His work be-
came an authoritative Bible of Art.
came an authoritative Bible of Art.
Ovid - 1901 - Ovid and His Influence
Strange stories clustered about
his memory, as is natural enough in the case
of any great man. We hear of two students
who paid a visit to his tomb and asked his
ghost what was the best of all his verses. The
answer promptly came:
Virtue will even shun permitted joys.
This sentiment is Helen's, in her reply to Paris.
The answer to the second question, what was
the poet's worst, is no less satisfactory. The
lines recanted by the poet come from Phaedra's
epistle:
Pleasure is truth, truth pleasure. Jove says so:
'Tis all he knows, and all he needs to know.
Having compassion on the repentant heathen,
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
the young men offered prayers in his behalf.
At that there came a voice from the tomb:
No paternosters, I pray;
Traveler, go on your way.
The peasants about Sulmona know wilder
tales than this. Ovid, "Uiddiu," as they call
him, learned magic arts in the mystic grove of
the sorceress near Lucco. In one night he put
up a splendid villa, surrounded by gardens,
vineyards and orchards, and watered by a
spring which still is called "The Fount of
Love. " To punish the curiosity of sight-seers,
he changed the men into birds, and the maidens
into a long line of poplars. When the terrified
inhabitants prayed his mercy, he mounted a
great chariot with horses of fire, and dashed
off to Rome. There he plied his profession as
before, creating warriors from dragons' teeth,
giving life to statues, changing a woman's hair
to snakes, or her legs to a fish's tail. Finally,
the King's daughter fell in love with him and
he with her. But the King was obdurate, and
sent the conjurer away to Siberia, a land of
perpetual snow. There the wizard died. But
he still visits his villa, and every Saturday night
he goes off with the witches to the nut-tree of
Benevento.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Here is a curious weaving of popular fancy
about the tales of the Metamorphoses. Once
Ovid's stories were let loose by some cleric, the
good people of Sulmona could readily have at-
tached them to the poet himself, along with
other marvels. This process may indicate that
the stories about Virgil the magician were more
largely a product of Italian fancy than Com-
paretti, in his famous work, Virgil in the
Middle Ages, would admit. Travellers like
Conrad of Querfurt and Gervasius of Tilbury
were not altogether wild-eyed barbarians; they
may have exaggerated what they heard in Italy,
but they doubtless heard wonders in plenty.
Ovid, along with his magic, is the hero of
various amorous adventures, one of which, a
famous one, had been told of Virgil. At the
same time, Ovid is a very holy man, and num-
bered among the prophets of the coming of our
Lord. Somewhat later than our period -- in
fact in the full flush of the sixteenth century
-- Ovid passed, with little difficulty, from
magic to alchemy. Nicholas Valois composed
in French verses a work, finished by the priest
Vicot, entitled Le Grande Olympe, in which he
sets forth for the first time, he declares, the
true meaning of the stories of the Metamor-
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
phoses. Ovid's text is made a quarry for the
alchemist's pick and shovel. He strikes gold
immediately and constantly. The fable of
Deucalion and Pyrrha, for instance, betokens,
like the twin peaks of Parnassus, the masculine
and the feminine elements among the metals,
that is, gold and silver, from the union of which
the philosopher's stone is produced. In this
fashion, the whole poem is subjected to the
fatal touch of Midas; Ovid's gold is converted
into the baser metal. This sort of interpreta-
tion must have had something of a history be-
fore Valois and Vicot; one of their authorities
was Arnaldus de Villa Nova, who was as
learned in alchemy as we have found him in
medicine.
Ovid's Alter Ego
After Virgil's fame was overgrown with mag-
ical accretions, a new personage came into be-
ing, utterly unlike his historical counterpart;
his biography, separately recorded, touches the
experience of our Virgil at hardly a single
point. Ovid's personality did not quite double
itself in this way, though there is material
enough to form a lengthy and exciting career
for an alter Ovidius. A good approach is made
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
by certain commentators of the twelfth cen-
tury, who explain the poet's exile by his refusal
to accede to the amorous proposals of the Em-
peror's wife, who then, indignant at this slight,
falsely accused him to her husband. Livia in
the role of Potiphar's wife and Ovid in that of
Joseph, or Joseph Andrews, is indeed a novelty.
Possibly the full history of Ovid's double may
be discovered after all. A German poet of the
thirteenth century who continues the Chronicle
of Rudolf of Ems gives at least the outline of
such a story. 48
A heathen known to fame
Had Ovid for his name.
A writer of some note,
'The Tale of Troy' he wrote.
Far in a foreign land,
There ruled a monarch grand.
He knew nor shame nor fear;
His virtues had no peer.
He made Ovidius
His Chancellarius
And his chief scribe. The lay
Says that one fatal day
To wrath the monarch stirred
What from his Queen he heard.
So to avenge his wife,
He sought the poet's life.
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
The King's method was to set Ovid adrift in a
ship, first granting his request for a supply of
pens, paper and parchment. On the voyage,
Ovid wrote his Tale of Troy, and, on landing,
sent back the book to the King. The King,
who took a lively interest in the Trojan legend,
pardoned the poet, and the work was translated
from heathen Latin into good German.
Viii. DANTE AND CHAUCER
At the end of the Mediaeval period, its two
greatest writers, Dante and Chaucer, reflect in
their different mirrors all that is most typical
of the age. Both of them inevitably include in
their picture of life something of what Ovid
was and of what he had become.
Dante
For Dante, Ovid is one of the great world-
poets, one of those whom with Virgil, his good
guide, he meets in the pleasant greensward that
delights the reader, somewhat unexpectedly, in
the Limbo of Hell; Homer, Horace and Lucan
are the other members of this tranquil group,
and Statius greets the two travellers in Purga-
tory. Dante's reading of Ovid is shown by the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
most diverse sorts of reminiscences, which are
more abundant than those of any Latin poet
except Virgil. The spirit of Ovid the lover,
chastened and refined, comes to Dante through
the troubadours and the singers of the dolce
stil nuovo; it is exalted, in the lyrics of the Vita
Nuova and the Convivio and finally in the di-
vine allegory of the Commedia, to heights of
which Ovid never dreamed.
