may safely conclude that, at the time of the composition of the Eclogues at any rate, his associations were those of a student, not those of a tourist. Nor would it be just to stigmatize the predilection which this indicates as merely conventional. It may be narrow, but within its limits it is genuine. There are some minds which are better calculated, at least in youth, to be impressed by the inexhaustibleness of Art than by the infinity of Nature. They may lack the genial susceptibility which in others is awakened immediately by the sight of the world without, and they may not have had time to educate their imperfect sympathies into a fuller appreciation; but they respond without difficulty to the invitations of natural beauty as conveyed to them through an intervening medium, adapted by its own perfection for the transmission of the perfection which exists beyond. They see with the eyes of others, not with their own; but their soul nevertheless receives the vision. Over such minds the recollection of a word in a book has the same power which others find in a remembered sight or sound. It recalls not only its own image, but the images which were seen in company with nay, it may touch yet longer trains of association, and come back upon the memory with something like the force of the entire body of impressions originally excited by the work which happens to contain it. Even those who have held more direct intercourse with nature are not insensible to the operation of this secondary charm. Can any one who reads Milton doubt that the mere sound of the stately names of classic history and mythology exercised a real influence on the poet's fancy? And Mr. Tennyson has given us a testimony to the constraining magic of Virgil's own language, where he speaks of himself as haunted during his journey from Como not by the thought of the overflowing lake, but by the ballad-burthen music' of Lari Maxume.

it:

6

It is not, however, the existence of imitation alone, considered merely as imitation, that makes us speak of the Eclogues as unreal. Imitation involves the absence of reality, just as translation does, simply because the thing produced is not original: but it need not imply its destruction. But with the Eclogues the case is different. It is not merely that Virgil formed his conception of pastoral poetry from Greek models, but that he sought to apply it to Roman life. In the vocabulary of poetry, as he understood it, a shepherd was a Sicilian, or perhaps an Arcadian; therefore an Italian shepherd must be spoken of as an Italian Sicilian, and pastoral Italy as Sicilian Italy. Instances of this historical and geographical confusion meet us in every page of the Eclogues. The very fact that the names of the shepherds are invariably Greek would naturally be sufficient to warn us what we are to expect. The introduc

In his poem "The Daisy."

8

tion of men called Meliboeus and Tityrus talking about Rome leaves us no room to wonder at any further mixture of incongruities. Yet the lengths to which this confusion is pushed have been overlooked by the majority of scholars; nor am I aware of any one, with the exception of a writer in the Quarterly Review and Mr. Keightley', who has set the matter in its true light. When Castelvetro, in the sixteenth century, asserted that the favourite trees of the Eclogues, the beech, the ilex, the chestnut, and the pine, do not grow about Mantua, subsequent critics were ready to reply that the features of the country may have changed in the lapse of centuries, and that surely Virgil must know best. But such reasoning will hardly avail against the absence of the green caves in which the shepherd lies, or the briary crags from which his goats hang, or the lofty mountains whose lengthening shadows remind him of evening. These are the unmistakeable features of Sicily, and no illusion of historical criticism will persuade us that they have changed their places, strange as it is to meet them in conjunction with real Mantuan scenery, with the flinty soil of Andes, and the broad, lazy current of the Mincio. The actual Mantua is surrounded by a lake: its pastoral counterpart, like Shakspeare's Bohemia, seems to be on the sea, the stillness of whose waters enables the shepherds to sing undisturbed, as in Theocritus it forms a contrast with the unresting sorrow of the love-sick enchantress. The same rule, if rule it can be called, is observed in the manners and institutions of the shepherds: there is the Italian element, and there is the Sicilian, added, as it were, to make it bucolic. The Pales of the Italians and the Apollo Nomios of the Greeks, as Mr. Keightley again points out, retire together from the country, which the death of Daphnis has left desolate: the two highdays of the shepherds' calendar are the Greek festival of the Nymphs and the Roman Ambarvalia. It seems not improbable that a similar account is to be given of the social position of the shepherds themselves, who, though living on terms of Arcadian equality, appear to be sometimes slaves or hirelings, sometimes independent proprietors: but the status of their brethren in Theocritus is itself a point which is apparently involved in some uncertainty.

