VIRGIL’S PLACE IN ROMAN LITERATURE.
Virgil is the earliest in time and much the most important in rank among
the extant poets of the Augustan Age. It is only in comparatively recent
times that any question has arisen as to the high position due to him
among the great poets of all ages. His pre-eminence not only above all
those of his own country, but above all other poets with the exception of
Homer, was unquestioned in the ancient Roman world. His countrymen claimed
for him a rank on a level with, sometimes even above, that of the great
father of European literature. And this estimate of his genius became
traditional, and was confirmed by the general voice of modern criticism.
For eighteen centuries, wherever any germ of literary taste survived in
Europe, his poems were the principal medium through which the heroic age
of Greece as well as the ancient life of Rome and Italy was apprehended.
No writer has, on the whole, entered so largely and profoundly into the
education of three out of the four chief representatives of European
culture—the Italians, the French, and the English—at various stages of
their intellectual development. The history of the progress of taste might
be largely illustrated by reference to the place which the works of Virgil
have held, in the teaching of youth and among the refined pleasures of
manhood, between the age of Dante and the early part of the present
century.
Since that time, however, an undoubted reaction has set in against the
prestige once enjoyed by Latin poetry. And from this reaction Virgil has
been the chief sufferer. The peculiar gifts, social and intellectual, of
Horace have continued to secure for him many friends in every country and
in every generation. The spirit of Lucretius is perhaps more in unison
with the spirit of the present than with that of any previous age, owing
to changes both in imaginative feeling and in speculative curiosity and
belief through which the world is now passing. The sincerity and unstudied
grace of Catullus are immediately recognised by all who read his works.
But in regard to Virgil, if former centuries assigned him too high a
place, the criticism of the present century, in Germany at least, and for
a certain time in England, has been much less favourable. French criticism
has indeed remained undeviatingly loyal, and regards him as the poet, not
of Rome only, but of all those nations which are the direct inheritors of
the Latin civilisation(89). And in England, at the present time, the
estimate of his genius, expressed both by writers of acknowledged
reputation and in the current criticism of the day, is much more
favourable than it was some thirty years ago.
It would be neither desirable nor possible to enter on a critical
examination of the value of a writer, who has been so much admired through
so long a time, without taking some account of the prestige attaching to
his name. It may be of use therefore to bring together some of the more
familiar evidences of his reputation and influence in former times, to
show the existence of a temporary reaction of opinion and to assign causes
for it, and to indicate the grounds on which his pre-eminence as the
culminating point in Latin literature and his high position among the
poets of the world appear to rest.
I.
It was as a great epic poet, the poet of national glory and heroic action,
that he was most esteemed in former times. The Aeneid may not have been
regarded as more perfect in execution than the Eclogues and Georgics, but
it was regarded as a work of higher inspiration. The criticism which
Virgil by implication applies to his earlier works, in the use of such
expressions as ‘ludere quae vellem,’ ‘carmina qui lusi pastorum,’ ‘in
tenui labor(90),’ etc., as compared with the high ambition with which he
first indicates his purpose of composing an epic poem in celebration of
the glory of Augustus—
Temptanda via est qua me quoque possim
Tollere humo, victorque virum volitare per ora(91)—
coincides with the view which the ancients took of the relative value of
the poetry of external nature and of heroic action. The contemporaries and
successors of Virgil did not share in the sense of some failure in the
treatment of his subject which is attributed to Virgil himself; and hence
they ranked him as the equal of Homer in the largest and most important
province of poetry. And as this comparison was the source of excessive
honour in the past, it has been the cause of the depreciation to which he
has been exposed in the present century.
The great reputation enjoyed by the Aeneid dates from the first appearance
of the poem. The earliest indication of the admiration which it was
destined to excite appears in the tones of expectation and enthusiasm with
which Propertius predicts the appearance of a work greater than the
Iliad:—
Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Graii:
Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade(92).
The immediate effect produced by the poem may be traced in the frequent
allusions to the story of Aeneas in the fourth book of the Odes of Horace.
The continuance of this influence is unmistakeable in Ovid, and there are
also many traces of Virgilian expression in the prose style of Livy(93).
The author of the dialogue ‘De Oratoribus’ testifies to the favour which
the poet enjoyed, even before the publication of his epic, both with the
Emperor and with the whole people, who ‘on hearing some of his verses
recited in the theatre rose in a body and greeted him, as he happened to
be present at the spectacle, with the same marks of respect which they
showed to the Emperor himself(94).’ He would thus appear, even in his
lifetime, to have thoroughly ‘touched the national fibre(95),’ and to have
gained that place in the admiration of his countrymen which he never
afterwards lost. By the poets who came after him his memory was cherished
with the veneration men feel for a great master, united to the affection
which they feel for a departed friend. Lucan indeed rather enters into
rivalry with him than follows in his footsteps; nor can there be any surer
way of learning to appreciate the peculiar greatness of Virgil’s manner
than by reading passages of the Aeneid alongside of passages of the
Pharsalia. The new poets under the Flavian dynasty, Valerius Flaccus,
Silius Italicus, and Statius, though they failed to apprehend the secret
of its success, made the Aeneid their model, in the arrangement of their
materials, in their diction, and in the structure of their verse. Statius,
in bidding farewell to his Thebaid, uses these words of acknowledgement:—
Vive, precor, nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta,
Sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora(96);
and Silius, having occasion to mention Mantua, celebrates it as—
Mantua, Musarum domus, atque ad sidera cantu
Evecta Aonio, et Smyrnaeis aemula plectris(97).
Martial, among many other tributes of admiration(98) scattered over his
poems, says of Virgil that he could have surpassed Horace in lyric, Varius
in tragic poetry, had he chosen to enter into rivalry with them(99). The
younger Pliny(100), speaking of the number of books, statues, and busts
possessed by Silius, adds these words: ‘of Virgil principally whose
birthday he kept with more solemnity than his own, especially at Naples,
where he used to visit his monument as if it were a temple.’ But the
greatest proof of Virgil’s influence on the later literature of Rome is
seen in many traces of imitation of his style in the language of the
historian Tacitus, the one great literary genius born under the Empire. So
great a master of expression would not have incurred this debt except to
one whom he regarded as entitled above all others to stamp the speech of
Rome with an imperial impress. In Juvenal there are many references and
allusions to familiar passages in the Aeneid(101): and it appears from him
that the works of Virgil and Horace had in his time become what they have
since continued to be, the common school-books of all who obtained a
liberal education. It is one of the hardships of the schoolmaster’s life,
described in his seventh Satire, to have to listen by lamplight to the
‘crambe repetita’ of the daily lesson,—
Quum totus decolor esset
Flaccus et haereret nigro fuligo Maroni(102).