To Ovidius Ethicus, Dante appeals when dis-
coursing, in the spirit of Juvenal, on true no-
bility. 49 Nor does Dante, supported by the
allegorizing tendencies of his day, fail to find
in the Metamorphoses a treasury of hidden
meanings. With Ovidius Magus he has no con-
cern, save with the magician who can set a
metamorphosis before our eyes. To him he
flings the challenge of a rival in his art. As he
describes the simultaneous transformation of
the robber Brunelleschi into the form of a ser-
pent and of the serpent into the form of Brunel-
leschi, he exclaims:50
"Let Ovid be silent concerning Cadmus and
Arethusa, for if, poetizing, he converts him into
a serpent and her into a fountain, I envy him
not; for two natures front to front never did
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
he transmute, so that both the forms were
prompt to exchange their matter. " (Norton)
This is a gauntlet too heavy for Ovid to raise.
His magic is legerdemain. We admire the dex-
terity with which he deludes us, but we are
conscious of the trick and of the performer's
consciousness of it. When Dante tells the tale,
we bow before a miracle.
Chaucer
If Ovid hardly touched the spirit of Dante,
he contributed profoundly to the development
of Chaucer's genius; Chaucer and Jean de
Meun are the most conspicuous reincarnations
of Ovid in the Middle Ages. Their tempera-
ments are their own, but Ovid dwells within
them. Chaucer, like Dante, names Ovid among
the great poets of old,
Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan and Stace,51
and, it is safe to say, owes him a greater debt
than to any other poet, old or new.
Chaucer learned Ovid in the writings of
French masters, especially Jean de Meun and
Guillaume de Machaut, and he also read him
at first hand. His earlier works are packed with
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Ovidian matter, nicely adjusted to his own de-
sign. In the new Aeneid which adorns the walls
of the Temple of Venus in his House of Fame,
Dido is drawn after Ovid rather than Virgil,
and the epic itself is what Virgil's poem would
be if it filtered through the Art of Love. One
of the pillars in the House of Fame is erected to
\enus clerk, Ovyde,
That hath y-sowen wonder wyde
The grete god of Loves name.
Chaucer is professedly Ovid's pupil in the art
of love, and he deeply understands the master's
teaching.
Chaucer has also studied the nature of
woman with Ovid's help, as is obvious in
Troilus. The plan of the Legend of Good
Women no less than much of its matter was
furnished by Ovid. Ovid, as we have seen, had
taken up the cudgels for the injured race in the
third book of his Art of Love. Chaucer's de-
fence is presented with the same enthusiasm
and the same delicious undertone of irony,
In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer fulfils a
prophecy implicit in the House of Fame and
fills his stage not with characters drawn from
books but with the men and women of his own
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
times, the "neyghebores" at his door. His
debt to Ovid in this achievement is, at first
sight, less conspicuous than before. Allusions
and borrowings are far less abundant than in
the earlier works. He has transcended Ovid,
the singer of the tender loves, and now enters
the list against Ovid the master of narrative
and of a novel sort of epic. Though the subjects
of the Metamorphoses and the Canterbury
Tales have nothing in common, they are both
collections of diverse stories which the authors
would weave into a harmonious pattern. Chau-
cer did not finish his design, but that design,
we may be sure, would have exhibited in the
whole as it does in the parts a dexterity that
matches Ovid's in securing variety, contrast,
shifting of the scenes, unity in diversity and a
self-concealing art.
The prevailing tone of the Canterbury Tales
is that of comedy, with seasonings of ribaldry,
irony and banter; but Chaucer's comedy is not
merely gay. It is true to the full and ancient
idea of comedy, the mirror of life, and has
place for pathos, which may also deepen into
tragedy. In " the Knight's Tale" and that of
"the Man of Law," we have two stories ap-
propriate for romance, one Classical and one
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Mediaeval in matter, but both touched with
tragedy and with the sublime simplicity of
what Matthew Arnold called the grand style.
Ovid has these tragic moments in his epic of
transformations; both he and Virgil may have
guided Chaucer, here and in Troilus, in his
ennobling of romance. Chaucer's deeper moods
are more intense than Ovid's and his art of
dramatic portrayal is more vivid and diversi-
fied. Dryden praises them both, adding that
"the figures in Chaucer are much more lively,
and set in a better light. "62
One turns back from Chaucer to Ovid with
a deeper understanding of the latter's astound-
ing combination of witty blasphemy and de-
votion to the sacred rite. Chaucer treats the
Friar and the Sumner, both representatives of
Holy Church, as cavalierly as Ovid does Jove
and Apollo. The mediaeval poet could give
points to Luther and even Erasmus for a more
effective ridicule than theirs. But we turn from
satire to the gentle piety of the Prioress, who
tells of a miracle that awes the company,
Miller and Sumner and all, into silence. There
is pure religion and undefiled in the tale of
Griselda, and the heart of the Christian faith
is in the simple verses:
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
But hye god som tyme sendon can
His grace in-to a litel oxes stalle.
It is the hut of Philemon and Baucis once more,
save that Chaucer, though no ardent mystic, is,
as ever, deeper than Ovid when he sets his mind
on serious things.
The Canterbury Tales, then, in which the
poet might seem to have forgotten Ovid, show
just as clearly the presence of notable Ovidian
qualities, absorbed by Chaucer into his own
temperament and art. Above all, the two poets
are akin in their detachment of spirit. They
have the liberated mind, not that of the sceptic
like Anatole France, not that of the prophet,
like Dante or Virgil, immersed in the world of
ideas to which their art gives form, but that
of Shakespeare, sympathetic of human follies
and virtues and wisdoms and imaginings, yet
disentangled from them. Horace is of this
brotherhood, but in Ovid and Chaucer nil ad-
mirari has become a cosmic principle. Ovid,
the whole Ovid, never was better understood
than in the Ages of Faith, and no one ever so
lived him through as Geoffrey Chaucer.
