 426 ff.
21. Herrick, "A Ternarie of Littles,, upon a Pipkin of
Jellie sent to a Lady," in his Hesperides.
[177]
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? NOTES
22. Fasti, iii. in ff.
23. De Rerum Natura, ii. 600 ff.
24. Met. , i. 325 ff.
25. Fasti, iv. 331 ff.
26. Fasti, v. 297 ff.
27. Fasti, i. 201 ff.
28. Fasti, v. 681 ff.
29. Odes, iv. 5. 23.
30. Epistulae, ix. 4.
31. Tristia, i. 1. 39.
32. rnVtia, iii. 4. 55 ff.
33. Tristia, v. 10. 37.
34. Tristia, iii. 3. 73 ff.
35. Naturalis Historia, xxxii. 152.
36. C. O. Minchin, Sea Fishing; Ars Amatoria, iii. 425.
37. Fasti, i. 493 ff.
38. F* Ponto, ii. 10.
for drama and opera. Above all, Moliere should
be read from cover to cover by the true
Ovidian, not merely for the abundant imita-
tions, but for the spirit of comedy of which he
and Ovid and the few elect who are chronicled
in Meredith's essay know the inner secrets.
The atmosphere of Carmina Amatoria is con-
[160]
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
stantly about us in Moliere's plays. In his
Amphitryon, for instance, he has avoided
Plautus's daring combination of divine bur-
lesque and divine worship; the comedy of the
gods at the beginning of the play is in the
manner not of Plautus but of Ovid.
Ovid, the master of burlesque, was himself
subjected to that irreverence. Following in
the wake of Scarron's new Aeneid, D'Assoucy
turned the myths of the Metamorphoses
into travesty. Ovid would not have been
shocked, though he might wonder at the
necessity of such performances. All in all, the
seventeenth century in French literature is an-
other aetas Ovidiana. In fact, it may well be
that the qualities which impress us today as
distinctively French were at least partly due to
the deliberate study of antique models, first
during the regime of the Pleiade, at the begin-
ning of the sixteenth century, and again, with
special devotion to Ovid, in the times of the
Grand Monarque. Courtesy, finesse and style
--virtues conspicuously French--would surely
be recognized in Ovid and be fortified by his
example.
Ovid's prestige suffered no diminution in the
eighteenth century, as the names of Gentil-
[ 161 ]
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Bernard and Andre Chenier will serve to sug-
gest. In an elegy on the exile of the poet, Lin-
gendes scorches the barbarian Augustus for
robbing his country of the rarest spirit that it
had ever seen. He consoles the exile with the
hospitality that France extends and with the
French beauties, la belle Renie in particular,
whose like the city of Aeneas never saw. So
then, he exclaims:
Va trouver les Frangais oil le destin t'appelle
Tour finir ton malheur,
Et quitte de bon coeur ta langue maternelle
Pour apprendre la lew.
But Ovid had been speaking French -- and the
French Ovidian -- for some time.
Even during the Romantic revolt, our poet
was too French to be permanently cast aside.
In the year VII of that New Era which the
Disciples Reason established for mankind,
though less solidly than they supposed, there
was printed in Paris, " sous les yeux et par les
soins de" J. C. Poncelin, a translation into
French of the Oevres Complettes d'Ovide, ac-
companied in the different volumes by exquisite
engravings, one of which, reproduced above,
represents a not altogether heart-broken Ovid
[162]
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
in exile. Since the Romantic movement, French
scholarship has made admirable contributions
to our understanding of Ovid, but among men
of letters, few besides Banville and Anatole
France may be numbered among his disciples.
The appearance of a golden little volume on
Ovid by Emile Ripert marks, let us hope, the
beginning of a better era.