Such a systematic confusion of time, place, and circumstance, it will be readily admitted, goes far to justify the way in which Virgil has been spoken of in the opening of this essay as the great corruptor of pastoral

7 Quarterly Review, vol. lii. p. 93; Keightley, Notes, p. 15.

"Fagum dicit pro natura loci: prope Mantuam et in agris Virgilii erant veteres fagi. Cf. Ecl. 2. 3., 9. 9. Haeserunt nonnulli, quod hodie nullae sunt prope Mantuam, ut Holdsworth. et alii. Sed non meminerunt XVIII saecula interjecta esse. In Libano hodie cedrorum exigua silva: olim omnis iis abundabat." Spohn, quoted by Wagner on Ecl. 1. 1.

poetry, if by pastoral poetry is meant a truthful dramatic representation of one of the simplest forms of life. How far it vitiates the character of the Eclogues as pure poetry, irrespective of the class to which they profess to belong, is a further question, and one which ought not to be decided till we have seen how much it may involve. If the Eclogues are to be condemned on this ground, it is hard to see how we are to excuse a work like Cymbeline. If the somewhat broad shield of the romantic drama is sufficient to cover the latter, room may perhaps be found under it for the former. No incongruity of which Virgil has been guilty can be so glaring or so fatal to those notions of reality which the very form of historical knowledge suggests as that produced by the juxtaposition of the modern Italian, not only with the legendary Briton, but with the Roman of the earlier empire. It is not that the laws of time and circumstance are simply violated, but that they are violated in such a way that the result appears to us inconceivable as well as false, two types, belonging to different periods of the same nation, and as such forming the subjects of an obvious historical contrast, being imagined for the moment to co-exist, not in the other world, as in the various Dialogues of the Dead, where this incongruity enters into the very idea of the composition, but in a world which, if not our own, resembles it in all its essential features as a theatre for human action and passion. Yet criticism seems now to be agreed that the very glaringness of such incongruities, though doubtless attributable as much to ignorance or recklessness as to any profound design, ought only to teach us to divest ourselves of all extraneous prepossessions, and examine the piece as a representation of human nature apart from the conditions of time, just as when we look at some of the early paintings our sense of beauty need not be ultimately disturbed by our consciousness that the actions pourtrayed in the two parts of the picture are obviously not simultaneous but successive. Virgil, of course, according to our ordinary nomenclature, is a classical, not a romantic poet; but the fact will hardly be held to exclude him from the benefit of a similar plea, if indeed it should not suggest fresh matter for consideration with regard to the laws generally, and probably with justice, supposed to distinguish the two great schools of Ancient and Modern Art.

This, however, is not the only kind of confusion by which the pastoral reality of the Eclogues is disturbed or destroyed. Not only is the Sicilian mixed up with the Italian, but the shepherd is mixed up with the poet. The danger was one to have been apprehended from the first. So soon as pastoral poetry came to be recognized as a distinct species, the men of letters who cultivated it, perhaps themselves grammarians or professional critics, were likely to yield to the temptation of painting themselves in bucolic colours, instead of copying the actual bucolic life

which they saw or might have seen in the country. They started from the position that shepherds, besides being subjects for poetry, were themselves singers and lovers of song; it was not difficult to convert the proposition, and assume that a pastoral singer might be spoken of as a shepherd. A symptom of this failing appears even in Theocritus, in whose seventh Idyl the speaker, describing himself as being in company with a poetical goatherd, modestly declines a comparison with the professed poets Asclepiades and Philetas, thereby intimating that he is himself a professed poet in disguise. In Moschus the identification is more consciously realized'. Bion is bewailed as the ideal herdsman, for whom Apollo and the wood-gods wept, whose strains drew looks of love from Galatea, and whose pipe even the lips of Pan may scarcely touch. Those, however, who wish to see to what extent it may be interwoven with the texture of a series of poems, should look for it in the Eclogues. They will not have very far to seek; indeed it meets them at the very threshold. Nothing but the extreme awkwardness of the manner in which it is introduced into the first Eclogue could have prevented the critics from recognizing it at once. As it is, they have passed it over in their search for something more recondite and more creditable to Virgil. Their view, as elaborated by the latest commentators, is that Tityrus is a supposed farm-slave, perhaps a bailiff of Virgil's, who, going to Rome to purchase his freedom, receives the welcome assurance that his master's property is to be undisturbed in the general unsettlement; the obvious truth is (I am stating not my own discovery but that of my former coadjutor) that the notions of the enfranchised slave and the poet secured in his farm, the symbol and the thing symbolized, are actually blended together, so that the narrative is at one time allegorical, at another historical, Tityrus going with his earnings to his master, and receiving for answer, "You shall not be dispossessed by my soldiers." The same conventional conception reappears in other places, though it is nowhere else so clumsily managed. Menalcas, the poet-shepherd of the ninth Eclogue, whose strains were so nearly lost to the world, is admitted on all hands to be Virgil himself. In the opening of the sixth, Virgil is once more the shepherd Tityrus, who is taught by Apollo that a shepherd's duty is to make his sheep fat and his verses thin. If Virgil is a shepherd because he is a poet, his friends, as being poets themselves,

