No More Learning

Ovid's best teacher was his own genius.
Poetry came to him with an almost fatal ease.
Given a theme in prose, he would find that the
thing turned out verse. The experience is rare,
though repeated by Pope and Lamartine. One
of the ancient lives of Ovid declares that once
when his father caught him writing a poem and
proceeded to apply the rod, the lad cried out
(in his native medium):
Parce mihi numquam versificabor pater!
Oh father dear, make it no worse;
I vow I'll nevermore write verset
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
This promise was ill kept. Throughout his life,
Ovid's thought flowed into verse, in love-elegy,
in tragedy, in tragical monologues of deserted
heroines, in an art of cosmetics, in an art of
love, in a remedy for the disease, in an epic
on miraculous transformations, in a calendar
of the Pagan Year. Even after his exile in
8 a. d. to the frozen shore of the Euxine Pontus,
his vein of poetry did not freeze. He poured
forth laments and petitions for forgiveness, as
well as less gloomy strains.
Ovid was thrice married, finding at last a
true mate, to whom he writes from exile in
terms of deep affection. By one of his earlier
wives he had a daughter who imitated the
paternal example by marrying twice. One of
the letters from exile is addressed to Perilla,
probably his step-daughter, the daughter of
his third wife. The letter reveals a delightful
intimacy between Ovid and the girl; he had
encouraged her in the old days to write verse,
and had acted as her kindly critic.
The life of our poet, we see, is bisected, like
the life of Cassiodorus and of Boccaccio. It is
natural to divide Ovid's poetry and his temper-
ament into two halves, one gay and active, one
sombre and depressed. But though exile was a
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
grim reality of horror to Ovid, his genius was
steady and normal in its development, and his
strength was only gradually unnerved by the
catastrophe of his latter days. His successes
and his downfall follow, as he saw, from the
same cause, his wit.
i. The Poet of Love
i. corinna
Him, who loves always one, why should they call
More constant, than the man loves always all?
COWLEY
Et falso movi pectus amore meum. ovn>
The Roman love-elegy, whatever had pre-
ceded it in the later Greek literature, had a rich
and varied history before Ovid. He mentions
his precursors, Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius, in
a kind of apostolic succession, and registers
himself as fourth in the line. 8 Catullus does
not appear, since technically he should not.
Horace quite as justly does not cite him as his
master in lyric poetry. But though Catullus
eludes literary categories with a Protean agil-
ity, we as moderns must reckon with him in
lyric of a kind that Horace could not write,
and in the poetry of a love that none of his
successors could feel. Jean de Meun, in the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
heart of the Middle Ages, as he starts to com-
plete the Romance of the Rose, does not leave
Catullus out of his galaxy of the poets of love;
he proudly, and truly, adds his own name and
that of Guillaume de Lorris, the author of the
first part of the great Mediaeval mirror of love
and courtesy. The truth is no less apparent to
Ovid, who pays Catullus his tribute in the
proper place. 4 And despite the technical ac-
curacy of Ovid's account of the elegists, it is
also true that Catullus should be acclaimed as
the inventor of the Roman love-elegy. The
history of a passion, the rehearsal of adven-
tures and joys and woes, is clearly the theme
of Catullus, whatever his form of verse be
called. Though his name may not head the
royal four, who will deny, if we turn from the
singers of love to their ladies, that the line of
Lycoris, Delia, Cynthia and Corinna descends
straight from Queen Lesbia? Who would im-
agine, if we consider Ovid's words, that he and
Catullus celebrated their sweethearts in a dif-
ferent kind of song? The lines on Corinna and
those on Lesbia seem of a piece. 5 If we would
know the real history of Roman elegy and
understand both Ovid and Catullus, cherchez
la femme!
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
But cherchez Corinne! She is hard to find.
The name is fictitious, as Ovid informs us.
What of her nature? What of the poet's pas-
sion? He tells us how it came. He finds his
couch hard and the bed-clothes restive. A night
of insomnia leaves him with aching bones at
dawn, -- he concludes that he is in love, and
reasons that the best way to stand it is to make
no protest. Unconditional surrender to Cupid!
Let us celebrate a trionfo d' amore, the little
god riding in his car, Compliments, Confusion
and Craze parading in the van, Conscience and
Common Sense trailing behind with shackled
wrists, -- and there is the poet, the latest catch,
trudging along with his fellow-captives.
Think back from this gay imagery to the
crystal-clear passion of Catullus:6
I hate and love. The cause I cannot tell,
But know the feeling and its torture well.
