Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/585

Rh The Georgics is surely the Madame Bovary of the ancient world. This composition, so different from the imperfect and unfinished, the sometimes shadowy or wooden Aeneid, that epic which he himself on his death-bed had left orders that his friends should destroy, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary virtuosity and one of the greatest examples of the mastery over language ever produced. Every line is a technical triumph; every word is the right word. Even when the subject is quite dull or prosaic, as it not infrequently is, the poet has bent all his energy to presenting it in the most intense and concentrated form and in a manner exactly suited to the matter. In seven years, the colours, the movements, the sounds of the country life of ancient Italy were fixed for eternity. The ravens still flap in the trees; the snake still glides out in his new skin; the bees still buzz by their mossy ponds to their oleaster-shaded nests. You will say perhaps that this is a mere tour de force which no serious poet should ever have attempted, that Virgil might better have gone on writing brief pastorals, like the Eclogues, all his life. But there is a genuine poetic emotion which carries off both the Georgics and the Aeneid, though it is not of precisely the same lyric character as the lacrimae rerum. It is the devotion to the idea of Rome. It is a little hard for us in twentieth century America to understand this intense enthusiasm for an official political and social ideal; we are inclined to think that Virgil's outbursts about Rome are like our Fourth of July orations. But there is an actual poetic conviction about the rhetoric of such passages as "O passi graviora!"; and from the time when the peasant in the First Eclogue tells of having seen the imperial city, and the hexameter, distending, resounds with a thunderous rumour, to the climax of the Sixth Book of the Aeneid when Anchises announces to Aeneas the supremacy and the moral grandeur of the city which he is about to found (Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento) Rome stands behind all that Virgil wrote as a passion profoundly felt. He conceived that the ideals of his civilization were a proper subject for poetry and that a life-time devoted to setting them to verse, though it involved the most interminable patience and the most exacting labour, was a life-time well spent.—Ah, Virgil, I am afraid that all Professor Mackail's eloquence will never sell you to "the world of to-day": for one thing you took life too slowly and for another you took poetry too seriously.