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 producedMacaulay; 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 2.' 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 1 S. Coleridge's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 411. §3] THEIR ITALIAN CHARACTER 173 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 composed1. 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 1 From the similarity between the lines in Hor. Sat. i. I. 114, Ut cum carceribus missos, and those at the end of Georg. i. 512, Ut cum carceribus sese effudere quadrigae, it has been argued that Georgic i, at all events, must have appeared before the first Book of the Satires. Ribbeck supposes that the lines of the Georgics may have been seen or heard by Horace before the appearance of the poem, and imitated by him. But is it likely that Horace would have appropriated an image from an unpublished poem? Is it not as probable that Virgil was the imitator here, as in other passages where he uses the language of contemporaries, e.g. of Varius, Ecl. viii, 88? RELATION TO HESIOD 175 applied was, even when not of a licentious character, regarded by the more serious minds of Rome, such as Cicero1 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 iugo3. 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. 1 Compare the contrast drawn by him between Ennius and the contemporary Cantores Euphorionis,' Tusc. Disp. iii. 19. 2 Cf. also W. F. Teuffel's History of Roman Literature, chap. i. note I. 3 You sing the lore of the old poet of Ascra, of the field on which the corn, the hill on which the grape grows.' iii. 32. 77-78. 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 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 1 The city which is called Rome, O Meliboeus, I thought, in my folly, was like this city of ours.' |