We need no formal proof that that poet is in
love. Tibullus and Propertius took love seri-
ously, a bit too seriously. Ovid's chief inspira-
tion for something new in elegy came from
Horace, who finds Tibullus a trifle lacrimose
and genially ridicules the lover and his woes.
Horace also understands the admirably pro-
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
tective art of satirizing the third person in
terms of the first; he did not really blurt out
the story of his love when the wine went to his
head or really lay his plump body on the cruel
sill for an unheeded serenade in the rain. In
such pictures as these, he is having a little fun
with the romantic lover as he appears in elegy;
and Ovid is having more. With an undeniable
interest, and perhaps some experience, in in-
trigue, with an incorrigible indecency and yet
without a touch of the prurience of Sterne,
he invents a mistress and a world of escapades,
partly to give his fancy rein and partly to in-
dulge in sprightly travesties. Falsus amor,
"imaginary amours," is his name for this in-
vention. 7 His amusement must have been vast
when one Roman dame let it be whispered that
she was the genuine Corinna.
Let us follow some of the episodes in our
lover's uncertain career. After his capture, the
new victim takes vows of perpetual fidelity to
his only sweetheart, and promises her through
his songs the immortality of the famous
heroines of myth. In the next poem, he blithely
instructs her how to deceive her husband at a
banquet that they all attend. Then Corinna
comes to him for a mid-day revel. May the
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
gods send many mid-days of this kind! And
now the lover is singing a sweetly elaborate
serenade, -- what is technically known as a
"closed-door serenade " -- but it has no effect
on the lady or on the boorish concierge. Our
hero, thus flouted, is desperate. Small wonder
that in a fit of indignation he grabbed his sweet-
heart and scratched her face; a poem records
his utter repentance and humiliation. Then fol-
lows a dreadful scene, witnessed by the poet
behind the arras. The hag Dipsas, procuress
and type of all evil, instructs his darling in the
art of love. The creature's nomen is her omen;
Dipsy is her name and tipsy is her nature.
Ne'er has Aurora gilt the morning skies
That Dipsy sighted her with sober eyes.
She explains the social standards of the age:
The slattern Sabine under Tatiuf rule
Kept but one lover in her simple school.
While Mars abroad fighteth our foemen down
Good Venus reigns within Aeneas' town.
Our beauties are at play, and she is chaste
Whom none has asked. Or if she's not straight-
laced,
A rustic hoyden, she herself will ask.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Casta est quant nemo rogavit, -- that motto
heads one of the stories of Prosper Merimee
and is elaborated wittily by Congreve. It is
not the poet's doctrine. Oh, no! Dipsas is the
speaker. But from other poems, it is fairly ap-
parent that rusticitas is the ultimate word for
moral evil, physical evil and spiritual evil.
Finally, when the hag exhorts her pupil always
to demand pay for her favors, and in particular
to set no commercial value on the only coin that
the poet can pay, his verses, then his righteous
indignation can stand no more. He leaps from
his covert and pronounces on the beldame the
most awful imprecation that mind can con-
ceive:
Homeless and poor, by every god accursed,
Have winters lengthy, and perpetual thirst!
A dirge now follows, on the loss of his mis-
tress's hair, in consequence of a violent appli-
cation of cosmetic. But weep no more, Lady,
weep no more. Augustus has vanquished the
Sygambri, and there should soon come from the
north a new supply of wigs in your favorite
shade of blonde.
Now Germany shall send you caitiff hair;
Thus shall my darling in the triumph share.
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
As beaux stand round with admiration big,
Blusking you'll say, "My charm is but a wig.
Some dimpled Gretchen from beyond the Rhine
Merits the fame that once, alas, was mine. "
Such is our lover's career. After many suc-
cesses, after loving two sweethearts at the same
time, after loving with undivided affection each
girl that he sees, after many buffetings and
floutings, he would fain resign. He has had
much to bear. It is not pleasant to sing a
closed-door serenade to your mistress while the
rival is within or to be observed by the latter
as he comes away.
Waste no more honeyed words, fell charm of yore.
I'm not so foolish as I was before.
And yet, the battle of Hate versus Love tor-
ments him:
I cannot live or with you or without.
I think I know my will and still I doubt.
If only she were either less beautiful or more
virtuous, -- but either wish is vain. Ah, well,
there is no escape.
You're mine, whatever else. Decree my fate I
Will you by will I love, or forced by fate?
But no! Let freedom's breeze my broad sails fill!
I'll nolens volens will Love rule my will!
