NATURE IN LUCRETIUS AND VIRGIL.
When from the representations of Nature in Homer, and indeed in all
the Greek poets, we turn to the rural descriptions of the Roman poets,
we feel that we have passed into a wholly different atmosphere. If
there were no other there is at least this cardinal distinction between
them:—The Greeks had no antiquity behind them, at least no earlier
literature to come between them and the open face of things. They saw at
first hand with their own eyes, felt with their own hearts, described
in their own words. The Romans, those at least of the literary age,
before they wrote a line that has come down to us, had received the whole
Hellenic learning and poetry poured in upon them, so that the very air of
Italy was colored with the hues of Greece. This makes it so difficult, in
studying the productions of any Roman poet—their descriptions of Nature
not less than other things—to be sure that you have the features of
Italian scenery pure and uncolored, and that they have not been tinged
and refracted by the Hellenic medium of associations and language through
which they were habitually beheld. No doubt the Romans originally were
and never ceased to be a country-loving people. The pictures that have
come down to us of Cincinnatus, and of other worthies of the early
Republic, represent even their greatest generals and dictators as living
on paternal farms in rural thrift and simplicity. But there remains no
poetry coeval with that primitive time. Before we reach their poets the
day of small estates and patrician life in the fields is over, all Italy
is held in vast domains by rich senators who themselves lived in the
city, and committed the care of their lands to a bailiff with hordes of
slaves.
In the last half-century of the Republic, to which belong the earliest
Roman poets who describe Nature, the town life, varied by retirement to
the Tiburtine or Sabine villa, was universal among the poets and their
associates. Some of them had passed their childhood in the rustic life of
distant provinces, and the remembrance of that life still lives in their
poetry, as in Catullus, and more distinctively in Virgil. The earliest
pictures of Nature that occur in any Roman poetry are to be found not
in pastoral or idyl, but in the great philosophic poem that expounds an
elaborate system of Nature. Lucretius was too earnest a preacher of his
Atomic Philosophy to linger over descriptions of scenery for their own
sake. Nevertheless, his wearisome expositions of materialistic system are
relieved by many a beautiful illustration drawn directly from the Nature
which his own eyes had seen, and portrayed with a clearness of outline
and a startling vividness, in which, as Professor Sellar has truly said,
he is unrivaled in antiquity save by Homer. The rigorous dogmatism of
a mechanical philosophy is in him combined with the keenest eye to all
the appearances of the outer world, minute as well as vast. Evidently he
had lived much in the open air, had been a haunter of all waste places,
wild mountain ranges, dripping caves, solitary sea-shores. He had noted
all the sights, listened to the sounds and the silences, and observed
the ways of the wild creatures that dwell there. His impressions he has
stamped in many a noble line, that comes in with delightful freshness to
illustrate his prolix argument. His eye was upon the smallest and most
sequestered appearances, as the many-colored shells on the shore, and
the dripping of water over moss-covered rocks; but still more familiarly
did his imagination move with the great elemental movements of Nature,
and when the storms and winds were up, he found himself “one among the
many there.” According to the philosophy he had adopted, and earnestly
propounded, all the most beautiful and mysterious aspects of things were
the mere products of dead mechanic forces. But the genius of the poet
at times shook itself free from the trammels of his creed, and rose to
the contemplation, not of a dead mechanic world, but of one informed by
a vast life, which moves through all material things, and makes them
instinct with unity.
In the language of the philosophers, while consciously he taught only a
_Natura naturata_, his imagination and sympathy grasped, in spite of him,
a _Natura naturans_. It is impossible that any great poet, however his
understanding may be caught in the meshes of mere materialism, can in
his hours of inspiration rest contented with that. Assuredly Lucretius
did not. Accordingly, we find him here and there breaking out into the
earliest utterance of that mystical Pantheistic feeling about the life of
Nature, which we shall find reappearing in Virgil, and which has recurred
so powerfully in modern poetry.