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? ovid and his influence
2. Ovid in the Renaissance
The Renaissance was another aetas Ovidi-
ana. At what time Ovid "returned" it were
hard to say, for he had never departed. But an-
tiquity as a whole was more zealously sought
and found in this tremendous period than in
the centuries preceding -- the term "Renais-
sance" is no misnomer. Ovid's popularity, as
attested by translations, allusions and imita-
tions in the literature of all the European
countries, was securely established and ever
enlarged its bounds. The thirst for ancient life
and thought found satisfaction in his pages.
Painters and sculptors no less than poets,
turned to the Metamorphoses for stories and
themes, and for pictures that needed only the
transferring to canvas or to stone.
His work be-
came an authoritative Bible of Art.
i. PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO
Petrarch reckoned Ovid among his favorites.
With a hint from the Amores, he hit on an in-
vention in his Trionfo d'Amore that enjoyed a
wide vogue in contemporary and subsequent
poetry. But no censor morum could be more
savage than Petrarch in berating the indecency
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
! of that " insane work," the Art of Love, worthy
cause of the poet's exile, and typical product
of a mind " lascivious, lecherous, and altogether
mUlierous. " In general, Petrarch is too serious
and self-centred to- make Ovid his friend for
-life.
Boccaccio started with an intensely intimate
friendship with Ovid. His early works, both
Latin and Italian, are saturated with the amor-
'osities of Ovid's early poetry and with the gay
fancy of the Metamorphoses. In Fiametta, he
has constructed an elaborate tissue from the
Heroides and added his darling to their num-
ber. Ovid, praised by name, has furnished
many of the "ensamples olde" for the Am-
oroso. Visione, but here the spirit of Corinna
is. caught up into that of Beatrice and of Laura.
The pastoral fairy-land of Ameto takes much
of its scenery from the Metamorphoses. We
cannot deny that Boccaccio, or Sannazaro after
him, may have known something of the Greek
romance, but for the essence of the Ameto or
the Arcadia, we need look no further than Ovid,
Virgil, a few other Romans, and the genius of
the two authors. In the Decamerone, Boccaccio,
like Chaucer, essays a larger contest with Ovid.
If with Dryden, we allow Chaucer a special
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
prize as master of drama, the three contest-
ants all come off with flying colors, -- Arcades
omnes.
In the latter half of his bisected life, spent
soberly under the spell of the worshipped
Petrarch, Boccaccio turned to Ovid chiefly for
material for his scholarly work De Genealogia
Deoriem; Virgil is his principal authority, with
Ovid a close second. Boccaccio is not, like
Chaucer and Jean de Meun, an Ovid perfected
and transcended, but an Ovide manque. In his
youth, Ovid somewhat went to his head, and
in his old age was somewhat banished from his
heart.
ii. NEO-LATIN POETRY
As the full flush of the Renaissance comes
on, Latin poetry grows into a new art, beside
which the Latin verse of Dante, and even that
of Petrarch and Boccaccio, seemed to critics
of the day primitive and crude. In the work of
its best representatives, such as Pontano and
Sannazaro, this poetry is no mere learned ex-
ercise, but an expression of the writer's tem-
perament no less genuine than his writings in
his mother-tongue. To know fully the mind of
any poet of the age -- and the age includes
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
John Milton -- we must not relegate his Latin
poems to an appendix, but read them in order
with his other works.
Ovid's influence appears chiefly in the elegies
of the period; it notably affected their form.
The idea of love, as we have seen, that Ovid
sets forth in his early poems, was refined and
etherealized as it passed into the Mediaeval
Knightly Code and the poetry of the Trouba-
dors, whence it was exalted to heights yet more
sublime by Dante and, following in his wake,
by Petrarch and Boccaccio; Boccaccio's Am-
oroso Visione presents these three stages in
turn. Later in the Renaissance, the spirit of
Ovid reasserts itself. But Plato, too, was a
sovereign influence from the days of the Flor-
entine Academy, and these two battle hard for
the soul of every poet of the coming centuries
who sang of love. The "Platonism " of Spenser
and the "metaphysical" school in English
poetry is strongly seasoned with Ovid; at last
his influence quite faded away in the purer
idealism of Wordsworth's ode.
Of the two writers whom I have selected as
representative of the best in Neo-Latin poetry,
Pontano reflects in his verse the gorgeous color-
ings of the bay of Naples, whose islands and
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
peaks and inlets he transformed, with a fresh
sense of myth, into nymphs and deities and
subjects for his poems. Pontano's most original
use of the elegy is in his De Amore Comugali.
Ovid might be mystified at such a title, but
would admire the contents; for this proper poet
has more sensuous charm and passion than any
of the Roman poets of love, with the single
exception of Catullus. The initial poem of the
third book is in homage of Ovid. Pontano
stands raptly gazing on the town of the poet's
birth, and imagines a meeting between Ovid
and Corinna there. A dialogue ensues in which
Ovid in the role of the passionate shepherd is
seriously intense for once.
Sannazaro is a gentler spirit, more celestial
than Pontano; his verse has less color and more
grace. When he imitates Ovid in swearing fidel-
ity to his mistress, his oath is true. When he
takes the lament for Tibullus as a model for
his eulogy of Pontano, he avoids witty incon-
gruities and utters his devotion simply. San-
nazaro no less than his friend has the art of
peopling the hills and streams about Naples
with sprightly personifications. This is the
charm of his famous invention in the pastoral,
his Fisher Eclogues: Virgilian in form, they
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
have many a coloring from Ovid. In the Sal-
ices, he tells of the escape of some nymphs
from a troop of villain satyrs and their merci-
ful transformation into willows, which still
shrink from the touch of their pursuers and
lean far out across the stream. Catullus could
not surpass the grace or Ovid the narrative
rapidity of this perfect little poem.
Ovidius Ethicus was not forgotten in the
Renaissance. Commentaries were written as
explicitly moral as those of the twelfth century.