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
This is a complex sort of freedom, worthy a
place among the metaphysical conceits of
Donne or Cowley. There is an unexpectedly
Calvinistic ingredient in Ovid's erotic philos-
ophy; he finds no difficulty in being damned
for the glory of his mistress. To die in her
embraces, that is the happy end.
Then at the grave some sobbing friend shall say,
"Just as he lived, our Ovid passed away. "
11. THE BEGINNINGS OF A GREATER PLAN
O mihi turn si vita supersit
Tu procul annosa pendebis fistula pinu
Multum oblita mihi. milton
Pulsanda est magnis area maior equis. ovn>
Medea
In one of the poems of the Amores, Ovid
describes the ancient and solemn rites of Juno
which he witnessed with his wife at Falerii, a
town just over the Etruscan border. The sud-
den revelation of Ovid as a sober family man
taking a steep road to attend a religious festi-
val is a bit disconcerting. Yet the tone of the
poem is serious or even devout; Ovid, like a
true Roman, has a relish for liturgy.
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
'Tis worth the toil to see a splendid rite,
Though rough the hills that take us to the sight.
As the horrors of tragedy are lightened -- and
intensified -- by scenes of comic relief, so there
is a kind of " serious relief," the use of which
Ovid well understands. Satire, said Thackeray,
must walk arm in arm with Sympathy. Humor
needs pathos to give it depth, and the audacity
of Ovid's wit calls loudly for sobriety. The
poet sometimes hears, and sometimes does not
heed. The threnody on the death of Tibullus
in the Amores is spoiled of its seriousness by
over-pretty conceits and the amusing cat-fight
of Delia and Nemesis at their lover's funeral.
One often asks of Ovid, with Dryden, "If
this were wit, was this a time to be witty? "
Wit, as Ovid observed, was his undoing.
None the less, at the time when our poet
was busied with the adventures of his imagi-
nary Corinna and her ridiculous lover, he was
planning greater things. The new work should
be not epic, for he had burned his fingers in
that fire, but tragedy.
Ovid was fond of the
drama, as allusions in the Tristia and adapta-
tions in the Metamorphoses amply show. His
play, on the familiar subject of Medea, has not
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
come down to us, but it won the plaudits of
competent critics like Tacitus and Quintilian.
With the help of Seneca's tragedy on the same
theme, it is perhaps possible to infer that the
conception of Medea in Ovid's play was more
stern and heroic than that which appears in
his later works.
Heroides
O sely womman, ful of innocence,
Ful of pitee, of trouthe, and conscience,
What maked yow to men to trusten so? chaucer
Ignotum hoc aliis ille novavit opus. ovid
Whatever the merits of his play, Ovid was
not encouraged to send others in its train. In-
stead, he hit on a happy device, of which a
suggestion had appeared in Propertius, where-
by both his interest in tragedy and his wit,
wholesomely sobered, could find scope. He in-
vented a series of letters, sent by lonely or
desperate heroines to the men who had caused
their distress. The poems are tragic mono-
logues in form, set over into epistles. Attic
tragedy has furnished Ovid with the largest
number of his subjects, yet some come from
epic, some can be traced no farther back than
the Hellenistic period in Greek literature, and
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
once, in the letter of Dido, the poet reckons
with an illustrious Roman model.
In spirit, only two of these pieces are within
range of tragic feeling. The despair of Phyllis,
nine times descending to the shore and nine
times hoping vainly for the sight of her return-
ing lover's sails, stirs deeper emotions than
mere sympathy. So do the horror and the
bravery of Canace, victim of her brother's in-
cestuous love, and of her own. The former
story, so far as we know, is no earlier than the
Hellenistic age, when tragedy had virtually
ceased to be. Canace was one of the themes of
Euripides, Ovid's master in many ways; one
can feel Greek iambics under the elegiac dis-
tichs at the close of the poem.
Elsewhere in the Heroides, one waits in vain
for the thrill of tragic pity and fear, even in
the letters of Medea, Deianira and Phaedra,
heroines that figure in well-known masterpieces
of the Attic stage. Ovid subjects the characters
of tragedy to his art of metamorphosis, as his
predecessors in the Hellenistic age had done.
Heroic figures were made over for romance
then as in the Middle Ages. He was a startling
inventor who in Ovid's phrase,
Made fierce Achilles sentimental.
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
Ovid liked the novelty, and tried his hand at it.
But there is not the faintest breath of romantic
quaintness in his lettres des dames du temps
jadis. Ovid's is not a chronicle of wasted time,
or
Beauty making beantiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights.
