No More Learning

Epistulae Ex Ponto
The letters of the latter part of Ovid's exile
show nothing new in the poet's genius or his
mood, except that whatever hope he had enter-
tained of a restoration has gone for good; the
twilight of the Tristia is settling into night.
At least he can now name the friends to whom
he writes; it is no longer dangerous for them
to be known as his correspondents. The num-
ber of them is amazing; there seems to have
been nobody worth knowing, at least in the
literary set, that Ovid did not know. His ap-
peals do not cease, fruitless though they must
be. They become monotonous, and he tells us
so. Yet they become so varied that he can con-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
struct a new art, -- safer, and less effective
than his former invention --? ? an ars precandi!
His pupil is no longer Corinna, but that other
heroine of mythology, Penelope; she is urged
to apply the new precepts in a final address
to Livia.
Ovid dwells several times on the sacred bond
that unites fellow-poets; he goes back in fond
reminiscence to his travels with Macer, in Asia,
in Sicily, at the fountain in Syracuse where
Arethusa had made her way up from the deep!
Something it is together seas to brave,
Together pay our vows to gods that save. 38
Again, the poet's fancy takes him back to the
little garden which he used to water with his
own hands, and in which he had set out some
plants -- are they still alive? He thinks of tak-
ing up farming in his new abode; he must learn
the calls that Gothic oxen know, -- he will
make them mind! This pastoral description
recalls the delightful account in the Meta-
morphoses of the wooing of Pomona; the al-
tered context gives the repeated words a vivid
pathos. In fact, reminiscence now brings him
pain; the dwelling of his mind on Rome
freshens the grief of exile. The poet anticipates
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Francesca's bitter epigram that it is sorrow's
crown of sorrow to remember happiness in
misery. 38
There are reflections on immortality in the
letters from the Pontus, but the poet is less
interested in his own immortality than in that
which his power of song can confer on others,
-- on the Emperor, on Cotta, and above all,
on his wife. Yes, the gods themselves, if it be
not blasphemy to say it, he declares, depend
for a part of their majesty on the poet's song.
This is indeed a subdued sort of blasphemy for
Ovid; there are no divine burlesques in the
poems of his exile.
Ovid's studies in Gothic had progressed, and
he had made friends among the uncouth in-
habitants. Ovid is the least snobbish of men;
he craved sympathy and society. "If I have
said anything bad about Gothland," he writes
a friend, "please assume that I meant the
country and not the people, -- the people are
not a bad lot. " Ovid read one of his poems in
the vernacular to a native, to the latter's de-
light. Another told him, as a bit of local tra-
dition, the story of Iphigenia in Tauris. If this
incident is as mythical as the tale, it only shows
that the Goths have entered with Corinna and
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
Penelope into the poet's imaginary world of
living myths.
But more and more the poet's fancy weakens,
or turns into a morbid nervousness. The dream
becomes a nightmare; he is fighting on a
Gothic battle-field, grazed by the enemy's ar-
rows, shackled with their bonds. He rehearses
his ailments again, with an unpleasant wealth
of circumstance. His present existence is a life
in death. He would welcome a metamorphosis,
-- not to a conscious being but to a thing of
wood or stone. He fights to the end; his is no
coward's death. All his strength fails but the
mind conquers all. Aye, he will die bravely by
the Pontic Sea. But the fight is over; Ovid has
his death-blow. The last lines of his book, and
for all we know, of his life, are these:
All have I lost; enough of life remains
To furnish substance for my spirit's pains.
Stab on. The torture can no further go;
There is no place for yet another blow.
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? n. OVID THROUGH THE
CENTURIES
Si quid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.
ovm
Compagni d'alto ingegno e da trastullo
Di quei che volentier gia '1 mondo lesse,--
L'un era Ovidio.
PETRARCH
Among all the poets who take rank merely as story-tellers
and creators of mimic worlds, Ovid still stands supreme.
