MOTIVES, FORM, NATIONAL INTEREST, AND SOURCES OF THE GEORGICS.
I.
The appearance of the Eclogues marked Virgil out among his contemporaries
as the poet of Nature and rural life. That province was assigned to him,
as epic poetry was to Varius and tragedy to Pollio. It is to the Eclogues
only that the lines in which Horace characterises his art can with
propriety be applied. These lines were written before the appearance of
the Georgics, and probably before any considerable part of the poem had
been composed(272). The epithets which admirably characterise the
receptive attitude of Virgil’s mind in the composition of his pastoral
poems are quite inapplicable to the solid and severe workmanship and the
earnest feeling of his didactic poem. The Eclogues are the poems of youth,
and of a youth passed in study and in contact with Nature rather than with
the serious interests of life. Though Virgil indicates in them the
ambition which was moving him to vaster undertakings, yet he shows at the
same time his consciousness of the comparative triviality of his art. The
class of poem to which the word _ludere_ is applied was, even when not of
a licentious character, regarded by the more serious minds of Rome, such
as Cicero(273) for instance, with a certain degree of contempt, as being
among the ‘leviora studia,’ partaking more of the ‘Graeca levitas’ than of
the ‘Roman gravitas(274).’ The genuine Roman spirit demanded of its
highest literature, as of its native architecture, that it should either
have some direct practical use, or contribute in some way to enhance the
sense of national greatness.
The literary impulse directing Virgil to the composition of the Georgics
was probably the wish to be the Hesiod, as he had already been the
Theocritus, of Rome. The poets of the Augustan Age selected some Greek
prototype whose manner they professed to reproduce and make the vehicle
for the expression of their own thought and experience. Thus Horace chose
Alcaeus, Propertius chose Callimachus as his model. Virgil assigns to
Pollio the praise of alone composing poems ‘worthy of the buskin of
Sophocles.’ In the Georgics he professes to find his own prototype in
Hesiod:—
Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen.
Propertius also recognises him as the disciple of the sage of Ascra:—
Tu canis Ascraei veteris praecepta poetae,
Quo seges in campo, quo viret uva iugo(275).
Though Hesiod can scarcely have taken the highest rank as a poet, yet a
peculiar reverence attached to his name from his great antiquity, and from
the ethical and theological spirit of his writings. As Virgil chose the
mould of Theocritus into which to cast the lighter feelings and fancies of
his youth, he naturally turned to ‘The Works and Days of Hesiod’ as a more
suitable model for a poem on rural life, undertaken with a more serious
purpose, and demanding a severer treatment.
The change in Virgil’s life between the composition of the Eclogues and
the Georgics had however much more influence in determining the difference
in the character of the two poems, than the mere artistic desire to enter
on a new path of poetry. During the composition of the earlier poems
Virgil was living in a remote district of Italy, associating with the
country-people or with a few young poets like himself, and coming in
contact with the great world of action and national interests only through
the medium of his intercourse with the temporary governors of the
province. Rome and its ruler and the powerful stream of events in which
his own fortunes were finally absorbed affect his imagination as they
might do that of one who heard of them from a distance, but who in his
ordinary thoughts and sympathies was living quite apart from them;
Urbem quam dicunt Romam Meliboee putavi
Stultus ego huic nostrae similem(276).
But before undertaking the task of writing the Georgics he had become an
honoured member of the circle of Maecenas, the intimate friend of Varius
and of Horace (who himself owed his introduction to that circle to the
kindly offices of the two older poets) and of others distinguished in
literature and public affairs. He had lived for a time near the centre of
the world’s movement, in close relations to the minds by which that
movement was directed. As the most genuine of his Eclogues had been
inspired by his personal share in the calamities of his country, it was
natural that he should, now when his own fortunes were restored through
the favour of those at the head of affairs, feel a stronger and more
disinterested sympathy with the public condition, at a crisis to which no
one capable of understanding its gravity could feel indifferent. It was
natural that his new relations and the impulse of the new ideas which came
to him through them should move him to undertake some work of art more
suited to his maturer faculty, his graver temperament, and the firmer
fibre of his genius. Nor is there any difficulty in believing that
Maecenas may have had some influence in determining him to the choice of a
subject which enabled him to range over the whole of that field of which
he had already appropriated a part, which would afford scope to the
literary ambition urging him to write a poem on a greater scale and of
more enduring substance, and which, at the same time, might serve
indirectly to advance the policy of reconciliation and national and social
reorganisation which Caesar and his minister were anxious to promote.