He invites the romantic into the light of
common day; his pathos is human and con-
temporary. It is varied enough; it attends the
patient longings of Penelope, the humorous
timidities of Laodamia, the tumultuous passion
of Sappho. The poet has a modest garden, but
he cultivates it intensively.
The writers in the Heroides are thus, after
all, characters in elegy rather than tragedy and,
perforce, characters in the kind of elegy that
Ovid had made his own. The use of the elegiac
metre is thus appropriate, if not inevitable.
Wit, the poet's supporting virtue and his em-
barrassing vice, breaks forth in season and out.
Briseis, he cannot forget, is heroine not only
in the Iliad, but in Horace's ode to a young
friend in love with a maid-servant. In Ovid's
poem, humor plays delicately on the surface
of pathos, -- dangerous skating, which Horace
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
would have applauded. Laodamia is treated
with a freer hand; she well-nigh becomes mat-
ter for comedy. As her husband sails with the
army for Troy, she cautions him to beware of
Hector on the field. His campaigns are else-
where.
In love, not war, a par fit, gentil knight, --
So let my dear one love, while others fight.
And let him be cautious in the landing! In the
thousand ships, be his the thousandth, and of
all on board, be he the last to leap ashore! All
this would turn the lament into burlesque, if
this were all. Again, as in Briseis, the under-
tone is pathos, with an approach to tragic
irony; for Protesilaus was to leap forth first,
not last, and fall by Hector's spear.
The strands of grave and gay fail to unite
in the Heroides when gayety brings us from
the heroic age plump into that of Augustus.
Tell-tale reminiscences of the Amores are all
too plentiful. Penelope apprehends from her
husband the dreadfully Ovidian reproach of
rusticity. Briseis slips from her tent quite in
the manner of Corinna eluding the concierge.
Phaedra has studied an advance-copy of the
Art of Love. The heroine of Euripides, to be
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
sure, is as adroit, and Hippolytus delivers a
kind of Anti-Ovidius, sive de Arte non Amandi;
but all this finesse is, in the play, caught up
into tragedy, with its deep questionings of di-
vine justice and human fate. When, in the let-
ter, Jove is displayed as the first Augustan and
critic of rusticity, illusion takes wings and the
atmosphere of the Amores is about us.
That ancient piety, doomed soon to die,
Lasted through Saturn's rustic dynasty.
Jove called things righteous if they pleasant be,
Wedded his sister and made morals free.
Ovid does not quite turn Phaedra's appeal into
comedy. Would that he had done so! He has
merely out-Euripidized Euripides.
The poems of the Heroides, despite their
artificialities, lapses in taste and the presence
of jocoseness where one looks for grief, are
alive today for the reason that Ovid has ac-
complished the chief purpose for which he
wrote them. We should regard them not as
unsuccessful attempts at tragic monologue, but
as thoroughly competent studies of woman's
moods. To Catullus and the other predecessors
of Ovid in love-elegy, woman is an unsolved
riddle. The poet can analyze his own emotions,
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
but back of them is the impenetrable cause,
from which he moves uneasily away. Lesbia
is vividly a person because her worshipper is.
We can reason back, theologically, from effect
to cause, and have no doubt that she very
much exists. We know that she is beautiful
and passionate and wicked; she bites. But
what the inner workings of her soul are, Catul-
lus cannot tell. He can get no farther than
sentio et excrucior. Tibullus and Propertius
are still less capable of an answer. We doubt
the reality even of their own feelings; their
mistresses fade into the background of literary
conventions; it matters not whether Plania was
really Hostia or who she was. Nor has Ovid,
in the Amores, much place for an analysis of
woman's moods. His chief amusement is in the
invention of his myth and in the ridicule of
the romantic lover who figures in it. But Ovid
is equipped by a superfeminine acuteness,--
I speak as a man -- to understand women. He
is a member of that small coterie to which
Euripides before him, Chaucer, Boccaccio,
Shakespeare and Meredith after him had right
of entrance. It is in the Heroides that our poet
blithely embarks upon the great adventure:
Insano iuvat indulgere furori.
