Art. 3.-THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEIUS. 1. The Tragedy of Pompey the Great. By John Masefield. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1910. 2. Les Sources de Lucain. By René Pichon. Paris : Leroux, 1912. 3. Lucanus de Bello Civili; Tertium edidit C. Hosius. Leipzig: Teubner, 1913. THE fickleness of an all-controlling Fortune was ever present to the ancients; and there was nothing in all Rome's chequered history that impressed it so deeply on the Roman mind as the piteous death and downfall of the puissant soldier upon whom, as the peer of Alexander of Macedon, the partial judgment of his countrymen had bestowed the name of 'Great.' To this not only Juvenal in the well-known passage (Satire x, 283 foll.), but Propertius, Pliny, Seneca and others make frequent and impressive reference. Nor has it lost its interest Of this the popularity of Mr Masefield's drama, now we believe in its third edition, is evidence enough. now. Mr Masefield's title is chosen well. The end of Pompey may be rightly called a 'tragedy,' not in the ignoble sense of current usage, which would apply it to the fate of some defaulting financier who cuts his throat and leaves his family to pay the price of his sin, but as the expression of a catastrophe that might fitly have engaged the genius of an Æschylus, a Sophocles or a Shakespeare -the fall of an Agamemnon, an Edipus or a Lear. And be it here observed that in tragedy pure and simple, the character of the victim is something in the main indifferent. He must not indeed be despicable, but he need be neither virtuous nor capable. The impious vainglory of Agamemnon, the blind self-will of Edipus, the sheer fatuity of Lear, seem in truth temptations to Providence. And when the bard of Alexander's Feast sings Darius, great and good, Fallen from his high estate,' his aim is avowedly a different one. He seeks 'soft pity to infuse.' Virgil, it has long been noted, in an arresting passage (Eneid, II, 557 foll.) had the end of our Roman conqueror before him when he pictured the Trojan monarch stretched headless on the sand. the Priam of tradition is but a lay figure of a man; and But Pompey, for all his titles, was in strictness neither great nor good. But-and herein lies the fitness of the comparison and the very depth of the tragedy-both fell as no others had fallen of all that had held the gorgeous East in fee,' · There was no need, then, for Mr Masefield to step into the twentieth century and make appeal in his hero to the vaporous sentiment and irresponsible idealism which with our contemporaries so often passes for thought. Selfish, vain and callous, Pompey knew no ideals, whether vague or formulated. Delusions indeed he cherished'slovenly delusions' as Mr Heitland in his 'Roman Republic' justly calls them, which ultimately proved his ruin. But, for him, all was well with the Roman ship if he, or at least none greater, was the pilot at the helm. Mr Masefield has paid some attention to details; and in this respect he has the advantage of predecessors who have taken contemporaries of Pompey as subjects of their dramas. But, in life and verity, and whether as man or Roman, the Pompey of Mr Masefield falls far below the Julius Cæsar of Shakespeare, and hardly reaches the level of the Cato of Addison. One further criticism. To those who look in a Roman drama for something of the massiveness and dignity of the Roman style the fragments of speech into which Mr Masefield has chosen to chop his dialogue will be a perpetual irritation. Verse we know and prose we know; but what is this? 'POMPEY. Ah! Cornelia. You make death hard. But it would be sweet to die so for you. To die. To join that senate of the old Romans; the wise ones. To bring them news of Rome there. In the shadows. CORNELIA. Saying that you come crowned. Having played the Roman. "Having obeyed their laws." POMPEY. Ah! Like the Spartans. Ringed in with spears. There in the rocks.'-(ACT 1.) Enough of the modern presentation. Let us turn to the ancient sources. Through the ravages of time which, not to speak of minor losses, have taken from us entirely the 'Historiae' of C. Asinius Pollio, the statesman, orator and friend of Virgil, and left us of Livy but the bare 'Contents' of the later books, on the scale, may be, of a word or less to a chapter, the 'Commentaries' of Cæsar on the Civil War constitute the sole continuous contemporary narrative of the last days of the Roman Commonwealth. Cæsar being what he was, and human nature being what it is, it is not unnatural or unreasonable that we should go outside for evidence to control and supplement his testimony. For this purpose the Correspondence of Cicero is of inestimable value; and the Roman biographies of the late Greek writer Plutarch give us much that has not been preserved elsewhere. But this material, after all, is scanty; and hence it is that the 'Civil War' of Lucan, an historical epic written little more than a century after the events which it professes to describe, when the sources now lost to us were still accessible, is invested with a more than literary interest. It has been the aim of more than one painstaking and learned investigator to enquire what materials Lucan had before him, how he dealt with them, and how much he altered or added from his own invention. The method, though attractive, is not without drawbacks of its own; its results are not positive but inferential and presumptive. It has, in fact, some of the uncertainty which