by Virgil
Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt—
Nunc frondent silvae, nunc formosissimus annus—
Formosi pecoris custos, formosior ipse—
Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta—
Ut Linus haec illi divino carmine pastor.
The effect he produces by the sound and associations of proper names is like that produced by Milton through the same instrument. Thus, to take one instance out of many, how suggestive of some golden age of pastoral song are the following lines, vague and conventional though their actual application appears to be in the passage where they occur:—
Non me carminibus vincet nec Thracius Orpheus,
Nec Linus, huic mater quamvis atque huic pater adsit,
Orphei Calliopea, Lino formosus Apollo.
Pan etiam Arcadia mecum si iudice certet,
Pan etiam Arcadia dicat se iudice victum.
More even in his rhythm than in his diction does Virgil’s superiority appear, not only over all the poets of his country, but perhaps over all other poets of past times, except Homer, Milton, and Shakspeare, in those passages in which his dramatic art admits of a richly musical cadence. Our ignorance of the exact pronunciation of Greek in the Alexandrian Age makes a comparison between the effect that would have been produced by the rhythm of Theocritus and the rhythm of the Eclogues in ancient times difficult or impossible. Yet it may be allowed to say this much, that if the rhythm of the Eclogues does not seem to us to attain to the natural and liquid flow of the Greek idyl, yet its tones are deeper, they seem to come from a stronger and richer source, than any which we can elicit from the Doric reed. Rarely has the soothing and reviving charm of the musical sounds of Nature and of the softer and grander harmonies of poetry been described and reproduced more effectively than in these lines:—
Hinc tibi, quae semper, vicino ab limite saepes
Hyblaeis apibus florem depasta salicti
Saepe levi somnum suadebit inire susurro;
Hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras;
Nec tamen interea raucae, tua cura, palumbes,
Nec gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo:
and in these which suggest the thought of that restorative power of genius which a poet of the present day has happily ascribed to Wordsworth:—
Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta,
Quale sopor fessis in gramine, quale per aestum
Dulcis aquae saliente sitim restinguere rivo:
and in these again, which give both true symbols and a true example of the ‘deep-chested music’ in which the poet gives utterance to the thought which has taken shape within his mind:—
Quae tibi, quae tali reddam pro carmine dona?
Nam neque me tantum venientis sibilus austri,
Nec percussa iuvant fluctu tam litora, nec quae
Saxosas inter decurrunt flumina valles.
The objections often urged against the poetical value of the Eclogues may be admitted. They are imitative in form. They do not reproduce scenes and characters from actual life, nor are they consistent creations of the imagination. They do not possess the interest arising from a contemplative insight into the hidden workings of Nature, nor from reflection on the problems of life. Their originality, their claim to be a representative work of genius, consists in their truth and unity of sentiment and tone. If it be said that the sentiment which they embody is but a languid and effeminate sentiment, the admiration of two great poets, of the most masculine type of genius that modern times have produced, is a sufficient answer to this reproach. The admiration of Milton is proved by the conception and workmanship of his ‘Lycidas,’ the most richly and continuously musical even among his creations. Of Wordsworth’s admiration there is more than one testimony,—this, from the recently published Memoir of the daughter of his early friend and associate in poetry, perhaps the most direct: ‘I am much pleased to see (writes S. Coleridge) how highly Mr. Wordsworth speaks of Virgil’s style, and of his Bucolics which I have ever thought most graceful and tender. They are quite another thing from Theocritus, however they may be based on Theocritus.’ The criticism which the same writer applies to ‘Lycidas’ suggests the true answer also to the objections urged against Virgil’s originality. ‘The best defence of Lycidas is not to defend the design of it at all, but to allege that the execution of it is perfect, the diction the ne plus ultra of grace and loveliness, and that the spirit of the whole is as original as if the poem contained no traces of the author’s acquaintance with ancient pastoral poetry from Theocritus downwards.’ To the names of these two poets we can now add the name of one of the most illustrious, and certainly one of the least effeminate, among the critics and men of letters whom this century has produced—Macaulay; who, after speaking of the Aeneid in one of his letters, adds this sentence, ‘The Georgics pleased me better; the Eclogues best,—the second and tenth above all.’
