§ 3]

HIS SUPPORT OF THE EMPIRE

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loving disposition, was not incompatible with Roman fortitude and resolute endurance.

The reproach from which it is impossible entirely to clear his memory is that of undue subservience to power. It was in the qualities of independence and self-assertion that his character was deficient. It is to the excess of his feeling of deference to power, and not to any insincerity of nature, that we attribute the language occasionally-as in the Invocation to the Georgics -transcending the limits of truth and sobriety, in which the position of Augustus is magnified. It is for ever to be regretted that he was induced to sacrifice not only the tribute of admiration originally offered to the friend of his youth, but even the symmetrical conception of his greatest poem, to the jealousy which Augustus entertained of the memory of Gallus. Virgil, again, has no sympathy with political life, as it realised itself in the ancient republics, or with the energetic types of character which the conflicts of political life develope. His own somewhat submissive disposition, his personal attachments and admirations, his hatred of strife, his yearning after peace and reconcilement, made him a sincere supporter of the idea of the Empire in opposition to that of the Republic. To a character of a more combative energy and power of resistance it would have been scarcely possible to have been unmoved by the spectacle of the final overthrow of ancient freedom, though that freedom had for a long time previously contributed little to human happiness. But the nobleness of Virgil's nature is not the nobleness of those qualities which make men great in resistance to wrong, but the nobleness of a gentle and gracious spirit.

By no poet in any time has he been surpassed in devotion to his art. Into this channel all the currents of his being, all fresh sources of feeling, all the streams of his meditation and research were poured. The delight in poetry and the kindred delight in the beauty of Nature were the main springs of his happiness. With the high ambition of genius and the unceasing aim at perfection he combined a remarkable modesty and a generous

appreciation of all poets who had gone before him. But distrust in himself never led to any flagging of energy. The stories told of his habits of composition confirm the impression. of his assiduous industry. In writing the Georgics he is said to have dictated many lines early in the morning, under the first impulse of his inspiration, and to have employed the remainder of the day in concentrating their force within the smallest compass. Of no poem of equal length can it be said that there is so little that is superfluous. He himself described this mode of composition by the phrase 'parere se versus modo atque ritu ursino''that he produced verses by licking them into shape as a bear did with her cubs.' The Aeneid was first arranged and written out in prose: when the structure of the story was distinct to his mind, he proceeded to work on different parts of it, as his fancy moved him. Another statement in regard to his manner of reading is worth mentioning, as indicating the powerful inspiration of the true doidos, which he added to the patient industry of the conscientious artist. It is recorded. on the authority of a contemporary poet, that he read his own. poems with such a wonderful sweetness and charm ('suavitate tum lenociniis miris'), that verses which would have sounded commonplace when read by another, produced a marvellous effect when 'chanted to their own music by the poet himself. Similar testimony is given of the effect produced by the reading or recitation of their own works by some among our own poets, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron among others. This large, musical, and impassioned utterance-the 'os magna sonaturum' is a sure note of that access of emotion which forces the poet to find a rhythmical expression for his thought.

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It was through the union of a strong and delicate vein of original genius with a great receptive capacity and an unwearied love of his art that Virgil established and for a long time re

1 Compare the lines of Coleridge on hearing 'The Prelude' read aloud by Wordsworth :—

'An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts

To their own music chanted.'

tained his ascendency as one of the two whom the world honoured as its greatest poets. Though his supremacy has been shaken, and is not likely ever again to be fully reestablished, the examination of his various works will show that it was not through accident or caprice that one of the highest places in the dynasty of genius was allotted to him, and that his still remains one of the few great names which belong, not to any particular age or nation, but to all time and to every people.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ECLOGUES.

I.

THE name by which the earliest of Virgil's recognised works is known tells us nothing of the subject of which it treats. The word 'Eclogae' simply means selections. As applied to the poems of Virgil, it designates a collection of short unconnected poems. The other name by which these poems were known in antiquity, 'bucolica,' indicates the form of Greek art in which they were cast and the pastoral nature of their subjects. Neither word is used by Virgil himself; but the expressions by which he characterises his art, such as Sicelides Musae,' 'versus Syracosius,' 'Musa agrestis' and 'silvestris,' show that he writes in a pastoral strain, and that he considered the pastoral poetry of Greece as his model. He invokes not only the Sicilian Muses,' but the fountain of Arethusa.' He speaks too of Pan, and Arcadia, and the Song of Maenalus." His shepherdThe poets whom he in

poets are described as 'Arcadians.'

troduces as his prototypes are the 'sage of Ascra,' and the mythical Linus, Orpheus, and Amphion. He alludes also to Theocritus under the name of the Syracusan shepherd.' The names of the shepherds who are introduced as contending in song or uttering their feelings in monologue-Corydon, Thyrsis, Menalcas, Meliboeus, Tityrus, etc.-are Greek, and for the most part taken from the pastoral idyls of Theocritus. There is also. frequent mention of the shepherd's pipe, and of the musical accompaniment to which some of the songs chanted by the shepherds are set.

The general character of the poems is further indicated by the frequent use of the word 'ludere,' a word applied by

GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE POEMS

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Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and others to the poems of youth, of a light and playful character, and, for the most part, expressive of various moods of the passion of love. Thus at the end of the Georgics Virgil speaks of himself thus:Carmina qui lusi pastorum, audaxque iuventa,

Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi'.

This reference shows further that the poem which stands first in order was placed there when the edition of the Eclogues was given to the world. But other references (at v. 86-87 and vi. 12) seem to imply that the separate poems were known either by distinct titles, such as Varus, the title of the sixth, or from their opening lines, as the 'Formosum Corydon ardebat Alexim,' and the 'Cuium pecus? an Meliboei?' It has been also suggested, from lines quoted in the ninth, which profess to be the opening lines of other pastoral poems, that the ten finally collected together were actual 'selections' from a larger number, commenced if not completed ('necdum perfecta canebat') by Virgil. But these passages seem more like the lines attributed to the contending poets in the third and seventh Eclogues, i. e. short unconnected specimens of pastoral song.

Nearly all the poems afford indications of the time of their composition and of the order in which they followed one another; and that order is different from the order in which they now appear. It is said, on the authority of Asconius, that three years, from 42 B.C. to 39 B. C., were given to the composition of the Eclogues. But an allusion in the tenth (line 47) to the expedition of Agrippa across the Alps in the early part of 37 B.C. proves that a later date must be assigned to that poem. The probable explanation is that Virgil had intended to end the series with the eighth, which celebrated the triumph of Pollio over the Parthini in 39 B.C.,

A te principium, tibi desinet,

but that his friendship for Gallus induced him to add the tenth,

1

'I, the idle singer of a pastoral song, who in the boldness of youth made thee, O Tityrus, beneath the shade of the spreading beechi, my theme.'