Catullus, the poet contemporary with Lucretius, is too much absorbed in
love and friendship, finds too exciting an interest in the society of
man, to give much time to Nature. In his most original poems, or at least
those in which he most speaks out his feelings, Nature holds little,
almost no place. Two poems refer to his villa at Tibur, with, however,
little mention of any rural pleasures connected with it.
The well-known lines on his return to his home at Sirmio, on the Lago
di Garda, for all their wonderful charm, breathe more of the love of
home and rest after long voyaging than of enjoyment in Nature for her
own sake. His more elaborate and artistic poems contain some beautiful
natural images and similes, expressed with that unstudied felicity and
clear sense of beauty which distinguished him. But they do not come to
more than side glances by the way, as he hurries on to his human theme.
It has, however, been remarked, that while to Lucretius, to Horace, even
to Virgil, the sea is a thing of dread rather than of admiration, from
which they shrank as a treacherous creature, Catullus felt the grandeur
of its immensity, and rejoiced in the laughter of the waves in calm, and
in their changing colors beneath the storm.
Germans have written learned books, some to maintain, others to deny,
that the ancient Greeks and Romans had any feeling for Nature, or, as
the phrase goes, were inspired by the sentiment of Nature. Schiller has
gone as far as to deny that Homer had any more caring for Nature than
he had for the garment, the shield, the armor, which he describes with
equal relish. In the face of such an assertion we have but to read a few
passages from Homer above cited, and innumerable others like them. No
doubt the ancients had not that intimate, delicate, dwelling sympathy
for Nature which we call the modern feeling. But there is hardly a tone
of sentiment which Nature in modern times has evoked, of which some
faint prelude at least might not be found among them. Passages from the
dialogue, and especially from the choruses, of Sophocles and Euripides,
might, had we time, have been cited, which speak of natural objects with
almost as much fondness as though they had been written yesterday.
One side of this feeling, which is dwelt on as peculiarly a birth of
recent times, is the passion for mountains. And no doubt the feeling of
the Latin poets as they thought of them was for the most part shuddering
and affright. Yet Virgil, though he generally speaks the same language,
seems at times to catch something of their free and far delight, as
when he speaks of Father Apennine roaring with all his holm-oaks, and
rejoicing to heave his snow-white summit into the sky. In such a passage
it would seem as though the power of hills was for a moment on him, and
he caught a prophetic glimpse of that mountain-rapture which was reserved
for this century at last adequately to express. Quinctilian, however,
represents the current feeling of his countrymen when he says, “Species
maritimis, planis, amœnis,”—Beauty belongs to countries that lie beside
the sea, level and pleasant.
But granting that the feeling for Nature among the Romans was thus
limited, if one wished to prove that it was real, one would be content to
point to Virgil alone. His preëminence as a poet of the country was early
recognized by his friend and contemporary, Horace:—
“Molle atque facetum
Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”—
To Virgil the Muses of the country gave the gift of delicacy and artistic
skill. When Horace thus wrote of his friend only the Eclogues had as yet
appeared. But the two greater poems which Virgil afterwards produced,
among their other merits, elevate him, as a lover and describer of
natural scenes, to a place which his earlier poems alone would not have
won for him.
With regard to the Eclogues, the purely imitative and conventional
character of their language, personages, and sentiment, is well known.
But for long it was believed that their scenery at least was real,
borrowed from Mantua and the banks of his native Mincio. But later
critics have shown that imitation penetrated even here, and that as
the sentiments and substance of the Eclogues are all borrowed from
Theocritus, not less is the framework of scenery in which these are
set. The vine-clad cave in which the shepherd reclines, the briery crag
from which he sees his goats hanging, the mountains that cast long
shadows toward evening, these, it is said, are nowhere to be seen in the
neighborhood of Mantua, but belong entirely to Sicily. Some even assert
that neither the ilex, the chestnut, nor the beech grows anywhere near
the banks of the Mincio. Yet even amid the prevailingly Sicilian scenery
there are touches here and there, where he reverts to what his own eyes
had seen, as where he describes his farm as covered with bare stones and
slimy bulrushes, and the Mincio as weaving for his green banks a fringe
of tender reeds.
