MR. MUNRO'S LUCRETIUS.*
Tax tide of cram bookmongering to which the high pressure of modern competition at the English Universities had given birth, seems to have taken a turn, and a small band of scholars has arisen, scholars in the fine old English sense of the word, but armed in the full armour of modern science, who have once more set up the old standard of independent English scholarship. By his ripe and elegant translations, by his polished and elaborate commentaries, Professor Conington has marked the growth of the new professorial school at Oxford. The almost Cyclopian, certainly German, labour of collating the text of Shakespeare, recently carried to a triumphant issue by the Public Orator and his co-editors at Cambridge, is a monument of the new spirit which the example of Germany has infused into the study of Qur own literature. When men of the delicate and polished attain- ments of the Public Orator undertake a task so grinding it is a sign that the days of idle quotation are passed, and that science has taken the place of dilettantism. Of this little band Mr. Munro is one of the best ornaments. That he was one of the very first among Latin scholars in England has long been known in Univer- sity circles. His new edition of Lucretius places him in the front rank not of English but of European scholarship. It is a pleasure to find in this book all the characteristics of the man, charac- teristics which have won for him the peculiar and deep respect. of all who have been brought into contact with him,—the firm, quiet, unassuming modesty in the midst of profound at- tainments, the absolute incapacity to acquiesce in any slipshod - result, the habit almost as fixed as a law of nature of carrying an investigation for its own sake to the very furthest point to which it can be carried, and stopping short only when all the materials of investigation are exhausted, the strong and quiet scorn for every- thing superficial, for everything which is not of the essence of the thing, so far as it can be got, these and many other qualities are * Titi Lucreti Cart de Serum Mallard Libri Sex. With a translation and notes. By 'ff. A. J. Munro, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College. Deighton, Cambridge.
indeed peculiarly Mr. Munro's. Let us add M all fairness, they are also those which the University of Cambridge places above all others in its ideal of academical excellence, even though its scorn is sometimes misapplied to qualities which transcend mere accuracy of acquisition.
We should ill have profited by the example of such a man if we presumed to sit ex cathedra upon a book to which he has devoted the flower of his ripest energies and the fulness of his knowledge in a department now peculiarly his own. We only ask leave to give some amount of his labours. His task has been threefold, to supply a more perfect text with a critical apparatus, to give a translation, and to add a commentary explaining and illustrating the poem. The arrangement is original, but not inconvenient. The text and the translation are in one volume, the latter standing at the foot of the former in the same page. This volume does not contain a note. All the notes in a body occupy the second volume, and these again are divided into two parts. The critical discussion of the text is taken alone and separately step by step in notes occupying the first part of the second volume. The philosophi- cal and literary notes are taken separately in the second part. Thus the reader may refer to either without being condemned to wade through the other. Of all the ills which fall upon the student, perhaps the worst is to have to wade through a discussion of the text when he is looking for commentary, or to swallow half a yard of speculation when he is studying the text, with the dreary feeling that after he has borne one or suffered the other the point he wishes information upon may very likely have been the one omitted. Here at all events the reader may satisfy himself at once what is in store for him. Probably Mr. Munro will care less than his publisher to be complimented on the beautiful type and paper of these two volumes. One remark, how- ever, we cannot refrain from making. The difference between the paper and type of Mr. Manro's Lucretius, if compared with the paper and type of German classics, is no very fanciful symbol of the quality and form of English learning, when genuine.
The history of the text of Lucretius upon which Mr. Munro has spent so much labour is peculiar. The great mass of the poem is in a better state than that of many other authors, but in some portions the text has received irreparable injury. " If," says Mr. Munro, "Lucretius had come down to us with a text as uninjured as that of Virgil and a few other ancient writers, he could scarcely have been reckoned among the most difficult Latin poets." The obscurity of the poem is due not to the obscurity of the poet, who is indeed more direct and less allusive than Virgil or Horace, for instance, but in a great measure to the losses which the text has suffered in certain portions. As in ethnology a vast number of nations are all traced up to one parent stock which has unkindly disappeared, so all the existing copies of Lucretius are traced up to one unfinished original, which has also long since vanished. Mr. Munro's history of the various MSS. and editions is worth reading, even by amateur readers, to see what is implied in original as distinguished from second-hand erudition. How glibly we may quote a classical author, how furiously the battle may rage around the supposed dictum of an ancient, we all know. But the key to the arena, the very ground upon which the
battle rages, may lie, practically does lie, in the hands of one or two men,—before Mr. Munro, for instance, in the
hands of the great scholar Lachmann, after Lachmann in the hands of Mr. Munro. Those who fight so furiously round a text may awake at any moment to find that they are fighting upon the idle ground of an idle vision, that the line which is the cause of the strife was perhaps never written by Lucretius at all, and that what he did write is lost. It may be said, that is not much to learn. Merely to find out that Lucretius did not write a certain line is no great addition to the sum of human learning. No greater addition than to know the truth, and to walk on solid ground. But those who read Mr. Munro's preface, quite a literary novelty in English literature, will see what a vast survey of literature, how much penetration, how much candour, what a delicate fidelity to truth, what abnegation, what honour (literary men are not all, all honourable men) is required to carry out the vast literary undertaking of settling the disputed text of a great author con- scientiously. We cannot follow Mr. Munro into the history he gives of the text of Lucretius, but those who read it will find there what so few Englishmen have even a glimpse of—a revelation of what is implied in demonstrative learning, and they will find what
they would do well to remember in certain other controversies, that a long list of orthodox authorities may mean nothing more than a compound of stupid industry and clever xnavery, truth and chicanery, delicate scholarship and covert black- guardism, speculative honesty and disreputable theft. Those who are familiar with these elements in controversy are never likely to be very hot partizans.