Among ‘the ancient arts by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy
had waxed great,’ none had fallen more into abeyance, through the
insecurity of the times, than the cultivation of the land. The restoration
of the old ‘Coloni’ of Italy and the revival of the great forms of
national industry, associated with the older and happier memories of Rome,
had been a leading feature in the policy of the great popular leaders from
the Gracchi down to Julius Caesar. Among the completed glories of the
Augustan Age, Horace, some twenty years later, specially notes the
restoration of security and abundance to the land:—
Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat,
Nutrit rura Ceres almaque faustitas(277),
and in the same Ode:—
Condit quisque diem collibus in suis,
Et vitem viduas ducit ad arbores(278).
And in the brief summing up of the whole glories of the Augustan reign
contained in his latest Ode he begins with the words,—
Tua, Caesar, aetas
Fruges et agris rettulit uberes(279).
All Virgil’s early associations and sympathies would lead him to identify
himself with this object and with the interests and happiness of such
representatives of the old rural life of Italy as might still be found, or
might arise again under a secure administration. In proposing to himself
some serious aim for the exercise of his poetic gift, it was natural that
he should have fixed on that of representing this life in such a way as to
create an aspiration for it, and to secure for it the sympathy of the
world. The language in which he speaks of the poem as a task imposed on
him by Maecenas need not be taken literally: but it is no detraction from
Virgil’s originality to suppose that he, like Horace, was encouraged by
the minister to devote his genius to a purpose which would appeal equally
to the sympathies of the statesman and of the poet. The testimony of
Virgil’s biographer on this subject, which may probably be traced to the
original testimony of Melissus, the freedman of Maecenas, is neither to be
disregarded nor unduly pressed, any more than the language in which Virgil
himself makes acknowledgment of his indebtedness. It is impossible to say
what chance seed of casual conversation may have been the original germ of
what ultimately became so large and goodly a creation. If, in the
composition of the Georgics, Virgil employed his art as an instrument of
government, we cannot doubt that he did so not only because he recognised
in the subject of the poem one suited to his own genius, but because his
past life and early associations brought home to him the desolation caused
in the rural districts by the Civil Wars, the moral worth of that old
class of husbandmen who had suffered from them, and the public loss
arising from the diminution in their number and influence. To idealise the
life of that class by describing, with realistic fidelity and in the
language of purest poetry, the annual round of labour in which it was
passed; to suggest the ever-present charm arising from the intimate
contact with the manifold processes and aspects of Nature into which man
is brought in this life of labour; to contrast the simplicity and sanctity
of such life with the luxury and lawless passions of the great world; and
to associate this ideal with the varied beauty of Italy and the historic
memories of Rome, were objects worthy of one who aspired to fulfil the
office of a national poet. It is no detraction from the originality of his
idea to suppose that some such suggestion as that attributed to Maecenas
gave the original impulse to the poem. Not only the art, genius, and
learning, but the religious faith and feeling, the moral and national
sympathies, which give to it its peculiar meaning and value, are all the
poet’s own. His strong feeling for his subject was as little capable of
being communicated from without, as the genius with which he adorns
it(280).
With such feelings as those which were moving the imagination of Virgil, a
modern poet might have shaped his subject into the form of a poetic idyl,
in which the joys and sorrows of men and women living during this national
crisis might have been represented in union with the varied aspects of the
scenery and the chief modes of rural industry in Italy. Such a form of art
would have enabled the poet to add the interest of individual character
and action to his abstract delineation of the ‘acer rusticus’ or the ‘duri
agrestes’ engaged in a hard struggle with the forces of Nature. And one or
two passages, containing some sketch drawn directly from peasant life, as
for instance i. 291–296,
Et quidam seros hiberni ad luminis ignes, etc.,
and iv. 125–146,
Namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis, etc.,
make us regret that the conditions of his art, as conceived by him, did
not encourage him to blend something more of idyllic representation with
the didactic and descriptive treatment of his subject. But the idyl which
treats the incidents of human life in the form either of a continuous poem
or of a tale in prose was unknown to the early art of Greece; and Roman
imagination was incapable of inventing a perfectly new mould into which to
cast its poetic fancies and feelings. Nor is it probable that a poem so
truly representative of Italy in all its aspects could have been produced
in the form of an idyl, of which the interest would have been concentrated
on some family or group of personages.