After the end of the first century A.D., even the imitative poets of Rome
become rare; but the pre-eminence still enjoyed by Virgil is attested by
the number of commentaries written on his works, the most famous of them
being the still extant commentary of Servius, belonging to the latter part
of the fourth century. The fortune of Virgil has in this respect been
similar to that of his great countryman Dante. From the time of his death
till the extinction of ancient classical culture, there was a regular
succession of rhetoricians and grammarians who lectured and wrote
treatises on his various poems. Among those who preceded Servius, the most
famous names are those of Asconius Pedianus, Annaeus Cornutus, the friend
of Persius, and Valerius Probus, in the first century A.D. These
commentators supplied materials to Suetonius for the life on which that of
Aelius Donatus, which is still extant, is founded. The frequent quotations
from Virgil in the desultory criticism of Aulus Gellius and the systematic
discussions in the Saturnalia of Macrobius attest the minute study of his
poems in the interval between the second and the fifth centuries. Similar
testimony to his continued influence is afforded by the early Christian
writers, especially by Augustine. And though there may be traced in them a
struggle between the pleasure which they derived from his poetry and the
alienation of their sympathies owing to his paganism, yet it is probable
that the favour shown to him and to Cicero during the first strong
reaction from everything associated with the beauty of the older religion,
was due as much to the pure and humane spirit of their teaching as to the
fascination of their style: nor perhaps was this teaching inoperative in
moulding the thought and giving form to the religious imagination of the
Latin Church. The number and excellence of the MSS. of Virgil, the most
famous of which date from the fourth and fifth centuries, confirm the
impression of the continued favour which his works enjoyed before and
subsequently to the overthrow of the Roman rule in the West. Wherever
learning flourished during the darkest period of this later time, the
poems of Virgil were held in special esteem. Thus we read in connexion
with the literary studies of Bede: ‘Virgil cast over him the same spell
which he cast over Dante: verses from the Aeneid break his narratives of
martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of the great master in
a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of spring(103).’ His works
were taught in the Church schools: and the feeling with which he was
regarded by the more tolerant minds of the mediaeval Church appears in a
mass sung in honour of St. Paul at the end of the fifteenth century:—
Ad Maronis mausoleum
Ductus fudit super eum
Piae rorem lacrimae;
Quem te inquit reddidissem
Si te vivum invenissem
Poetarum maxime(104)!
The traditional veneration attaching to his name, among the classes too
ignorant to know anything of his works, survived during the middle ages in
the fancies which ascribed to him the powers of a magician or beneficent
genius, appearing in many forms and at various times and places widely
separated from one another.
With the first revival of learning and letters in different countries, the
old pre-eminence of Virgil again asserts itself. In England ‘the earliest
classical revival’ (to quote again the words of Mr. Green) ‘restored
Cicero and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its stamp on
the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers like
William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury.’ One of the earliest works in
Scottish literature is the translation of the Aeneid by Gawain Douglas. It
is characteristic of the rudimentary state of learning at the time when
this translation appeared that the Sibyl is represented as a nun, who
directs Aeneas to tell his beads(105). But the greatest testimony to the
persistence of Virgil’s fame and influence in the western world is the
homage which the genius of Dante pays to the shade of his great
countryman. ‘May the long zeal avail me and the great love that made me
search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author. Thou art he from whom
I took the good style that did me honour(106).’ The feeling with which
Dante gives himself up to the guidance of Virgil through all the mystery
of the lower realms is like that under which Ennius evokes the shade of
Homer from the ‘halls of Acheron’ to interpret to him the secrets of
creation. Dante combines the reverence for a great master, which seems to
be more natural to the genius of Italy than to that of other nations, with
a high self-confidence and a bold and original invention. Lucretius
expresses a similar enthusiasm for Homer, Ennius, Empedocles, and
Epicurus; and by Virgil the same feeling is, though not directly
expressed, yet profoundly felt towards Homer and Lucretius. And in all
these cases the admiration of their predecessors is an incentive, not to
imitative reproduction, but to new creation. It was as the poet of ‘that
Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of
wounds’ that the poet of mediaeval Florence paid homage to the ancient
poet of Mantua. The admiration of Dante, like that of Tacitus, is the more
corroborative of the spell exercised over the Italian mind by the art and
style of Virgil from the difference in the type of genius and character
which these poets severally represent. The influence of Virgil was
exercised, with a power more over-mastering and injurious to their
originality, upon the later poets and scholars of Italy with whom the
Renaissance begins. The progress of modern poetry was for a long time
accompanied—and it would be difficult to say whether it was thereby more
obstructed or advanced—by a new undergrowth of Latin poetry, for the
higher forms of which Virgil served as the principal model. Petrarch
attached more importance to his epic poem of ‘Africa,’ written in
imitation of the rhythm and style of the Aeneid, than to his Sonnets. The
influence of Virgil on the later Renaissance in Italy is abundantly proved
in the works of poets, scholars, and men of letters in that age. Ninety
editions of his works are said to have been published before the year
1500(107). From Italy this influence passed to France and England, and was
felt, not by scholars and critics only, but by the great poets and
essayists, the orators and statesmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. It was discussed as an open question whether the Iliad or the
Aeneid was the greater epic poem: and it was then necessary for the
admirers of the Greek rather than of the Latin poet to assume an
apologetic tone(108). Scaliger ranked Virgil above Homer and Theocritus.
His prestige was greatest during the century of French ascendency in
modern literature, that, namely, between the age of Milton and that of
Lessing. The chief critical law-giver in that century was Voltaire, and no
great critic has ever expressed a livelier admiration of any poem than he
has of the Aeneid. It is to him we owe the saying, ‘Homère a fait Virgile,
dit-on; si cela est, c’est sans doute son plus bel ouvrage(109).’ He
claims elsewhere for the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Aeneid a
great superiority over the works of all Greek poets(110). He says also
that the Aeneid is the finest monument remaining from antiquity. As
Spenser was called the ‘poet’s poet,’ so Virgil might be called the
orator’s poet. Even by a rhetorician of the second century the question
was discussed whether Virgil ‘was more a poet or an orator(111).’ Bossuet
is said to have known his works by heart(112). In the great era of English
oratory, no author seems to have been so familiarly known or was so often
quoted. We read in a recent sketch of the life of Burke(113), ‘Most
writers have constantly beside them some favourite classical author, from
whom they endeavour to take their prevailing tone.... Burke, according to
Butler, always had a ragged Delphin Virgil not far from his elbow.’ A
vestige of the attraction which his words had for an older school of
English politicians may be traced in the survival of Virgilian quotation
in some of the parliamentary warfare of recent times. The important place
which Virgil has filled in the teaching of our public schools—the great
nurses of our classic statesmen—has perhaps not been without some
influence in shaping our national history(114). It would be no
exaggeration to say that the poems of Virgil, and especially the Aeneid,
have contributed more than any other works of art in modern times, not
only to stamp the impression of ancient Rome on the imagination, but to
educate the sensibility to generous emotion as well as to literary beauty.
