The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil Part 10

Virgil acknowledges at once the source of his inspiration and the lowly position which his genius was willing to a.s.sume. He may have consoled himself for this abnegation of a higher ambition by the thought suggested in the lines addressed to the ideal poet and hero of his imagination-

Nec te paeniteat pecoris, divine poeta, Et formosus ovis ad flumina pavit Adonis(238).

In order to understand the pastoral poetry of Virgil, both in its relation to a Greek ideal and in its original truth of feeling, it is necessary to remember the chief characteristics of its prototype in the age of Ptolemy Philadelphus of Alexandria and in the early years of the reign of Hiero of Syracuse. The pastoral poetry of Sicily was the latest creation of Greek genius, born after the n.o.bler phases of religious and political life, and the epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry which arose out of them, had pa.s.sed away. In ancient, as in modern times, the pastoral idyl, as an artistic branch of literature, has arisen, not in a simple age, living in unconscious harmony with Nature, but from the midst of a refined and luxurious, generally, too, a learned or rather bookish society, and has tried to give vent to the feelings of men weary of an artificial life and vaguely longing to breathe a freer air(239). But there was in ancient times a primitive and popular, as well as a late and artistic pastoral. Of the primitive pastoral, springing out of rustic gatherings and festivals, or from lonely communion with Nature,

Per loca pastorum deserta atque otia dia(240),

and transmitted, from generation to generation, in the mouth of the people, no fragment has been preserved. Yet traces of the existence of this kind of pastoral song, and of the music accompanying it, at a time antecedent to the composition of the Homeric poems, may be seen in the representation, on the s.h.i.+eld of Achilles, of the boy in the vineyard 'singing the beautiful song Linus,'-a representation which is purely idyllic,-and of the shepherds, in the Ambuscade, who appear te?p?e???

s??????, as they accompany their flocks. The author of the Iliad absorbed the spirit of this primitive poetry in the greater compa.s.s of his epic creation, as Shakspeare has absorbed the Elizabethan pastoral within the all-embracing compa.s.s of his representation. Much of the imagery of the Iliad, several incidents casually introduced in connexion with the names of obscure persons peris.h.i.+ng in battle, some of the supernatural events glanced at, as of the meeting of Aphrodite with Anchises while tending his herds on the spurs of Ida,-a subject of allusion also in the Sicilian idyl,-are of a pastoral character and origin. In the lines which spring up with a tender grace in the midst of the stern grandeur of the final conflict between Hector and Achilles-

?? ?? p?? ??? ?st?? ?p? d???? ??d' ?p? p?t???

t? ?a????e?a?, ? te pa?????? ???e?? te, pa?????? ???e?? t' ?a???et?? ????????(241)-

the familiar cadences as well as the sweetest sentiment of pastoral song may be recognised.

This primitive pastoral poetry may have been spread over all Greece and the islands of the Aegean, from the earliest settlements of the h.e.l.lenic race, or of that older branch of the family to which the name Pelasgic has been vaguely given, and may have lingered on the same in spirit, though with many variations in form and expression, among the peasantry and herdsmen of the mountain districts till a late period. But the earliest writer who is said to have adopted this native plant of the mountains and the woods, and to have trained it to a.s.sume some form of art, was Stesichorus of Himera, who flourished about the beginning of the sixth century B.C. But nothing more is heard of it till it revived again at Syracuse in the early part of the third century.

Some of the primitive modes of feeling which gave birth to the earliest pastoral song still survive, though in altered form, in this later Sicilian poetry. The song of the ???????, or herdsmen, like the song of the masked wors.h.i.+ppers of Bacchus (t?a??d?a), may be traced to that stage in the development of the higher races in which Nature was the chief object of wors.h.i.+p and religious sympathy. Under the symbols of Linus, Daphnis, or Adonis, the country people of early times lamented the decay of the fresh beauty of spring, under the burning midsummer heat(242). This primitive germ of serious feeling has perpetuated itself in that melancholy mood which runs through the pastoral poetry of all countries.

