VII] ITALIAN WORKMANSHIP 277 created a new and nobler type, which never has been, and probably never will be, improved on. The execution of the poem is characterised by the genial susceptibility and enthusiasm of the Italian temperament, by the firm structure of all Roman work and the practical moderation and dignity of the Roman mind, and by a kind of meditative and pensive grace peculiar to the poet himself. The thought of the poem is not separable from the sentiment pervading it. And in this respect there is a marked difference between the genius of Virgil and of Lucretius. However much the speculative activity of Lucretius is charged with feeling, yet the thought stands out, clearly defined, through the atmosphere surrounding it. The melancholy of Lucretius, though it was the result partly of disposition, the reaction perhaps of a strongly passionate temperament,—and partly of his relation to his age, was yet a state of mind for which he could assign definite grounds. That of Virgil was probably also in a great measure the result of temperament; but it seems to be a mood habitual to one who meditated much inwardly on the misery of the world, who was moved by compassion for all sights of sorrow or suffering1, and was yet unable to shape this sense of the burthen of the mystery' into articulate thought. The atmosphere of the poem has become one with its substance. The fusion of meditation and feeling derived from the individual genius of the poet imparts a distinctively original charm to the style of the Georgics. The style is thus, in a great degree, Virgil's own, and owes little to the borrowed beauties of Greek expression. Though the language of the Alexandrine poets is sometimes reproduced, yet the beauty of those transferred passages arises from the grace given to them, not from that borrowed from them. The same It is among the blessings of the countryman's lot enumerated in the passage O fortunatos,' etc., that he is removed from the painful sight of the contrasts between poverty and riches which the life of a great city presents neque ille Aut doluit miserans inopem aut invidit habenti. may be said of the use sometimes made of the quaint diction of Hesiod. In one or two striking passages, such as that Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis, etc., Virgil has adopted the language of the Iliad1; and though it is impossible to improve on that, yet there is no slavish imitation of it; only a new picture is painted, recalling, by some vivid touches, a former piece by the great master. If detraction is to be made from the originality of expression in the Georgics, the debt due by Virgil was incurred to his own countryman. In adopting modes of expression from Lucretius, Virgil brings down the bold creativeness of his original to a tone more suited to the habitual sobriety of the Italian imagination. He often fixes into the form of some general thought what appears in Lucretius as a living movement or individualised action. And this tendency to abstract rather than concrete representation is in accordance with the Roman mould of mind. We notice also how much more sparingly he uses such compound words as 'navigerum,'' silvifragis,' etc., by which the earlier poets endeavoured to force the harder metal of the Latin language into the flexibility of Greek speech. Virgil felt that these innovations were unsuited to the genius of the Latin tongue, and endeavoured to enlarge its capacities by novel constructions and by using old words with a new application rather than by novel formations of words. But this gain was perhaps more than compensated by the loss which the language suffered in idiomatic purity and clearness. In rhythmical movement the poem exhibits the highest perfection of which Latin verse is capable. Of Homer's verse it has been happily said that it has 'a tranquil deep strength, reminding us of his own line, Ἐξ ἀκαλαρρείταο βαθυρρόου ὠκεανοῖο 1 Il. xxi. 257-262. 2 'Out of the tranquil deep current of ocean.' Professor Lushington's Inaugural Lecture delivered to the Students of the Greek Classes in the University of Glasgow, November, 1838. VII] RHYTHMICAL MOVEMENT 279 The movement of Virgil's verse reminds us rather of his own river qui per saxa volutus Purior electro campum petit1. Occasionally we catch the sound of some more rapid rush and impetuous fall, as in the hurry and agitation and culminating grandeur of these lines— Continuo, ventis surgentibus, aut freta ponti Montibus audiri fragor, aut resonantia longe Litora misceri et nemorum increbrescere murmur 2;— but generally the stream flows on, neither in rapid torrent nor with abrupt transitions, but with a tranquil deep strength,' fed by pure and abounding sources of affection, of contemplation, of moral and religious feeling, of delight from eye and ear, from memory and old poetic association. 1 'Which rolling over rocks in stream purer than amber makes for the plain.' 2 Forthwith as the winds are rising, either the channels of the sea begin to boil and swell, and a dry crashing sound to be heard on the lofty mountains, or the shores to echo far with a confused noise, and the uproar of the woods to wax louder.' G. i. 356-9. CHAPTER VIII. THE ROMAN EPIC BEFORE THE TIME OF VIRGIL. THE distinction between what is called the primitive and the literary epic has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. The two kinds of narrative poem belong to totally different epochs in civilisation; they are also the products of very different national temperaments and faculties. It is somewhat remarkable that those literatures which are richest in literary epics the ancient Latin, the modern Italian, and the Englishare those which possess few or no native poems either of the type realised in the Nibelungen-Lied, the Song of Roland, and poems of that class, or of the type realised in the Iliad and Odyssey; nor is there, in connexion with the earlier traditions of the Italian or the English race, that cycle of heroic adventure and personages in which such poems have their origin. The composition of the Aeneid and of the Paradise Lost implies powers of combination, of arranging great masses of materials, of concentration of the mind on a single object, more analogous to those which produced the vast historical work of Livy and 'The Decline and Fall' of Gibbon, than to the spontaneity, the naïveté, the rapidity of conception and utterance, and that immediate sympathy between poet and people, to which we owe the continuous poems developed out of some germ of popular ballad or national legend. It was the peculiar glory of Greece, that in the earlier stage of her literary development she manifested not only a perfection of expression and of art, but a maturity of intelligence, a true insight into the meaning of life, a nobility of imagination in union with a clearness and sanity. of judgment, which the most advanced eras of other literatures PRIMITIVE AND LITERARY EPIC 281 scarcely equal. Thus the two great Greek epics are unique in character, and, while they have, in the highest degree, the excellences of each class, they can properly be ranked under neither. While exhibiting, better than any other writings, man and the outward world in 'the first intention,'-man in the energy and buoyancy of the national youth, and Nature in the vividness of impression which she makes on the mind and sense in their most healthy activity,—they are at the same time masterpieces of art and great monuments of the national mind. The Greek imagination with no appearance of effort produced works of such compass and harmonious proportion as only long years of labour and reflection in collecting and combining materials in accordance with a predetermined purpose produced in other literatures. We are not called upon to consider here the conditions out of which the earlier type of epic poetry is developed, or to enquire why the Latin race failed to create at least some inartistic legendary poem of sufficient length to be ranked in that form of literature. Perhaps no answer could be given to the question excepting that the Latin race had not sufficient creative force to produce such a work,-which is simply another way of stating the fact that it did not produce epic poems. The Romans were from a very early period interested in their past history and traditions. They seem to have shaped, either out of real incidents in their national and family history, or out of their chief national characteristics, stories of strong human interest, which only want the 'vates sacer' to be converted into poems. Every great family seems to have had its own traditions, glorifying the exploits and preserving the memory of illustrious ancestors; and whatever may have been the case in regard to the legendary stories connected with the fortunes of the State, some of these traditions were undoubtedly expressed in rude Saturnian verse, and chanted at family gatherings and at funeral banquets. The memory of these ancestral lays—if we may apply that word to them-survived till the time of 1 E. g. those of Lucretia, Virginia, Coriolanus, Brutus, T. Manlius, etc. |