There is probably no author, even at the present day, of whom some
knowledge may be with more certainty assumed among cultivated people of
every nation.
II.
This unbroken ascendency of eighteen centuries, which might almost be
described in the words applied by Lucretius to the ascendency of Homer—
Adde Heliconiadum comites; quorum unus Homerus
Sceptra potitus(115)—
is as great a fortune as that which has fallen to the lot of any writer.
If any one ever succeeded in securing that which Tacitus says ‘should be
to a man the one object of an insatiable ambition,’ to leave after him ‘a
happy memory of himself(116),’ that may be truly said of Virgil. Though
his name may henceforth be less famous, it cannot be deprived of its
lustre in the past. Nor does it seem possible that this reputation could
have been maintained so long, in different ages and nations, without some
catholic excellence, depending on original gifts as well as trained
accomplishment, which could unite so many diversely-constituted minds of
the highest capacity in a common sentiment of veneration. The secret of
his long ascendency is, in the words of Sainte-Beuve, that ‘he gave a new
direction to taste, to the passions, to sensibility: he divined at a
critical period of the world’s history what the future would love.’
It is only in the present century that the question has been asked whether
this great reputation was deserved. But the earliest witness who might be
called against his claims to this high distinction is Virgil himself. In
the Eclogues and Georgics the delight which he finds in the exercise of
his art is qualified by a sense of humility, arising from a feeling of
some want of elevation in his subject. In his last hours he desired that
the Aeneid should be burned: and that this was not a mere impulse arising
from the depression of illness may be inferred from the request which he
made to Varius, before leaving Italy, ‘that if anything happened to him he
should destroy the Aeneid.’ A letter written to Augustus is quoted by
Macrobius, in which Virgil speaks of himself as having undertaken a work
of such vast compass ‘almost from a perversion of mind(117).’ No poet
could well be animated by a loftier ambition than Virgil; yet few great
poets seem to have been so little satisfied with their own success. It was
not in his nature to feel or express the confident sense of superiority
which sustained Ennius and Lucretius in their self-appointed tasks, nor
even that satisfaction with the work he had done and that assurance of an
abiding place in the memory of men which relieve the ironical
self-disparagement of Horace.
The most obvious explanation of this passionate and pathetic desire that
the work to which he had given eleven years of his maturest power should
not survive him, is the unfinished state, in respect of style, in which
the poem was left. He had set aside three years for the final revision of
the work and the removal of those temporary ‘make-shifts,’ which had been
originally inserted with full knowledge of their inadequacy, in order not
to check the ardour of composition. After having devoted three years of
his youth to the execution of a work so slight in purpose and so small in
compass as the Eclogues, he might well feel depressed by the thought that
a work of such high purpose and so vast a scope as the Aeneid—and a work
of which such expectations as those expressed by Propertius were
entertained—should be given to the world before receiving the final touch
of the master’s hand.
Yet the words in the letter to Augustus,—‘that I fancy myself to have been
almost under the influence of some fatuity in engaging on so great a
work’—if they are to be taken as a true expression of his feeling, imply a
deeper ground of dissatisfaction with his undertaking. Horace, in the
estimate which he forms of his own work, seems to maintain the due balance
between the self-assertion and the modesty of genius. But his modesty
arises from his thorough self-knowledge, and from his understanding the
limits within which a complete success was attainable by him. That of
Virgil seems to be a weakness incidental to his greatest gifts, his sense
of perfection, his appreciation of every kind of excellence. His large
appreciation of the genius of others, from the oldest Greek to the latest
Latin poet, his regard for the authority of the past, his attitude of a
scholar in many schools, his willing acceptance of Homer as his guide
through all the unfamiliar region of heroic adventure, were scarcely
compatible with the buoyant spirit, as of some discoverer of unknown
lands, which was needed to support him in an enterprise so arduous and so
long-sustained as the composition of a great literary epic. The task which
he set himself required of him to combine into one harmonious work of art,
which at the same time should bear the stamp of originality,—of being a
new thing in the world,—the characteristics and excellences of various
minds belonging to various times. With such aims it was scarcely possible
that the actual execution of his work should not fall below his ideal of
perfection. Especially must he have recognised his own deficiency in the
pure epic impulse, which apparently sustained Homer without conscious
effort. He could not feel or make others feel the culminating interest in
the combat between Turnus and Aeneas, which Homer feels and makes others
feel in the combat between Hector and Achilles. In his earlier national
poem he had vindicated the glory of the ploughshare in opposition to the
glory of the sword; and, in his later battle-pieces, he must have felt his
immeasurable inferiority to the poet of the Iliad. And yet neither the
precedents of epic poetry nor his purpose of celebrating the national
glory of Rome permitted him to leave this part of his task unattempted. To
describe a battle or a single combat in the spirit and with the
fellow-feeling of Homer has been granted to no poet since his time. Among
modern poets perhaps Scott has approached nearer to him than any other.
Among Roman authors, Ennius, who gained distinction as a soldier before he
became known as a writer, was more fitted to succeed in such an attempt
than the poet whose earliest love was for ‘the fields and woods and
running streams among the valleys.’
As the comparison of his own epic poem with the greatest of the Greek
epics is the probable explanation of Virgil’s own dissatisfaction with the
Aeneid, so it is the cause of the adverse criticism to which the poem has
been exposed in recent times. Of these adverse criticisms, that expressed
by Niebuhr, both in his History of Rome and in his Historical Lectures,
was among the earliest. In the former he expresses his belief that Virgil,
at the approach of death, wished ‘to destroy what in those solemn moments
he could not but view with sadness, as the groundwork of a false
reputation(118).’ In the latter he says, ‘The whole of the Aeneid, from
the beginning to the end, is a misconceived idea.’ ‘Virgil is one of the
remarkable instances of the way in which a man can miss his true calling.
His was lyric poetry.’ ‘It is a pity that posterity so much overrated the
very work which was but a failure(119).’
Although the service rendered to the study of antiquity by the historical
insight of Niebuhr is probably as great as that rendered by the genius of
any scholar of this century, yet the opinions expressed by him on
literature are often more arbitrary than authoritative. Still this verdict
on the merits of the Aeneid was in accordance with the most advanced
criticism of the time when it was written, both in Germany and England.