From that tendency of the Greek imagination to give a human meaning to all that interested it, this dirge over the fading beauty of the early year soon a.s.sumed the form of a lament over the death of a young shepherd-poet, dear to G.o.ds and men, to the flocks, herds, and wild animals, to the rocks and mountains, among which he had lived. In the Daphnis of Theocritus, the human pa.s.sion of love produces that blighting influence on the life of the shepherd which in the original myth was produced by the fierce heat of summer on the tender life of the year. A still later development of the myth appears in the lament over the extinction of youthful genius by early death. It is not in any poem of Theocritus, but in the 'Lament of Bion,'-the work of a later writer, apparently an Italian-Greek,-

a?t?? ??? t??

??s?????? ?d??a? ??p? ????(243),-

that we find the finest ancient specimen of this later development. It is from this new form of the old dirge of Linus or Daphnis that the fancies and feelings of the ancient pastoral have been most happily adapted to modern poetry, as in the Lycidas, the Adonais, and the Thyrsis of English literature.

Another traditional theme of 'pastoral melancholy,' of which Theocritus makes use, is the unrequited love of the Cyclops for Galatea. This too had its origin in the personification of natural objects(244). But, unlike the song of Daphnis, the myth of which it was the expression was purely local, and confined to the sh.o.r.es of Sicily. It also ill.u.s.trates the tendency of all pastoral song to find its chief human motive in the pa.s.sion of love.

While the original motive of the primitive lament for Daphnis or Linus was the unconscious sympathy of the human heart with Nature, the most prominent motive of artistic pastoral or idyllic poetry, from the 'Song of Songs' to the 'Hermann and Dorothea' and 'The Long Vacation Pastoral' of these later times, has been the pa.s.sion of the human heart for the human object of its affection, blending with either an unconscious absorption in outward scenes or a refined contemplation of them(245).

But there is another very distinct mode of primitive feeling traceable in Theocritus, which dictates the good-humoured, often licentious, banter with which the shepherds encounter one another. As the pastoral monologue continued to betray the serious character of the Lament out of which it sprung, so this natural dialogue continued to bear traces of that old licence of the harvest-home and the vintage-season, which

Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit(246).

The 'lusit amabiliter' of Horace's lines, which soon became inapplicable to the biting and censorious Italian spirit, expresses happily the tone of the dialogue in the fourth and fifth Idyls of Theocritus, which Virgil attempts to reproduce in his third Eclogue. This source of rural poetry was known to the 'Ausonian husbandmen' as well as to the country people of Greece and Sicily: and its native force pa.s.sed not only into the Greek pastoral idyl, but into the Sicilian comedy of Epicharmus and the old comedy of Athens, and, through a totally different channel, into Roman satire. There is, however, another form in which the pastoral dialogue appears both in Theocritus and Virgil, namely, of extemporaneous contests in song. Probably these more artistic contests and the award of prizes to the successful compet.i.tor had their origin in the bantering dialogue of the shepherds; as the tragic contests at the Dionysian festivals had their origin in the rivalry with which the masked votaries of Dionysus poured forth their extemporaneous verses, in sympathy with the sufferings of their G.o.d.

