Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/746

Rh 722 ROMAN LITERATURE own person and by inheritance the natural spell which sways the imagination of the world. The sentiment of hero-worship was at all times strong in the Romans, and no one was ever the object of more sincere as well as simulated hero-worship than Augustus. It was not, how- ever, by his equals in station that the first feeling was likely to be entertained. The earliest to give expression to it was the humbly-born poet from the Cisalpine pro- vince ; but the spell was soon acknowledged by the calmer and more worldly-wise poet whose first enthusiasm had directed him into the opposite camp. The disgust aroused by the anti-national policy of Antony, and the danger to the empire which was averted by the result of the battle of Actium, with the confidence inspired by the new ruler, combined to reconcile the great families as well as the great body of the people to the new order of things. While the establishment of the empire produced a revival of national and imperial feeling, it suppressed all independ- ent political thought and action. Hence the two great forms of prose literature which drew their nourishment from the struggles of political life, oratory and contem- porary history, were arrested in their development. The chief interest of letter-writing had consisted in its being the medium of interchange of thought on politics, and thus, although correspondence between friends still went on as before, no collection of letters was of sufficient im- portance to be preserved. The main course of literature was thus for a time diverted into poetry. That poetry in its most elevated form aimed at being the organ of the new empire and of realizing the national ideals of life and character under its auspices ; and in carrying out this aim it sought to recall the great memories of the past. It became also the organ of the pleasures and interests of private life, the chief motives of which were the love of nature and the passion of love. It sought also to make the art and poetry of Greece live a new artistic life. Satire, debarred from that comment on political action which had been open to Lucilius and to Catullus and Calvus under the republic, turned to social and individual life, and com- bined with the newly-developed taste for ethical analysis and reflexion introduced by Cicero. One great work had still to be done in prose a retrospect of the past history of the state from an idealizing and romanticizing point of view. For that work the Augustan age, as the end of one great cycle of events and the beginning of another, was eminently suited, and a writer who, by his gifts of imagina- tion and sympathy, was perhaps better fitted than any other man of antiquity for the task, and who throiigh the whole of this period lived a life of literary leisure, was found to do justice to the subject. Although the age did not afford that free scope and stimulus to individual energy and enterprise which have been the conditions under which the most truly creative literature has flourished, no age afforded more material and social advantages for the peaceful cultivation of letters. The new influence of patronage, which in other times has chilled the genial current of literature, became, in the person of Maecenas, the medium through which literature and the imperial policy were brought into union. Poetry thus acquired the tone of the world, kept in close connexion with the chief source of national life, while it was culti- vated to the highest pitch of artistic perfection under the most favourable conditions of leisure and freedom from the distractions and anxieties of life. The earliest in the order of time of the poets who adorn this age Virgil (70-19) is also the greatest in genius, the most richly cultivated, and the most perfect in art. He is the idealizing poet of the hopes and aspirations and of the purer and happier life of which the age seemed to contain the promise. He elevates the present by associat- ing it with the past and future of the Avorld, and sancti- fies it by seeing in it the fulfilment of a divine purpose. Poetry is no longer, as in the previous generation, in dis- cord with the dominant tendency of affairs, but in harmony with all that was restorative of the peace, order, and happiness of the world. Virgil is the true representative poet of Rome and Italy, of national glory and of the beauty of nature, the artist in whom all the efforts of the past were made perfect, and the unapproachable standard of excellence to future times. While more richly endowed with sensibility to all native influences, he was more deeply imbued than any of his contemporaries with the poetry, the thought, and the learning of Greece. It was by lean- ing on these supports that his genius felt its way and expanded into higher and wider development. His art begins in imitation of the cadences, the diction, and the pastoral fancies of Theocritus ; but even in these imitative poems of his youth we see that he is perfect master of his materials. The Latin hexameter, which in Ennius and Lucretius was the organ of the more dignified and majestic emotions, became in his hands the most perfect measure in which the softer and more luxurious sentiment of nature has been expressed ; and the Latin language was enriched with its sweetest and most musical variations. The senti- ment of Italian scenery and the love which the Italian peasant has for the familiar sights and sounds of his home found a voice w r hich never can pass away ; and the joy and pain of the passion of love were revealed in these poems in a way as yet unapprehended by the world. In this the earliest and least serious effort of Virgil's genius there is no immaturity of art, and in poems outwardly most remote from the current of active life there is the recogni- tion of the master-force by which that current was destined to be impelled and controlled. In his next poem, the G'eorgics, we are struck by the great advance in the originality and self-dependence of the artist, in the mature perfection of his workmanship, in the deepening and strengthening of all his sympathies and convictions. His genius still works under forms prescribed by Greek art, and under the disadvantage of having a practical and utilitarian aim imposed on it. But he has even in form so far surpassed his originals that he alone has gained for the pure didactic poem a place among the highest forms of serious poetry, while he has so transmuted his material that, without violation of truth, he has made the whole poem alive with poetic feeling. The homeliest details of the farmer's work are transfigured through the magical potency of the poet's love of nature in her imme- diate charm of sight and sound and in her all-pervading presence, especially as that charm and presence reveal themselves in the land and climate of Italy ; through his religious feeling and his pious sympathy with the sanc- tities of human affection ; through his patriotic sympathy with the national greatness ; and through the rich allu- siveness of his art to everything in poetry and legend which can illustrate and glorify his theme. In the Pastoral Poems and Georgics Virgil is the idealiz- ing poet of the beauty and of the old simple and hardy life of Italy, as the imagination could conceive of it in an altered world. In the sEneid he is the idealizing poet of national glory, especially as that glory was manifested in the person of Augustus. The epic of national life, vividly conceived but rudely executed by Ennius, was perfected in the years that followed the decisive victory at Actium. To do justice to his idea Virgil enters into rivalry with a greater poet than those whom he had equalled or sur- passed in his previous works. And, though he cannot unroll before us the page of heroic action with the power and majesty of Homer, yet by the sympathy with which he realizes the idea of Rome, and by the power with which