The writer by whom the critical taste of England was most stimulated and
enlarged about the same time was Coleridge; and in his ‘Table Talk’ such
disparaging dicta as this occur more than once: ‘If you take from Virgil
his diction and metre, what do you leave him?’ The whole tone of the
criticism which arose out of the admiration of German thought and poetry
was thoroughly opposed to the spirit in which Latin literature had been
admired. Mr. Carlyle also expressed in one of his earliest works—the Life
of Schiller—an estimate of the value of Virgil, which was not uncommon
among younger scholars at the Universities some thirty years ago. ‘Virgil
and Horace,’ he writes, ‘he (Schiller) learned to construe accurately, but
is said to have taken no deep interest in their poetry. The tenderness and
meek beauty of the first, the humour and sagacity and capricious pathos of
the last, the matchless elegance of both would of course escape his
inexperienced perception; while the matter of their writings must have
appeared frigid and shallow to a mind so susceptible.’ Even the warmest
admirers of Virgil about that time, such as Keble, are content to claim
for him high excellence as the poet of outward nature. The late Professor
Conington, while showing the finest appreciation of ‘the marvellous grace
and delicacy, the evidences of a culture most elaborate and most refined,’
in the poet to the interpretation of whose works he devoted the best years
of a scholar’s life, has questioned ‘the appropriateness of the special
praise given to Virgil’s agricultural poetry, and conceded though with
more hesitation to his pastoral compositions.’ He speaks also of it as an
admitted fact that ‘in undertaking the Aeneid at the command of a
superior, Virgil was venturing beyond the province of his genius.’ And he
describes this disparaging estimate as the opinion ‘which is now generally
entertained on Virgil’s claims as an epic poet(120).’ Mr. Keightley is
also quoted by him as speaking of Virgil as ‘perhaps the least original
poet of antiquity(121).’ It is certainly not in the spirit of an ardent
admirer that the author of Virgil’s life in the ‘Dictionary of Classical
Biography and Mythology’ approaches the criticism of his poetry. But it is
by German critics and scholars that Virgil’s claim to a high rank among
the poets of the world is at the present day most seriously impugned. Thus
to take two or three conspicuous instances of their disparaging criticism:
Mommsen in his History of Rome(122) speaks contemptuously of the
‘successes of the Aeneid, the Henriade, and the Messiad;’ Bernhardy in his
_Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur_ (1871) brings together a formidable
list of German critics and commentators unfavourable to the merits of the
Aeneid, in which the illustrious name of Hegel appears; Gossrau in his
edition of the Aeneid quotes from Richter (as a specimen of the
unfavourable opinions pronounced by many critics) the expression of a wish
that, with the exception of the descriptions and episodes, the rest of the
poem had been burned(123); and W. S. Teuffel, among other criticisms which
‘damn with faint praise,’ has the following: ‘Aber er ist zu weich und zu
wenig genial als dass er auf dem seiner Natur zusagendsten Gebiete hätte
beharren und darauf Ruhm ernten können.’
The chief, as well as the most obvious, cause of the revolt against
Virgil’s poetical pre-eminence, which, though yielding apparently to a
revived sentiment of admiration, has not yet spent its force, is the great
advance made in Greek scholarship in England and Germany during the
present century. Familiarity with Latin literature is probably not less
common than it was a century ago, but it is much less common relatively to
familiarity with the older literature. The attraction of the latter has
been greater from its novelty, its originality, its higher intrinsic
excellence, its profounder relation to the heart and mind of man. The art
of Homer and that of Theocritus are felt to be an immediate reproduction
from human life and outward nature; the art of Virgil seems, at first
sight, to be only a reproduction from this older and truer copy. The Roman
and Italian character of his workmanship, the new result produced by the
recasting of old materials, the individual and inalienable quality of his
own genius, were for a time obscured, as the evidences of the large debt
which he owed to his Greek masters became more and more apparent.
Again, the greater nearness of the Augustan Age, not in time only but in
spirit and manners, to our own age, which in the last century told in
Virgil’s favour in the comparison with Homer, tells the other way now. The
critics of last century were interested in other ages, in so far as they
appeared to be like their own. The rude vigour and stirring incident of
the Homeric Age or the Middle Ages had no attraction for men living under
the _régime_ of Louis XIV. and XV. or of Queen Anne and the first Georges.
What an illustrious living Frenchman says of the great representative of
French ideas in the last century might be said generally of its criticism.
‘Voltaire,’ says M. Renan, ‘understood neither the Bible, nor Homer, nor
Greek art, nor the ancient religions, nor Christianity, nor the Middle
Ages(124).’ And yet he was prepared to pronounce his judgment on them by
the light of that admirable common sense which he applied to the questions
of his own day. One of the great gains of the nineteenth century over
former centuries consists in its more vital knowledge of the past. The
imaginative interest now felt in times of nascent and immature
civilisation all tells in favour of Homer and against Virgil. The
scientific study of human development also tends more and more to awaken
interest in a remote antiquity. Even the ages antecedent to all
civilisation have a stronger attraction for the adventurous spirit of
modern enquiry than the familiar aspect of those epochs in which human
culture and intelligence have reached their highest level. This new
direction given to imaginative and speculative curiosity, while greatly
enhancing the interest felt, not in the Iliad and Odyssey only, but in the
primitive epics of various races, has proportionately lowered that felt in
the literary epics belonging to times of advanced civilisation.
Recognising the radical difference between the two kinds of
representation, some recent criticism refuses to the latter altogether the
title of epic poetry, and relegates it to some province of imitative and
composite art. There is a similar tendency in the present day to be
interested in varieties of popular speech,—in language before it has
become artistic. Both tendencies are good in so far as they serve to draw
attention to neglected fields of knowledge. They are false and mischievous
in so far as they lead to the disparagement of the great works of
cultivated eras, or to any forgetfulness of the superior grace, richness,
and power which are imparted to ordinary speech by the labours of
intellect and imagination employed in creating a national literature.
Other causes connected with a great expansion of human interests acting on
the imagination, and with the revolt against the prevailing poetical
style, which arose about the beginning of the present century, have tended
to lower the authority of writers who formed the standard of taste to
previous ages. The desire of the new era was to escape from the exhausted
atmosphere of literary tradition, and to return again to the simplicity of
Nature and human feeling. The genius of Roman literature is more in
harmony with eras of established order, of adherence to custom, of
distinct but limited insight into the outward world and into human life,
than to eras of expansive energy, of speculative change, of vague striving
to attain some new ideal of duty or happiness. The genius of Greece
exercised a powerful influence on several of the great English and German
poets who lived in the new era. But neither Goethe nor Schiller, Byron nor
Scott, Shelley nor Keats were at all indebted, in thought, sentiment, or
expression, to the poets of the Augustan Age. Among the great poets of
this new era the only one known to have greatly admired Virgil, and who in
his poems founded on classical subjects was influenced by him, is the one
who most decidedly proclaimed his revolt against the artificial diction
and representation of the school of classical imitators,—the poet
Wordsworth.