In our own literature, after Chaucer and
Gower, we may meet Ovid again in the graceful
fancies of Spenser's Faerie Queene and find a
new pastoral Fasti in his Shephearde's Calen-
dar. There are suggestions of Corinna in Sid-
ney's Stella, though the poet had no need to
fear the reproach " That Plato I have reade for
nought. " A new sort of Heroides is invented
by Drayton, who composes, in his England's
Heroical Epistles, message and answer for
Rosamund and Henry II, Queen Katherine and
Owen Tudor, and other noble (and rather
heavy) characters. In the Elizabethan drama,
Ovid supplies subjects for many of the mytho-
logical plays, including the daring use of the
story of Iphis and Ianthe in the Maid's Meta-
morphosis, an anonymous piece written about
1600. One will discover many a bit of Ovid by
browsing about in Heywood and Lyly and
[163]
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Peele. In Lyly's Endimion, when Sir Tophas
falls in love with a very Ovidian character, the
"old enchantress," Dipsas, he reels off Latin
quotations, mostly from the Art of Love, and
says to his servant: "Epi, I feel all Ovid de
arte amandi lie as heavie at my heart as a
loade of logges. " Ben Jonson, who has not so
many borrowings from Ovid as one might ex-
pect, constructs a sub-plot in the Poetaster
from the poet's life.
"As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to
live in Pythagoras," said Francis Meres, in his
Palladis Tamia, "so the sweet witty soul of
Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued
Shakespeare. " Shakespeare is another of our
poet's reincarnations. There is hardly an as-
pect of Ovid's genius and art that one will not
see reproduced somewhere in Shakespeare.
Ovid's works are a storehouse of ancient lore
for him, and a monument of "the elegancy
and golden cadence of poesy. " Naso he is in-
deed, the man " for smelling out the odorifer-
ous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention. "Ba
But primarily, it is the call of deep unto deep
that Shakespeare hears in Ovid. A brilliant
essayist of our day finds in Shakespeare, as
many have found in Ovid, a lack of religion. 54
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
This analysis leaves something unexplained,
and yet both spirits are free, looking about on
a world of shifting circumstance, and moulding
it into what their fancy wills.
The youthful Milton, Puritan though he was,
consecrated his earliest verse to Ovid. Curious
evidence of his fondness for Ovid has recently
come to light, in the shape of one hundred and
seventy-one stanzas written by Milton at the
age of fifteen to accompany a set of draw-
ings illustrating scenes in the Metamorphoses.
The juvenile phrases here exhibited may
be traced in the poet's later works. 55 Milton's
Latin verse, free and convivial in some of
its specimens, must be read simultaneously
with the Ode on the Nativity, Lycidas and
the other English poems, if we would see
the conflict of Ovid and Virgil in Milton's
mind and art. 58 Ovid leads at the start,
but Virgil wins, and becomes the poet's fore-
most model in Paradise Lost. Yet Ovid is not
flung aside. He furnishes Milton with mat-
ter and with devices, both of which are sub-
limated in the loftier Virgilian air of his epic.
The poetry, both the gay and the sober, of
Herrick and Cowley will take on new meaning
if one come to them fresh from Ovid. Dryden's
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
satire will be found more nearly akin to Ovid
than to the other ancient models that he so
nicely balances in his essay. In his Fables, he
has, perhaps unconsciously, summed up the
course of Mediaeval narrative by selecting as
his typical raconteurs Chaucer, Boccaccio and
Ovid. As master of the stage, Dryden passed
on his sceptre to Congreve, and in Congreve,
Ovid, the Ovid of the Art of Love, lives again.
There has never been a finer monument to
Ovid's placid irony than the Way of the World.
Gay and Prior are worthy masters of Ovid's
comedy. Swift's satire is more bitter, Pope's is
of sharper tang and Addison is a gentler spirit.
And yet the reader of Ovid will find his mas-
ter's presence in them all.
The Romantic movement in England, as in
the other countries of Europe, sounds Ovid's
knell, though not for Byron, who, as author of
Don Juan, often suggests the flavor of Pope.
We should not view Romanticism too narrowly,
for Landor, a discreet admirer of Ovid, lived
through the period, and Shelley carried his
copy of our poet as he travelled about in Italy.
Amongst the Victorians, Tennyson shows some
reading of our poet, particularly in Oenone, and
Browning's omnivorous appetite finds satisfac-
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
tion now and then in the marvels of the Meta-
morphoses or the poet's romantic career. Swin-
burne, whose masters are the Greeks, had
studied Ovid for his Atalanta. But despite such
incidental homage, Ovid had had his day. This
was no aetas Ovidiana, and none has followed
since. It is perhaps about time that our poet's
star should once more take the ascendant.
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? III. OVID THE MODERN
"Les anciens, monsieur, sont les anciens, et nous sommes
les gens de maintenant. "
Prisca iuvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum
Gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis.
