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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 passed 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 competitor 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 god.

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 anticipated by 'the grave muse of Stesichorus,' and whether this wild product of the mountains was of a native Siculian or an Hellenic 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 associations; familiar with the songs and old traditions of the land, as well as with the fancies of earlier poets; living his life in friendly association with his literary compeers, such as the Alexandrine Aratus' and Nicias, the physician and poet',-he 1 Idyl vii. 97, vi. 2. 2 Idyl xi. 2-6, xiii. 2.

sought to people the familiar scenery of mountain, wood, brook, and sea-shore with an ideal race of shepherds, in whom the natural emotions and grotesque superstitions 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, assumed 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'' 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 2.'

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

1 Preface to Poems by M. Arnold, First Series.
2 vii. 19, 20:-

καί μ' ἀτρέμας εἶπε σεσαρώς
ὄμματι μειδιόωντι, γέλως δέ οἱ εἴχετο χείλευς.

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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', challenging each other to compete in song or plying each other with careless jest, 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 associations 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 association and actual experience, as in those landscapes of the Renaissance which combine aspects of real scenes with the suggestions of classical poetry, and introduce figures of the day in modern dress

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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'.' 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 forestglades, 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.

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§3] FERSONAL ELEMENT IN THE ECLOGUES 161

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 passion of love and the Italian passion 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 Tityrus on the restitution of his land, and in that in which Moeris and Lycidas discourse together. We know of no actual Galatea or Amaryllis associated with the joy or the pain of his youth; though his subtle perception of the various moods of the passion of love can hardly be a mere poetic intuition, unen

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