The very perfection of Virgil’s art, combined with the calmness and
moderation of his spirit, was out of harmony with the genius of such a
time. He seemed to have nothing new to teach the eager generation which
regarded the world and speculated on its own destiny with feelings
altogether unlike to those of the generations that went before it. The
truth of his sentiment, its adaptation to the spiritual movement of his
own age, in which it gained ascendency like a new revelation, had caused
it to pass into the modes of thought and feeling habitual to the world.
This too may be said of the ethical feeling and common sense of Cicero’s
philosophical treatises. Moral speculation has been so long and so deeply
permeated by the thought expressed in these treatises that it now appears
trite and common-place. So too the moderation and unfailing propriety of
Virgil’s language had no attraction of freshness or novelty to stimulate
the imagination. The direct force of language in Homer or Lucretius never
can become trite or common-place. It affects the mind now as powerfully
and immediately as in the day of its creation. There is also a kind of
rhetorical style which produces its effect either of pleasure or distaste
immediately. It does not conceal its true character, but tries to force
the reader’s admiration by startling imagery, or strained emphasis, or
tricks of allusive periphrasis. Whether this style is admired or detested,
it does not lose its character with the advance of years. Juvenal and
Persius probably affect their readers in much the same way as they did
three centuries or seventeen centuries ago. But this is not the style of
Virgil and of Horace. They produce their effect neither through that
direct force which causes a thought to penetrate or an image to rise up
immediately before the mind, nor by strained efforts at rhetorical effect.
As their language became assimilated with the thought and feeling of
successive generations, it may have lost something of the colouring of
sentiment and association, of the delicate shades of meaning, of the vital
force which it originally possessed. It has entered into the culture of
the world chiefly through impressions produced in early youth, when the
mind, though susceptible of graceful variations of words and harmonious
effects of rhythm, is too immature to realise fulness of meaning
half-concealed by the well-tempered beauty and musical charm of language.
The style of Virgil is the fruit of long reflection, and it requires long
reflection and familiarity to draw out all its meaning. The word
‘meditari,’ applied by him to his earlier art, expresses the process
through which his mind passed in acquiring its mastery over words. In
apprehending the charm of his style it is not of the spontaneous fertility
of Nature that we think, but of the harvest yielded to assiduous labour by
a soil at once naturally rich and obedient to cultivation—‘iustissima
tellus.’ These characteristics of his art were not unlikely to be
overlooked in an age which demanded from the literature of imagination a
rapid succession of varied and powerful impressions.
III.
Though some of the causes which tended to lower the estimation in which
Virgil was held were only temporary in their operation, yet it can hardly
be doubted that his claim to pre-eminence in Latin literature and to a
high rank among the greatest poets of all times must, if put forward at
all, be maintained on somewhat different grounds from those on which his
position formerly rested. He never again can enter into rivalry with Homer
as the inspired poet of heroic action. He cannot again enjoy the advantage
of being widely known, while access to his predecessor is confined to a
few scholars not much in sympathy with the poet of an age so far separated
from their own. The art of Virgil in so far as it is a copy of the art of
Homer has already produced all the effect on the culture of the world
which it is destined to produce. The life of the heroic age will continue
to be known to all future times as it was originally fashioned by the
creative mind of Homer, not as it was modified by the after-thought of
Virgil.
What charm Virgil had for his countrymen as the reviver of the early
poetry of Greece and as the first creator of the early romance of Italy,
what permanent value he has as one of the great interpreters of the secret
of Nature and of the meaning of human life, will appear in the course of
the detailed examination of his various poems. But there are some
considerations, from an historical point of view, which may be stated
provisionally as grounds for assigning to him the place of most importance
in Latin literature. He is, more than any other Latin writer, a
representative writer,—representative both of the general national idea
and of the sentiment and culture of his own age. One clear note of this
representative character is that he absorbs and supersedes so much of what
went before him, and that he anticipates and also supersedes much that
came after him. The interest which Rome and Italy have for all times, the
interest which the Augustan Age has as the epoch of the maturest
civilisation of ancient times and as a great turning-point in the history
of mankind, will secure the attention of the world to an author who sets
before it, in forms of pure art and with elaborate workmanship, the
idealised spectacle of the marvellous career of Rome, and best enables it
to feel the charm of natural beauty and ancient memories associated with
Italy; and who has interpreted, as no one else has done, the meaning and
tendency of his age, and of the change which was then preparing for the
human spirit and for the nations of the future.
(1.) The Aeneid brings home to us, in a way in which no other work of
Latin literature can do, all those elements in the idea of the destiny,
the genius, and character of Rome which most powerfully move the
imagination, while it enables us for a time to forget those elements of
hardness, unscrupulous injustice, and oppressive domination on which the
historian is forced to dwell, and which alienate the sympathies as much as
her nobler aspect compels the admiration of mankind. The grandeur and
dignity of the Imperial State appear softened and mellowed by Virgil’s
marvellous art and humane feeling. ‘The Aeneid,’ says Hallam, ‘reflects
the glory of Rome as from a mirror(125).’ ‘It remains,’ says Mr. Merivale,
‘the most complete picture of the national mind at its highest elevation,
the most precious document of national history, if the history of an age
is revealed in its ideas, no less than in its events and incidents(126).’
‘Virgile,’ writes M. Sainte-Beuve, ‘a été le poëte du Capitole(127).’
‘Dans ce poëme,’ writes M. de Coulanges of the Aeneid, ‘ils (les Romains)
se voyaient, eux, leur fondateur, leur ville, leurs institutions, leurs
croyances, leur Empire(128).’ M. Patin again describes the same poem as
‘expression de Rome, de Rome entière, de la Rome de tous les temps, de
celle des Empereurs, des Consuls, des Rois(129).’ He might have added that
it had anticipated the idea of the Rome of the Popes, in some at least of
its aspects. The type of character which Virgil has conceived in Aeneas is
more like that of the milder among the spiritual rulers of mediaeval Rome
than that either of the Homeric heroes or of the actual Consuls and
Imperators who commanded the Roman armies and administered the affairs of
the Roman State. It has been said of him by another Frenchman that he was
more fitted to be the founder of an order of monks than of an Empire.