Such were the first rude utterances of the deeper as well as the gayer emotions of men, living in the happy security of the country districts or the 'otia dia' of the mountains in Greece, Sicily, and perhaps Southern Italy, which the art of Theocritus and his successors cast into artistic forms and measures suited to the taste of educated readers. How far, in the manner in which he accomplished this, Theocritus had been antic.i.p.ated by 'the grave muse of Stesichorus,' and whether this wild product of the mountains was of a native Siculian or an h.e.l.lenic stock, it is not possible to determine. A citizen of Syracuse, in the palmy days of Hiero, before there was any dream of Roman conquest; deeply susceptible of the beauty of his native island, but, like a Greek, seeing this beauty in relation to human a.s.sociations; familiar with the songs and old traditions of the land, as well as with the fancies of earlier poets; living his life in friendly a.s.sociation with his literary compeers, such as the Alexandrine Aratus(247) and Nicias, the physician and poet(248),-he sought to people the familiar scenery of mountain, wood, brook, and sea-sh.o.r.e with an ideal race of shepherds, in whom the natural emotions and grotesque superst.i.tions of actual herdsmen should be found in union with the refinement, the mythological lore, the keen sense of the beauty, not unmixed with the melancholy, of life, characteristic of a circle of poets and scholars enjoying their youth in untroubled and uneventful times. All his materials, old and new, a.s.sumed the shape of pictures from human life in combination with the representations of the sounds, sights, and living movement of Nature. The essential characteristic both of his pastoral Idyls and of those drawn from city-life, such as the second, fourteenth, and fifteenth, is what has been well called the 'disinterested objectivity(249)' of Greek art: and this is the chief note of their difference from Virgil's pastorals. Even where, as in the seventh, the poet introduces himself on the scene, he appears as one, and not the most important, of the personages on it. He does not draw attention to his own feelings or fortunes, only to his playful converse and rivalry in song with the young shepherd-poet Lycidas, 'with the bright laughing eye and the smile ever playing on his lip(250).'

It may be urged against these Idyls that, as compared with the best modern Idyls, in prose or verse, they are, for the most part, wanting in incident or adventure; and this charge is equally applicable to Virgil's pastorals.

But there is always dramatic vivacity and consistency in the personages of Theocritus, and this cannot equally be said of those introduced into the Eclogues. It might be urged also against the representations of Theocritus, and still more against those of Virgil, that the 'vestigia ruris' have been too carefully obliterated. Yet, though not drawn immediately from life, this picture of Sicilian shepherds and peasants, possessed with the vivid belief in Pan and the Nymphs, singing the old dirge of the herdsman Daphnis among the mountain pastures, or the love-song of the Cyclops and Galatea on the rocks overhanging the Sicilian sea, or the song of Lityerses among the ripe corn-fields(251), challenging each other to compete in song or plying each other with careless tending their flocks rather as a picturesque pastime than as a toilsome occupation, and living a life of free social enjoyment in the open air, was a genuine ideal of the Greek imagination, not perhaps, too far removed from the actual reality.

Before the time of Virgil there had been no attempt to introduce this form of art into Italy. Though the germ of a rude rustic poetry existed in the 'Fescennine verses,' no connexion can be traced between them and the highly artificial pastoral of the Augustan Age. The Eclogues of Virgil are in form and even in substance a closer reproduction of a Greek original than any other branch of Latin literature, with the exception of the comedy of Terence. The 'Lament of Daphnis,' the song of unrequited love, the bantering dialogues of the shepherds and their more formal contests in song, reappear in Latin tones and with some new a.s.sociations of individual and national life, but in such a manner as to recall the memory of the Sicilian idyl rather than to suggest a new experience from life. And yet Virgil is not satisfied, like the authors of Latin comedy, with presenting to the imagination types of Greek life, Greek sentiment and manners, and Greek scenes. He desires not only to reproduce in new words and music the charm which had fascinated him in Theocritus, but to blend the actual feeling and experience of an Italian living in the Augustan Age with this ideal restored from a by-gone time. The result is something composite, neither purely Greek nor purely Italian; not altogether of the present time nor yet of a mythical foretime; but a blending of various elements of poetic a.s.sociation and actual experience, as in those landscapes of the Renaissance which combine aspects of real scenes with the suggestions of cla.s.sical poetry, and introduce figures of the day in modern dress along with the fantastic shapes of mythological invention. The scenes and personages of the Eclogues are thus one stage further removed from actuality than those of the Greek pastoral. They do not reproduce, as Keats has done, the Greek ideal of rural life, and they do not create a purely Italian ideal. There was, indeed, latent in the Italian imagination an ideal of a homely rustic life, finding its happiness in the annual round of labour and in the blessing of a virtuous home, and that ideal Virgil loved to draw with 'magic hand;' but that was altogether unlike the ideal of the Greek imagination. The life of industry and happiness which Virgil glorifies in the Georgics,-that of the 'primitive, stout-hearted, and thrifty husbandmen' of Horace,-whose pride was in their 'glad harvests,' their 'trim fields,' their 'vineyards,' and in the use which they derived from their flocks, herds, and beehives, had nothing in common with that of the 'well-trimmed sunburnt shepherds' whom Greek fancy first created, and whom Keats has made live for us again, enjoying the fulness of actual existence in union with the dreams of an 'Elysian idleness(252).' Least of all could the pastoral life of Arcadia or Sicily have been like the habitual ways of men in the rich plains of Mantua. The district of Italy most like the scenes of the Greek idyl was Calabria, where, among the desolate forest-glades, the herds and flocks of some rich senator or eques were now tended by barbarous slaves, with whose daily existence the ideal glories of pastoral song were not likely to intermingle.