Ovid is also the starting-point for a long line
of "Sacred Fasti," beginning with "good old
Mantuan" in 1513 and continued by French
writers of Latin verse like the Benedictine
Hugo Vaillant (1674). Similarly, the Art of
Love was translated into something supernal.
Petrus Iacobus Martellus in 1698 published at
Bologna his L'Arte d'Amar Dio, and Thomas
Ravasinus at Paris in 1706 two books De Arte
Amandi S. Mariam.
For a typical utterance of what Ovid meant
in the Renaissance, we may consult the edition
by Guido Morillonius in 1516. This scholar
declares:
"When, not many days ago, I would re-
fresh my mind after the meanderings of the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
dialecticians and seek the holy dwellings of the
Muses, by chance I laid hand on the Heroides
of Ovid. Ye Gods, what manifold learning do
they display, and how they twinkle with
sprightly wit! If Horace gave his vote for one
who could combine the profitable and the pleas-
ant, none, methinks, can excel Ovid in this art.
He has so mingled the serious with honey-sweet
fiction and fiction with the serious, that 'tis
hard telling whether he offers us more pleasure
than profit or more profit than pleasure. "
Such was the agreeable compound discovered
by most readers at that time in the works of
Ovid.
3. Ovid in Modern Poetry
In the wide expanse of modern literature,
it were profitless to enumerate every author
who has in some fashion drawn inspiration
from Ovid's poetry. From the Renaissance to
the Romantic movement at the close of the
eighteenth century, Ovid's works were firmly
fixed in the programme of liberal studies. It
were difficult to mention a writer of eminence
in the literatures of Europe who showed no
acquaintance with Ovid in writing on Ovid's
themes. Modern reincarnations of Ovid occur,
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
though none so impressive as Jean de Meun
or Chaucer. There is no greater treat for a
lover of literature than to master an ancient
poet, Homer or Euripides, Virgil or Ovid, and
to read through those moderns who studied
him best.
In Italian literature, for example, we turn to
Ariosto. He is replete with reminiscences of
Ovid, but to recognize these is only the begin-
ning of the reader's interest. We must know
the background of Ariosto, first of all, by fol-
lowing the course of the Mediaeval chivalrous
epic as it is reinterpreted by Pulci and Boiardo,
and by noting the Classical flavors with which
these romances, like those of the Middle Ages,
were spiced. The spirit of Ovid is more obvi-
ous in Pulci and that of Virgil in Boiardo. We
are then ready for the Orlando Furioso, which
will furnish the Ovidian reader unbounded en-
tertainment. The poem is a glorious mixture,
a whirlwind of adventures and magic, flying
dragons, enchanted castles and furious com-
bats. The magic is not that of Ovid, made natu-
ral by the poet's sleight-of-hand, nor that of
Dante, made true by the poet's faith, -- it is a
slap, dash, devil-may-care magic which recks
not of reason or credulity. The work is a ka-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
leidoscope of all history, all cultures, all beliefs,
with a riot of Ovidian irony and burlesque.
Woe to the critic, if he would avoid the mad-
house, who would plot Ariosto's epic technique!
Not only the hero but the epic is furioso, and
the reader is mad with delight.
In Portuguese literature, we shall find a wide
acquaintance with Ovid exhibited by Camoens
in his famous epic, Lusiadas. Turning to Spain,
? we observe Ovid assisting at the inception of
the modern novel. The Comedia de Calisto y
Melibea, known as the Celestina, written at the
close of the fifteenth century, owes its general
plot to Ovid's amatory poems and to the
Mediaeval Pamphilus. In form, it is a prose
dialogue, which holds in solution both the novel
and the drama. In the drama, we shall find a
thorough student of Ovid in Lope de Vega. In
the work of which he himself was most fond,
the Dorotea, he harks back to Celestina for the
character of the go-between, but besides this,
the piece is crowded with reminiscences of
Ovid. Calderon appreciated the "serious re-
lief" furnished by the story of Cephalus and
Procris in the Art of Love and the Metamor-
phoses, for he made a tragedy of it in his Celos
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
aun del Aire Matan. He also saw that it made
good stuff for comedy, and turned it into one,
his C6falo y Procris. These examples will suf-
fice to convince the Ovidian that his poet was
well known to Spanish writers. To meet Ovid's
peer in narrative irony and burlesque, one has
only to turn to Cervantes.
Erasmus gives us the best of Holland, and
the Praise of Folly is Erasmus at his best. The
satire is essentially Horatian, with a bit of -
Lucian thrown in, yet the reader of Ovid will
feel that he is breathing a familiar air. In Ger-
many, we may strike at once for the highest,
for Ovid is one of the Latin poets whom Goethe
greatly relished. As is plain from Dichtung
und Wahrheit, he had read Ovid at an early
age, and later he defended him against Herder's
attacks. There are constant reminiscences of
Ovid in Wilhelm Meister. When Goethe took
his departure from Rome in 1781, his own
distress of mind recalled to him Ovid's farewell
to his city in the Tristia, and prompted the
writing of the Romische Elegien. We should
not expect much of Ovid in Faust,--except
perhaps in the person of Mephistopheles -- and
yet Goethe pays homage to his beloved poet
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
by inserting Philemon and Baucis among the
manifold figures in his great vision of life at
the end of the poem.
Ovid is more at home in France than in Ger-
many. He is a favorite with the authors of the
Pleiade, -- Marot, Baif, DuBellay and Ron-
sard. Montaigne read him at school on the sly.
The satires of Regnier contain many close imi-
tations of Ovid. One of them reproduces the
libertine's confession of Amores, ii. 4; as Re-
gnier is not a libertine but a moralist, his poem
is tinged with virtuous longings and regrets, --
it is a new sort of Ovide moralist. Still, Re-
gnier could imitate in another style. Later in
the seventeenth century, translations of our
poet multiplied; La Fontaine turned the Meta-
morphoses into rondeaux. As praeceptor amoris
Ovid assumed in polite society the authority
that he had once exercised in the Mediaeval
Courts of Love. 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-
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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-
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his memory, as is natural enough in the case
of any great man. We hear of two students
who paid a visit to his tomb and asked his
ghost what was the best of all his verses. The
answer promptly came:
Virtue will even shun permitted joys.