The appreciation of Wordsworth is a certain touchstone of the genuineness of Virgil’s feeling for Nature. It is true that the sentiment to which he gives expression in the Eclogues is only one, and not the most elevated, of the many modes in which the spirit of man responds to the forms and movement of the outward world. But the mood of the Eclogues is one most natural to man’s spirit in the beautiful lands of Southern Europe. The freshness and softness of Italian scenes are present in the Eclogues, in the rich music of the Italian language, while it still retained the strength, fulness, and majesty of its tones. These poems are truly representative of Italy, not as a land of old civilisation, of historic renown, of great cities, of corn-crops, and vineyards,—‘the mighty mother of fruits and men;’—but as a land of a soft and genial air, beautiful with the tender foliage and fresh flowers and blossoms of spring, and with the rich colouring of autumn; a land which has most attuned man’s nature to the influences of music and of pictorial art. As a true and exquisite symbol of this vein of sentiment associated with Italy, the Eclogues hold a not unworthy place beside the greater work—the ‘temple of solid marble’—which the maturer art of Virgil dedicated to the genius of his country, and beside the more composite but stately and massive monument which perpetuates the national glory of Rome.
CHAPTER V.
Motives, Form, National Interest, and Sources of the Georgics.
I.
The appearance of the Eclogues marked Virgil out among his contemporaries as the poet of Nature and rural life. That province was assigned to him, as epic poetry was to Varius and tragedy to Pollio. It is to the Eclogues only that the lines in which Horace characterises his art can with propriety be applied. These lines were written before the appearance of the Georgics, and probably before any considerable part of the poem had been composed. The epithets which admirably characterise the receptive attitude of Virgil’s mind in the composition of his pastoral poems are quite inapplicable to the solid and severe workmanship and the earnest feeling of his didactic poem. The Eclogues are the poems of youth, and of a youth passed in study and in contact with Nature rather than with the serious interests of life. Though Virgil indicates in them the ambition which was moving him to vaster undertakings, yet he shows at the same time his consciousness of the comparative triviality of his art. The class of poem to which the word ludere is applied was, even when not of a licentious character, regarded by the more serious minds of Rome, such as Cicero for instance, with a certain degree of contempt, as being among the ‘leviora studia,’ partaking more of the ‘Graeca levitas’ than of the ‘Roman gravitas.’ The genuine Roman spirit demanded of its highest literature, as of its native architecture, that it should either have some direct practical use, or contribute in some way to enhance the sense of national greatness.
The literary impulse directing Virgil to the composition of the Georgics was probably the wish to be the Hesiod, as he had already been the Theocritus, of Rome. The poets of the Augustan Age selected some Greek prototype whose manner they professed to reproduce and make the vehicle for the expression of their own thought and experience. Thus
Horace chose Alcaeus, Propertius chose Callimachus as his model. Virgil assigns to Pollio the praise of alone composing poems ‘worthy of the buskin of Sophocles.’ In the Georgics he professes to find his own prototype in Hesiod:—
Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen.
Propertius also recognises him as the disciple of the sage of Ascra:—
Tu canis Ascraei veteris praecepta poetae,
Quo seges in campo, quo viret uva iugo.
Though Hesiod can scarcely have taken the highest rank as a poet, yet a peculiar reverence attached to his name from his great antiquity, and from the ethical and theological spirit of his writings. As Virgil chose the mould of Theocritus into which to cast the lighter feelings and fancies of his youth, he naturally turned to ‘The Works and Days of Hesiod’ as a more suitable model for a poem on rural life, undertaken with a more serious purpose, and demanding a severer treatment.