III.

It is easy for those who wish to depreciate the art of Virgil to point out very many instances of imitation and artificial treatment in the Eclogues, and to establish their manifest inferiority to the Greek idyl in direct truth and vividness of representation. They are not purely objective, like the Greek idyl, nor purely subjective as the Latin elegy generally is.

They are very much inferior to the Greek originals in dramatic power; and the idyl is really a branch of dramatic poetry. Like the pure drama, it depends on the power of living in the thoughts, situations, and feelings of beings quite distinct from the poet himself. Some of the Eclogues, those in which the pa.s.sion of love and the Italian pa.s.sion for the land are the motives, are dramatic in spirit, though the conception of the situation is not consistently maintained. But in most cases, where he is not merely imitative, the dramatic form is to Virgil as a kind of veil under which he may partially reveal what moved him most in connexion with his own personal fortunes, and may express his sympathies with literature, with outward nature, and with certain moods and sentiments of the human heart. It is not in virtue of the originality and consistency of their conception, but of their general truth of feeling and the perfection of the medium through which that feeling is conveyed, that those who admire the Eclogues must vindicate their claim to poetic honour.

The reserve with which all his personal relations are indicated, and the allusive way in which the story of his fortunes is told, are in keeping with the delicacy and modesty of Virgil's nature. He tells us nothing directly of his home-life or occupations, though his attachment to the scenes familiar to him from childhood is felt in the language with which Meliboeus felicitates t.i.tyrus on the rest.i.tution of his land, and in that in which Moeris and Lycidas discourse together. We know of no actual Galatea or Amaryllis a.s.sociated with the joy or the pain of his youth; though his subtle perception of the various moods of the pa.s.sion of love can hardly be a mere poetic intuition, unenlightened by personal experience. The eminent men with whom he was brought into contact, Octavia.n.u.s, Pollio, Varus, and Gallus, are not individualised; though the different feelings of reverential or loyal respect, of colder deference, or admiring enthusiasm, which they severally excited in him, can be clearly distinguished. In the undesigned revelation of himself, which every author makes in his writings, there are few indications of the religious and moral feeling and of the national sentiment which are among the princ.i.p.al elements in Virgil's maturer poems: but we find abundantly the evidence of a mind open to all tender and refined influences, free from every taint of envy or malice, serious and pensive, and finding its chief happiness in making the charm, which fascinated him in books, in Nature, and in life, heard in the deep and rich music of the language, of which he first drew out the full capabilities:-

Saepe ego longos Cantando puerum memini me condere soles(253).

The Eclogues also present Virgil to us as not only a poet, but, as what he continued to be through all his life, a student of the writings of the past. Like Milton he was eminently a learned poet, and, like Milton, he knew the subtle alchemy by which the duller ore of learned allusion is trans.m.u.ted into gold. The tales of the Greek mythology and the names of places famous in song or story act on his imagination, not so much through their own intrinsic interest, as through the a.s.sociations of literature.