GILBERT MURRAY
OVID, the poet of changing forms, was
aware that his exile was for himself
a metamorphosis. If he could have
followed the career of his posthumous self, he
would have noted, presumably with amuse-
ment, many a transformation which ideas about
his character, his purposes and his art were to
undergo. He found himself famous at an early
age; the lays of the mysterious Corinna were
sung all over town, and some of his poems, even
after his exile, were rendered in the theatres
to the accompaniment of song and dance. Exile
had threatened the extinction of his works
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
when he burned his copy of the Metamorpho-
ses and the libraries ejected his works from
their shelves. But all copies of his greatest
work had not been destroyed, and the others
were doubtless circulated as before. The sen-
sational advertisement given to the Art of Love
could hardly have interfered with its sale. Ovid
was a man's man, -- and something of a lady's
man as well -- and throughout his career had
many friends among the poets about town.
These friends took care that his works were
not forgotten. Some of his verses, in his time
or later, were scribbled on the walls of Pom-
peii. Before his death, busts were made of him
and his features were engraved on gems; un-
fortunately, no certified copy of his likeness
remains today.
Eventually, Ovid became a school-book.
This fate befell the Metamorphoses at the
hands of a certain, or uncertain, Lactantius
Placidus. Ovid's comedies of the gods and his
studies of human moods were relieved of their
sparkle and reduced to the lowest terms of fact
in usum puerorum.
Turn what he would to verse, his toil was vain;
The sober teacher made it prose again.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
This is the first of the posthumous metamor-
phoses of Ovid.
Ovid's fame among writers and critics of
literature under the Empire had a somewhat
chequered course. Eminent men of letters ap-
plauded him, with reservations. If imitation is
the best token of praise, he was reckoned
among the immortals by the age of Nero and
that of Trajan. Seneca, for instance, in his
plays, drew abundantly from Ovid's matter and
manner. The verdict that he pronounces on our
poet's slips into banality falls heavily on his
own head. He differs from Ovid in taking his
own absurdities seriously.
In following the experiences of the post-
humous Ovid, we should expect, besides fre-
quent metamorphoses, a Pythagorean resort of
his spirit to other poets' forms. His first re-
incarnation, with the necessary adaptation to
his new environment, is in Martial. Martial is
a sort of proletarian Ovid. Like Ovid, he has a
sprightly, kaleidoscopic mind, but is several
grades beneath him, morally and spiritually.
He is a parasite of greater appetite than taste,
ready to feed on whatever is cast to him, offal
or ambrosia. Ovid is audacious: Martial is un-
abashed. Et pudet et dicam, -- "Ashamed I
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
am, and yet I'll say it," declares Ovid; non
pudet et dicam, expresses Martial. He has
Ovid's abandon, which is the ethical corollary
of a philosophy of metamorphosis, without that
savoir faire which prevented Ovid from ever
becoming vulgar. Like Ovid, Martial makes no
pretences. He has wit and feeling and a dainty
grace, -- on occasion.
Juvenal seems an utter contrast to Ovid, but
Ovid has the makings of a moralist, as the
Middle Ages were aware. He does not cry ser-
mons from the house-tops, but his works are
stored with acute observations on men and
morals which, if the context be forgotten,
might be fitted into a letter of St. Paul's or a
satire of Juvenal's. Both poets declare that
beauty is no aid to chastity. One says:
Lis est cum forma magna pudicitiae,
the other:
Rara est adeo concordia formae
Atque pudicitiae.
Metre aside, which is which? 40 In a stretch of
seven lines in which this epigram appears in
Juvenal, there are four reminiscences of Ovid.
The weeping moralist turns to the laughing for
counsel now and then.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
We may follow the literature of the later
Empire and note Ovid's presence here and
there. He was one of the standard authors.
But except in Martial, his influence was not
profound. His spirit was still in exile.
i. Ovid in the Middle Ages
When the Dark Ages swept over Europe,
Ovid was submerged, nor did he make much
impression on the writers of the Carolingian
Renaissance. Ludwig Traube, an immortal
name in the history of Mediaeval studies, aptly
termed the Carolingian period of literature
aetas Vergiliana. Virgil was the supreme model
for the epic that glorified the ideals of the
Emperor in an age of renaissance, and for a
new and delightful pastoral that embodied a
popular theme in the ancient form. Ovid's day
was yet to come. His ghost would say, again,
if it crossed from Tomis to Aix la Chapelle:
I'm barbarous here, whom none can understand.
