feeling with the pain and the happiness of which human affection. is the source. The numerous passages in which phrases or cadences, thought or imagery in the Georgics recall phrases or representation in the earlier poem 1, leave no doubt that Virgil found in Lucretius a heart and spirit with which his own largely receptive nature could in many ways sympathise, as well as that he recognised in him a guide whom he could follow in imagination among the lonely heights of Parnassus 2.' Yet, on the other hand, it is quite true that both the character and genius of Virgil are essentially of a different type from those of Lucretius. They are both thoroughly original representatives of different elements in the Roman and Italian character.--So far as he represents the mind and temper of Rome, Lucretius represents the old order which had passed away. Though scarcely anything is known of the circumstances of his life, yet his gentile name (as is shown by Mr. Munro), his relation of equality to Memmius, the stamp of his powerful personality impressed on his poem, point to the conclusion that he was one of the old Roman aristocracy, born into a time when many of its members had begun to retire in disgust from active interest in the Republic, which they were no longer able to govern. It was, as has been already remarked 3, to this class among the Romans, almost exclusively, that the taste for literature was confined in the last age of the Republic; and it was among men of this class, such as the Luculli and Hortensius, and the Velleius and Torquatus of Cicero's Dialogues, that the Epicurean philosophy found its chief adherents. The poem of Lucretius shows all the courage and energy, the power of command, the sense of superiority and the direct simplicity of manner emanating from it, which are the inheritance of a great governing class. He is the one man of true genius for poetry whom that class gave to Rome. His lofty pathos and tenderness of feeling are the graces of his own nature, refined and purified by the most 1 Compare Munro's notes passim, and specially the note on Lucret. iii. 449. 2 Compare Georg. iii. 291 with Lucret. i. 926. 3 Chap. iii. p. 109. humanising studies. His profound melancholy is a mood natural to one who looks on the passing away of a great order of things, political, social, and religious, in the midst of scenes of turbulence and violence, and takes refuge from an alien world in the contemplation of another order of things, infinitely more majestic than either the old social state which was shaken and tottering to its fall, or the new which was yet 'powerless to be born.' There could scarcely be any greater contrast, in social relations and the dispositions arising out of them, between any two men, than between the representative of the old governing families of the Republic, and the humbly-born native of the Cisalpine province,—delicate in health, modest and self-distrustful, yet endowed with a deep consciousness of genius and a resolution to follow that guidance only,-entering on manhood and beginning his career as poet contemporaneously with the events which determined the ascendency of the new order of things, and identified with it through his personal relations to the leading men of the new Empire,—a poet who derived from his birth and early nurture 'the spirit of the ages of Faith','—one too who had been happy in his early home-affections and in the friendships of his manhood, and who was able to dedicate his mature years to his art under conditions of the greatest personal and national security. In considering the influence of the ideas of Lucretius on the mind of Virgil, we must accordingly make large allowance for the medium of alien sympathies, personal, social, and political, through which they were refracted. We must take into consideration also the wide difference between the philosophic poet and the pure poetic artist. The feeling of Virgil towards philosophy was apparently one of aspiration rather than of possession. He shows no interest in the processes of enquiry,—in tracing the operation of great laws in manifold phenomena,—in investigating one obscure subject after another, with the confident assurance that every discovery 1 Merivale's Roman Empire. is a step towards the light and the ultimate revelation of the whole mystery. Virgil recognises the source of his own strength in the words Flumina amem silvasque. It is the power of love which quickens his intuition and enables him to perceive the tenderness and beauty revealed in the living movement of Nature. He receives and applies the complete ideas of Lucretius, but he does not follow them with the eagerness of their author through the various phases of their development. Certain results of a philosophic system affect his imagination, but he does not seem to feel how these results necessarily exclude other conclusions which he will not abandon. Hence arises his prevailing eclecticism,-the existence of popular beliefs side by side in his mind with the tenets of