This sentiment is Helen's, in her reply to Paris.
The answer to the second question, what was
the poet's worst, is no less satisfactory. The
lines recanted by the poet come from Phaedra's
epistle:
Pleasure is truth, truth pleasure. Jove says so:
'Tis all he knows, and all he needs to know.
Having compassion on the repentant heathen,
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
the young men offered prayers in his behalf.
At that there came a voice from the tomb:
No paternosters, I pray;
Traveler, go on your way.
The peasants about Sulmona know wilder
tales than this. Ovid, "Uiddiu," as they call
him, learned magic arts in the mystic grove of
the sorceress near Lucco. In one night he put
up a splendid villa, surrounded by gardens,
vineyards and orchards, and watered by a
spring which still is called "The Fount of
Love. " To punish the curiosity of sight-seers,
he changed the men into birds, and the maidens
into a long line of poplars. When the terrified
inhabitants prayed his mercy, he mounted a
great chariot with horses of fire, and dashed
off to Rome. There he plied his profession as
before, creating warriors from dragons' teeth,
giving life to statues, changing a woman's hair
to snakes, or her legs to a fish's tail. Finally,
the King's daughter fell in love with him and
he with her. But the King was obdurate, and
sent the conjurer away to Siberia, a land of
perpetual snow. There the wizard died. But
he still visits his villa, and every Saturday night
he goes off with the witches to the nut-tree of
Benevento.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Here is a curious weaving of popular fancy
about the tales of the Metamorphoses. Once
Ovid's stories were let loose by some cleric, the
good people of Sulmona could readily have at-
tached them to the poet himself, along with
other marvels. This process may indicate that
the stories about Virgil the magician were more
largely a product of Italian fancy than Com-
paretti, in his famous work, Virgil in the
Middle Ages, would admit. Travellers like
Conrad of Querfurt and Gervasius of Tilbury
were not altogether wild-eyed barbarians; they
may have exaggerated what they heard in Italy,
but they doubtless heard wonders in plenty.
Ovid, along with his magic, is the hero of
various amorous adventures, one of which, a
famous one, had been told of Virgil. At the
same time, Ovid is a very holy man, and num-
bered among the prophets of the coming of our
Lord. Somewhat later than our period -- in
fact in the full flush of the sixteenth century
-- Ovid passed, with little difficulty, from
magic to alchemy. Nicholas Valois composed
in French verses a work, finished by the priest
Vicot, entitled Le Grande Olympe, in which he
sets forth for the first time, he declares, the
true meaning of the stories of the Metamor-
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
phoses. Ovid's text is made a quarry for the
alchemist's pick and shovel. He strikes gold
immediately and constantly. The fable of
Deucalion and Pyrrha, for instance, betokens,
like the twin peaks of Parnassus, the masculine
and the feminine elements among the metals,
that is, gold and silver, from the union of which
the philosopher's stone is produced. In this
fashion, the whole poem is subjected to the
fatal touch of Midas; Ovid's gold is converted
into the baser metal. This sort of interpreta-
tion must have had something of a history be-
fore Valois and Vicot; one of their authorities
was Arnaldus de Villa Nova, who was as
learned in alchemy as we have found him in
medicine.
Ovid's Alter Ego
After Virgil's fame was overgrown with mag-
ical accretions, a new personage came into be-
ing, utterly unlike his historical counterpart;
his biography, separately recorded, touches the
experience of our Virgil at hardly a single
point. Ovid's personality did not quite double
itself in this way, though there is material
enough to form a lengthy and exciting career
for an alter Ovidius. A good approach is made
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
by certain commentators of the twelfth cen-
tury, who explain the poet's exile by his refusal
to accede to the amorous proposals of the Em-
peror's wife, who then, indignant at this slight,
falsely accused him to her husband. Livia in
the role of Potiphar's wife and Ovid in that of
Joseph, or Joseph Andrews, is indeed a novelty.
Possibly the full history of Ovid's double may
be discovered after all. A German poet of the
thirteenth century who continues the Chronicle
of Rudolf of Ems gives at least the outline of
such a story. 48
A heathen known to fame
Had Ovid for his name.
A writer of some note,
'The Tale of Troy' he wrote.
Far in a foreign land,
There ruled a monarch grand.
He knew nor shame nor fear;
His virtues had no peer.
He made Ovidius
His Chancellarius
And his chief scribe. The lay
Says that one fatal day
To wrath the monarch stirred
What from his Queen he heard.
So to avenge his wife,
He sought the poet's life.
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
The King's method was to set Ovid adrift in a
ship, first granting his request for a supply of
pens, paper and parchment. On the voyage,
Ovid wrote his Tale of Troy, and, on landing,
sent back the book to the King. The King,
who took a lively interest in the Trojan legend,
pardoned the poet, and the work was translated
from heathen Latin into good German.
Viii. DANTE AND CHAUCER
At the end of the Mediaeval period, its two
greatest writers, Dante and Chaucer, reflect in
their different mirrors all that is most typical
of the age. Both of them inevitably include in
their picture of life something of what Ovid
was and of what he had become.
Dante
For Dante, Ovid is one of the great world-
poets, one of those whom with Virgil, his good
guide, he meets in the pleasant greensward that
delights the reader, somewhat unexpectedly, in
the Limbo of Hell; Homer, Horace and Lucan
are the other members of this tranquil group,
and Statius greets the two travellers in Purga-
tory. Dante's reading of Ovid is shown by the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
most diverse sorts of reminiscences, which are
more abundant than those of any Latin poet
except Virgil. The spirit of Ovid the lover,
chastened and refined, comes to Dante through
the troubadours and the singers of the dolce
stil nuovo; it is exalted, in the lyrics of the Vita
Nuova and the Convivio and finally in the di-
vine allegory of the Commedia, to heights of
which Ovid never dreamed.