It is under this reflex action that he recalls to memory the tales of Pasiphae, of Scylla and Nisus, of Tereus and Philomela; introduces Orpheus, Amphion, and Linus as the ideal poets of pastoral song; and alludes to Hesiod, Euphorion, and Theocritus in the phrases 'the sage of Ascra,' 'the verse of Chalcis,' 'the Sicilian Shepherd.' It is in this spirit that he a.s.sociates the musical accompaniment of his song with the names of Maenalus and Eurotas, of Rhodope and Ismarus; and that he speaks of bees and thyme as 'the bees and thyme of Hybla,' of doves as 'the Chaonian doves,' of vultures as 'the birds of Caucasus.' He also characterises objects by local epithets, suggestive rather of the a.s.sociations of geographical science than of poetry. Thus he speaks of 'Ariusian wine,' of 'Cydonian arrows,' 'Cyrnean yews,' 'a.s.syrian spikenard,' and the like. The interest in physical enquiries appears in the allusion in Ecl. iii. 40,

In medio duo signa Conon, etc.,

and in the rapid summary of the Epicurean theory of creation at vi. 31, etc.,

Namque canebat uti magnum per inane coacta, etc.

In these last pa.s.sages it is not so much by the scientific or philosophical speculations themselves, as by their literary treatment by former writers, that Virgil appears to be attracted. Perhaps the frequent recurrence of these localising epithets, where there is nothing in the context to call up any thought of the locality indicated, may appear to a modern reader an unfortunate result of his Alexandrine studies; yet the grace with which old poetic a.s.sociations are evoked and new a.s.sociations created by such lines as these,

Tum canit, errantem Permessi ad flumina Gallum Aonas in montis ut duxerit una sororum,

or these,

Omnia quae Phoebo quondam meditante beatus Audiit Eurotas, iussitque ediscere laurus, Ille canit(254),

attests the c.u.mulative force which ancient names, identified with the poetic life of the world, gather in their transmission through the literatures of different ages and nations.

In the Georgics and Aeneid, as well as in the Eclogues, Virgil shows a great susceptibility to the beauty and power of Nature. But Nature presents different aspects and awakens a different cla.s.s of feelings in these poems. In the Eclogues he shows a great openness and receptivity of mind, through which all the softer and more delicate influences of the outward world enter into and become part of his being. The 'molle atque facetum' of Horace denotes the yielding susceptibility(255) to outward influences, and the vivacity which gives them back in graceful forms. In the Georgics, the sense of the relation of Nature to human energy imparts greater n.o.bleness to the conception. She appears there, not only in her majesty and beauty, but as endowed with a soul and will. She stands to man at first in the relation of an antagonist: but, by compliance with her conditions, he subdues her to his will, and finds in her at last a just and beneficent helpmate(256). In the Eclogues she takes rather the form of an enchantress, who, by the charm of her outward mien and her freely-offered gifts, fascinates him into a life of indolent repose. If the one poem may in a sense be described as the 'glorification of labour,'

the other might be described as the 'glorification of the _dolce far niente_' of Italian life. The natural objects described by Virgil are often indeed the same as those out of which the representation of Theocritus is composed; but in Theocritus the human figures are, after all, the prominent objects in the picture: the speakers in his dialogue, though not unconscious of the charm proceeding from the scenes in which they are placed, yet are not possessed by it; they do not lose their own being in the larger life of Nature environing them. Theocritus shows everywhere the social temperament of the Greeks. It is an Italian, not perhaps without something of the Celtic fibre in his composition, who utters his natural feelings in the lines,

ibi haec incondita solus Montibus et silvis studio iactabat inani(257).