Epicureans, Stoics, and Platonists,-of some conclusions of the Lucretian science along with the opposing doctrines expressed in the poetry of Alexandria. Even in the arrangement of his materials and the grouping of his landscapes, some chance association or rhythmical cadence seems to guide his hand, more often than the perception of the orderly connexion of phenomena with one another. II. The idea which Lucretius revealed to the world in fuller majesty and life than any previous poet or philosopher, was the idea of Nature, apprehended, not as an abstract conception, but as a power omnipresent, creative, and regulative throughout the great spheres of earth, sky, and sea, and the innumerable varieties of individual existence. The meaning conveyed by the Greek word puois, as employed by Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, etc., is powerless to move the imagination or enlarge the sense of beauty, when compared with the illimitable content of Natura daedala rerum' as conceived by the Latin poet. Nature is to him the one power absolutely supreme and independent in the Universe, too vast and too manifold to be subject to any will but her own, Libera continuo dominis privata superbis. Her independent existence is incompatible with that of the multitude of beings, of limited power and intelligence, which the old mythologies established as lords over the world and man. The gods, abiding in a state of blessed ease and indifference, are themselves dependent on a power infinitely transcending their own. But in what relation does man stand to this power? He too is within her sphere, altogether subject to her, but no special object of her regard. He exists only through compliance with and resignation to her conditions. And these conditions are on the whole unfavourable to him. He can gain only a scanty subsistence by a continual struggle with reluctant and rebellious forces in the earth; and even after all his toil and care, causes over which he has no control, such as the inclemency of the skies and incalculable vicissitudes of heat and cold, frustrate his endeavours. Quod superest arvi tamen id natura sua vi Aut subiti perimunt imbris gelidaeque pruinae, 1 'What remains of tilled land, even that Nature by its own force would overgrow with briars did not the force of man resist it, inured, for the sake of living, to ply, with pain and labour, the stout mattock, and to split up the new earth with the deep-sunk ploughs: did not we, by turning up the fruitful clods with the plough-share, and subduing the soil of the earth, call forth the seeds to the birth, they could not of their own impulse come forth into the clear air. And after all, sometimes the products of much toil, when they are already in blade and in beauty over the earth, either the Sun in heaven scorches with excessive heat, or sudden rains and chill frosts ruin them, and the blasts of the winds in wild hurricane make them their sport.' Lucret. v. 206-217 (See Munro's note on the passage). Cf. How deeply the thought expressed in these lines-the thought of the hard struggle which man is forced to carry on with an unsympathetic Power--sank into the mind of Virgil, is evident from the various passages in the Georgics in which the phraseology as well as the idea expressed by Lucretius is reproduced. These lines in which the struggle between the 'vis humana,' impersonated in the husbandman, and the resistance offered by Nature to his energetic labours, is vividly described, suggest whatever there is of speculative thought in the Georgics. And though it would be misleading to speak of that poem as, in any sense, a philosophical poem, yet, as in all other great works of genius, some theory of life-of man's relation to his circumstances and of his place, either in a spiritual or natural dispensation pervades and gives its highest meaning to the didactic exposition. Lucretius further regards this state of things, so far from being remediable by man, as necessarily becoming worse. Each new generation of husbandmen and vinedressers finds its burden heavier: Iamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator Crebrius, incassum manuum cecidisse labores', etc. The earth which, under the genial influence of sun and rain, produced fair crops without the labour of the ploughman and vinedresser 2, can now scarcely produce its fruits in sufficient quantity, though the strength of men and oxen is worn out by labouring on it. The cause of this decay in productiveness he attributes to the waste or dissipation of the elemental matter of our world, which has become much greater and more rapid than the supply of new materials. In the long warfare waged from infinite time' Ex infinito contractum tempore bellum Georg. ii. 411; i. 198; i. 208; ii. 237; ii. 47; i. 197. Compare also Virgil's use of subigere and vertere as applied to the soil. And now the aged peasant, shaking his head, often sighs forth the complaint, that the labour of his hands has come to naught.' Lucret. ii. 1164, etc. 2 V. 932, etc. 3 ii. 1160, etc. |