But ing object or incident to relieve and ani- sistible impulse of nature. The moment mate the scene. In his pictures there is he strikes his lyre, the numbers appear always some stir of life, some elements of not only to come, but to control in their human experience familiar or heroic, pas- melodious course the most intractable sionate or pathetic. Again the promi- materials of his art, as the fabled harp of nence which he gives to the passion of Orpheus did the stocks and stones of love, not only on its sensuous side in fer-nature. There is a dash, sparkle, and vid elegiacs, but on its sentimental or spontaneity in his writing, which indiromantic side, as it touches the imagina- cates the most genuine native inspiration, tion and the heart, anticipates one of the and the fullest enjoyment of the work. most characteristic features of modern With his temperament and position inliterature. The same holds true of his deed, nothing but a love of poetry, amountintimate knowledge of female character, ing to a passion, could have induced him his insight into the subtle and powerful to devote his life to its production. He workings of the female heart. Ovid is had a joyous, pleasure-loving nature, which unrivalled, amongst Roman poets, in his his circumstances and surroundings enpower of delineating the perplexing, but, abled him to gratify to the full. His rank in the strictest sense, fatal logic of female and independent position introduced him passion, its sudden moods and contradic- to the society of the capital, while his tory impulses, its wild vehemence or self-social qualities, his genius and accomconsuming reserve, its pathetic tender- plishments, made him heartily welcomed ness, unsuspected strength, and absolute by its highest circles. He was the child devotion. From his limitations of genius of his age, and thoroughly enjoyed the and temperament he cannot, indeed, touch brilliant society, the multiplied luxuries the highest notes of female character, but and refinements, of imperial Rome. he includes a much wider range than any it is clear from the result that he had of his Roman predecessors or contempo- still a keener delight in his chosen work. raries, and this is one of the points in He could sacrifice personal and social which he becomes a vital link between gratifications for the sake of giving form ancient and modern art. and substance to the visions inspired by his ardent poetical feeling. And his enthusiasm for the poetical art was supported by the rarest literary gifts. Foremost amongst these must be ranked his power of vivid conception. In his productive moods, the pictures that come within the eye and prospect of his soul seem as full of life "as though they lived indeed." The visions that fill his imagination have the color, movement, and complex detail of the breathing world. to his vigorous and prolific fancy comes his unrivalled mastery over the vehicle of his art, musical and expressive diction. His facility of expression has been the subject of critical eulogy from his own time to ours. His unfailing ease and grace of language, his exquisitely musical versification, indicate the union of consummate literary skill with inborn lyrical genius. Every thought, feeling, and image, as it arises, is perfectly reflected in the magical mirror of his harmonious verse. Language, music, and imagery seem as plastic to his touch as nature herself in the hands of his transforming deities. This power of vivid conception, mastery of expressive speech, and command over descriptive detail give to his separate pictures a concrete reality and completeness that fascinate the mind, and produce almost irresistibly a momen Ovid's defects no less than his excellences are curiously modern. Those most insisted on by hostile critics are the over-elaboration of details, the indulgence in discursive episodes, the accumulation of trivial conceits, strained metaphors, and far-fetched illustrations. In a word, he is charged with an unrestrained exuberance of fancy, feeling, and expression. But this very exuberance helps to make him the most picturesque and interesting, if not the most poetical, of Roman poets. Niebuhr's opinion, that, excepting Catullus, Ovid is the most poetical of the Romans, is well known, and there is a good deal to be said in its support. Of course, Ovid has not the severe beauty and concentrated epical art of Virgil. Even his best work wants the perfect unity and proportion, the dignity and grace, the mingled reserve and finish of the Georgics and the Aeneid. But in Virgil you feel everywhere the lima labor. He works as a conscientious artist, impressed with the magnitude of his task, and ever striving with a noble perseverance after a lofty ideal, which he spares no pains to reach. And as a work of art the result is almost perfect, although you never lose the sense of effort, of cumulative and painful effort, involved in its production. Ovid, on the other hand, seems to sing from an irre Next phoses" might have been as great as Homer. The lines from the well-known Latin elegy, in which this opinion is expressed, may be quoted from Cowper's version: tary belief in the truth even of his wildest | his youth, at all events, Milton preferred fictions. There is a grave and artless, Ovid to Virgil, and maintained that but or intense and passionate, circumstan- for his exile the poet of the "Metamortiality about his narrative that carries conviction captive, and forces you to believe that what you so vividly see and feel must be the reflex of an actual experience. There can hardly, for example, be a wilder fiction than the story of Phaeton; but the narrative is so full of life and reality that after the glowing lines have once impressed it on the mind, it becomes almost impossible to think of the zodiac without a vision of the splendid chariot with its fiery steeds breaking impetuously away from the unsteady driver, and carrying ruin, conflagration, and eclipse down the western steep of heaven. Stories and episodes almost equally impressive and memorable might