In the latter part of the eleventh century,
our poet came at last to his own. If the Middle
Ages had been slow in claiming him, they now
made up for lost time. Nothing could be more
happy than Traube's title of aetas Ovidiana
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
for this period, which includes the twelfth cen-
tury and runs the length of the thirteenth.
First of all, Ovid's works were taken into the
schools; they were regarded as an essential
element in a liberal education. Nor did the
Mediaeval master leave the text of Ovid un-
explained. The presence of glosses is apparent
in manuscripts of various of his works as early
as the ninth century, and by the twelfth, a most
thorough method of interpretation had been
evolved, in which we see that the amatory
poems were not always subjected to a mystical
interpretation. They were understood in the
Middle Ages as they are today. Many choice
passages from Ovid were culled for florilegia,
or "bouquets," the flowers in which were
picked to delight the nose, not merely to exer-
cise the hands. All the works of Ovid have their
place in a more ample library than a five-foot
shelf, the Biblionomia of Richard de Fournival,
chancellor of the cathedral of Amiens in the
thirteenth century. Hugo of Trimberg, in a
poem written in 1280 on the authors that no
gentleman should neglect, thus pays his re-
spects to Ovid in doggerel verse:
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Master Ovid cometh next,
Jolly dog and witty.
Fragrant posies of rick thought
Grow in many a ditty.
If the order you would learn
Of each and every poem,
Follow but the titles through,
And you'll quickly know 'em.
The Art of Love is not lacking in this list.
i. ELEGIAC COMEDIES
The Carolingians, though mainly the dis-
ciples of Virgil, had taken kindly to Ovid's
elegiac distich, and employed it for all sorts of
themes. A new and more skilful use of this
metre is to be noted in the eleventh century,
and is nowhere displayed with greater delicacy
than by Hildebert of Lavardin (11134), who
ended his career as Archbishop of Tours.
Hildebert, like other poets in the Middle Ages,
is master of two kinds of verse, the one simple
and generally unmetrical, appropriate for a
rustic singer as he pours forth his devotion in
a hymn. But the poet is only momentarily rus-
tic; he is writing in a certain style; he has not
forgotten his quantities. Hildebert could also
compose elegiacs with an easy grace that would
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
have excited Ovid's admiration. He is at his
best in a poem elegiac in form, tragic in spirit,
called Mathematicus. Its peer in comedy is his
poem on the story of Susanna, Versus de Sancta
Susanna. *1 Matter of this kind would ordi-
narily go into a Biblical epic.
Hildebert turns
it into a little drama in elegiac verse. The lines
on Susanna at her bath, -- the heat of the
summer day, her haste, her hesitant testing of
the water and quick plunge into it, her inno-
cent confidence in her solitude, contrasting with
the leering glances of the old men -- show
Ovid's dexterous rapidity, a mastery of his
rhetorical effects, and an apt use of his phrases.
Aestus erat, color instabat, sol flammeus imdas
lusserat immemores frigoris esse sui . . .
llluc invitant Susannam balnea; swgit,
Hue pro per at; fraudem nescit inesse loco.
Tentat aquam; laudat tentatam; nuda subintrat
Laudatam; nudam vidit uterque senum;
Vidit et incaluit.
Such verse might be written in the hey-day of
the Renaissance or by some admirer of Ovid
in the Augustan Age.
Hildebert's poem is the best representative
of a flourishing Mediaeval variety that, start-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
ing with the imitation of Plautus and Terence
in elegiac verse, turned more and more to
Ovid for matter as well as manner. In some
of the specimens, the wit is exceedingly coarse.