Was Cicero the editor of Lucretius? Lucretius has imitated Cicero's translation of Aratus in many places. Did the dying
poet place his unfinished poem in the hands of the orator whose translation " he evidently looked upon as one of his poetical models." Both Lachmann and Bernays decide, a little cavalierly perhaps, that Jerome, upon whose authority the editorship of Cicero rests, meant not the orator, but the orator's brother, Quintus. Mr. Munro argues at some length in favour of the orator with tact and discrimination, and it seems to us carries his point. Lucretius, the great popularizer for ages to come of Epicureanism, edited by Cicero, the friend of the Stoics, and the philosophical " Cousin " of his day, gives a curious glimpse into antiquity. Mr. Munro discusses another question, against Leming, namely, whether the Epicurean system is capable of poetical expression, and he argues the affirmative with fire, we had almost said vehemence. "I unhesitatingly assert that for all purposes of poetry both the physical and ethical doctrines of the Stoics are incomparably inferior to those of Epicurus. Read the Natura Deorum ; compare their one wretched world, their monotonous fire, their rotund and rotatory god, their method of destroying and creating anew their world, with the system of nature unfolded by Lucretius, grand and majestical at least in its general outline. Then look at their sterile wisdom and still more barren virtue, with their repudiation of all that constitutes the soul of poetry. Lucretius, on the other hand, can preach up virtue, and temper- ance, and wisdom, and sober reason with as loud a voice as any of your Stoics ; and then what inexhaustible resources does he leave himself in his alma Venus and dux vitae dia voluptas ! Are examples wanted? Then contrast the varied grace and exuberant beauty of Virgil, when he is pleased to assume the garb of an Epicurean, with the leaden dulness and tedious obscurity of the Stoic Manilius ; or compare the rich humour, and winning ways, and ease of a Horace with the hardness, and thinness, and forced wit of a Persius." There is exquisite truth in this last compari- son, and the character of Persius as a poet is touched with the point of a needle. The speculation is one of modern interest, one, for instance, which is debated in France at this moment every day, viz., " Whether poetry in the highest sense and materialism are compatible." Mr. Munro has thrown down a gauntlet which will probably soon be taken up here, and he is abundantly able to fight his own battle.
The translation is in prose, and this, too, seems characteristic of the man. Mr. Munro probably felt that all attempts at verse- renderings of great poems are at the best but plaster casts of fea- tures after death, and he had too delicate a sense of the living original to venture upon killing it in the operation. His work was meant to be a monument of learning, and not to minister by the vanity of verse to the idle satisfaction of the editor. As it stands Mr. Munro's translation is a model of solid learning, and the grace which it possesses is the grace of exact truth, not incom- patible with a certain rugged simplicity which is, for instance, quite un-Oxonian. But if any one will convince himself that true poetry, like the flower upon a tree, deminds not merely poetical matter, but the coincidence of such matter with a poetical form which is to that matter what music is to sound, let him stady Mr. Munro's translation carefully.
We shall conclude our article by quoting a passage which expresses very compendiously the position which Lucretius has occupied down to our time :- " CatnUus, though the poem (De Natural was published so short a time before his death, must have known it, as he has imitated it in more than one place. When it was given to the world Virgil was fifteen years of age. At such an age therefore the style and manner of Lucretius were able to impress themselves fully on the younger poet's susceptible mind, and perhaps the highest eulogy which has ever been passed on the former is that constant imitation of his language and thoughts which pervades Virgil's works from one end to the other. Horace, too, and Ovid had carefully studied him ; this commentary will in some degree show what they as well as Maniliwo owe to him, though this last disciple is not worth much. Lucretius thus exercised indi- rectly no slight influence on the whole future career of Latin poetry. To pass to modern times, the Italian scholars of the fifteenth century, full of enthusiasm for everything classical, yet admired no Latin poet more than Lucretius, Virgil alone excepted. The illustrious French scholars of the sixteenth century, Lambinus, Turnebua, Scaliger, pro- nounced him one of the greatest, if not the greatest of Roman poets. In more recent times he has been less praised and read. The critics of Germany have in general shown little sympathy for him: full of their Heraclitean fire, they will not tolerate anything Epicurean. Goethe alone is a brilliant exception : his sympathy and admiration for Lucretius never failed. In this country the most recent account of the philosophy and poetry of Lucretius is at the same time the fullest and most favourable, and by far the best; I speak of that given by Professor Seller in the Roman poets of the republic."
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