Even though the imagery of the Eclogues may be borrowed from the Sicilian
poet, yet here, as every where, Virgil is no mere translator, but proves
by the tender grace of the language in which he clothes the borrowed
imagery his feeling for original Nature. In the fifth Eclogue, when two
shepherds have been playing each his finest strain, partly to please,
partly to emulate the other, at the close, Menalcas says to Mopsus:—
“Such is thy song to me, O singer divine!
As is sleep upon the grass to weary men, as in summer heat,
Thirst to slake with pleasant water from the leaping brook.”
And then when Menalcas has sung his strain this is the reply of Mopsus:—
“What gifts, what shall I render thee for such a song?
For not so delightful to my ear is the sighing of the coming south
wind,
Nor the beating of billows upon the shore,
Nor the sound of streams down-falling through the rocky glens.”
Of these and such-like images the first hints may have been from
Theocritus, but assuredly they have won a new charm in their passage
through the mind of Virgil.
But if the scenery of the Eclogues partakes in some measure of the
conventional mould in which the whole of the poems are cast, the
_Georgics_ are poetry in earnest, dealing with a real subject, and
describing, in many places at least, real landscapes. Doubtless here,
too, as everywhere, Virgil is the learned poet; his mind comes to his
subject laden with the spoils of all antiquity. As he describes natural
objects, all the associations which ancient Mythology and Greek poetry
had thrown around them use spontaneously before him. Thus he would
often seem to look at things not at first-hand with his own eyes, but
through the media which former poets had fashioned for him. But this, if
we think of it, is one element of the consummate art of the Georgics.
The poet had to raise a homely subject above the dust of commonplace,
to add dignity to objects and processes which in themselves might seem
undignified, or even vulgar. Therefore he takes the husbandman back to
earlier times, and invests his toils with all the veneration and sanctity
which primeval tradition has shed around them, and teaches him to feel
that in his pursuits he is one with the first forefathers of the race.
This archaic coloring, richly yet delicately suffused, invests the poem
with a peculiar charm. Just so a modern poet, wishing to throw around the
life of shepherd and husbandman, even in our own days, an air of ancient
reverence, might still revert to Bible stories of the patriarchs—to Jacob
and Rachel meeting by the well, to Ruth in the corn-field, and David
among the sheep-cotes of Bethlehem. But making full allowance for all
that is archaic and mythological in the allusions to distant ages and
Eastern lands, there remains a large background of landscape in which the
plains of Mantua and Campania lie spread before us, and the intense skies
of Italy bend overhead.
Such a passage as the following is surely the work of one who had
watched and loved the alternations of the Italian summer:—
“But when glad summer at the west winds’ call
Shall send the flocks to woods and pastures free,
Then ’neath the star of dawn on the cool fields
Let browse thy sheep and goats, while morn is young,
And the fresh dew lies hoary on the grass—
The dew on tender blade, to cattle dear.
When the fourth hour of day brings parching thirst,
And in the trees cicadas’ notes are loud,
Then bid the herd at wells and deep clear pools
Drink the stream running from full oaken troughs.
But in the deep noon heat a shady vale
Seek, if perchance some oak of antique bulk
There spread his giant boughs; or some grove dark
With many a holm-oak’s gloom reposeth nigh
In hallowed shadow. Then at set of sun
Once more supply clear streams and drive afield
Thy flock, when eventide cools all the air,
And the moon dewy-moist repairs the lawns
With freshness, while the shores with halcyon notes
Resound, the copses with the goldfinch song.”