In Virgil's representation neither the scenes nor the human figures are so distinctly present to the eye; but there is diffused through it a subtle influence from the outward world, bringing man's nature into conformity with itself. The genius in modern times, which shows most of this yielding susceptibility to the softer aspects and motions of Nature, is that of Rousseau; but in the manner in which he gives way to this sentiment there is a want of restraint, a strain of excited feeling, suggestive of the contrast between this transient intoxication of happiness and the abiding unrest and misery of all his human relations. In reading Virgil there is no sense of any such jarring discord; yet it is rather as a pensive emotion, not unallied to melancholy, than as the joy of a sanguine temperament, that his susceptibility to outward impressions is made manifest.

The objects through which Nature exercises this spell are, as was said, much the same as those out of which the landscape of Theocritus is composed. Virgil, like Theocritus, enables us to feel the charm of 'the sparkling stream of fresh water,' of 'mossy fountains and gra.s.s softer than sleep,' of 'the cool shade of trees,' and of caves 'with the gadding vine o'ergrown.' The grace and tender hues of wild flowers-violets, poppies, narcissus, and hyacinth-and of fruits, such as the 'cerea pruna'

and the 'tenera lanugine mala,'-the luxuriant vegetation clothing the rocks and the ideal mountain glades,-

Ille latus niveum molli fultus hyacintho(258),-

the plants and trees,-osiers and hazels, ilex and beech,-the woods, and meadow-pastures, and rich orchards of his native district, have communicated the soul and secret of their being to the mellow tones of his language and the musical cadences of his verse. He makes us hear again, with a strange delight, the murmur of bees feeding on the willow hedge, the moan of turtle-doves from the high elm tree, the sound of the whispering south wind, of waves breaking on the sh.o.r.e, of rivers flowing down through rocky valleys, the song of the woodman plying his work, the voice of the divine poet chanting his strain. By a few simple words he calls up before our minds the genial luxuriance of spring, the freshness of early morning, the rest of all living things in the burning heat of noon, the stillness of evening, the gentle imperceptible motions of Nature, in the shooting up of the young alder-tree and in the gradual colouring of the grapes on the sunny hill-sides. If the labour of man is mentioned at all, it is in the form of some elegant accomplishment or picturesque task-pruning the vine or grafting the pear-tree, closing the streams that water the pastures, watching the flocks and herds feeding at their own will. The new era on which the world was about to enter is seen by his imagination, like the vision of some pastoral valley, half hidden, half glorified through a golden haze. The peculiar blessings antic.i.p.ated in that era are the rest from labour, the spontaneous bounty of Nature, the peace that is to reign among the old enemies of the animal kingdom.

The human affections which mingle with these representations of Nature are the love of home, and the romantic sentiment, rather than the pa.s.sion, of love. The common human feeling of the love of home Virgil realises more intensely from his love of the beauty a.s.sociated with his own home. Many of the sayings of t.i.tyrus and Meliboeus bear witness to the strong hold which their lands and flocks had on men of their cla.s.s:-

nos dulcia linquimus arva- ergo tua rura manebunt, Et tibi magna satis- Ille meas errare boves ut cernis- Spem gregis a, silice in nuda conixa reliquit- Ite meae, quondam felix pecus, ite capellae(259).

In the pa.s.sage of the same Eclogue, from 6879,

En unquam patrios ... salices carpetis amaras,

Virgil tells, in language of natural pathos and exquisite grace, of the poor man's sorrow in yielding his thatched hut, his well-trimmed fields, his corn crops, his pear-trees and his vines, the familiar sight of his goats feeding high up among the thickets of the rocks, to some rude soldier, incapable either of enjoying the charm or profiting by the richness of the land.

The three poems-the second, eighth, and tenth-of which love is the theme are all of a serious and plaintive cast. There are few touches in Virgil's art descriptive either of the happier or the lighter and more playful experiences of the pa.s.sion, which are the common theme of Horace's Odes.

Still less does he treat the subject in the style of Propertius and Ovid.