The change in Virgil’s life between the composition of the Eclogues and the Georgics had however much more influence in determining the difference in the character of the two poems, than the mere artistic desire to enter on a new path of poetry. During the composition of the earlier poems Virgil was living in a remote district of Italy, associating with the country-people or with a few young poets like himself, and coming in contact with the great world of action and national interests only through the medium of his intercourse with the temporary governors of the province. Rome and its ruler and the powerful stream of events in which his own fortunes were finally absorbed affect his imagination as they might do that of one who heard of them from a distance, but who in his ordinary thoughts and sympathies was living quite apart from them;
Urbem quam dicunt Romam Meliboee putavi
Stultus ego huic nostrae similem.
But before undertaking the task of writing the Georgics he had become an honoured member of the circle of Maecenas, the intimate friend of Varius and of Horace (who himself owed his introduction to that circle to the kindly offices of the two older poets) and of others distinguished in literature and public affairs. He had lived for a time near the centre of the world’s movement, in close relations to the minds by which that movement was directed. As the most genuine of his Eclogues had been inspired by his personal share in the calamities of his country, it was natural that he should, now when his own fortunes were restored through the favour of those at the head of affairs, feel a stronger and more disinterested sympathy with the public condition, at a crisis to which no one capable of understanding its gravity could feel indifferent. It was natural that his new relations and the impulse of the new ideas which came to him through them should move him to undertake some work of art more suited to his maturer faculty, his graver temperament, and the firmer fibre of his genius. Nor is there any difficulty in believing that Maecenas may have had some influence in determining him to the choice of a subject which enabled him to range over the whole of that field of which he had already appropriated a part, which would afford scope to the literary ambition urging him to write a poem on a greater scale and of more enduring substance, and which, at the same time, might serve indirectly to advance the policy of reconciliation and national and social reorganisation which Caesar and his minister were anxious to promote. Among ‘the ancient arts by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy had waxed great,’ none had fallen more into abeyance, through the insecurity of the times, than the cultivation of the land. The restoration of the old ‘Coloni’ of Italy and the revival of the great forms of national industry, associated with the older and happier memories of Rome, had been a leading feature in the policy of the great popular leaders from the Gracchi down to Julius Caesar. Among the completed glories of the Augustan Age, Horace, some twenty years later, specially notes the restoration of security and abundance to the land:—
Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat,
Nutrit rura Ceres almaque faustitas,
and in the same Ode:—
Condit quisque diem collibus in suis,
Et vitem viduas ducit ad arbores.
And in the brief summing up of the whole glories of the Augustan reign contained in his latest Ode he begins with the words,—
Tua, Caesar, aetas
Fruges et agris rettulit uberes.
All Virgil’s early associations and sympathies would lead him to identify himself with this object and with the interests and happiness of such representatives of the old rural life of Italy as might still be found, or might arise again under a secure administration. In proposing to himself some serious aim for the exercise of his poetic gift, it was natural that he should have fixed on that of representing this life in such a way as to create an aspiration for it, and to secure for it the sympathy of the world. The language in which he speaks of the poem as a task imposed on him by Maecenas need not be taken literally: but it is no detraction from Virgil’s originality to suppose that he, like Horace, was encouraged by the minister to devote his genius to a purpose which would appeal equally to the sympathies of the statesman and of the poet. The testimony of Virgil’s biographer on this subject, which may probably be traced to the original testimony of Melissus, the freedman of Maecenas, is neither to be disregarded nor unduly pressed, any more than the language in which Virgil himself makes acknowledgment of his indebtedness. It is impossible to say what chance seed of casual conversation may have been the original germ of what ultimately became so large and goodly a creation. If, in the composition of the Georgics, Virgil employed his art as an instrument of government, we cannot doubt that he did so not only because he recognised in the subject of the poem one suited to his own genius, but because his past life and early associations brought home to him the desolation caused in the rural districts by the Civil Wars, the moral worth of that old class of husbandmen who had suffered from them, and the public loss arising from the diminution in their number and influence. To idealise the life of that class by describing, with realistic fidelity and in the language of purest poetry, the annual round of labour in which it was passed; to suggest the ever-present charm arising from the intimate contact with the manifold processes and aspects of Nature into which man is brought in this life of labour; to contrast the simplicity and sanctity of such life with the luxury and lawless passions of the great world; and to associate this ideal with the varied beauty of Italy and the historic memories of Rome, were objects worthy of one who aspired to fulfil the office of a national poet. It is no detraction from the originality of his idea to suppose that some such suggestion as that attributed to Maecenas gave the original impulse to the poem. Not only the art, genius, and learning, but the religious faith and feeling, the moral and national sympathies, which give to it its peculiar meaning and value, are all the poet’s own. His strong feeling for his subject was as little capable of being communicated from without, as the genius with which he adorns it.
