The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil Part 19

In the last of the great episodes which remains to be considered, all the higher thoughts and feelings by which beauty, dignity, and moral grandeur are given to the subject are found concurring; and the presence of Lucretius is again felt as a pervading influence, though modified by Virgil's own deepest convictions and sympathies. The charm of peaceful contemplation, of Nature in her serenest aspect and harmony with the human soul, of an ethical idea based on religious belief and national traditions, of a life of pure and tranquil happiness, remote from the clash of arms and the pride and pa.s.sions of the world, is made present to us in a strain of continuous and modulated music, which neither Virgil himself nor any other poet has surpa.s.sed. Virgil creates a new ideal of happiness for the contemplation of his countrymen by combining the old realistic delight in the husbandman's life with the imaginative longing for the peace and innocence of a Saturnian Age, and with that new delight in the living beauty of the world and in the charm of ancient memories which it was his especial office to communicate. This ideal is contrasted, as is the older poet's ideal of 'plain living and high thinking,' with the pomp and magnificence of city life,-

Si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis Mane salutantum totis vomit aedibus undam-

Si non aurea sunt iuvenum simulacra per aedes Lampadas igniferas manibus retinentia dextris(391),-

and, as in the older poet also, with the distractions, the restless pa.s.sions, and the crimes of ambition. Virgil, as in other pa.s.sages, compresses into a few lines the thought which Lucretius with simpler art follows through all its detail of concrete reality. Thus the

Gaudent perfusi sanguine fratrum(392)

of Virgil is intended to recall and be explained by the more fully developed representation of the old cruelties of the times of Marius and Sulla, contained in the lines-

Sanguine civili rem conflant divitiasque Conduplicant avidi, caedem caede acc.u.mulantes; Crudeles gaudent in tristi funere fratris; Et consanguineum mensas odere timentque(393).

In their protest against the world both poets are entirely at one. But the ideal of Virgil's imagination, on its positive side, is more on the ordinary human level than that of lonely contemplation in accordance with which Lucretius lived and wrote. The Virgilian ideal, like that of Lucretius, recognised a heart at peace and independent of Fortune as a greater source of happiness than any external good. But this peace the one poet sought for in a superiority to the common beliefs of men; the other rather in a more trusting acceptance of them. Some other elements in Virgil's ideal Lucretius too would have ranked among the supreme sources of human happiness. The lines

Interea dulces pendent circ.u.m oscula nati, Casta pudicitiam servat domus(394),

beautiful as the thought and picture is, are not more true to human feeling, scarcely touch the heart and imagination so vividly, as the lines which suggested them-

Iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxor Optima, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati Praeripere(395).

Other elements in Virgil's ideal Lucretius would have sympathised with, as he did with all natural human pleasure; but the elements of social kindliness expressed in the lines-

Ipse dies agitat festos, etc.

could mix only as an occasional source of refreshment with his lonely contemplation. The great difference between the two men is that Virgil's ordinary feelings and beliefs are in unison with the common ways of life; he has a more active sympathy with the toils and pleasures of simple men; and, above all, he regards it as the highest good for man, not to secure peace of mind for himself, but to be useful in supporting others, in contributing to the well-being of his country, of his family, even of the animals a.s.sociated with his toil:-

hinc patriam parvosque Penates Sustinet, hinc armenta boum meritosque iuvencos(396).

This ideal Virgil seems to regard as one that might be attained by man, if he only could be taught how to appreciate it(397); nay, that has been attained by him in happier times when the land was cultivated by free men, each holding his own plot of ground. This was the life of the old Italian yeomen, the life by which Etruria waxed strong and brave, the life to which Rome herself owed the beginning of her greatness(398). It is the life which the national imagination, in its peaceful mood, and yearning to return into the ways of innocence and piety, discerned in that distant Golden Age, when all men lived in contentment and abundance under the rule of the old G.o.d, from whom the land received the well-loved name 'Saturnia tellus(399).'

Hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini, Hanc Remus et frater, sic fortis Etruria crevit Scilicet, et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma, Septemque una sibi muro circ.u.mdedit arces.

Ante etiam sceptrum Dictaei regis et ante Impia quam caesis gens est epulata iuvencis, Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat; Necdum etiam audierant inflari cla.s.sica, necdum Impositos duris crepitare incudibus enses(400).

CHAPTER VII.