II.
There was only one form of literary art known to the Greeks or Romans of
the Augustan Age which was at all suitable for the treatment on a large
scale of such a subject as that which now filled the mind of Virgil. Next
after the epic poem of heroic action, the didactic epos was regarded at
Rome as the most serious and elaborate form of poetic art. It was more
suited than any other form to the Roman mind. It is the only form in which
the genius of Rome has produced master-pieces superior not only to
anything of the kind produced by Greece but to all similar attempts in
modern times. As Roman invention, stimulated by the practical sense of
utility, by the passion for vast and massive undertakings, and by the
strong perception of order and unity of design, devised a new kind of
architecture for the ordinary wants of life, so in accordance with the
national bent to reduce all things to rule, to impose the will of a master
on obedient subjects, to use the constructive and artistic faculties for
some practical end, if it did not create, it gave ampler compass, more
solid and massive workmanship, and the associations of great ideas to that
form of poetic art which had been the most meagre and unsubstantial of all
those invented by the genius of Greece.
Moreover, a new form, or rather a form of more ample capacity, was
required to embody the new poetical feelings and experience which now
moved the Roman and Italian mind. If less interest was felt at Rome in
following the course of individual destiny, the interest felt in
contemplating the outward aspect and secret movement of Nature was now
stronger than it had been in the great ages of Greek literature. Though
the vivid enjoyment of the outward world had unconsciously shaped the
tales of the early Greek mythology, and though this enjoyment had entered
directly, as a subordinate element, into the epic, lyric, and dramatic
poetry of Greece, and, more prominently, into the later poetry of
Alexandria, and although the phenomena and laws of Nature had aroused the
speculative curiosity of the early Greek philosophers, no poet before
Lucretius had treated of Nature, in the immensity of her range, in the
primal elements and living forces of her constitution, and, at the same
time, in her manifold aspects of beneficence and beauty, and of
destructive energy, as the subject of a great poem. The forms adopted by
the great masters of Greek poetry,—the epic, lyric, and dramatic
writers,—whose essential business it was to represent the actions and
passions of men, were inapplicable to the treatment of this new subject of
man’s environment. Lucretius accordingly had to take the outline of his
form from the early physiological writers, whom the Greeks scarcely ranked
among their poets at all, and who, though animated by the speculative
passion to penetrate to the secret of Nature, were not specially
interested in her aspects of beauty or power, or in her relation to the
life of man. If he cannot claim the title of an inventor in art, yet by
adding volume and majesty to the rudimentary type of these early writers,
he gave to the ancient world the unique specimen of a great philosophical
poem.
So too Virgil, penetrated with the feeling of Nature in her relation to
human wants and enjoyment, and desirous to give an adequate expression to
this feeling, could derive no guidance from the nobler genius of Greece.
To find a suitable vehicle, he had to turn to the earliest and latest
periods of her literature. The didactic, as distinct from the philosophic
or contemplative poem, was the invention of a time prior to the existence
of prose composition. It seems to have arisen out of the impulse to convey
instruction and advice on the management of life generally, and especially
on the best means of securing a livelihood from the cultivation of the
soil. The use of the language of poetry for a purpose essentially
practical and prosaic was justified, in that primitive time, not only by
the absence of any other organ of literary expression, but also by the
fact that, in such a time, all literary effort was the result of animated
feeling, and that the most common aspects of Nature, such as the changes
of the seasons or of night and day, and what seem now the most familiar
occupations of life, were apprehended by the lively mind of the Greek with
a fresh sense of wonder, which use deadens in eras of more advanced
civilisation. But while this sense of wonder imparts a poetical colouring
to the language of early didactic poetry, and while sufficient harmony was
secured for it by the training of the ear during centuries of epic song,
the form and structure of this kind of art was, as compared with the other
forms of Greek poetry, essentially rudimentary. The sole specimen which
has reached our times appears in the form of a personal address, treating
of a number of subjects not closely connected with one another,
interspersed with various episodes, and producing the impression of a
connected whole solely through the vivid personality of the writer.
