Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/274

Rh 252 VIRGIL Italian, and, as a vehicle for the expression of feeling, hold an undefined place between the objectivity of the Greek idyll and the subjectivity of the Latin elegy. For the most part, they express the sentiment inspired, by the beauty of the world, and the kindred sentiment inspired by the charm of human relationships. Virgil s susceptibility to the beauty of nature was fostered by the sympa thetic study of Theocritus, but it was also native to himself. The originality of his representation appears in the truth with which it suggests the charm of Italy the fresh and tender life of an Italian spring, the grace and delicate hues of the wild flowers, and the quiet beauty of the green pastures and the rich orchards of his native district. The representative character of the poems is en hanced by the fidelity and grace with which he has expressed the Italian peasant s love of his home and of all things associated with it. But, whatever detraction may have to be made from the originality of the substance and form of these poems, the supreme charm of the medium of diction and rhythm through which the poet s feeling has found utterance is universally recognized. The power of varied harmony is as conspicuous in Virgil s earliest poems as in the maturer and more elaborate workmanship of the Gcorgics and JEncid. The Italian language, without sacrifice of the fulness, strength, and majesty of its tones, acquired a more tender grace and more liquid flow, which reappeared long after in the poets of modern Italy, from the gift the &quot; molle atque facetum &quot;- which the Muses of country life bestowed on Virgil. eorgics. But these Muses had a more serious and dignified function to fulfil than that of glorifying the picturesque pastime, the &quot;dolce far niente,&quot; the &quot; otia dia,&quot; of rural life. The Italian imagina tion formed an ideal of the happiness of a country life nobler than that of passive susceptibility to the sights and sounds of the out ward world. In the idyllic picture in which Horace enumerates the various delights of .the countryman s condition (Epodc 2), while the pleasures to eye and ear are not wanting, more stress is laid on the labours by which man co-operates with nature, and on the joy with which he contemplates the results of his toil. It was the aim of the more serious Roman writers to invest objects which minister to practical utility with the glory and charm of poetry. Suetonius tells us that Augustus valued nothing so much in litera ture as &quot; pnecepta et exempla publice vel privatim salubria. &quot; It is stated that Maecenas, acting on the principle of employing the poets of the time in favour of the conservative and restorative policy of the new government, directed the genius of Virgil to the subject of the Gcorgics. From a moral, social, and national point of view, no object could be of more consequence in the eyes of a statesman whose master inherited the policy of the popular leaders than the revival of the great form of national industry, associated with the older and happier memories of Rome, which had fallen into abeyance owing to the long unsettlement of the revolutionary era as well as to other causes. Virgil s previous life and associations made it natural for him to identify himself with this object, while his genius and artistic accomplishment fitted him to enlist the imagination of his countrymen in favour of so great a practical reform. It would be a most inadequate and false view of his purpose to suppose that, like the Alexandrian poets or the didactic poets of modern times, he desired n erely to make useful information and practical precepts more attractive by the aid of poetical rhythm and diction. His aim was rather under the form of practical instruction to describe with realistic fidelity, and at the same time to surround with an atmosphere of idealizing poetry, the annual round of labour in which the Italian yeoman s life was passed; to bring out the intimate relation with the manifold aspects and processes of nature into which man was brought in the course of that life, and to suggest the delight to heart and imagination which he drew from it ; to contrast the simplicity, security, and sanctity of such a life with the luxury and lawless passions of the great world; and to associate the ideal of a life of rustic labour with the varied beauties of Italy and the historic glories of Rome. Thus a speculative and religious, an ethical and patriotic, motive enlarges and supersedes the apparent motive of conveying instruc tion. This larger conception of the dignity of his subject separates the didactic poem of Virgil from all other didactic, as distinct from philosophic, poems. He has produced in the Gcorgics a new type of didactic, as in the ^Encid he has produced a new type of epic, poetry. The subject which is unfolded in the four opening lines &quot; Quid faei it Uctas scgetes, quo sidere terrain Vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adjungere vites Conveniat; qua; cura bourn, qui cultus linbemlo Sit peeori, apibus quanta experieutia pavcis &quot; is treated in four books, varying in length from 514 to 566 lines. The first treats of the tillage of the fields, of the constellations, the rise and setting of which form the farmer s calendar, and of tin- signs of the weather, on which the success of his labours largely depends. The second treats of the cultivation of trees, and especially of the vine and olive, two great staples of the national wealth and industry of Italy ; the third of the rearing of herds and Hocks and the breeding of horses ; the fourth of the tending of bees. The treatment of these homely subjects