THE GEORGICS AS THE REPRESENTATIVE POEM OF ITALY.

The consideration of the motives which influenced Virgil to undertake the composition of the Georgics, of the form of art adopted by him, of the national interest attaching to his subject, of the materials used by him and the sources from which he derived them, of the author who most influenced him in speculative idea and in the general manner of treating his subject, leads to the conclusion that, in its essential characteristics, the poem is a genuine work of Italian art and inspiration. If the original motive influencing him was the ambition to treat of rural life in the serious spirit of Hesiod, as he had done in the lighter vein of Theocritus, that motive was soon lost in the strong impulse to invest with charm and dignity the kind of life in which the Italian mind placed its ideal of worth and happiness. By thus identifying himself with a great national object Virgil raised himself to a higher level of art than that attained by poets whose interests are purely personal and literary.

Next to satire, there was no form of poetry which had more of a Roman character than didactic poetry. By becoming a province of Roman art, this form acquired all its dignity and capacity of greatness. And though the Georgics, being a work of Italian culture as well as of Italian inspiration, could not escape some relation, not in form only but in materials and mode of expression, to Greek originals, there is no great work of Latin genius, except the Satires and Epistles of Horace, in which the debt thus incurred is so small. And not only is the debt small in quant.i.ty, but it is incurred to authors much inferior to Virgil in creative power and poetical feeling. In using borrowed materials he makes the mind of Greece tributary to his own national design. But his most valuable materials are derived either from personal observation, or from Latin authors who had put on record the results of their observation: and his largest debt, in imaginative feeling and conception, is incurred not to any Greek author, but to the most powerful and original of Roman poets and thinkers. The speculative idea, which gives something of philosophical consistency to the poem, was, if not one of pure Italian conception, yet made more truly real and vital through the experience of the force and endurance exercised by the strong men of Italy in subduing the earth to their will, and in constructing their great material works ('operum laborem'), such as their roads, baths, aqueducts, harbours, encampments, and great draining works, by which they provided the comforts of life ('commoda vitae') and defended themselves against their enemies or the maligner influence of the elements.

The language of Virgil himself and the testimony of ancient commentators confirm the impression, that the object of which he was most distinctly conscious in the composition of the poem was the 'glorification of Italy,'-of the land itself in its fertility and beauty, and of the life most congenial to Italian sentiment. Even to a greater extent than he may have intended, Virgil, through the national mould in which his thought was cast and the national colour of his sympathies, fulfils this representative office. Where the poem seems to a modern reader to fail in human interest, the interest which it had for the poet's countrymen is revived by dwelling in thought on this representative character. When the a.s.sociations appealed to are of Greek rather than of Italian origin, we have to remember that the poem was addressed to a highly educated cla.s.s of readers, at the time when the Roman mind had been most enlarged and enriched, but had not yet been satiated by Greek studies. Yet this kind of appeal is quite subsidiary to that made to the native sensibilities of the Romans. It is to commend to their love and admiration a purely Italian ideal that Virgil employs the resources of Greek learning, as well as all the strength and delicacy of his own genius.

A rapid review of the tastes, sympathies, and affections on the part of his readers to which Virgil appeals, both in the body of his poem and in its finer episodes, will show that they all contribute to produce this representative character. Where some of the details of the poem seem to fail in poetic interest, they still have the interest of being characteristic of the Italian mind.

1. The poem professes to impart practical instruction on the best method of cultivating the land, of propagating trees, of breeding cattle, horses, etc., of profiting by the industry of bees:-

Quare agite, O, proprios generatim discite cultus, Agricolae(401).

This is the obvious and ostensible purpose of the poem; and the truth and accuracy of the instruction were important elements in the estimate which the countrymen of the poet formed of its value. Columella and Pliny, while controverting him on a few minor points(402), attest his practical knowledge as an agriculturist and a naturalist. Similar testimony is given by some modern writers competent to speak with authority on these subjects(403). Neither ancient nor modern critics regard him as free from liability to mistake, and the tendency of his mind to believe in marvellous deviations from natural law exposed him to errors into which less imaginative writers were not likely to fall; but the substantial accuracy of his observations and acquired knowledge seems to be attested both by positive and negative evidence. It is not a question as to whether the operations described in Virgil satisfy the requirements of skilled or even of unskilled farming in the present day, or whether he does not fall into mistakes in natural history which a modern reader, with no scientific knowledge of the subject, may easily detect; but whether he has adequately represented the methods of ancient Italian agriculture, and whether he is a trustworthy exponent of the scientific beliefs of his age, and an accurate observer of those phenomena which were as accessible to an ancient as to a modern enquirer. On these points he satisfied the best critics among his countrymen. The general truth of his observation is further attested by the survival in Southern Europe, into comparatively recent times, of some of the processes described by him, which seem most remote from our ordinary experience(404). It is attested also by the accuracy of his description of the unchanging phenomena of Nature, and of the habits of animals.