Didactic poetry was absolutely rejected in the maturity of Greek genius,
after the rise of a prose literature had marked off clearly the separate
provinces of prose and poetry, and after Greek taste had become more
exacting in its demand of unity of impression and symmetry of form in
every work of art. It was revived again in the Alexandrian epoch, when the
creative impulse was lost, and life and its interests had become tamer,
while at the same time knowledge had greatly increased, and a kind of
literary dilettanteism was one of the chief elements in refined enjoyment.
By the Alexandrine writers the irregular and desultory treatment of Hesiod
was abandoned. The didactic poem was treated by them as one of the
recognised branches of poetical art. It still retained the general
character of a personal address, which accident may have first suggested
to Hesiod, and which either his example or their own taste had imposed on
the early philosophic poets. The Alexandrine type of poem differed from
that of Hesiod by professing to convey systematic instruction on some
definite branch of knowledge, instead of offering practical directions on
the best method of carrying on some occupation, combined with a medley of
precepts, moral, religious, and ceremonial. The change may be compared to
that which the Roman satire underwent, from the inartistic medley of
Ennius and Lucilius to the systematic treatment of some special subject in
the satire of Persius and Juvenal. The primary aim of such writers as
Aratus and Nicander was not to communicate ideas capable of affecting the
imagination, but to satisfy intellectual curiosity by communicating
interesting information. So soon as this information ceased to be
interesting, the value of their work was gone. Thus although accident has
handed down several specimens of the Alexandrine type of didactic poetry,
their chief literary use is to enable us, by contrast, better to
appreciate the genius which, by interfusing with the materials used by
them other elements deeply affecting the heart, the imagination, and the
moral sympathies, has given the world, instead of the temporary gift of a
little useful information, the κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί which it possesses in the
Georgics.
In that poem Virgil combines something of the spirit of the older or
primitive type of didactic poetry with the systematic treatment of their
subject employed by the Alexandrine Metaphrastae. He retains the old form
of a personal address, not only in the dedication of the poem to Maecenas,
but in the manner in which he inculcates his precepts on the husbandman,
or indicates what he himself would do in particular circumstances(281).
Yet he bears more resemblance to the poets of Alexandria in his systematic
treatment and arrangement of his materials. He aims, like them, at
communicating a large body of unfamiliar knowledge, as well as conveying
practical precepts founded on experience. By combining these two aims, but
much more by making the aims of conveying precept and instruction
altogether subsidiary to that of moving the imagination and the
affections, Virgil, if he has not created a new type of didactic poetry,
has at least produced almost the only specimen of it which the world cares
to read. He is apparently conscious of the difficulty of imparting to a
poem of this type a continuous poetical charm; as Lucretius, with more
reason, is conscious of the difficulty of securing a sustained poetical
interest for his argumentative processes and his investigations into the
first principles of things. Virgil’s difficulty is to maintain his subject
on the level of poetical feeling, while at the same time adhering to the
necessities of practical instruction. And this difficulty attaches to
every kind of didactic poetry. He had to associate with a poetic charm,
not only the fair results of the husbandman’s labour, the ‘heavy harvests
and the Massic juice of the vine,’ but the processes and mechanical
appliances through which these fair results were obtained. Although his
idea of his art did not demand an exhaustive treatment of all the
operations of rural industry, such as was demanded of the prose writers on
the subject, yet it did demand that, in making his selection, he should
regard the importance of each topic in connexion with the work of the farm
as well as its adaptation to poetic treatment. It cannot be denied that
this necessary infusion of prosaic matter deprives even the most perfect
specimen of didactic poetry of that purity of imaginative interest which
pervades the masterpieces of epic, lyrical, and dramatic genius: but it
is, on the other hand, a great triumph of art to have redeemed so much as
Virgil has done from the homely realities of life into the more sacred
ground of poetry, and that without sacrifice either of the truth of fact
or of the dignity and sobriety of expression.
III.
While the title ‘Georgica’ reminds us that the form of the poem, like the
form of the ‘Bucolica’ and the ‘Aeneis,’ was derived from the Greeks, the
subject of which it treats was one of peculiarly national interest. As the
Aeneid may be said to be inspired by the idea of Rome and her destiny, and
as the practical purpose of that poem was to confirm the faith of the
Romans in their Empire and in the ruler in whom that Empire was vested, so
the Georgics may be said to be inspired by the idea of Italy; and the true
aim of the poem was to revive and extend the love of the land, and to
restore the fading ideal of a life of virtue and happiness, passed in the
labours of a country life. But while much of the materials and of the
workmanship of the Aeneid is originally due to Greek invention, the
general substance of the Georgics and the most essentially poetical
passages are of native origin.