"En verite Ovide est encore, en ce debut du XX0 siecle,
un poete d'actualite. "
O eminent authorities on Dante have
"It would hardly be an exaggeration
to say that distinctly modern literature has its
springs in the French poets of the twelfth cen-
tury, and that these poets were inspired and
(paradox as it may seem) ' modernized' by the
inspiration they drew from Ovid. " 67
There is nothing paradoxical here, for Ovid
is a modern of the moderns. It is curious how
we change our views about modernity as we
push back our studies into the past. We begin
by setting the highest values on things modern.
We rightly reject what is antiquated and mean-
ingless in favor of what is contemporary and
OVID
RIPERT
declared:
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? OVID THE MODERN
real. Then, by chance, we discover something
that immediately concerns us in Thucydides or
Plato or Horace, and we say: "How modern
these ancients were! " At the time when they
wrote, they thought themselves modern too. If
they can speak to us today, they are more alive
than one whose heart and lungs are still in
operation, but whose brain perished centuries
ago. As our studies proceed and the writers of
old seem more and more like human beings, all
of a sudden our perspective is reversed, as when
the planetary system of Ptolemy changed to
that of Copernicus. History no longer revolves
egocentrically about us; we begin to know our
place in the shifting panorama of time. We no
longer congratulate the ancients on being mod-
ern, but ourselves on our new-found ability to
appreciate living thought by whomsoever it has
been expressed. Literature has taught us how
to tell the quick from the dead. We embark on
a voyage of discovery, prepared to make our-
selves contemporary with the best of the past,
and to recognize modernity wherever there is
life.
To be contemporary with every age, a writer
must, first of all, seem modern to his own. One
whose imagination is fed merely by the past,
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
one who believes that the count of mighty poets
is made up and the scroll of them folded in the
Muse's hands, has, to the best of his ability,
sounded the death-knell of his own poetry. The
root of his fancy is strong, but the flower is
weak. Unless, like Keats, he belies his words
in his practice, he will soon be swept aside by
the living thought of his times. Something is
lacking in his sanity and in his sense of humor,
if he cannot exclaim with our poet:
Let others praise the hoary past. But how
I thank my stars I was not born till now!
The present age is suited to my ways. 58
To understand our debt to Ovid, we may, to
be sure, follow the course of his posthumous
fame and the manner of his appeal to the dif-
ferent ages. Irrespective of his own attain-
ments, we must ever be grateful to the writer
who saved for literature the stories of Midas,
of Alcyone, of Atalanta's race, of Pyramus and
Thisbe, of Philemon and Baucis, -- jewels that
have sparkled in diverse settings of pure gold.
We must also acknowledge the genius of a
writer who invented a new literary form like
the Heroides that proved prolific of emulation
in most of the subsequent periods of literature.
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? OVID THE MODERN
But it is even more essential to know the man
himself and his art. We owe a debt only to
those who can speak to our own times. The
Classics live today not because the ancient
authors became famous, -- magnorum no mi-
lium umbrae -- but because they were modern.
Ovid was modern, first, in his art of inter-
preting the past in terms of his own age, in
making his heroes Augustan, in pushing back
the boundary of his times to include the first
moments of history. It is the god Janus, once
a shapeless mass in the sea of primeval chaos,
who gives Ovid the maxim:
We praise old times but use the present age.
Yet, after all, this is modernity in the less im-
portant sense; it accounts for the poet's popu-
larity in his life-time but not for his appeal to
posterity. Ovid will remain modern so long as
the universal qualities that make him great are
valued by mankind, -- his wit, his art, his cre-
ative fancy, the mastery of his own moods and
of his plastic world. Wit was his ruin, but we
may pardon its excess. The exile's misery is his
atonement and perpetually a moral for sober-
minded folk to draw. It is profitable to draw
the moral, yet we need not emblazon it forever
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
in letters of lead, -- ingerao periit. Fatal to
him, his wit is no disaster to mankind, so long
as a spark of comedy survives.
Nor does Ovid fail to give us that criticism
of life which to Matthew Arnold is the essence
of literature. Gilbert Murray, who has come
nobly to Ovid's defence, finds, after all, that
our poet's criticism of life is slight. It is such
as is "passed by a child, playing alone and
peopling the summer evening with delightful
shapes, upon the stupid nurse who drags it off
to bed. " 58 I venture to see in Ovid a spirit
more mature than this. His mimic world is no
toy fancy, a thing apart. He rather has ab-
sorbed life into it as into the only verity that
remains eternal amid the flux and flow. Ovid
dwells in his mind rather than in the images
that it creates. His thought is so little obtru-
sive, his art is so careful that we too hastily
circumscribe its limits instead of stretching our
own imaginations by its aid.
