Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/275

Rh VIRGIL 253 The principal episodes of the poem, in which the true dignity and human interest of the subject are brought out, occur in the first and second books. Other shorter episodes interspersed through the different books add Variety to the didactic disquisition. These episodes, as is the case still more with the episodes of Lucretius, are not detached or isolated ornaments, but give a higher unity to the poem, and are the main ground of its perma nent hold upon the world. There is indeed one marked exception to this rule. The long episode with which the whole poem ends, the tale of the shepherd Arisfceus, with which is connected the more poetical fable of Orpheus and Eurydice, has only the slightest connexion with the general ideas and sentiment of the poem. It is altogether at variance with the truthful realism and the Italian feeling which prevade it. If we suppose that Virgil originally thought it necessary to relieve the interest and keep the attention of his readers by appealing to their taste for those mythological tales, which in an earlier part of the poem he had decried as &quot;omnia jam volgata,&quot; it would be difficult to acquit even so great an artist of some forgetfulness of the requirement of unity of impression in a work of art, especially in such a &quot; templum de marmore &quot; as the Georgics. But we are distinctly told that the concluding episode, from the middle till the end of the fourth book, had contained the praises of Gallus, the friend of Virgil s youth, who, about the time when Virgil was finishing the poem, had gained distinction in the war against Cleopatra, and had in consequence been made the first governor of the new province of Egypt. It is difficult to see how such a statement could have been invented if it were not true. Such a conclusion might well have been in keeping with the main purpose of the poem. As the first book ends with a dirge over the national fortunes before the outbreak of the war with Antony and Cleopatra, the last book might well have ended with a hymn of triumph over the successful end of that war, in which the hero of Virgil s youthful enthusiasm played so distinguished a part. After the fall of Gallus, owing to his ambitious failure in his Egyptian administration, and his death in 26 B.C., the poet, according to the story, in obedience to the command of the emperor, substituted for this encomium the beautiful but ir relevant fable of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which he first dis played the narrative skill, the pathos, and the magical power of making the mystery of the unseen world present to the imagin ation, which characterize the sEneid. The cardinal episodes of the poem, as it now stands, are the passages in bk. i. from line 464 to the end, and in bk. ii. from 136 to 176 and from 475 to 542. The first, introduced in connexion with the signs of the weather, recounts the omens which accom panied the death of Julius Cpesar, and shows how the misery of Italy and the neglected state of the fields, for which the poem seeks to find a remedy, are the punishment for the great sin of the previous generation. In the second of these passages the true key note of the poem is struck in the invocation to Italy &quot; Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, Magna virum. The thought of the varied beauties of the land, of the abundance and variety of its products, of its ancient cities and mighty works of man, its brave and hardy races, the great men and great families who had fought for her and saved her in old times, and of him, the greatest among her sons, who was then defending Rome against her enemies in the farthest East, inspires the poet, and gives dignity to the trivial details which seem sometimes to clog his high ambition. But a still higher and more catholic interest is given to the subject in the greatest of the episodes, the most perfect passage in all Latin poetry, that from line 458, &quot; fortu- natos minium,&quot; to the end. The subject is there glorified by its connexion not only with the national wellbeing but with the highest life and purest happiness of man. An ideal is held up to the imagination in which the old realistic delight in the labours of the field blends with the new delight in the beauty of nature, and is associated with that purity and happiness of family life which was an Italian ideal, and with the poetry of those religious beliefs and observances which imparted a sense of security, a constantly recurring charm, aud a bond of social sympathy to the old rustic life. The Georgics is not only the most perfect in art, but is the most native in sentiment and conception of all the works of the ancient Italian genius. It is essentially Italian in idea, in detail, in religious and ethical feeling, in colouring and sentiment, in its solid and massive composition. Though the form was borrowed from the Greek, yet we have to remember that it was only by becoming a province of Roman art that the didactic poem acquired dignity and the capacity of treating a great theme. Even where he borrows from Greek originals, Virgil, like a conqueror, makes the Greek mind tributary to his national design. The Georgics, the poem of the land, is as essentially Italian as the Odyssey, the poem of the sea, is essentially Greek. Nature is presented to us as she is revealed in the soft and rich luxuriance of Italian land scape, not in the clearly defined forms of Greek scenery. The