Virgil’s object is to make his readers believe in the mission of Rome, as
appointed by Divine decree, for the ultimate peace and good government of
the world. The work of Rome in the past, the present, and the future is
conceived by him as a manifestation of the Deity in his justice,
authority, and beneficence.
(2.) The spell which Rome exercises over the imagination is quite distinct
from the charm which the thought of Italy has for the hearts of men. The
love of Italy was a sentiment as deeply rooted in Virgil’s nature as his
pride in Rome. This sentiment pervades all his works and inspires some of
his noblest poetry. In his pastoral poems, under all the borrowed imagery
of the Greek idyl, it reveals itself in his sensibility to the beauty of
the Italian climate (‘caeli indulgentia’), to the charm of the various
seasons, to the distinctive graces of the plants and wild flowers native
to the soil, and in the expression of the deep attachment with which the
peasant-proprietor clung to his little plot of ground as the sphere alike
of his cares and of his happiness. In the Aeneid this patriotic feeling
shows itself, as a similar feeling shows itself in the poetry of Scott, in
the enthusiasm with which the martial memories of famous towns and tribes
are recalled in association with the picturesque features of the land. But
by no work of art, ancient or modern, is the complete impression, moral
and physical, of the old Italian land and people,—
Terra antiqua potens armis atque ubere glaebae(130),—
produced with such vivid truthfulness and such enduring charm as by the
Georgics. To express the whole meaning of Italy, it was necessary that the
poet should feel a pride in her stubborn industry(131) as well as in her
warlike energy; that he should cherish for the whole land, now united as
one nation, an impartial love; and that he should be deeply susceptible of
that beauty of season and landscape which was a more self-sufficing source
of pleasure(132) to the cultivated Italian than even to the ancient Greek.
Some sympathy with the ‘Itala virtus’—the courage and discipline of the
Marsian and other Sabellian races—Ennius had already expressed in his
national epic; but he was interested solely in military and political
life, in the activity of the camp and battle-field, the forum and
senate-house. Virgil was the first and the only Roman poet to realise the
full inspiration of that thought, to which he gives utterance in the close
of one of his noblest passages,—
Salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus,
Magna virum(133).
(3.) Virgil has also found a truer poetical expression than any other for
the political feeling and tendency of his time. He could not indeed teach
the whole lesson of the early Empire, or foresee, in the prosperity and
glory that followed the battle of Actium, the oppression experienced under
the rule of Tiberius, the degradation experienced under Nero. But his
imagination was moved by all those influences which, in the Augustan Age,
were giving a new impulse and direction to human affairs. His poems,
better than any other witnesses, enable us to understand how weary the
Roman world was of the wars, disturbances, and anarchy of the preceding
century, how ardently it longed for the restoration of order and national
unity, how thankfully it accepted the rule of the man who could alone
effect this restoration, and how hopefully it looked forward to a new era
of peace and prosperity, of glory and empire, under his administration.
The poetry of Virgil co-operated with the policy of the Emperor in the
work effected in that age. As Augustus professed to give a new
organisation to the political life of the Republic, Virgil gave a new
direction to its spiritual life, a new significance to its ancient
traditions. Augustus, in depriving Rome of her liberty, confirmed for
centuries her empire over the world: Virgil, in abnegating the independent
position of Lucretius and Catullus, established the ascendency of Roman
culture and ideas for a still longer time. As Augustus shaped the policy,
Virgil moulded the political feeling of the future. It is in his poems
that loyalty to one man, which soon became, and, till a comparatively
recent period, continued to be the master-force in European
politics,—apparently a necessary stage in the ultimate evolution of free
national life on a large scale,—finds its earliest expression. And the
loyalty of Virgil is not merely a natural emotion towards one who is
regarded as the embodiment of law as well as of power, but is a religious
acknowledgment of a government, sanctioned and directed by the Divine
will. Perhaps one reason why he is read with less sympathy in the present
than in previous centuries, is that his political ideal appears to us a
lower ideal than that of a free Commonwealth. But in Virgil’s time faith
in the Republic had become impracticable, and, though the sentiment
continued to ennoble the life of individuals, it was powerless to change
the current of events. Loyalty to a person appealed to the imagination
with the charm of novelty, and might be justified to the conscience of the
world, as being, for that time and the times that came after, the
necessary bond of civil order and union.
(4.) As Virgil first expressed the political tendency of his age, so he is
the purest exponent of its ethical and religious sensibility. He recalls
the simpler virtues of the olden time, he represents the humanity of his
own age, he anticipates something of the piety and purity of the future
faith of the world. As in the development of Roman law, the spirit of
equity fostered by Greek studies gradually gained ascendency over the
native hardness of the Roman temper, so, from the time of Laelius and the
younger Scipio, the expansion through intellectual culture of the humane
and sympathetic emotions, expressed by the word ‘humanitas,’ continued to
prevail, in opposition to the spirit of national exclusiveness habitual to
the Roman aristocracy, and in spite of the cruel experience of the Civil
Wars. In no writers is this quality more conspicuous than in Cicero and in
Lucretius. In Lucretius this feeling inspires his passionate revolt
against the ancient religions. The humane feeling of Virgil, on the other
hand, is in complete harmony with his religious belief. His word _pietas_,
as is observed by M. Sainte-Beuve, is the equivalent both of our ‘piety’
and of our ‘pity.’ The Power above man is regarded by him not as an unreal
phantom created by our fears, but as the source and sanction of justice
and mercy, of good will and good faith among men.
This view of the relation between the supernatural world and human life is
not indeed the only one which Virgil shows us. He endeavours, by the union
of imagination, philosophy, and tradition, to establish religious opinion
as well as to kindle religious emotions; nor is he quite successful in
reconciling these various factors of belief. The ‘Fates,’ which are the
medium through which man’s happiness or misery is allotted, are sometimes
stern and inflexible, as well as beneficent in their action. They
accomplish their purposes with no regard to individual rights or feelings.
But though Virgil failed, as much as other exponents of religious systems,
in reconciling the necessities of his creed with the instincts of human
sensibility, it remains true that in regard to much both of his feeling
and intuition, in his firm faith in Divine Providence, in his conviction
of the spiritual essence in man and of its independence of and superiority
to the body, in his belief that the future state of the soul depends on
the deeds done in the body, in his sense of sin and purification for sin,
in the value which he attaches to purity and sanctity of life, his spirit
is much more in unison with the faith and hopes which were destined to
prevail over the world, than with the common beliefs or half-beliefs of
his own time. In his religious and ethical, no less than his political
sentiment, ‘il a deviné à une heure décisive du monde ce qu’aimerait
l’avenir.’ If it was as a great national poet, the rival of Homer, Hesiod,
and Theocritus, that he exercised the most powerful spell over his
contemporaries, it was rather as the ‘pius vates,’ the prophetic teacher,
that, in spite of themselves, he gained ascendency over the cultivated
minds of the early Latin and the mediaeval Churches(134).