Ovid perishes for
his style -- like Cicero among the philosophers
-- no less than for his wit.
As we glance back at the periods of history
that have valued Ovid most, -- that aetas Ovi-
diana in? the Ages of Faith, the Renaissance
in all the countries of Europe, the times of
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? OVID THE MODERN
Louis XIV in French literature, those of Eliz-
abeth, the Restoration and Queen Anne -- we
become aware that these are very eminent
periods in human civilization. The horrible
thought may occur that possibly our own age,
despite its triumphs in the natural sciences and
in creature comforts, may somewhat have
slipped from the heights of literary taste. We
are a restless race, not having time to live even
in the present, much less in the past. Would
Ovid's ghost have again to exclaim, as in the
darker part of the Middle Ages:
I'm barbarous here, whom none can understand?
Ovid was too modern for the Dark Age; per-
haps he is too modern for ours. Who would
think that? Away with such blasphemy! It is
mere chance that our eyes have turned a blind
spot towards Ovid. Books have their fates.
How else could Meredith nicely describe the
spirit of Ovid's comedy without mentioning his
name? He could not have read him with care.
Otherwise, he would have made Naso toast-
master at his famous symposium on Noses in
Diana of the Crossways and have raised his
glass at Shakespeare's eulogy and Herrick's
toast:
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
A Goblet next Vie drink
To Ovid; and suppose
Made he the pledge, he'd think
The world had all one Nose. 60
The Dark Age had the disadvantage of not
possessing Ovid's works. We who have erred
can easily make amends. It is a comfortable
penance; open his books and read.
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? NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
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? NOTES
1. F. L. Lucas, Euripides and his Influence, p. 69,
Boston, 1923, in the Series, Our Debt to Greece and Rome.
2. Controversies, ii. 2. 12.
3. Tristia, iv. 10. S3 ff.
4. Amores, iii. 15. 7.
5. Tristia, iv. 10. 59:
Moverat ingenium totam cantata per urbem
Nomine non vero dicta Corinna mihi.
Tristia, ii. 427:
Sic sua lascivo cantata est saepe Catullo
Femma, cui falsum Lesbia nomen erat.
6. Carmen, 85.
7. Tristia, ii. 340.
8. Introduction to the Annus Mirabilis (ed. G. R. Noyes,
P- 25)-
9. Voyage autour de ma Chambre, chapter xxv.
10. Romance of the Rose, vv. 10692 ff. The edition of
Michel is cited, as more generally accessible than the criti-
cal edition by Langlois.
11. Romance of the Rose, vv. 9090 ff. The whole passage
shows a close study of Ovid.
12. In "The Padlock. "
13. Ripert, Ovide, p. 43.
14. House of Fame, vv. 627 ft.
15. Sir James G. Frazer, with an English translation (in
The Loeb Classical Library), ii. p. 394.
16. Met. , ii. 450 ff.
17. Met. , vii. 797 ff.
18. Met. , xii. 414 ff.
19. Met. , xii. 162 ff.
20. Met. , xv. 426 ff.
21. Herrick, "A Ternarie of Littles,, upon a Pipkin of
Jellie sent to a Lady," in his Hesperides.
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? NOTES
22. Fasti, iii. in ff.
23. De Rerum Natura, ii. 600 ff.
24. Met. , i. 325 ff.
25. Fasti, iv. 331 ff.
26. Fasti, v. 297 ff.
27. Fasti, i. 201 ff.
28. Fasti, v. 681 ff.
29. Odes, iv. 5. 23.
30. Epistulae, ix. 4.
31. Tristia, i. 1. 39.
32. rnVtia, iii. 4. 55 ff.
33. Tristia, v. 10. 37.
34. Tristia, iii. 3. 73 ff.
35. Naturalis Historia, xxxii. 152.
36. C. O. Minchin, Sea Fishing; Ars Amatoria, iii. 425.
37. Fasti, i. 493 ff.
38. F* Ponto, ii. 10.