οὐ γάρ πω, κατ' ἐμὸν νόον, οὔτε τὸν ἐσθλὸν Σικελίδαν νίκημι τὸν ἐκ Σάμω, οὔτε Φιλητάν, ἀείδων, βάτραχος δέ ποτ ̓ ἀκρίδας ὥς τις ἐρίσδω.

(Theocr. 7. 39.)

1 STTI Bíwv Téovaкev å Вovкóλos. (Moschus, 3. 11: but see the whole context.)

2 See, for instance, Wunderlich, quoted by Wagner at the end of Heyne's Argument of Ecl. 1.

or at least friends of a poet, must be shepherds too, and the times upon which he has fallen must be described by pastoral images. Gallus, the soldier and elegiac poet, already introduced among the heroes of mythology in the sixth Eclogue, appears in the tenth as the dying shepherd of Theocritus, languishing under the shelter of a rock, and consoled by the rural gods; he is at the same moment in Italy and in Arcadia, acting with Octavianus against Sex. Pompeius, and bewailing his lost love in the ears of ideal swains. Whatever may be the ultimate source of the inspiration which animates the fourth Eclogue, and whoever the child shadowed forth as the king of the peaceful world, the poem is evidently a description of the new era supposed to be inaugurated in Pollio's consulship by the peace of Brundisium; but the golden age is represented as a golden age of pastoral life, where art is to be nothing and nature every thing, a recollection of the legendary past in Hesiod converted into an anticipation of the historical future. So the Daphnis of the fifth Eclogue is evidently the great Julius, as the similarity of the images to those in the preceding poem is sufficient to show; it is a pastoral poet that celebrates him, and therefore he must be celebrated as a shepherd, wept by all nature in his death, powerful and honoured as a rural god in his immortality. Even where the poems appear at first sight to be purely dramatic and impersonal, the poet is still visible. Menalcas, an actor in the fifth Eclogue, announces himself at the end of it as the author of the second and third; in the ninth an intimation is made from which we infer that the fifth also is really his work, the song of Mopsus no less than his own. The second Eclogue is one which we should gladly believe to be purely ideal, instead of sifting the tradition which professes to verify it: nor need we be anxious to think with Servius that the song of Silenus to the shepherds is really an epicurean lecture delivered by Syro to his pupils. But when we find shepherds rivalling each other for the favour of Pollio, and lampooning Bavius and Maevius, we feel that jealousy for the poet's credit as a painter of life is rather a misplaced sentiment.

It is as an artist that Virgil appears chiefly to challenge our admiration, as in his other works, so also in the Bucolics. The language, indeed, which he puts into the mouths of his pastoral personages is for the most part as undramatic as the thoughts which that language ex

3 It may be said that in Milton's Lycidas the Virgilian confusion of shepherd and poet is turned into mere chaos by the introduction of a third element, the Christian shepherd or minister. There is however this difference, that the object, no less than the effect, of the poem is not to describe pastoral life, but to paint student life in pastoral colours. The tenth Eclogue might take the benefit of the same distinction, if we could separate it in our judgment from the rest. Milton's use of mythology might afford another ground for comparison with Virgil: but the subject is too large for a note.