The chief modes of rural industry treated in the various books are those
which flourished in Italy,—the tillage of the land for various crops, the
cultivation of the vine and the olive, the breeding and rearing of cattle,
sheep, and horses, and the tending of bees. It is noticed by Servius that
the agricultural precepts of the poem apply only to Italy and not to other
lands: ‘Sane agriculturae huius praecepta non ad omnes pertinent terras,
sed ad solum situm Italiae.’ The frequent references to the products of
other lands serve to suggest by contrast the superiority of Italy in those
which are the special subject of the poem and which are most essential to
human well-being. Cato also is represented by Cicero(282) as resting the
charm of a country life in the contemplation of the same operations of
Nature as those indicated in the opening lines of the Georgics:—
Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram
Vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vites
Conveniat(283),—
The number of Roman writers who treated in prose of this subject, both
before and after Virgil, testifies further to the strong national interest
attaching to it. Among these writers, Varro, the immediate predecessor of
Virgil, associates the subject directly with the pride which the Romans
felt in their country. He introduces the speakers in his Dialogue as
holding their conversation in the Temple of Tellus, and examining a map or
painting of Italy on the wall. One of the speakers addresses the others in
these words, ‘You who have travelled over many lands, have you ever seen
any more richly cultivated than Italy? I, indeed, have never seen any so
richly cultivated.’ He especially characterises the excellence of its
corn-crops, its vines, olives, and fruit-trees: ‘What spelt shall I
compare to the Campanian? what wheat to the Apulian? what wine to the
Falernian? what oil to that of Venafrum? is not Italy planted with trees,
so that the whole of it seems an orchard(284)?’ Other authors, Virgil
himself among them(285), and Columella in the Introduction to his
treatise(286), testify to the pride which the Italians took in their breed
of horses and herds of cattle. And though the Italian bees and their
product were not so famous in poetry as the bees of Hymettus and ‘the
honey of Hybla,’ yet Horace speaks of the country near Tarentum as one
‘where the honey yields not to the honey of Hymettus;’ and in another Ode,
in which he contrasts his own moderate estate with the resources of richer
men, he mentions Calabrian honey along with the wine of Formiae and the
fleeces of Gallic pastures among the chief sources of wealth:—
Quanquam nec Calabrae mella ferunt apes
Nec Laestrygonia Bacchus in amphora
Languescit mihi, nec pinguia Gallicis
Crescunt vellera pascuis(287).
This branch of his subject moreover enables Virgil to celebrate the floral
beauties of Italy, and to exhibit on a small scale a picture of a
community at once warlike, politic, and industrious, such as had been
realised on the soil of Italy, and especially in the old Roman
Commonwealth, more completely than among any other people.
The subject was moreover intimately associated with the national history.
Several of the early legends, such as those of Cincinnatus, and, in more
historical times, of Atilius Regulus and Curius Dentatus, attest the
prominence which agriculture enjoyed among the pursuits of the foremost
men in the Republic. The surnames of many noble families, patrician and
plebeian, such as the Lentuli, Stolones, Bubulci, Pisones, Dolabellae, and
the name of the great Fabian Gens, are connected etymologically with
agricultural occupations, products, or implements, and afford evidence of
a time when the men who filled the great offices of the State lived on
their own lands(288), and were known for the success with which they
improved their farms. The passion to possess and subdue the land was, in
the early history of the Republic, the main motive power both of the
political and military history of Rome. Even down to the establishment of
the Empire there was no question which more divided the two great parties
in the State than that of the Agrarian laws. And though, after the
conquest of Italy, Roman wars were fought for dominion rather than for new
territory, yet the hope of owning land, if not on Italian yet on some
foreign soil, which he should hold by his sword as well as cultivate by
his plough, supported the Roman soldier, even under the Empire, through
the long years of his service. The Roman ‘colonies,’ the origin of so many
famous European cities, were settlements of ‘Coloni’ or cultivators of the
soil.