(5.) Though other periods of ancient history, and notably the fifth
century B.C. in Greece, were richer in genius and enjoyed a happier and
nobler life than the Augustan Age, yet this latter age, as the latest of
the great literary epochs of antiquity, inherited the science, wisdom,
power, and beauty stored up in all the art and writings of the past. The
Augustan Age was pre-eminently an age of culture, and Virgil was
pre-eminently the most cultivated man belonging to the age. In early youth
he had learned from Greek masters all they could teach him in poetry and
rhetoric, in science and philosophy; and through all his life he combined
the productive labours of an artist with the patient diligence of a
student. He was familiar with the successive schools of Greek poetry, from
Homer and Hesiod down to the epic and didactic poets of Alexandria. He was
acquainted with all the physical sciences known in his time, especially,
it is said, with astronomy and medicine. His earlier writings show the
influence of the philosophical system of Epicurus, while his later
convictions are more in agreement with the Platonic philosophy. The
oratory of the later books of the Aeneid breathes the spirit of Stoicism.
We are told that he proposed to devote the years that might remain to him
after the completion of the Aeneid to the further study of philosophy,
perhaps with the view of writing a great poem, which might rival and
answer Lucretius. The extant fragments of Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius,
Attius, and Lucilius, and of later and obscurer writers such as Hostius
and Varro Atacinus, show that he had read their works, and could skilfully
adapt what he found in them to his own national epic. The Georgics, again,
show a careful study and assimilation of the thought and language of
Lucretius. And to the pursuits of a scholar he united the research of an
antiquary. He collected from many sources the myths and traditions
connected with the origin of ancient customs and ceremonies, or attaching
to the towns and tribes of Italy, famous in early times. He was especially
well versed in the ceremonial lore of the Priestly Colleges. Thus, in
addition to his higher claims on the admiration of his countrymen, his
poems were prized by them as a great repertory of their secular and sacred
learning. Many fancies and dim traditions of a remote antiquity, many
vestiges of customs and ceremonies which have disappeared from the world,
many thoughts and expressions of men who have left scarcely any other
memorial of themselves, still survive, because the mind of Virgil
discerned some element of interest in them which fitted them to contribute
to the representative character of the work to which his life was
dedicated.
(6.) Virgil’s pre-eminence as a literary artist and master of poetical
expression is so generally acknowledged that it is not necessary to
illustrate it in this preliminary statement of the position which he holds
in Roman literature. The Augustan Age was characterised by a careful study
and application of the principles of art, as well as by an elaborate
culture. By the labours and reflection of three or four generations the
Latin language had been gradually changed from a rude Italian dialect into
a great organ of law, government, and literature. The efforts of the
generation preceding the Augustan Age to attain to perfection in form and
style received their fulfilment in the work accomplished by Virgil and
Horace. Each of them, in his own way, obtained a complete success; but the
sustained perfection of a long poem, epic or didactic, is a much greater
result than the perfection shown in the composition of an ode. Virgil,
alone among his countrymen, discerned the true conditions in accordance
with which a long continuous poem, epic or didactic, could as a whole
gain, and permanently retain, the ear of the world: and, in accordance
with these conditions, he worked the various materials, descriptive,
meditative, narrative, and commemorative, of the Georgics and Aeneid into
poems of large compass, sustained interest, and finished execution. His
style marks the maturity of development after which the vital force
animating the growth of the Latin language begins to decay. One of the
most sensible causes of this decay in the idiomatic structure of the
language both of verse and prose is the predominance of Virgil’s influence
over the later writers. He and Horace introduced into Latin all that it
could well bear of the subtlety and flexibility which characterise the
Greek tongue. When first introduced, this infusion of a new force into the
Latin language, modifying the use of words and altering the structure of
sentences, probably appeared to the literary class at Rome a new source of
wealth, colouring words and phrases with the gleam of old poetic
association. But this new infusion, though an immediate source of wealth,
tended to corrupt the pure current of native speech. The later poetical
style of Rome never regains the lucidity and volume which it has in
Lucretius, or the ease and sparkling flow of Catullus. The maturity of
accomplishment immediately preceded and partly occasioned the decay in
vital force.
In other arts the maturest excellence often foreruns a rapid and
inevitable decline. One cause of this seems to be, that the great masters,
having once for all expressed in the happiest manner whatever is best
worth expressing within the range and vision of their own era, leave to
their successors the choice of tamely imitating them or of striving to
gain attention, by a strained way of expressing it, for what is not worth
expressing in any way. Into the first of these pitfalls the imitative
poets of the Flavian era sank; the more ambitious _littérateurs_ of the
Neronian Age fell into the second. Another cause of the close connexion
between the maturity and the decay of art is that the representation of
man and Nature produced by a great master is coloured by his own thought
and feeling. The representation thus established gains ascendency over the
future. Each new reproduction of this departs further from reality. Art
becomes thoroughly conventional. It revives only after a new range of
interests, some vital change in belief and ideas, has arisen in the
evolution of national life, accompanied by a new birth of original genius,
and powerful enough to divert the minds of men from the contemplation of
the old to the novel spectacle of the world in which they live. The
emotions thus excited force out for themselves a fresh channel: the sound
of poetry is again heard in the land, and the hearts of men are
refreshed:—
Illa cadens raucum per levia murmur
Saxa ciet, scatebrisque arentia temperat arva(135).
The imaginative literature of Greece, of England, and of France has thus
renewed itself at various epochs in the history of these nations. Either
the life of the ancient world was too much exhausted, or the ascendency of
Virgil in the literature of his country was too powerful, to permit the
appearance of any new spring of Latin poetry.
IV.
Whether the gifts of intellect and feeling by which Virgil represented his
country and his age entitle him to a place among the greatest poets of the
world, will be answered variously according to the degree in which men
recognise in him the presence of that diviner faculty of imagination which
no analysis can explain. If we look to him for the original force of
creative imagination which we find in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles on
the one hand, and in the greatest poets of modern times on the other, we
shall fail to establish his equality with them. But as there have been
various types of philosophical intellect in the world, so there have been
various types of imaginative power. And among these types we may
distinguish those characteristic of the Hellenic, the Germanic, and the
Italian races. The genius of the ancient Latin race is further removed
from that of the modern Germanic race, than either is from the genius of
ancient Greece. The peculiar richness of our own poetic literature arises
from its combining some of the great characteristics of each type. While
Scott and Byron, for instance, are among the greatest representatives of
the purely modern imagination, the works of Pope and Gray are essentially
of the Latin type; and those of Dryden, Milton, and Spenser blend Roman
strength or the culture of Latin ideas with English boldness and modern
exuberance of fancy: while, again, Shelley, Keats, and all the greatest
among our living poets have received a powerful impulse from Greek art and
Greek ideas. It must be admitted by students of Latin literature that the
intellectual movement and sensibility of the present time has a closer
affinity with the ancient Greek than with the ancient Latin culture.