It has generally been held that one of the most prominent notes
of Virgil’s genius was his sympathy with Nature. To this the late
Professor Conington, whose opinion on whatever concerned Virgil deserves
all respect, used to demur, and to maintain rather that his chief
characteristic lay in an elaborate and refined culture, manifesting
itself in the most consummate delicacy and grace. But though Virgil was
before all things the poet of learned culture and artistic beauty, this
did not hinder, rather prompted him, to turn on Nature a sympathetic
and loving eye. The perception of a sympathy between the feelings and
vicissitudes of man and the world that surrounds him appears nowhere so
strongly as in his latest poem, the Æneid. It may have been that as his
subject led him much into battles and adventures, alien to his taste, he
seized all the more eagerly every opportunity of reverting to that Nature
which had been his earliest delight.
Whatever be the cause, the pictures of Nature, whether in description
or in simile, are more frequent, more intimate, more tender, than in
either of his earlier productions. It has been noticed, for instance,
that at the beginning of the sixth book, as the Sibyl draws nigh, the
earth rumbles, the mountains quake, as if sharing the human dread at her
approach; and that throughout the fourth book there is maintained a fine
sympathy between the aspects of the outer world and the passions which
agitate the human actors.
It is thus he sets off the tumult in the soul of the lovelorn and wronged
queen in contrast with the calm and silence of night:—
“Now night it was, and everything on earth had won the grace
Of quiet sleep; the woods had rest, the wildered waters’ face:
It was the tide when stars roll on amid their courses due,
And all the tilth is hushed, and beasts, and birds of many a hue,
And all that is in waters wide, and what the waste doth keep
In thicket rough, amid the hush of night tide lay asleep,
And slipping off the load of care forgat their toilsome part.
But ne’er might that Phœnician queen, that most unhappy heart,
Sink into sleep, or take the night into her eyes and breast,
Her sorrows grow, and love again swells up with all unrest.”
Is not the feeling here what would be called quite modern? For its tone,
might it not have been written yesterday? This contrast between Nature’s
repose and the tumult of the human heart, thus consciously felt and
expressed, belong to a late and self-conscious age. In Homer you may see
such contrasts, as when Helen, looking from the walls of Troy, misses her
true brothers from among the Achaian host, and says that they kept aloof
from the war, fearing the reproach which she had brought on herself and
them. And the poet adds:—
“So spake she, but them already the life-giving earth covered
In Lacedæmon there, in their dear native land.”
Here the contrast is only half consciously felt, hinted at obliquely,
not brought into prominence. To emphasize and dwell on the contrast, as
Virgil does, is modern, one of the many points in which the Latin poet’s
feeling is like that of our own day.
Many more passages might be cited where Virgil turns aside from his epic
narrative to dwell over natural scenes. The elaborate description of the
storm in the first book; the sail through the Ionian Islands; the night
passed on the Sicilian coast with Ætna heard thundering overhead through
the dark, in the third book; the island, in the fifth book, which is made
the goal round which the racing-boats row; the fleet entering the mouth
of the Tiber while the calm morning lies ruddy on the sea;—these are a
few which come to mind.
But it is in the many similes scattered throughout the Æneid that the
Virgilian grace and tenderness is seen at its best. It has been the
fashion with the commentators to trace back every one of Virgil’s similes
to Homer or some other Greek poet. And the two I shall now give have not
wholly escaped this imputation, though there seems small foundation for
it in their case.
In the boat-race, when Mnestheus, having run his boat into a narrow and
sheltered passage among rocks, has with difficulty scraped through and
shot again into open sea, this is Virgil’s comparison:—
“As a dove scared suddenly from a cave,
Where she has her home and dear nestlings in the crannied rock,
Hurries fieldward in her flight, and with flurried pinions
Loudly flaps the roof—soon gliding in calm air
Skims her smooth way, sailing aloof on moveless wings.”
Again, when Æneas, led by the Sibyl, descends to the nether world, and
arrives at the shores of the river Styx, the ghosts of the dead come
flocking round him in crowds:—
“Numerous as the leaves in the woods that at first touch of autumn’s
cold
Gliding fall; or numerous as the birds that flock together shoreward
from the deep,
When wintry weather drives them across the sea, and sends them into
sunny lands.”