Thus in the selection of his subject Virgil appealed to old national
associations and living tastes in a way in which no Greek poet could have
done in choosing any mode of practical industry for poetic treatment. Even
the details of direct instruction would attract a Roman reader by
reminding him of labours which he may often have watched and perhaps have
shared. Though Virgil found new sources of attraction by references to
Greek mythology and science, and though he availed himself of the diction
of Greek poets much inferior to himself in their perception of beauty and
their power over language, yet his materials are mainly drawn either from
personal observation, or from Italian writers who had put on record the
results of what they had seen and done. There is a thoroughly Roman
character in the technical execution of the poem, in the command over
details, in the power of orderly arrangement with a view to convenience
rather than logical symmetry, and in the combined sobriety and dignity of
the workmanship. But it is in the longer episodes, in which the deeper
meaning of the poem is most brought out, that the intimate connexion
between the various topics treated in it and the national character and
fortunes becomes most apparent. There is indeed one marked exception to
the maintenance of this unity of impression. The long episode in Book iv,
from line 315 to 558, has no national significance. And this is an
undoubted blot on the artistic perfection of the work. This episode not
only adds nothing to its representative character, but it suggests fancies
and associations utterly alien from the Italy of the Augustan Age. The
space given to such a theme is opposed to the truer taste of the poet,
expressed in such lines as these—
Non hic te carmine ficto
Atque per ambages et longa exorsa tenebo.
and
Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmina mentes,
Omnia iam volgata(289).
But it is not the judgement of the poet, but the despotic will of the
Emperor, that is responsible for this imperfection. The fourth Book
originally ended with an episode which afforded scope for the expression
of personal feeling, for awakening an interest in that land which was now
of vast importance to the State, and which affected the imagination of
cultivated Romans as it does that of cultivated men in modern times(290),
and for illustrating the national greatness and the recent history of
Rome. In the first edition the mention of Egypt at line 287 had led Virgil
to celebrate the administration of that province under his early friend
Cornelius Gallus. When Gallus fell into disgrace and was forced to commit
suicide in 26 B.C., Virgil was required to re-edit the poem with a new
concluding episode(291). The subject treated in the earlier edition of the
poem would have enabled Virgil to give renewed expression to his
admiration and affection for the Gallus of the Eclogues, to tell the tale
of the downfall of Cleopatra, and to magnify the greatness of Rome in the
conquest and government of her provinces. The episode as it now stands is
a finished piece of metrical execution; it illustrates the attraction
which the Greek mythological stories had for educated Romans; it is
expressed in those tones of tender pathos of which Virgil was a master;
but it is at the same time a standing proof of the malign influence which
the Imperial despotism already exercised on the spontaneous inspiration of
genius, as well as on all sincere expression of feeling.
IV.
If the idea of the poem and of the national interests associated with it
arose in Virgil’s mind during his life in Rome, it was in his retirement
in Campania that he prepared himself for and executed his task. Like the
Aeneid it was a work of slow growth, the result of careful study and
meditation. Besides the great change of the concluding episode, there are
some slight indications that the poem was retouched in later editions; and
perhaps a very few lines added to the original work may have been either
left finally unadjusted to their proper place, or may have been transposed
in the copying of the manuscript(292). Although regard for his art was a
more prominent consideration in the mind of Virgil than of Lucretius, yet
he did not, any more than his predecessor, wish to separate the office of
a teacher from that of a poet. How far the experience of his early years
in the farm in the district of Andes or of his later residence on his land
near Nola may have contributed to his knowledge of his subject, we have no
means of knowing; but probably the delicacy of his health as well as his
devotion to study may have limited his experience to the observation of
the labours of others. But the power of vividly realising and enjoying the
familiar sights and work of the farm,—the life which he gives to the
notices of seed-time and harvest, of the growth of trees and ripening of
fruits, of the habits of flocks, herds, and bees, etc.,—the deep love for
his subject in all its details—
Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore(293)—
were gifts which could not come from any study of books. The poetry of
manhood is, more often perhaps than we know, the conscious reproduction of
the unconscious impressions of early years, received in a susceptible and
retentive mind. Virgil, in common with all great poets, retained through
life the ‘child’s heart within the man’s.’ Through this geniality of
nature he was able—
angustis hunc addere rebus honorem(294)—
to glorify trite and familiar things by the light reflected from the
healthy memories and the idealising fancies of boyhood and early youth.