A modern reader may think the value of his poetry little, if at all enhanced, by the rank which he may claim among the 'scriptores rei rusticae.' It may seem matter for regret that so much of the faculty, which should have given permanent delight to the world, should have been employed in conveying temporary instruction. His very fidelity to the office of a teacher detracts somewhat from his poetic office. Though it satisfies our curiosity to know how the ancient Italians tilled their lands and cultivated the vine, yet this satisfaction is quite distinct from the joy which the poetical treatment of a poetical subject gives to the imagination. It is not as repertories of useful information that the great writers of Greece and Rome are to be studied. Their importance in this way has long since been superseded. Each generation adds to the stock of knowledge in the world, modifies the results arrived at by the preceding generation, and dispenses with the works in which these results have been embodied. But a work of power, stimulating moral and intellectual feeling,-whether in the form of poem, history, speech, or philosophic dialogue,-may acquire from long antiquity even a stronger hold over the imagination than it originally possessed(405). In the didactic poems of Lucretius and Virgil the information conveyed by them possesses permanent value, in so far as it is coloured by human feeling,-in so far as we recognise the pa.s.sion or affection by which the poet was stirred in acquiring his knowledge and in conveying it to sympathetic readers. And as the scientific enthusiasm of Lucretius animates the driest details of his argument, so the love entertained for his subject by Virgil,-as an Italian, the son of a small Italian land-holder,-

Veneto rusticis parentibus nato inter silvas et frutices educto(406),-

writing for Italians, for whom every detail of farm labour had a fascination unintelligible to us,-brightens with the gleam of human and poetical feeling the technical teaching of the traditional precepts of Italian husbandry. The position of a teacher a.s.sumed by him,-a position which no great Greek or English poet could gracefully maintain,-impresses us with the thorough adaptation of the form of the poem to the sober practical understanding of the Italian race. Horace mentions this love of teaching and learning as one of the notes distinguis.h.i.+ng the Roman from the Greek genius:-

Maiores audire, minori dicere per quae Crescere res posset, minui d.a.m.nosa libido(407).

It adds to our sense of Virgil's thoroughness as an artist to know that he faithfully performed the office which he undertook; and the fact of his undertaking this office helps to bring home to us the practical, unspeculative genius of those to whom his poem was in the first place addressed.

2. Not only the instruction directly conveyed in the poem, but the frequent ill.u.s.trations from geography, mythology, and astronomy, have much less meaning to us than they had to the contemporaries of the poet. Yet they help to make us realise the relation in which the Rome and Italy of the Augustan Age stood to the rest of the world and to the culture of the past. By the references to the varied products of other lands we are reminded of the active commercial intercourse between Rome and the East,-a feature of the age of which we are also often reminded in the Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace. We see how the success of the Roman arms had made the products of the whole world-the 'saffron dye of Tmolus,' the 'ivory of India,' the 'spices of Arabia,' the 'iron of the Chalybians,'

the 'medicinal drugs of Pontus,' the 'brood-mares of Epirus(408)'-part of the possessions of Rome. We are reminded too of the fact that many Romans and Italians were settled as colonists in the provinces of the Empire, and that Virgil had them also in view in the instruction which he imparts(409). The frequent allusions to Greek mythology and to the constellations, on the other hand, help to remind us that the art and science of the past, as well as the material products of the world, had now been diverted to the enjoyment and use of the new inheritors of intellectual culture.