To Ovidius Ethicus, Dante appeals when dis-
coursing, in the spirit of Juvenal, on true no-
bility. 49 Nor does Dante, supported by the
allegorizing tendencies of his day, fail to find
in the Metamorphoses a treasury of hidden
meanings. With Ovidius Magus he has no con-
cern, save with the magician who can set a
metamorphosis before our eyes. To him he
flings the challenge of a rival in his art. As he
describes the simultaneous transformation of
the robber Brunelleschi into the form of a ser-
pent and of the serpent into the form of Brunel-
leschi, he exclaims:50
"Let Ovid be silent concerning Cadmus and
Arethusa, for if, poetizing, he converts him into
a serpent and her into a fountain, I envy him
not; for two natures front to front never did
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
he transmute, so that both the forms were
prompt to exchange their matter. " (Norton)
This is a gauntlet too heavy for Ovid to raise.
His magic is legerdemain. We admire the dex-
terity with which he deludes us, but we are
conscious of the trick and of the performer's
consciousness of it. When Dante tells the tale,
we bow before a miracle.
Chaucer
If Ovid hardly touched the spirit of Dante,
he contributed profoundly to the development
of Chaucer's genius; Chaucer and Jean de
Meun are the most conspicuous reincarnations
of Ovid in the Middle Ages. Their tempera-
ments are their own, but Ovid dwells within
them. Chaucer, like Dante, names Ovid among
the great poets of old,
Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan and Stace,51
and, it is safe to say, owes him a greater debt
than to any other poet, old or new.
Chaucer learned Ovid in the writings of
French masters, especially Jean de Meun and
Guillaume de Machaut, and he also read him
at first hand. His earlier works are packed with
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Ovidian matter, nicely adjusted to his own de-
sign. In the new Aeneid which adorns the walls
of the Temple of Venus in his House of Fame,
Dido is drawn after Ovid rather than Virgil,
and the epic itself is what Virgil's poem would
be if it filtered through the Art of Love. One
of the pillars in the House of Fame is erected to
\enus clerk, Ovyde,
That hath y-sowen wonder wyde
The grete god of Loves name.
Chaucer is professedly Ovid's pupil in the art
of love, and he deeply understands the master's
teaching.
Chaucer has also studied the nature of
woman with Ovid's help, as is obvious in
Troilus. The plan of the Legend of Good
Women no less than much of its matter was
furnished by Ovid. Ovid, as we have seen, had
taken up the cudgels for the injured race in the
third book of his Art of Love. Chaucer's de-
fence is presented with the same enthusiasm
and the same delicious undertone of irony,
In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer fulfils a
prophecy implicit in the House of Fame and
fills his stage not with characters drawn from
books but with the men and women of his own
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
times, the "neyghebores" at his door. His
debt to Ovid in this achievement is, at first
sight, less conspicuous than before. Allusions
and borrowings are far less abundant than in
the earlier works. He has transcended Ovid,
the singer of the tender loves, and now enters
the list against Ovid the master of narrative
and of a novel sort of epic. Though the subjects
of the Metamorphoses and the Canterbury
Tales have nothing in common, they are both
collections of diverse stories which the authors
would weave into a harmonious pattern. Chau-
cer did not finish his design, but that design,
we may be sure, would have exhibited in the
whole as it does in the parts a dexterity that
matches Ovid's in securing variety, contrast,
shifting of the scenes, unity in diversity and a
self-concealing art.
The prevailing tone of the Canterbury Tales
is that of comedy, with seasonings of ribaldry,
irony and banter; but Chaucer's comedy is not
merely gay. It is true to the full and ancient
idea of comedy, the mirror of life, and has
place for pathos, which may also deepen into
tragedy. In " the Knight's Tale" and that of
"the Man of Law," we have two stories ap-
propriate for romance, one Classical and one
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Mediaeval in matter, but both touched with
tragedy and with the sublime simplicity of
what Matthew Arnold called the grand style.
Ovid has these tragic moments in his epic of
transformations; both he and Virgil may have
guided Chaucer, here and in Troilus, in his
ennobling of romance. Chaucer's deeper moods
are more intense than Ovid's and his art of
dramatic portrayal is more vivid and diversi-
fied. Dryden praises them both, adding that
"the figures in Chaucer are much more lively,
and set in a better light. "62
One turns back from Chaucer to Ovid with
a deeper understanding of the latter's astound-
ing combination of witty blasphemy and de-
votion to the sacred rite. Chaucer treats the
Friar and the Sumner, both representatives of
Holy Church, as cavalierly as Ovid does Jove
and Apollo. The mediaeval poet could give
points to Luther and even Erasmus for a more
effective ridicule than theirs. But we turn from
satire to the gentle piety of the Prioress, who
tells of a miracle that awes the company,
Miller and Sumner and all, into silence. There
is pure religion and undefiled in the tale of
Griselda, and the heart of the Christian faith
is in the simple verses:
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
But hye god som tyme sendon can
His grace in-to a litel oxes stalle.
It is the hut of Philemon and Baucis once more,
save that Chaucer, though no ardent mystic, is,
as ever, deeper than Ovid when he sets his mind
on serious things.
The Canterbury Tales, then, in which the
poet might seem to have forgotten Ovid, show
just as clearly the presence of notable Ovidian
qualities, absorbed by Chaucer into his own
temperament and art. Above all, the two poets
are akin in their detachment of spirit. They
have the liberated mind, not that of the sceptic
like Anatole France, not that of the prophet,
like Dante or Virgil, immersed in the world of
ideas to which their art gives form, but that
of Shakespeare, sympathetic of human follies
and virtues and wisdoms and imaginings, yet
disentangled from them. Horace is of this
brotherhood, but in Ovid and Chaucer nil ad-
mirari has become a cosmic principle. Ovid,
the whole Ovid, never was better understood
than in the Ages of Faith, and no one ever so
lived him through as Geoffrey Chaucer.