be selected from each of the marvellous fifteen books. The best qualities of Ovid's muse are, indeed, concentrated in the "Metamorphoses," and they have conspired to make it one of the most attractive and entertaining books ever written. The actual popularity of the poem, too, has been immense. Ovid is almost the one classical author whose light was never extinguished even in the darkest ages of ignorance and barbarism. By a curious fate the brilliant compendium of heathen mythology was often the only monument of antiquity to be found in monastic libraries, and it seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed by monkish scholars. At least it was often copied with zealous industry in the scriptorium, and moralized with pious ingenuity in the cell, when a profoundly serious and even religious author like Virgil was uncared for or unknown. In the Middle Ages the poem supplied a perfect storehouse of materials for the pictorial uses of the fine and decorative arts. If peaceful days, in letter'd leisure spent more; To the list of appreciative poets Shakespeare must certainly be added. The higher qualities of Ovid's genius and work were indeed precisely of the kind to attract and fascinate the youthful author of "Venus and Adonis." The life and color, the passion and pathos, the endless variety of magical changes in the " Metamorphoses," with their exquisite verbal combinations and metrical harmonies, would have an irresistible charm for his opening fancy and ardent poetic feeling. But there is still another quality of Ovid's genius which, perhaps, affected Shakespeare at the outset of his career more than all the rest. Ovid is, I venture to think, the most dramatic of Roman poets. This is, perhaps, a more disputable claim than any already made on his behalf. At least, it is one which many critics would be indisposed to allow. They often speak of his tender and passionate scenes as though they were rhetorical exercises rather than outbursts of genuine feeling; but, although many artificial and rhetorical passages are to be found in Ovid's writings, the remarkable Half the looms of Europe were fact about the more important appears to busy working stories from Ovid into me to be the wonderful freshness, variety, webs destined to brighten with life and and even depth of real feeling they display. color the gloom of many a baronial and In the appreciation of his characteristics, civic hall, as well as to protect and adorn Ovid has fared better at the hands of the many a noble lady's bower. After the poets than of the critics, and I cannot but revival of letters Ovid was read in all the think Dryden right both as poet and critic, schools and colleges of Christendom, and in the judgment he pronounces: "Though at the rise of vernacular literatures the I see many excellent thoughts in Seneca, Metamorphoses was amongst the ear- yet he, of them [the Roman poets], who liest translations made from the classics had a genius most proper for the stage, into the mother tongues of Europe. I was Ovid; he had a way of writing so fit need hardly refer to the high estimation to stir up a pleasing admiration and conin which Óvid was held by many of the cernment, which are the objects of traggreatest modern poets, and especially edy, and to show the various movements amongst ourselves by Chaucer, Spenser, of a soul combating betwixt two different and perhaps most of all, by Milton. In passions, that, had he lived in our age, or in his own could have writ with our advantages, no man but must have yielded to him." It is true that we are deprived of the best and more direct means of estimating Ovid's dramatic faculty in the loss of his one great tragedy, the "Medea." But from the favorable judgment of not too friendly contemporary critics we may fairly conclude that it was a work of real and even remarkable dramatic power. In the most considerable of his extant works, the "Fasti" and "Metamorphoses," both the subject and form chosen are less fitted, and but for the result, one might have said least fitted, for the display of Ovid's peculiar genius. Nothing at first sight would seem less suitable to become the subject of a serious epic than the national mythology, as it had already lost, or was fast losing, all real hold on the cultivated intelligence of the Roman world. In Ovid's day it had reached the stage of sceptical criticism, and was at many points exposed to popular ridicule and contempt. With regard to form, the natural bent of Ovid's mind was, as I have said, towards lyrical and dramatic poetry. In the earliest period of his career the poet himself had the clearest perception of this. At the beginning of the third book of his "Elegies" he says that, when meditating his future work, he was visited by the rival muses of the buskin and the lyre, and that the former upbraided him with wasting his poetic gifts on trivial love ditties instead of concentrating them on the nobler task of depicting imperial woes in tragic verse. In reply to this appeal he pleads for a slightly extended indulgence of the lyric mood, intimating that when he had completed his "Elegies " he would betake himself to tragedy, for which, as he elsewhere tells us, he felt he had a special turn. This early promise was not, however, redeemed. In after years, when he resolved to undertake more serious work, instead of devoting himself to the drama, he was led by the courtly and literary influences of his time to attempt an epic. The emperor, in his desire to restore the older and more robust conditions of national life, favored this more solid form of the poetical art, and Virgil's recent success had given it a temporary supremacy. With Virgil, however, the choice of the épic form was perfectly natural. It was in thorough harmony with the seriousness of his disposition and aims. But Ovid had little of Virgil's profound and absorbing interest in the conditions and continuity of national greatness, in the past and future of Rome as the instrument and representative of law, order, and progress in the world. He had still