Woman fares badly in these comedies. She
whose charm has adorned the tale is used to
point the awful moral. Ovid, while largely re-
sponsible for the creation of this literary form,
would not approve the crude lack of courtesy
that its coarser examples exhibit. He would
have conveyed the same satire with an art that
even the fair victim would have found delect-
able.
ii. THE TALE
A tradition which Ovid did not found but
which he helped to perpetuate is that of the
novel or tale. Greek romance, and Latin, as
represented by Petronius and Apuleius, handed
over something of its spirit to Christian hagiog-
raphy; the lives of the saints contain many
good stories. Various waifs and strays from
the ancient authors were floating about, and
attracted similar matter that came in from
India or was disseminated by the Arabs. These
were increased by a host of popular fabliaux.
Stories in the Latin, accompanied by a proper
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
moralization, were collected in the Gesta Ro-
manorum. At the end of the tradition stand
those immortal raconteurs, Boccaccio and
Chaucer. It is natural that some of Ovid's
stories should be taken from their settings and
remoulded into popular form. Thus the tale of
Pyramus and Thisbe, which Ovid alone had
rescued from oblivion, appears in two Latin
poems of the thirteenth century, then in Old
French, German and Netherlandish. Thisbe is
among the good women whose legends Chaucer
immortalizes; Gower has the story in his Con-
fessio Amantis; the youthful and ardent Boc-
caccio tells it in L'Amorosa Fiametta; the aged
and scholastic Boccaccio retells it in his trea-
tise De Claris Mulieribus. Tasso is not wearied
of repeating it; in Spanish literature we see it
in Montemayor; then it is caught up in trag-
edy, comedy and farce in the drama of all the
European countries; Bottom's performance in'
A Midsummer Night's Dream has a noble lin-
eage behind it.
iii. VAGABOND POETRY AND SATIRE
The jolly vagabonds, or Goliards, whose
poetry John Addington Symonds illustrated in
a little volume of attractive title and not dis-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
appointing contents, found much in Master
Ovid well suited to their needs. He is the chief
priest of their order, with Horace second in the
hierarchy. They have learned the arts of love
and sing without restraint of the modes and
mysteries of Venus, sometimes with a merry
Macaronic refrain.
Audi bela mia,
Mille modos Veneris
Da hizevaleria.
In sadder vein, the bard laments the changes of
Fortune and expounds the law of her mutability
as Ovid had done in the Tristia, or he tells of
a new sort of metamorphosis in a scathing de-
nunciation of the stingy rich, who, instead of
bestowing their garments on the poor poet,
have them refitted for themselves in another
shape; he himself manages to remould the first
verse of Ovid's poem into good Goliardic form.
In nova fert animus
Dicere mutata
Vetera, vel potius
Sunt inveterata.
In another mood, he displays the schoolboy's
exultation at a holiday, when he can fling aside
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Nasonis carmina, vel aliorum pagina, and fare
forth to the green fields. Again, in Phyllis and
Flora, one of the best of Mediaeval debates,
the poet follows the gay cavalcade to the Court
of Love, where fawns and nymphs are sporting
in the woods, and Silenus, still as disreputable
as Ovid pictures him in the Art of Love, rides
up on his donkey.
"Ho/ ", he shouts in gurgling tones,
Stepping pedetentim.
Fain he'd join the Maenads' cry;
Wine and age prevent him.
The case of Knight versus Cleric is tried, and
with no slight help from Ovid, the verdict is
reached that the Cleric is the greater expert in
the art of Love. The most tremendous homage
paid to our poet is in a graceful amorosa vi-
sione, modelled on one of the letters Ex Ponto.
Cupid appears in the watches of the night, and
laments that the high standard of Ovid's amor-
ous precepts is maintained no longer: o tem-
pora, o mores I Each strophe in this poem is
capped with a resonant hexameter from the
Art of Love or the Remedies. The prophet
himself is speaking in reproof of a degenerate
age!
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
The verse of the Goliards is found as early
as the ninth century. Collections were made of
the various poems, gay and grave, amatory,
convivial, political, religious, which these wan-
dering minstrels sang at courts and monasteries.