Students of Homer and Aeschylus, as well as those who have once felt the
spell of
‘Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force,’
of Wordsworth’s contemplative elevation and the impassioned ideality of
Shelley, find, in turning to Virgil, that their range of feeling and of
contemplation has become narrower. They no longer enjoy the same
illimitable prospect, they no longer breathe the same keen air, which
buoyed them up on the higher altitudes of poetry. Greek and modern works
of imagination manifest a profounder feeling, a more varied contemplation
of the mystery of life, than is compatible with the more realistic
tendencies of Latin poetry. And though the representation of the outward
world in Virgil is, in its serene beauty, suggestive of a secret unceasing
life which appeals to the human spirit in its more tranquil moods, yet it
does not move the mind to that profounder sense of an affinity between the
soul of man and the soul of Nature which the great modern poets awaken.
The charm and power of Latin poetry consists, for the most part, in the
vital strength of feeling with which it invests a limited and definite
range of interests. What the Roman poets cared for they cared for with all
their heart, and strength, and mind. They seem to have written from more
enduring, if less abundant, sources of affection than other poets. Their
hearts thoroughly realised what they idealised in imagination. This strong
realism and constancy of feeling explains the labour with which they
perfected their art, as the strong love of his small portion of land
explains the labour which the ideal husbandman of the Georgics bestows on
it. Through that vividness of feeling with which they cherished the
thought of what gave actual joy to their lives, Catullus and Horace were
able to invest the names of Sirmio, of Lucretilis and Digentia, with an
interest which attaches to the favourite residences of no other poets:
though perhaps future generations will find a similar classic charm
attaching to the homes of Wordsworth and of Scott, and to the hills,
dales, and streams which they have endowed with the wealth of their strong
affection. The human objects of their passionate love excited in several
of the Roman poets this same vital warmth of feeling. The ‘spirat adhuc
amor’ is still true of all the poetry which the love of Lesbia and of
Cynthia inspired. Even Ovid, whose want of seriousness and profound
feeling is the chief flaw in his poetic temperament, had the most vivid
sense of the pleasure and of the pain of his own existence. It is this
capacity in the imagination of being vitally interested in and possessed
by its object, which enabled Lucretius to breathe the breath of enduring
life into the dry bones of the atomic philosophy. And that this strong
realism of feeling is a characteristic of the race to which these poets
belonged is proved by the pathetic force of the numerous sepulchral
epitaphs of persons altogether undistinguished, preserved from the times
of the early Empire. It is owing to the power of producing a strong and
abiding impression that Latin has retained the function of being the
language of great epitaphs and of great inscriptions in modern times.
Virgil too possessed this gift of vividly realising the objects which
interested him; and his singularly receptive nature enabled him to feel a
much larger number of interests than the other poets of his country. What
his speculative system was to Lucretius in its power of concentrating on
itself all his capacity of feeling; what ‘Lesbia’ and ‘Sirmio’ and the few
objects associated with the happiness and pain of his life were to
Catullus; what the valley in the Sabine hills was to Horace(136); what
Cynthia in life and death was to Propertius; what the remembrance of past
joy in the midst of sorrow was to Ovid; that the thought of Rome and the
memories associated with it, the charm of the land and air of Italy, the
strength and sanctity of human affection, the mystery of the unseen world,
were to Virgil. The necessities of his art require him to introduce into
his poem materials which touch his own nature less deeply, and which come
to him through the reflex action of literary association; and these,
though he always treats them gracefully, he does not invest with the same
sense of reality. But when his imagination is moved by the thought of
Rome, of Italy, of a remote antiquity, of human affection, of the unseen
world, then his art becomes truly and vividly creative. The depth of
feeling with which these things affect him reveals itself in the blended
majesty and sweetness, the tenderness and pathos of his tones,
occasionally in some more solemn cadence and a kind of mystic yearning.
If a return to the high admiration once felt for Virgil involved any
detraction from the high admiration with which the great poets of Greece
and of the modern world are regarded, anything like his claims to his old
rank would generally be set aside. If for no other reason, yet because
they have more in common with the general ideas and movement of the modern
world, these last-named poets have a stronger hold on students of
literature in the present day. But, happily, the ‘sacrum litterarum
studium’—to use a phrase of Macrobius—the religion of the world of
letters, is not a jealous or intolerant faith. The object of that religion
is to keep alive the sentiment of reverence for every kind of excellence
which has appeared in the literature of the world. That Virgil was once
the object of the greatest reverence is a reason for not lightly putting
his claims aside now. In our study of the great writers of old, it is well
to realise the true lesson taught in the sad beauty of the lines,—
Οὐχ ἁμὶν τὰ καλὰ πράτοις καλὰ φαίνεται εἶμεν
οἳ θνατοὶ πελόμεσθα τὸ δ’ αὔριον οὐκ ἐσορῶμες(137).
The course of time brings with it losses as well as gains in sensibility.
Though the thoughts of the Latin poet may not help us to understand the
spirit of our own era, they are a bond of union with the genius and
culture of Europe in other times. If poetry ever exercises a healing and
reconciling influence on life, the deep and tranquil charm of Virgil may
prove some antidote to the excitement, the restlessness, the unsettlement
of opinion in the present day. And as it is by the young especially that
the imaginative art of Virgil, in comparison with the imaginative art of
other great poets, is most questioned, they may be reminded that the words
of such a writer are best understood after long study and experience of
life have enabled us to feel ‘their sad earnestness and vivid
exactness(138).’ The wise and generous counsel of Burke should induce some
diffidence in their own judgment on the part of those to whom the power
and charm of this poet have been slow in revealing themselves.
‘Different from them are all the great critics. They have taught us one
essential rule. I think the excellent and philosophic artist, a true judge
as well as perfect follower of Nature, Sir Joshua Reynolds, has somewhere
applied it or something like it in his own profession. It is this, that if
ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers and
artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all
the learned had admired, not to follow our own fancies, but to study them
until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at
this union of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are
dull than that the rest of the world has been imposed on(139).’