3. It was seen how a.s.siduously Virgil, in the body of his poem, inculcates the necessity and duty of labour. And though the 'glorification of labour'

was found to be rather a derivative and tributary stream than the main current of interest in the poem, yet it is impossible to doubt that to the mind of Virgil this a.s.siduous toil of the husbandman, on a work so congenial and surrounded with such accessories of peaceful happiness, had a special attraction, even independent of its results. This recognition of the dignity of labour owes nothing to a Greek original. A life of intellectual leisure was the ideal of the Greeks. Hesiod indeed does dwell on the necessity of labour, as the ground both of worldly well-being and divine approval,-and this is another point of affinity between him and Virgil,-but the line in which he claims consideration for work,

????? d' ??d?? ??e?d??, ?e???? d? t' ??e?d??(410),

is apologetic in tone; and, moreover, Hesiod can hardly be regarded as a typical Greek. There seems to be no word in the Greek language equivalent to the grave Roman word 'industria.' Perhaps it is owing to the disesteem in which labour was held by Greek writers that industry is scarcely ranked among virtues, nor idleness among vices, even by modern moralists. When long after the time of Homer a new poet arose in Greece, appealing to a great popular sentiment, it was in their pa.s.sion for the great public games that he found the point of contact with the hearts of his countrymen. The Romans, on the other hand, show a great capacity for labour in every field of exertion,-in war and the government of men, in law and literature, in business transactions, in the construction of vast works of utility, and in cultivating the land. And of these, next to war and government, the last was most congenial to the national mind. The land was to the Romans the chief field of their industry and the original source of their wealth, as the sea was the scene of occupation and adventure to the Greeks, and, through the outlet which it gave to the results of their artistic ingenuity, the great source of their prosperity.

The Odyssey is a poem inspired, in a great degree, by the impulse which first sent the Greek nation forth on its career of maritime and colonising enterprise. The Georgics are inspired by that impulse which first started the Latin race on its career of conquest, and which continued to animate the struggle with the reluctant forces of Nature, as it had animated the struggle with the other races of Italy for the possession of the soil.

4. Again, we find that the poem is pervaded by the poetical feeling of Nature. And Virgil, more than any other poet, presents that aspect of Nature in which the outward world appeared to the educated Italian mind.

The personality and individual life attributed to natural objects, such as trees, rivers, winds, etc., belongs to a stage of conception between the Greek anthropomorphism and the recognition by the imagination of universal law and interdependence of phenomena. Modern poets consciously personify natural objects with more boldness and varied sympathy than Virgil. His conception of the life and personal attributes of natural objects appears to be less a conscious creative effort of the imagination, than an unconscious impression from outward things; an impression produced in a state of pa.s.sive contemplation, rather than of active adventure; and an impression produced by qualities of a serene and tender beauty, rather than by those of a bolder or sublimer aspect. In all these respects Virgil represents a stage in the culture of the imagination between that of the early Greek poets and artists, and that of the most imaginative poets and painters of modern times. The familiar beauty of the outward world, as it was felt by a Roman or Italian, was expressed in the Latin word 'amoenum.'

Thus Horace describes his retreat among the Sabine hills, as not only dear to him personally, but as beautiful in itself:-

Hae latebrae dulces, etiam, si credis, amoenae(411).

And it is to the attributes summed up in that word that Virgil imparts the ideal life of the imagination.

But not only is the feeling of Nature in the Georgics characteristic of the highest culture of the Italian mind, but the spectacle of Nature,-

'The outward shows of sky and earth'

brought before us,-is that which still delights the eye and moves the imagination in the various districts of Italy. The description of Spring at Georg. ii. 323345,

Ver adeo frondi nemorum, ...

... exciperet caeli indulgentia terras,

is one of which (though we can always feel its beauty) we cannot often verify the accuracy in our more northern lat.i.tudes. It is to an Italian spring, more than to any season in any other European country, that the words of the third Eclogue 'nunc formosissimus annus,' are applicable. The varied pastoral beauty of the long summer day described at Georg. iii.

323338,-from the early dawn when the fields are fresh beneath the morning-star; through the gathering warmth of the later hours, when the groves are loud with the chirping of the gra.s.shoppers and the herds collect around the deep water-pools; through the burning heat of midday, from which the shade of some huge oak or some grove of dark ilexes affords a shelter; till the coolness of evening tempers the air, and the moon renews with dew the dry forest-glades,-is a beauty quite distinct from the charm of freedom and solitude,-yet not too remote from human neighbourhood,-of the changing aspects of the sky, and of the picturesque environment of hill, river, and moorland, which abides in the pastoral regions of our own and other northern lands. The 'sweet interchange of hill and valley(412),' mountain range and rich cultivated land, which northern and central Italy exhibits, must have made such scenes as that described at ii. 186188,