would attend a restoration of a dialogue on the telephone from what was heard at one end only. Notwithstanding this, there is general agreement that, embedded in the poem of Lucan, are precious fragments of history which have not been preserved to us elsewhere; and that the author on whom he drew (if not exclusively, as has been supposed by some, at least in the main) for all that was not due to his own imagination, was the great historian of Padua. Such, for example, is the view of M. Pichon, in his recent monograph on 'The Sources of Lucan,' in which, despite some partiality towards his author, the subject on the whole is handled with fairness and discretion. There is good reason for thinking that the influence of Livy upon Lucan was particularly marked in the two books of the 'Civil War' which take the career of Pompey to its close. On the appreciative character of Livy's references to Pompey we have the clearest testimony from outside. Tacitus (Annals, IV, 34) reports the words of a speaker in the Senate who said that 'Titus Livius, a writer in the first rank for style and honesty, extolled Gnæus Pompeius so highly that Augustus called him a "Pompeian." In his seventh and eighth books, and especially in the latter, Lucan is frankly and enthusiastically 'Pompeian'; and, while from the nature of the case much evidence of specific borrowing from the historian cannot be expected, there is still explicit testimony that more than one passage and incident were so derived. There is something more; but to appreciate it properly we must have regard to the difference in the subjects of the books. The two together make up the Pompeian tragedy, but their aspects are not the same. The seventh shows us the fall of the leader and his cause; its interest in the main is military and political. But the eighth directs our eyes towards a lonely figure on a darkening stage; and the interest is acutely personal and human, until the curtain falls. There, then, we should expect the Livian influence to be strongest and the contrast with the ordinary Lucanian manner most marked. A writer's style, it has been said, is himself; and of all the Roman writers there were none whose individualities were more distinct and more different than those we are considering. They have both of them, it is true, that rhetorical character which marks the Augustan and still more the post-Augustan literature; but the rhetoric of Lucan is not the rhetoric of Livy. They lie as far apart as the period and the epigram. The natural propensity of Lucan's genius was never better given than in the anonymous epitaph : 'Cordova bare me, Nero slew. My lyre The duel sung of son-in-law and sire. Not mine the long-drawn period's delays Of crawling verses; mine the short, sharp phrase. If thou would'st shine, dart with the lightning's flight; To the poetical quality of Livy's prose it is impossible to be blind. But whether Lucan was in truth a poet even his admirers could not agree.* At all events, for much that lies nearest to the hearts of poets he cared but little. One of the most magnificent passages of Classical Literature is the Homeric description of the untroubled * Quintilian, x, 1, 90; Martial, XIV, 194. and unsullied serenity of Olympus, the home of the Gods, in the 'Odyssey'. (6, 42 sqq.). Its beauty has stirred many poets to noble imitation, as, for example, Lucretius, Swinburne, and Tennyson, who takes from it: 'The island valley of Avilion Where falls not hail or rain or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly.' But see what our Corduban makes of it (VII, 478-480): 'tunc aethera tendit extremique fragor conuexa inrumpit Olympi unde procul nubes, quo nulla tonitrua durant.' * In the last line we have the reduction of poetry to its lowest terms. In the phrase of an American humourist, it is as succinct as an invoice.' In Lucan, again, who, we must in fairness remember, was cut off before his genius had begun to ripen and ere he had learned the lessons of life, we miss for the most part the touches of sympathy that enlist human interest and redeem even horrors from repulsiveness. Let a single illustration suffice. An unhappy combatant in one of the scenes of carnage in which the constant sight of gladiatorial exhibitions made the Roman take a callous enjoyment has been torn in sunder (III, 635 foll.); and this is Lucan's comment on the death, nullius uita perempti est tanta dimissa uia' ('Never had life passed by so broad a road'). To put the matter briefly, in this narrative of the final scenes of Pompey's life not only are the characteristic faults of the narrator-exaggerated emphasis, unnatural antithesis, twisted expression and so forth-less obtrusive than usual; but we are also aware of touches of subtle appeal to our emotions, and thrilling, if vague, suggestions of pathos and romance. And in these, or at least a portion of them, it seems natural to see the influence of the sympathetic imagination of the greatest historical artist of Rome.† *The roar of battle mounted to the skies and broke in on the remote Olympian vault, from which clouds are far, whither no thunders reach.' † In another respect, which may seem to some a trifle, though I do not think it is, these two books, and particularly the eighth book, are marked off from the rest. This is their sparse employment of simile. For the remaining eight, Lucan's average is one simile in every 86 lines. In Books VII-VIII, he has 6 in 1744 (in VIII 1 in 872 lines)-the figures for Books |