less of that brooding and almost oppressive sense of the mystery and burden of life which solemnized Virgil's mind, and becomes audible at times in the touching minor key of his verse. He is separated from Virgil, too, by position, as well as by temperament. During the interval between them the Roman world had passed from the deep shadows and destructive violence of the republican conflict to the sunlight and repose of the imperial day. Ovid lived in the sunlight and rejoiced in its warmth and brilliance till the sudden winter of his exile came. The ease and gaiety of this congenial urban life are well reflected in his minor writings. But alike in the subject and form chosen for his greatest works, there can be little doubt that he had originally a serious purpose in view. Among his other reforms, Augustus was anxious to restore the old reverence for the national deities, and Ovid was evidently desirous of giving the emperor's policy that kind of literary support of which the Aeneid is the most brilliant example. He wished to do for the ritual and mythology what Virgil had done for the legendary history and antiquities of Rome. In other words, his aim was to revive popular interest in the deities and ceremonial of the national religion. He states at the beginning of the "Fasti" that this was his design in dealing poetically with the national calendar. And the "Metamorphoses" opens with the gravity and earnestness befitting a religious poem. But if he ever seriously thought himself capable of producing a sacred epic, he certainly formed an erroneous estimate of his literary aptitudes and poetical gifts. In any case his joyous temper and dramatic genius soon triumphed over the original design, and instead of bringing the gods down from heaven and exhibiting them as objects of awe and reverence to men, he simply carried his contemporaries to Olympus, and filled the august seats with lively representatives of the morals and manners of the Augustan age. This has sometimes been urged as a fatal objection to the poem. It is said that in its treatment of the national mythology, instead of maintaining their antique majesty, Ovid had not only modernized the gods, but represented them in the most literal, if not in the lowest, sense as being of like passions with ourselves. The reply of course is, that after warming to his work the poet | fact. The stories of Phaeton, of Medea, treated the subject naturally, under the of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Midas, of inspiration and according to the impulses Progne and Philomela, of Baucis and of his own genius. He could not help Philemon, amongst others, had evidently vitalizing the stories, and he filled them impressed themselves on his youthful with the only life he knew, that of human imagination in a way never to be forgotpassion and mundane activities. Instead ten. But these points and others conof a sacred epic, we have accordingly a nected with Shakespeare's acquaintance series of brilliant stories and vivid dra- with Ovid will come more fully out in the matic sketches, often pathetic enough in special illustrations which are to follow. their tenderness and tragical in their in- Probably no critic would deny that tensity. Although not dramatic in form, Shakespeare was familiar with Ovid, but most of his longer and most important many maintain, as Farmer did, that his works are, in this way, thoroughly dra- knowledge was derived solely from transmatic in substance. This is true not only lations, and especially from Golding's of the "Fasti" and "Metamorphoses," translation of the "Metamorphoses." but of the "Heroic Epistles," in which That Shakespeare well knew this vigorOvid's dramatic genius is often displayed ous and picturesque version is certain; with singular vividness and power. The objections sometimes urged against them on the ground of anachronisms and external incongruities, such as, in the case of Ariadne, the want of any means of communication with Theseus, the absence of writing materials, and possibly her ignorance of the art, are ludicrously wide of the mark. The real question is whether, realizing in essentials the character and circumstances of the heroines, the poet expresses with vividness and truth the poignant internal conflict of grief and | hope, of tumultuous passion, agonizing dread, and tender desire. It will hardly be denied that this is strikingly true with regard to many of the epistles, and especially the best. On this ground they might well be described in the phrase of a modern poet as "dramatic lyrics." But the "Metamorphoses" contain a number of powerful sketches that might appropriately come under the same heading. Dryden, with his usual critical sagacity and poetical insight, has noted this. Referring to a theory, since disproved, about the "Medea" of Seneca, that it might possibly be the lost tragedy of Ovid, he says: I am confident the "Medea" is none of his : for though I esteem it for the gravity and sententiousness of it, which he himself concludes to be suitable to a tragedy, "Omne genus scripti gravitate tragedia vincit," yet it moves not my soul enough to judge that he, who in the epick way wrote things so near the drama, as the story of Myrrha, of Caunus, and Biblis, and the rest, should stir up no more concernment where he most endeavoured it. but I feel equally confident, from what has already been said, that his study of Ovid in the original was begun at Stratford School, and had been voluntarily extended to his chief poems before he became acquainted with any translation. There are some points of evidence which tend directly to support this view. In the first place it is a striking fact that the keynote as it were of Shakespeare's public career as a poet should have been struck by a quotation from a section of Ovid's poems not yet translated into English. So far as we know Shakespeare himself published in his own name only three poems the "Venus and Adonis," the "Lucrece," and the "Sonnets." Of these, the "Venus and Adonis was not only the first published, but apparently the earliest considerable poem the author had written. "The first heir of my invention," he calls it in the dedication to the Earl of Southampton. The poem, though not published till 1593, must, in this case, have been written some years earlier, probably before Shakespeare left Stratford for London. On the title-page are the following lines from Ovid's "Elegies :". Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo These lines are taken from a poem of which, as I have said, there existed at the time no English version. The earliest translation of the " Elegies" is that usually attributed to Marlowe, and published by his friends some years after his death. The exact date of the first edition cannot But it is clear, I think, from internal be decided with certainty, but Ritson fixes evidence that Shakespeare had been it at 1596, and Gifford, on apparently struck with the dramatic power of many good grounds, a year or two later. The of the narratives of the "Metamor-second edition, which probably followed phoses" long before Dryden noted the within a year of the first, contains two and again in the "Sonnets," and here too, as we shall see, he echoes the confident predictions of future fame in which Ovid indulges at the close of his greatest work. But the earlier quotation shows that Shakespeare had extended his studies in Ovid, not only beyond the books usually read in the schools, the "De Tristibus" and the "Metamorphoses,' but beyond the utmost limits where the help of a translation was available. " versions of the elegy from which Shakespeare quotes the second, signed B. J., being the work of Ben Jonson. This is established, not only by the initials, but by the fact that it is printed in full by Jonson as his own in the "Poetaster," which appeared in 1601. Gifford is probably right in his conjecture that both versions are by Jonson, the first being a rough sketch of the second. In any case, the earlier version was not published till some years after the "Venus I may next take another point of eviand Adonis." But what, perhaps, is even dence, which, though comparatively small more to the point, the quotation is one and indirect, appears to tell with some which, from the circumstances of the force in the same direction. It is well case, could hardly have been chosen by known that Shakespeare derived several any but a scholar, or at least by one who of the names occurring in his dramas, knew the original well. From their set- such as Autolycus, directly from Ovid. ting in the elegy, the lines would fail Some of these have curious points of into attract special attention and be rela- terest connected with them. But there is tively unimportant in a translation. On one, about which little has been said, that the other hand, in the original poem, they is perhaps more remarkable and interesthave a distinctive emphasis and are full ing than any besides the name of the of concentrated meaning and power. fairy queen, Titania. Of this name so The elegy is a spirited vindication of accomplished a student of Shakespeare as poetry from the envious criticism of those Mr. Ward says, singularly enough: "The who represented the poet as an idler, igno- figure of the elf-queen Shakspere might bly shirking the public duties which, as a have found in the 'Wife of Bath's Tale' reputable citizen, he ought to discharge. in Chaucer. Her name Titania was, so In reply, Ovid proudly asserts that the far as we know, Shakspere's invention, position of the true poet is higher than and may have been suggested by Di any to be gained by wealth or rank or ana, who, as King James I. informs us, public honors, that in his works he leaves amongst us was called the Phairee,' an immortal heritage to men through though Simrock (ii. 34) derives the same which his nobler essence not only sur- from titti (children), the stealing of whom vives, but outlasts all the symbols and is a favorite pursuit of the elfin spirits." monuments of earthly greatness. In Both the German critic and the English illustration of this, he commemorates historian had apparently forgotten that some of the greatest poets of the past, the name is traceable to Ovid, and that including Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, as used by him it has a very distinctive Menander, Ennius, Lucretius, Virgil, Tibullus, Gallus; and after going through the inspiring roll, he virtually says: "With these I take my part, their labors and rewards are the only object of my ambition, their life the only life I care to live." It is a characteristic utterance on the part of Ovid, and expresses the fixed resoive of his nobler nature. But it is perhaps still more characteristic in the mouth of Shakespeare, when, conscious of great powers, and resolved to find, or create, an ample field for their exercise, he set out on his life's journey with no help from fortune or friends, and no ultimate hope or desire beyond the poet's crown. In these lines he avows himself the child of Apollo, and declares that henceforth his elixir vitæ will be full draughts from the Castalian spring. The same proud note of confidence in himself and devotion to his art reappears again significance. So far as I know, however, Mr. Keightley is the only critic who has connected the name with Ovid; and he does so very generally, without bringing out in any detail the meaning and value of the fact. His statement is that Titania occurs once in the "Metamorphoses as a designation of Diana. But in reality the name occurs not once only, but several times, not as the designation of a single goddess, but of several female deities, supreme or subordinate, descended from the Titans. On this ground it is applied to Diana, to Latona, to Circe, to Pyrrha, and Hecate. As Juno is called by the poets Saturnia, on account of her descent from Saturn, and Minerva, on less obvi ous or more disputed grounds, is termed Tritonia, so Diana, Latona, and Circe are each styled by Ovid Titania. This desig nation illustrates, indeed, Ovid's marked power of so employing names as to in · |