§6] MATURE EXPRESSION OF ROMAN MIND 57 Lucretius and Catullus, awakened and kept alive in the great writers of this age the desire to perfect the work commenced by their predecessors, and to develope all the majesty, beauty, and harmony of which their native speech was capable. The education in grammar, rhetoric, and Greek literature, which in the later years of the Republic had trained men for the contests of public life, prepared them to recognise and appreciate the perfection of style and of rhythm which was now for the first time attained. But the attainment of this perfection was a stumblingblock to writers of an inferior order, and to all the poets who came afterwards. The Augustan poets left to their successors, what they had not themselves received, the fatal legacy of an established poetical diction. The resources of the language for the highest purposes of poetry seem to have been exhausted by the supreme effort of this epoch. The golden perfection of the Augustan style gave place to the forced rhetoric and the sensational extravagance of the Neronian age and to the soberer but tamer imitations of the Flavian era. In its inner inspiration, as well as its outward expression, the Augustan poetry was the maturest development of the national mind. The inspiring influences of Latin poetry were the idea of Rome, the appreciation of Greek art, the genial Italian life. We have seen how the first establishment of the Empire gave to the national idea a temporary importance and prominence which it had not had since Ennius first awoke his countrymen to the consciousness of their destiny. It was only in the Augustan Age, or during the few years preceding it, that the taste of the Romans was sufficiently educated to appreciate the perfect art of the Greeks. The whole of Italy was now for the first time united in one nation. A new generation had been born and grown to manhood since the Social War. The pride in Rome and the love of the whole land might now be felt by all men born between the Alps and the Straits of Sicily. The districts far removed from the capital, 'by the sounding Aufidus' or 'the slow-winding Mincius,' still kept alive the traditions of a severer morality and the habits of a simpler and happier life'. They were still able to nourish the susceptible mind of childhood with poetic fancies 2. In the following generation the idea of the empire was one no longer of inspiring novelty, but rather of a dull oppression. The taste for Greek literature had lost its freshness and quickening power. The natural enjoyment of life, the susceptibility to beauty in art and nature, the love of simplicity, were no longer possible to minds enervated and hearts deadened by the unrelieved monotony of luxurious living. 1 Traditum ab antiquis morem. Hor. Sat. i. 4. 117. 2 Me fabulosae Vulture in Apulo, etc. Hor. Od. iii. 4. 9. CHAPTER II. VIRGIL'S PLACE IN ROMAN LITERATURE. VIRGIL is the earliest in time and much the most important in rank among the extant poets of the Augustan Age. It is only in comparatively recent times that any question has arisen as to the high position due to him among the great poets of all ages. His pre-eminence not only above all those of his own country, but above all other poets with the exception of Homer, was unquestioned in the ancient Roman world. His countrymen claimed for him a rank on a level with, sometimes even above, that of the great father of European literature. And this estimate of his genius became traditional, and was confirmed by the general voice of modern criticism. For eighteen centuries, wherever any germ of literary taste survived in Europe, his poems were the principal medium through which the heroic age of Greece as well as the ancient life of Rome and Italy was apprehended. No writer has, on the whole, entered so largely and profoundly into the education of three out of the four chief representatives of European culture-the Italians, the French, and the English-at various stages of their intellectual development. The history of the progress of taste might be largely illustrated by reference to the place which the works of Virgil have held, in the teaching of youth and among the refined pleasures of manhood, between the age of Dante and the early part of the present century. Since that time, however, an undoubted reaction has set in against the prestige once enjoyed by Latin poetry. And from this reaction Virgil has been the chief sufferer. The peculiar gifts, social and intellectual, of Horace have continued to secure for him many friends in every country and in every generation. The spirit of Lucretius is perhaps more in unison with the spirit of the present than with that of any previous age, owing to changes both in imaginative feeling and in speculative curiosity and belief through which the world is now passing. The sincerity and unstudied grace of Catullus are immediately recognised by all who read his works. But in regard to Virgil, if former centuries assigned him too high a place, the criticism of the present century, in Germany at least, and for a certain time in England, has been much less favourable. French criticism has indeed remained undeviatingly loyal, and regards him as the poet, not of Rome only, but of all those nations which are the direct inheritors of the Latin civilisation'. And in England, at the present time, the estimate of his genius, expressed both by writers of acknowledged reputation and in the current criticism of the day, is much more favourable than it was some thirty years ago. It would be neither desirable nor possible to enter on a critical examination of the value of a writer, who has been so much admired through so long a time, without taking some account of the prestige attaching to his name. It may be of use therefore to bring together some of the more familiar evidences of his reputation and influence in former times, to show the existence of a temporary reaction of opinion and to assign causes for it, and to indicate the grounds on which his pre-eminence as the culminating point in Latin literature and his high position among the poets of the world appear to rest. I. It was as a great epic poet, the poet of national glory and heroic action, that he was most esteemed in former times. 1 'Virgile depuis l'heure où il parut a été le poëte de la Latinité tout entière.' Sainte-Beuve. The Aeneid may not have been regarded as more perfect in execution than the Eclogues and Georgics, but it was regarded as a work of higher inspiration. The criticism which Virgil by implication applies to his earlier works, in the use of such expressions as 'ludere quae vellem,' 'carmina qui lusi pastorum,' ' in tenui labor',' etc., as compared with the high ambition with which he first indicates his purpose of composing an epic poem in celebration of the glory of Augustus Temptanda via est qua me quoque possim Tollere humo, victorque virum volitare per ora 2— coincides with the view which the ancients took of the relative value of the poetry of external nature and of heroic action. The contemporaries and successors of Virgil did not share in the sense of some failure in the treatment of his subject which is attributed to Virgil himself; and hence they ranked him as the equal of Homer in the largest and most important province of poetry. And as this comparison was the source of excessive honour in the past, it has been the cause of the depreciation to which he has been exposed in the present century. The great reputation enjoyed by the Aeneid dates from the first appearance of the poem. The earliest indication of the admiration which it was destined to excite appears in the tones of expectation and enthusiasm with which Propertius predicts the appearance of a work greater than the Iliad : Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Graii: The immediate effect produced by the poem may be traced in the frequent allusions to the story of Aeneas in the fourth To sing, at my own will, my idle songs,' 'who sang the idle songs of shepherds,' 'my task is on a lowly theme.' 2I must strive to find a way by which I may raise myself too above the ground, and speed to and fro triumphant through the mouths of men. 3 Give place, all ye Roman writers, give place, ye Greeks: some work, I know not what, is coming to the birth, greater than the Iliad.' Eleg. iii. 32.64-65. |