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There are manifold types of woman and
woman's moods in the poem, -- wife, sister,
step-mother, servant, shepherdess, queen, the
trusting girl, the vengeful woman, the ingenue
and the adept in passion and its art. The study
of Phaedra will satisfy us better, if we look
not for tragedy or even pathos, but for a
searching analysis of a woman's longings, cas-
uistries and wrongs. Ovid's Phaedra is less
noble than the heroine of Euripides's play, but
she is altogether as complex. In his portrayal
of Dido, our poet subjects himself even more
audaciously to comparison, and has been
treated with general contumely and misunder-
standing for his pains. Ovid is not correcting
Virgil. He is picturing a different heroine, less
queenly, more subtle. He would interpret the
turnings and returnings of her emotions, like
the colors on the changing sea, at the moment
when, certain of her betrayal, she would send
her sister to implore Aeneas for a short re-
prieve. It will not do merely to say that Ovid
has replaced a heroine by a woman. No truer
woman ever suffered than Virgil's Dido. But
Ovid avoids tragedy; his Dido is a person of
more humor, irony and common sense. She is
in one mood, -- when she speaks of her unborn
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
child -- more heroic, not less. She can be fairly
blunt and brutal in showing her traitor the
commercial advantage of settling in Carthage.
Then in an instant she is a weak and loving
woman, begging her life of him. Dryden de-
clares that Virgil's portrayal of Dido must
yield to the Myrrha, the Biblis, the Althaea of
Ovid, who has "touched these tender strokes
more delicately than Virgil could. " 8
Incidental to Ovid's plan is a certain de-
preciation of his own sex. There is material for
a comic Aeneas in Dido's letter. He is fickle,
rock-hearted, short-sighted, perjured, supersti-
tious, ungallant and somewhat naive; he thinks
that after seven years of miscellaneous buffet-
ings on the deep he is the darling of the gods.
He owes his safety to her, not them; she saved
him from a watery grave and gave him food
and clothes. His eye is on the main chance and
his great mission is the love of war for war's
sake; he is bellicose but not heroic. Above all,
-- here is a slam at Virgil -- he is fickle and
feminine. Varium et mutabile Aeneas! So is
Jason,
Mobilis Aesonides vernaque incertior aura
mobile piu che il vento! Ovid has pointed the
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
way for Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and
partly depicted Meredith's egoist, -- that is,
any man -- who is as capricious as a woman
and who finds woman capricious chiefly be-
cause his logical processes operate less quickly.
Ovid damned Aeneas for all time and pre-
vented some readers from understanding the
tragedy of the fourth Aeneid, which needs, and
displays, the suffering of the hero no less than
of the heroine. Ovid's Aeneas is the father of
a long line of villains, ridiculed by Jean de
Meun, by Chaucer, by Shakespeare, by Scar-
ron and by Prior in his infamous couplet:
Nor sing I Aeneas, who led by his mother
Got rid of one wife and went far for another.
But Chaucer and Shakespeare, and Ovid, too,
are writing for a purpose, in which a tragic
Aeneas would be eminently out of place.
If we remove the Heroides from the realm
of tragedy to that of psychology, and allow
Ovid's wit a wider range than first appeared
appropriate, we shall better understand his
heroical letters and their writers. Nothing
would have amused him more than to see an
excess of seriousness imputed to them. When
Henry Esmond read Lady Castlewood his ver-
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? THE WORLD OF POETRY
sified renderings of the Epistles, particularly
the strains in which Medea and Oenone call
after their false lovers, "she sighed and said
she thought that part of the verses most pleas-
ing. " Thackeray had no small share of the
anima naturaliter Ovidiana, for he adds: "In-
deed she would have chopped up the Dean,
her old father, in order to bring her husband
back again. But her beautiful Jason was gone,
as beautiful Jasons will go, and the poor en-
chantress had never a spell to keep him. "
-
The Double Epistles
Ovid's friend Sabinus took up the cudgels
for the men, by composing answers, unhappily
not extant today, to several of the heroines'
letters; the heroes were allowed to explain
themselves. Ovid, acting on this hint, wrote
three double letters, message and reply, be-
tween Paris and Helen, Leander and Hero,
Acontius and Cydippe. It is strange that the
genuineness of these poems was debated so
long; if they are not from Ovid's pen, an
ignotus has beaten him at his own game.
The letter of Paris is a masterful application
of the precepts of the art of love. He begins
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? OVID AND HIS INFLUENCE
by declaring his passion. That is the whole
story; he loves her. But more, his love is di-
vinely enjoined. Appointed arbiter in the con-
test of the three goddesses, he favored Venus,
and Helen is the prize. He has come over the
seas for her. And when he saw her, -- it seemed
the vision of Venus again. But is he worthy?
His lineage springs from Jove and his kingdom
is far wealthier than poor little Sparta. Poor
little Sparta? That was not well said. The land
that gave Helen birth is paradise. Yet, really,
such beauty needs transplanting to an even
fairer garden.