is relieved by various episodes, introduced at various places, but mainly at the end of the different books, which serve to bring out the intimate connexion of his theme with his national and ethical purpose. As he had found in Theocritus a model for the form in which his idler fancies were expressed, he turned to an older page in Greek literature for the outline of the form in which his graver interest in rural affairs was to find its outlet; and, though the Works and Days of Hesiod could not supply an adequate mould for the systematic treatment of all the processes of rural industry, and still less for the treatment of the larger ideas to which this systematic treatment of the subject is subsidiary, yet that Virgil considered him as his prototype is shown by the line which concludes one of the cardinal episodes of the poem &quot; Ascrretunquc cano Koinana per oppida carmen.&quot; By the use which he makes of his quaint phraseology Virgil attracts attention to the relation which he wishes to establish between himself and Hesiod; and in the religious spirit with which they each regard man s labours and condition in the world there is a real affinity between the primitive Boeotian bard and the refined artist of the Augustan age. Virgil accepts also the guidance of other models of the decadence of Greek literature, the Alexandrian poets who treated the science of their day astronomy, natural history, and geography in the metre and diction of epic poetry. But. in avail ing himself of the work of the Alexandrians, Virgil is like a great master making use of mechanical assistants. From the compari son of passages in the Gcorgics with passages in those authors which suggested them, we learn to appreciate the immeasurable superiority of the poetical language of Rome at the maturity of its development over the exotic diction produced in the decay of Greek creative imagination. But a more powerful influence on the form, ideas, sentiment, and diction of the Gcorgics was exercised by the great philosophical poem of Lucretius, of which Virgil had probably been a diligent student since the time of its first appear ance, and with which, in the phrase of the English editor of the older poet, his mind was &quot;saturated&quot; when he was engaged in the composition of the Gcorgics. In Virgil we find the spirit of Hesiod in conflict with the spirit of Lucretius. He is at once attracted and repelled by the genius and attitude of the philosophic poet. He is possessed by his imaginative conception of nature, as a living all-pervading power ; he shares with him the Italian love of the beauty of the world, and the pathetic sympathy with animal as well as human life. He recognizes with enthusiasm his contem plative elevation above the petty interests and passions of life. 1 &amp;gt;ut lie is repelled by his apparent separation from the ordinary beliefs and pleasures, the hopes and fears, of his fellow men. Virgil is in thorough sympathy with the best restorative tendencies religious, social, and national of his time; Lucretius was driven into isolation by the anarchic and dissolving forces of his. So far as any speculative idea underlying the details of the Gcorgics can be detected, it is one of which the source can be traced to Lucretius the idea of the struggle of human force with the forces of nature. In Virgil this idea is modified by Italian piety and by the Italian delight in the results of labour. In the general plan of the poem, and the systematic arrangement of his materials, Virgil follows the guidance of Lucretius rather than of any Greek model. The dedication and personal appeals to Maecenas are parallel to those addressed to Memmius. The distinction between a poem addressed to national and one addressed to philosophical sympathies is marked by the prominence assigned in the one poem to Csesar as the supreme personality of the age, in the other to Epicurus as the supreme master in the realms of mind. The invocation to the &quot;Di agrestes,&quot; to the old gods of mythology and art, to the living Cjesar as the latest power added to the pagan Pantheon, is both a parallel and a contrast to the invocation to the all-pervading principle of life, personified as &quot;Alma Venus.&quot; In the systematic treatment of his materials, and the interspersion of episodes dealing with the deeper poetical and human interest of the subject, Virgil adheres to the practice of the older poet. He makes use of his connecting links and formulas, such as &quot;principle,&quot; &quot;quod superest,&quot; &quot;his animadversis,&quot; &quot;mine age,&quot; &c. Virgil indeed uses these more sparingly, so as to make the logical mechanism of the poem less rigid, while lie still keeps up the liveliness of a personal address. He shows his artistic superiority bypassing lightly over details which it is impossible to invest with beauty. All his topics admit of being vitalized by attributing the vivacity of human relationships and sensibility to natural processes, and by association with the joy which the ideal farmer feels in the results of his energy. Much of the argument of Lucretius, on the other hand, is as remote from the genial presence of nature as from human associations. Virgil makes a much larger use than Lucretius of ornament borrowed from older poetry, art, science, and mythology. There is uniformity of chastened excellence in the diction and versi fication of the Gcorgics, contrasting with the imaginative force of isolated expressions and the majesty of isolated lines and passages in Lucretius. The &quot;vivida vis&quot; of imagination is more apparent in the older poet ; the artistic perfection of Virgil is even more conspicuous in the Gcorgics than in the Eclogues or the SEncid.