With such feelings as those which were moving the imagination of Virgil, a modern poet might have shaped his subject into the form of a poetic idyl, in which the joys and sorrows of men and women living during this national crisis might have been represented in union with the varied aspects of the scenery and the chief modes of rural industry in Italy. Such a form of art would have enabled the poet to add the interest of individual character and action to his abstract delineation of the ‘acer rusticus’ or the ‘duri agrestes’ engaged in a hard struggle with the forces of Nature. And one or two passages, containing some sketch drawn directly from peasant life, as for instance i. 291–296,
Et quidam seros hiberni ad luminis ignes, etc.,
and iv. 125–146,
Namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis, etc.,
make us regret that the conditions of his art, as conceived by him, did not encourage him to blend something more of idyllic representation with the didactic and descriptive treatment of his subject. But the idyl which treats the incidents of human life in the form either of a continuous poem or of a tale in prose was unknown to the early art of Greece; and Roman imag
ination was incapable of inventing a perfectly new mould into which to cast its poetic fancies and feelings. Nor is it probable that a poem so truly representative of Italy in all its aspects could have been produced in the form of an idyl, of which the interest would have been concentrated on some family or group of personages.
II.
There was only one form of literary art known to the Greeks or Romans of the Augustan Age which was at all suitable for the treatment on a large scale of such a subject as that which now filled the mind of Virgil. Next after the epic poem of heroic action, the didactic epos was regarded at Rome as the most serious and elaborate form of poetic art. It was more suited than any other form to the Roman mind. It is the only form in which the genius of Rome has produced master-pieces superior not only to anything of the kind produced by Greece but to all similar attempts in modern times. As Roman invention, stimulated by the practical sense of utility, by the passion for vast and massive undertakings, and by the strong perception of order and unity of design, devised a new kind of architecture for the ordinary wants of life, so in accordance with the national bent to reduce all things to rule, to impose the will of a master on obedient subjects, to use the constructive and artistic faculties for some practical end, if it did not create, it gave ampler compass, more solid and massive workmanship, and the associations of great ideas to that form of poetic art which had been the most meagre and unsubstantial of all those invented by the genius of Greece.
Moreover, a new form, or rather a form of more ample capacity, was required to embody the new poetical feelings and experience which now moved the Roman and Italian mind. If less interest was felt at Rome in following the course of individual destiny, the interest felt in contemplating the outward aspect and secret movement of Nature was now stronger than it had been in the great ages of Greek literature. Though the vivid enjoyment of the outward world had unconsciously shaped the tales of the early Greek mythology, and though this enjoyment had entered directly, as a subordinate element, into the epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry of Greece, and, more prominently, into the later poetry of Alexandria, and although the phenomena and laws of Nature had aroused the speculative curiosity of the early Greek philosophers, no poet before Lucretius had treated of Nature, in the immensity of her range, in the primal elements and living forces of her constitution, and, at the same time, in her manifold aspects of beneficence and beauty, and of destructive energy, as the subject of a great poem. The forms adopted by the great masters of Greek poetry,—the epic, lyric, and dramatic writers,—whose essential business it was to represent the actions and passions of men, were inapplicable to the treatment of this new subject of man’s environment. Lucretius accordingly had to take the outline of his form from the early physiological writers, whom the Greeks scarcely ranked among their poets at all, and who, though animated by the speculative passion to penetrate to the secret of Nature, were not specially interested in her aspects of beauty or power, or in her relation to the life of man. If he cannot claim the title of an inventor in art, yet by adding volume and majesty to the rudimentary type of these early writers, he gave to the ancient world the unique specimen of a great philosophical poem.