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? ovid and his influence
2. Ovid in the Renaissance
The Renaissance was another aetas Ovidi-
ana. At what time Ovid "returned" it were
hard to say, for he had never departed. But an-
tiquity as a whole was more zealously sought
and found in this tremendous period than in
the centuries preceding -- the term "Renais-
sance" is no misnomer. Ovid's popularity, as
attested by translations, allusions and imita-
tions in the literature of all the European
countries, was securely established and ever
enlarged its bounds. The thirst for ancient life
and thought found satisfaction in his pages.
Painters and sculptors no less than poets,
turned to the Metamorphoses for stories and
themes, and for pictures that needed only the
transferring to canvas or to stone.
His work be-
came an authoritative Bible of Art.
i. PETRARCH AND BOCCACCIO
Petrarch reckoned Ovid among his favorites.
With a hint from the Amores, he hit on an in-
vention in his Trionfo d'Amore that enjoyed a
wide vogue in contemporary and subsequent
poetry. But no censor morum could be more
savage than Petrarch in berating the indecency
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
! of that " insane work," the Art of Love, worthy
cause of the poet's exile, and typical product
of a mind " lascivious, lecherous, and altogether
mUlierous. " In general, Petrarch is too serious
and self-centred to- make Ovid his friend for
-life.
Boccaccio started with an intensely intimate
friendship with Ovid. His early works, both
Latin and Italian, are saturated with the amor-
'osities of Ovid's early poetry and with the gay
fancy of the Metamorphoses. In Fiametta, he
has constructed an elaborate tissue from the
Heroides and added his darling to their num-
ber. Ovid, praised by name, has furnished
many of the "ensamples olde" for the Am-
oroso. Visione, but here the spirit of Corinna
is. caught up into that of Beatrice and of Laura.
The pastoral fairy-land of Ameto takes much
of its scenery from the Metamorphoses. We
cannot deny that Boccaccio, or Sannazaro after
him, may have known something of the Greek
romance, but for the essence of the Ameto or
the Arcadia, we need look no further than Ovid,
Virgil, a few other Romans, and the genius of
the two authors. In the Decamerone, Boccaccio,
like Chaucer, essays a larger contest with Ovid.
If with Dryden, we allow Chaucer a special
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
prize as master of drama, the three contest-
ants all come off with flying colors, -- Arcades
omnes.
In the latter half of his bisected life, spent
soberly under the spell of the worshipped
Petrarch, Boccaccio turned to Ovid chiefly for
material for his scholarly work De Genealogia
Deoriem; Virgil is his principal authority, with
Ovid a close second. Boccaccio is not, like
Chaucer and Jean de Meun, an Ovid perfected
and transcended, but an Ovide manque. In his
youth, Ovid somewhat went to his head, and
in his old age was somewhat banished from his
heart.
ii. NEO-LATIN POETRY
As the full flush of the Renaissance comes
on, Latin poetry grows into a new art, beside
which the Latin verse of Dante, and even that
of Petrarch and Boccaccio, seemed to critics
of the day primitive and crude. In the work of
its best representatives, such as Pontano and
Sannazaro, this poetry is no mere learned ex-
ercise, but an expression of the writer's tem-
perament no less genuine than his writings in
his mother-tongue. To know fully the mind of
any poet of the age -- and the age includes
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
John Milton -- we must not relegate his Latin
poems to an appendix, but read them in order
with his other works.
Ovid's influence appears chiefly in the elegies
of the period; it notably affected their form.
The idea of love, as we have seen, that Ovid
sets forth in his early poems, was refined and
etherealized as it passed into the Mediaeval
Knightly Code and the poetry of the Trouba-
dors, whence it was exalted to heights yet more
sublime by Dante and, following in his wake,
by Petrarch and Boccaccio; Boccaccio's Am-
oroso Visione presents these three stages in
turn. Later in the Renaissance, the spirit of
Ovid reasserts itself. But Plato, too, was a
sovereign influence from the days of the Flor-
entine Academy, and these two battle hard for
the soul of every poet of the coming centuries
who sang of love. The "Platonism " of Spenser
and the "metaphysical" school in English
poetry is strongly seasoned with Ovid; at last
his influence quite faded away in the purer
idealism of Wordsworth's ode.
Of the two writers whom I have selected as
representative of the best in Neo-Latin poetry,
Pontano reflects in his verse the gorgeous color-
ings of the bay of Naples, whose islands and
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
peaks and inlets he transformed, with a fresh
sense of myth, into nymphs and deities and
subjects for his poems. Pontano's most original
use of the elegy is in his De Amore Comugali.
Ovid might be mystified at such a title, but
would admire the contents; for this proper poet
has more sensuous charm and passion than any
of the Roman poets of love, with the single
exception of Catullus. The initial poem of the
third book is in homage of Ovid. Pontano
stands raptly gazing on the town of the poet's
birth, and imagines a meeting between Ovid
and Corinna there. A dialogue ensues in which
Ovid in the role of the passionate shepherd is
seriously intense for once.
Sannazaro is a gentler spirit, more celestial
than Pontano; his verse has less color and more
grace. When he imitates Ovid in swearing fidel-
ity to his mistress, his oath is true. When he
takes the lament for Tibullus as a model for
his eulogy of Pontano, he avoids witty incon-
gruities and utters his devotion simply. San-
nazaro no less than his friend has the art of
peopling the hills and streams about Naples
with sprightly personifications. This is the
charm of his famous invention in the pastoral,
his Fisher Eclogues: Virgilian in form, they
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
have many a coloring from Ovid. In the Sal-
ices, he tells of the escape of some nymphs
from a troop of villain satyrs and their merci-
ful transformation into willows, which still
shrink from the touch of their pursuers and
lean far out across the stream. Catullus could
not surpass the grace or Ovid the narrative
rapidity of this perfect little poem.
Ovidius Ethicus was not forgotten in the
Renaissance. Commentaries were written as
explicitly moral as those of the twelfth century.