The full beauty, however, of passages like these cannot be felt when
they are detached from the whole scene, in which they are inlaid. Æneas
traveling far into the nether gloom, through Pluto’s empty halls and
ghastly realms of the dead, is a picture almost too dismal. But how
exquisitely does Virgil relieve his own heart and that of the reader, by
letting in on that sad world these glimpses of a land still gladdened by
the sun!
If you compare Virgil with Homer, where they describe the same natural
objects, or even where the Latin poet borrows his similes directly from
the Greek, you cannot but feel how wide is the difference between them.
There is no more the entire outwardness, the self-forgetting serenity of
Homer’s descriptions, the colorless transparency as of a mountain range,
whose every stone and blade of grass lies reflected in the clear depths
of an unmoving lake. Received into Virgil’s heart the outward world
becomes colored with some of the melancholy of the poet and his time. Not
that to Virgil’s eye there was any sadness in Nature herself, but in his
hands Nature becomes so humanized, it so lends itself to human joys and
sorrows, that these cast their own gleams, and still more their shadows,
on that, in itself, unimpassioned countenance. This sympathy between man
and Nature Virgil apprehended more feelingly than any other Roman poet;
and in this, as in so many other things, we find in him an anticipation
of the modern time. As compared with Lucretius, Virgil deals with Nature
in a less sublime, but more human way. Lucretius demands the explanation
of Nature and her processes, Virgil seeks to enter into her feeling, to
catch her sentiment. As a French author has expressed it: “Lucretius is
not so much arrested by the beauty of Nature, as roused by its mystery,
to extort the secret of it. I admire thee, he seems to say, but on
condition that I may investigate and understand thee.” In Lucretius man
and Nature stand over against each other, observer and observed: they do
not meet and interpenetrate each other. Between Virgil and the outward
world there is no such philosophic barrier; his feelings flow freely
forth to it, and there find more or less satisfaction,—satisfaction
as from a familiar companion; whether familiar by the associations of
childhood or through the cherished learning of later years.
Lucretius had, as we know, a philosophic faith about Nature, which
satisfied his understanding, if it did not satisfy what was deeper in him
than understanding—that high imagination and poetic instinct which at
times craved a more spiritual interpretation. Virgil, on the other hand,
had no consistent theory regarding that Nature which he apprehended so
feelingly. In general he acquiesced in the orthodox mythology which he
had received from the tradition of the poets. And yet, while he accepted
it for poetic, or even patriotic reasons, he must, when he thought of
it, have felt strange misgivings. For the mythologic faith had entirely
ceased, to be real to himself or to his educated countrymen. That he
longed at times to penetrate the secret of Nature, and to know the
causes of things, he himself assures us. But there is no evidence in
his poetry that he ever rose to as clear a conception of one all-ruling
Divine Power as even Cicero had probably reached. There are, however, two
well-known passages, one in the fourth Georgic, the other in the sixth
Æneid, in which Virgil expresses a mystic and pantheistic theory as to
an all-pervading life of the world, which, if it cannot be called his
philosophic belief, seems to have been to him at least more than a mere
poetic fancy. Lucretius, impelled by the craving of his imagination for
life, not death, had in the opening of his poem and elsewhere allowed
such a feeling, as it were, to escape him, but had never recognized
it as an article of his faith. In Virgil it approaches more nearly to
a consciously held belief, or at least to a possible solution of the
mystery of Nature. It has been reserved for modern times to give fuller
expression to the same tendency of thought, sometimes as a mere feeling,
sometimes as a conviction. But however such a view may have expressed
passing phases, either of thought or feeling, it has never, either now or
in ancient times, approached to be a solution which can satisfy at once
reason, heart, and conscience.
Since these remarks on Virgil were in the press, Professor Sellar’s work
on Virgil has appeared. If I could have read it before writing the above
pages, I should probably have said more of Virgil’s treatment of Nature,
or less. As it is, I have allowed what I had said to remain unchanged.
Those who wish to see this and every other aspect of Virgil’s poetry
treated in the most thorough and instructive way, will be amply rewarded
by the study of Professor Sellar’s book.