ethical and religious ideal upheld is an Italian one. As a work of art, while showing in the largest degree the receptivity of the Greek feeling for form and symmetry which was the primary con dition of all Roman success in literature, the poem shows equally the Italian susceptibility to the beauty of the outward world, the dignity and sobriety of the Italian imagination, the firm and enduring structure of all Roman workmanship. The work which yet remained for Virgil to accomplish was the ^Eneid. addition of a great Roman epic to literature. This had been the earliest efi ort of the national imagination, when it first departed from the mere imitative reproduction of Greek originals. The work which had given the truest expression to the genius of Rome before the time of Virgil had been the Annales of Ennius. This work had been supplemented by various historical poems but had never been superseded. It satisfied the national imagination as an expression of the national life in its vigorous prime, but it could not satisfy the newly developed sense of art; and the expansion of the national life since the days of Ennius, and the changed con ditions into which it passed after the battle of Actium, demanded a new and ampler expression. It had been, as we learn both from his biographer and from himself &quot; Cum canerem reges et preelia&quot; Virgil s earliest ambition to write an heroic poem founded on the traditions of Alba Longa ; and he had been repeatedly urged by Augustus to celebrate his exploits. The problem before him was to compose a work of art on a large scale, which should represent a great action of the heroic age, and should at the same time embody the most vital ideas and sentimentof the hour, which in substance should glorify Rome and the present ruler of Rome, while in form it should follow closely the great models of epic poetry aud repro duce all their sources of interest. It was his ambition to be the Homer as he had been the Theocritus and Hesiod of his country. Various objects had thus to be combined in a work of art on the model of the Greek epic : the revival of interest in the heroic fore time; the satisfaction of the national and imperial sentiment; the expression of the enthusiasm and of the deeper currents of emotion of the age ; the personal celebration of Augustus. A new type of epic poetry had to be created, as a new type of didactic poetry had been realized in the Georgics. It was desirable to select a single heroic action which should belong to the cycle of legendary events celebrated in the Homeric poems, and which should be associated with the whole fortunes of Rome and with the supreme interests of the hour. The only subject which in any way satisfied these apparently irreconcilable conditions was that of the wanderings of Jneas and of his final settlement in Latium. The story, though not of Roman origin but of a composite growth, had been familiar to the Romans from the beginning of their literature, and had been recognized by official acts of senate and people as associated with the national fortunes. The subject enabled Virgil to tell over again and to give novelty to the tale of the fall of Troy, and to tell a tale of sea-adventure similar to that of the wanderings of Odysseus. But the special applicability of his subject to his purposes was determined by the claim which the Julii, a patrician family of Alban origin, made to descent from lulus, the supposed son of ./Eneas and founder of Alba Longa. The personal, as distinct from the national and artistic, motives of the poem could be satisfied by this subject alone. The ^Encid is thus at once the epic of the national life under its new conditions and an imitative epic of human actions, manners, and character. The true keynote of the poem is struck in the line with which the proem closes &quot; Tantse molis erat Romanam conderc gcnteni.&quot; The idea which underlies the whole action of the poem is that of the great part played by Rome in the history of the world, that part being from of old determined by divine decree, and carried out through the virtue of her sons. The idea of universal empire is thus the dominant idea of the poem. With this idea that of the unbroken continuity of the national life is intimately associated. The reverence for antiquity, for old customs and the traditions of the past, was a large element in the national sentiment, and has a prominent place in the sEncid. So too has the feeling of local attachment and of the power of local association over the imagina tion. This feeling is specially appealed to in the eighth book, which has been called the most purely Roman in the poem. The poem is also characteristically Roman in the religious belief and observ ances which it embodies. Behind all the conventional and artistic machinery of the old Olympic gods there is the Roman apprehen sion of a great inscrutable power, manifesting itself by arbitrary signs, exacting jealously certain observances, alienated for a time by neglect, ami again appeased by compliance with its will, working out its own secret purposes through the agency of Roman arms and Roman counsels. The word by which Virgil recognizes this power is Fatum (or Fata in the plural). The hero of the sEneid is an instrument in their hands, and the living emperor is regarded as fulfilling the same function in the actual world. The predominance of this idea gives coherence to the action, and establishes its relation to the whole national life. The poem is thus a religious as well as a