At least as early as the tenth century, some-
body hit on the happy idea of creating an
eponymous hero. Whatever their name may
mean, they ultimately claimed descent from
Goliath, who had become in popular fancy a
close rival to Satan, more interesting and lov-
able than Satan, because more human. We
have poems on the confession of Golias, his
sermon, his complaint to the Pope, his address
to the person who stole his purse, and his ad-
vice (dissuasive) on matrimony, his elevation
to the Bishopric, his metamorphosis, and his
apocalypse. This lively fiction serves the poet
as a medium for satirizing foibles of the laity
and corruption in the Church; it should not,
however, be taken too seriously as a "picture
of the times. " The spirit of Ovid is manifest
in the creation of this master of the sons of
Belial, and there are marked resemblances to
Ovid in the life and poetry of one of the known
Goliardic minstrels of the twelfth century, who
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
went under the name of the Archipoeta of
Cologne.
In the vernacular poetry of France and Ger-
many, the Troubadours and the Minnesinger,
who continue the tradition of the Goliards, turn
back, like them, to Ovid for imagery, themes
and part, at least, of his "art" and "rem-
edies " of love. Whatever the poets may have
thought of Corinna, a certain generalizing or
symbolistic spirit in their poetry suggests the
Amores, and one of their most delightful in-
ventions comes, it would seem, direct from
Ovid. This is the alba or tageliet, the song at
dawn, in which the lover, like Ovid's gallant,
upbraids the day for tearing him all too soon
from the arms of his lady.
The vein conspicuous in the poems on
Goliath flows copiously in Walter Map's Dis-
tinctiones, a glorious medley, a mirror of life
as he saw it at the court of Henry II, and in
all the world of man. Among Map's stories
some are taken from Ovid, -- Myrrha and
Leucothea, for example. In recounting his tri-
umphs in a debate with the heretical Wal-
densians, he exploits their ignorance of the-
ology by remarking that they could have driven
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
a better course of argument, had they not, like
Phaethon, been unaware of the names of the
horses. In the thirteenth century, Nigellus
Wireker, Map's peer in satire, shows fools
their image in his Speculum Stultorum, which
tells the story of an ass who lost his tail and
in compensation endeavored to study theology
at Paris. The poem is written in admir-
ably Ovidian elegiacs. It is one of the best
satires ever directed against the parade of
learning.
Ovid is a master of parody, and parody of all
things above, beneath and on the earth was one
of the delights of the Middle Ages. Blasphemy
has more point, and less sting, in an age of
faith, because it is the obverse of devotion.
With Mediaeval freedom in mind, we may turn
back with a new intelligence to Ovid's blithe
comedy of the gods, enjoy its irreverence, and
then accompany the author, in a proper spirit
of worship, to the celebration of some ancient
rite. Ovid has his place, inevitably, in the mock
solemnities of the Middle Ages. A grand coun-
cil is held in spring-time at Remiremont, an
assembling of the Court of Love to try the
familiar case of Knight versus Cleric as adepts
in the art of love. No men are admitted to the
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
solemn assize, -- only women and priests. A
damsel opens the ceremony by reading, as a
quasi evangelium, selections from the "Pre-
cepts of the Illustrious Master Ovid. " At the
end, a dreadful anathema is pronounced against
the Knights, followed by their excommunica-
tion.
If Ovid is Evangelist, why not Pope? He is,
in a poem of the twelfth century, a satire
on a jealous priest, for whose admonition the
authority is cited:
In just decree Pope Ovid swore,
One woman may have loves galore.
iv. ROMANCE AND EPIC
Mediaeval imagination delighted to make
over heroic characters and episodes into terms
of romance, to invite the great figures of an-
tiquity to march down the centuries and make
themselves at home in the Middle Ages; the
past is plastic in the author's hands. It is the
same process that ran a vigorous course in
the Hellenistic age of Greek literature and
culminated in Ovid himself. He was the first
of the Mediaeval romancers. He would have
enjoyed seeing his stories of Pyramus, Narcis-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
sus, Byblis and Phaethon extracted from their
context and retold in what to the Mediaeval
author seemed a modern way. The presence of
the ancient poet is also evident in the lengthier
romances, those of Crestien de Troyes as well
as those which deal with ancient subjects, such
as the anonymous Enias and the Roman de
Troie of Benoit de Sainte-More. The latter
poem is a kind of Mediaeval Homer, at several
removes; the former is the Mediaeval Virgil.