Ovid is also the starting-point for a long line
of "Sacred Fasti," beginning with "good old
Mantuan" in 1513 and continued by French
writers of Latin verse like the Benedictine
Hugo Vaillant (1674). Similarly, the Art of
Love was translated into something supernal.
Petrus Iacobus Martellus in 1698 published at
Bologna his L'Arte d'Amar Dio, and Thomas
Ravasinus at Paris in 1706 two books De Arte
Amandi S. Mariam.
For a typical utterance of what Ovid meant
in the Renaissance, we may consult the edition
by Guido Morillonius in 1516. This scholar
declares:
"When, not many days ago, I would re-
fresh my mind after the meanderings of the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
dialecticians and seek the holy dwellings of the
Muses, by chance I laid hand on the Heroides
of Ovid. Ye Gods, what manifold learning do
they display, and how they twinkle with
sprightly wit! If Horace gave his vote for one
who could combine the profitable and the pleas-
ant, none, methinks, can excel Ovid in this art.
He has so mingled the serious with honey-sweet
fiction and fiction with the serious, that 'tis
hard telling whether he offers us more pleasure
than profit or more profit than pleasure. "
Such was the agreeable compound discovered
by most readers at that time in the works of
Ovid.
3. Ovid in Modern Poetry
In the wide expanse of modern literature,
it were profitless to enumerate every author
who has in some fashion drawn inspiration
from Ovid's poetry. From the Renaissance to
the Romantic movement at the close of the
eighteenth century, Ovid's works were firmly
fixed in the programme of liberal studies. It
were difficult to mention a writer of eminence
in the literatures of Europe who showed no
acquaintance with Ovid in writing on Ovid's
themes. Modern reincarnations of Ovid occur,
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
though none so impressive as Jean de Meun
or Chaucer. There is no greater treat for a
lover of literature than to master an ancient
poet, Homer or Euripides, Virgil or Ovid, and
to read through those moderns who studied
him best.
In Italian literature, for example, we turn to
Ariosto. He is replete with reminiscences of
Ovid, but to recognize these is only the begin-
ning of the reader's interest. We must know
the background of Ariosto, first of all, by fol-
lowing the course of the Mediaeval chivalrous
epic as it is reinterpreted by Pulci and Boiardo,
and by noting the Classical flavors with which
these romances, like those of the Middle Ages,
were spiced. The spirit of Ovid is more obvi-
ous in Pulci and that of Virgil in Boiardo. We
are then ready for the Orlando Furioso, which
will furnish the Ovidian reader unbounded en-
tertainment. The poem is a glorious mixture,
a whirlwind of adventures and magic, flying
dragons, enchanted castles and furious com-
bats. The magic is not that of Ovid, made natu-
ral by the poet's sleight-of-hand, nor that of
Dante, made true by the poet's faith, -- it is a
slap, dash, devil-may-care magic which recks
not of reason or credulity. The work is a ka-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
leidoscope of all history, all cultures, all beliefs,
with a riot of Ovidian irony and burlesque.
Woe to the critic, if he would avoid the mad-
house, who would plot Ariosto's epic technique!
Not only the hero but the epic is furioso, and
the reader is mad with delight.
In Portuguese literature, we shall find a wide
acquaintance with Ovid exhibited by Camoens
in his famous epic, Lusiadas. Turning to Spain,
? we observe Ovid assisting at the inception of
the modern novel. The Comedia de Calisto y
Melibea, known as the Celestina, written at the
close of the fifteenth century, owes its general
plot to Ovid's amatory poems and to the
Mediaeval Pamphilus. In form, it is a prose
dialogue, which holds in solution both the novel
and the drama. In the drama, we shall find a
thorough student of Ovid in Lope de Vega. In
the work of which he himself was most fond,
the Dorotea, he harks back to Celestina for the
character of the go-between, but besides this,
the piece is crowded with reminiscences of
Ovid. Calderon appreciated the "serious re-
lief" furnished by the story of Cephalus and
Procris in the Art of Love and the Metamor-
phoses, for he made a tragedy of it in his Celos
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? THROUGH THE CENTURIES
aun del Aire Matan. He also saw that it made
good stuff for comedy, and turned it into one,
his C6falo y Procris. These examples will suf-
fice to convince the Ovidian that his poet was
well known to Spanish writers. To meet Ovid's
peer in narrative irony and burlesque, one has
only to turn to Cervantes.
Erasmus gives us the best of Holland, and
the Praise of Folly is Erasmus at his best. The
satire is essentially Horatian, with a bit of -
Lucian thrown in, yet the reader of Ovid will
feel that he is breathing a familiar air. In Ger-
many, we may strike at once for the highest,
for Ovid is one of the Latin poets whom Goethe
greatly relished. As is plain from Dichtung
und Wahrheit, he had read Ovid at an early
age, and later he defended him against Herder's
attacks. There are constant reminiscences of
Ovid in Wilhelm Meister. When Goethe took
his departure from Rome in 1781, his own
distress of mind recalled to him Ovid's farewell
to his city in the Tristia, and prompted the
writing of the Romische Elegien. We should
not expect much of Ovid in Faust,--except
perhaps in the person of Mephistopheles -- and
yet Goethe pays homage to his beloved poet
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
by inserting Philemon and Baucis among the
manifold figures in his great vision of life at
the end of the poem.
Ovid is more at home in France than in Ger-
many. He is a favorite with the authors of the
Pleiade, -- Marot, Baif, DuBellay and Ron-
sard. Montaigne read him at school on the sly.
The satires of Regnier contain many close imi-
tations of Ovid. One of them reproduces the
libertine's confession of Amores, ii. 4; as Re-
gnier is not a libertine but a moralist, his poem
is tinged with virtuous longings and regrets, --
it is a new sort of Ovide moralist. Still, Re-
gnier could imitate in another style. Later in
the seventeenth century, translations of our
poet multiplied; La Fontaine turned the Meta-
morphoses into rondeaux. As praeceptor amoris
Ovid assumed in polite society the authority
that he had once exercised in the Mediaeval
Courts of Love. 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-
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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-
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