The authors are not illiterate yokels, peering at
antique figures through a mist of Mediaeval
ignorance. They are cultivated gentlemen who
know the Classics well. They are following the
rule of an established literary form and adjust-
ing their material to it. In contrast to these
romances, and in deliberate contrast, other
poets retold ancient stories in the Latin heroic
hexameter with a closer conformity to history.
Such works deserve the name of epic rather
than romance. Thus Joseph of Exeter in the
twelfth century wrote a poem De Bello Troiano
in very decent Latin verse, and applying the
same method to a contemporary subject, sought
to immortalize the Crusades in his Antiocheis.
Similarly, the story of Alexander the Great re-
ceived a twofold treatment. The career of the
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Macedonian, something of a romance even in
its strictly historical form, had been embel-
lished with marvels from various sources, and
it furnished the theme for several romances in
the popular tongues. Ovid has contributed
something to their making. For instance, the
author of the Spanish poem, Libro de Alex-
andre, in the thirteenth century, imitates him
in more than one passage. But Ovid's influence
is no less obvious in the soberer Latin epic
Alexandreis which Gualterus de Insulis wrote
a hundred years earlier.
V. ARTS OF LOVE AND THE KNIGHTLY CODE
The Renaissance of the twelfth century was,
among other things, an age of knight-errantry
and courtly love. The poets of chivalry ac-i
cepted as a standard authority, with some mod-
ifications, Ovid's gay text-book on the art of
love. Crestien de Troyes translated it, and
though the translation is lost, Ovid is abun-
dantly present in the poet's romances. If the
historical Ovid took Paris and Helen from
Homeric epic and metamorphosed them into
figures for his comedy of love, the posthumous
Ovid assisted Crestien in a similar abstraction
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
of Lancelot and Guinevere from Celtic fairy-
legend, and a similar adaptation of their char-
acters to his romance.
In the next century, Ovid's poem is imme-
diately the inspiration of various poetical
treatises on the art of love. From France, Ovid
passes to Spain, and furnishes many sugges-
tions for the Libro de Buen Amor of the Ar-
cipreste de Hita, Juan Ruiz.
The acme of the Mediaeval transformation
of Ovid's treatise is reached in the Romance
of the Rose, one of the greatest works of the
period and of all time. It is a composite pro-
duction by two very different authors. Guil-
laume de Lorris, probably between 1225 and
1230, began a romance in the form of a vision.
A lover in his dream wanders amid a garden of
enchantment, where the Rose, the symbol of
his loved one, is guarded in a castle. With the
help of the god of love, Amors, he is about to
pluck the rose, when the poem abruptly ends;
the author, after some four thousand lines,
had not finished his work. The treatment is
leisurely, for Mediaeval romancers were not
pressed for time; like other undertakings of
the period, their work was done sub specie
aeternitatis. An air of dreamy mysticism, la
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
douce savor de la rose, pervades the story. The
poet takes much from Ovid, but what is taken
is absorbed and refined. The sentiment of love
is as pure, and as passionate, as in some of the
later Mediaeval hymns to the Blessed Virgin,
the Rose of Heaven.
Forty years later, the work was completed
by Jean Clopinel, or Chopinel, de Meun. He
enters at the eleventh hour and allows no pluck-
ing of the rose for over fifteen thousand verses
more. The Lover is not to win without knowing
what he wins and why. Jean de Meun is no
dreamer, but a scholar, versed in all the Latin
Classics, a philosopher, familiar with ancient
and contemporary thought, and a satirist, alive
to the weaknesses of nobles and churchmen
and women. He is likewise a poet and a wit,
and doubtless knew full well that he was strain-
ing the plot to the limits of its elasticity.