But while his feeling is all his own,—the happy survival probably of the
childhood and youth passed in his home in the district of Andes,—he
largely avails himself of the observation, the thought, and the language
of earlier writers, both Greek and Roman. His poem is eminently a work of
learning as well as of native feeling. He combines in its varied and firm
texture the homely wisdom embodied in the precepts and proverbs of Italian
peasants (‘veterum praecepta’),—the quaint and oracular dicta of
Hesiod,—the scientific knowledge and mythological lore of Alexandrine
writers,—the philosophic and imaginative conceptions of Lucretius,—with
the knowledge of natural history contained in the treatises of Aristotle
and Theophrastus, and the systematic practical directions of the old prose
writers on rural economy, such as the Carthaginian Mago(295), whose work
had been translated into Latin,—Democritus and Xenophon among Greek prose
writers,—Cato, the two Sasernae, Licinius Stolo, Tremellius, and Varro
among Latin authors. The purely practical precepts of the Georgics were
apparently selected and condensed from these writers(296). But no literary
inspiration or ideas were likely to have come from any of these last-named
authors, unless the Invocation in the first Book may have been suggested
by the example of Varro, who begins his treatise with an invocation to the
XII Di consentes. The proverbial sayings or rustic songs embodying the
traditional peasant lore, such as the ‘Quid vesper serus vehit?’ and the
‘hiberno pulvere, verno luto, grandia farra, Camille, metes(297),’ which
add an antique and homely charm to the poem, may have become known to
Virgil from the book of the Sasernae, who are quoted by Varro as
authorities for many of the old charms used by the primitive husbandmen,
such as ‘Terra pestem teneto, salus hic maneto,’ which is to be repeated
‘ter novies.’ Servius notes that the words ‘sulco attritus splendescere
vomer’ recall an old saying of Cato, ‘Vir bonus est, mi fili, colendi
peritus, cuius ferramenta splendent(298).’ The notices of ceremonial
observances, such as the account of the Ambarvalia, and the enumeration of
things that might lawfully be done on holy days(299), were probably
derived from the pontifical books and the sacred books of the other
priestly colleges, of which Virgil made large use also in the Aeneid. In
all the writers on practical farming, from Cato to Varro, he found that
strong appreciation of the supreme worth of rural industry and that strong
interest in its processes and results which justified him in identifying
his subject with the thought of the national life.
Among the sources of literary inspiration from which Virgil drew in the
Georgics, the oldest, and not the least abundant, was the ‘Works and Days’
of Hesiod. Yet a comparison of the two poems shows immediately that the
Georgics do not, either in form or substance, stand in that close relation
to their prototype, in which the Eclogues on the one hand, and the Aeneid
on the other, stand to the idyls of Theocritus and to the epic poems of
Homer. The immediate influence of Hesiod is most apparent in the first
Book of the Georgics, in which the subject is treated in connexion with
theological ideas; while in the second Book and in the later Books, in
which the philosophical conception of Nature, though in subordination to
the conception of a supreme Spiritual power, becomes more prominent, the
spirit of Hesiod gives place to the spirit of Lucretius. There is,
however, a real affinity between the primitive piety of the old Boeotian
bard and the attitude in which Virgil contemplated the world, though the
faith of Virgil has become more rational under the speculative teaching
and enquiry which had taken the place of earlier modes of thought among
the Greeks. Virgil is ever seeking to produce a poetical reconcilement
between primitive tradition and more enlightened views both of moral and
physical truth. Thus he introduces the old fable of the creation of the
present race of men in immediate juxtaposition with the assertion of the
‘laws and eternal conditions imposed by Nature on certain places.’ He
accepts the belief in a Golden Age and in the blight which fell on the
world under the dispensation of Jove; but he regards this blight as sent,
not in anger, but as a discipline and incentive to exertion. He describes
the natural progress of the various arts of life under this stimulus, but
still leaves room for divine intervention in the more important
discoveries:—
Prima Ceres ferro mortalis vertere terram
Instituit(300).
Again, the teleological view of Nature, which appears in the Georgics in
antagonism to the teaching of Lucretius, in such passages as i. 231—
Idcirco certis dimensum partibus orbem, etc.,
and i. 351—
Atque haec ut certis possemus discere signis—
is in the spirit of Hesiod, though in advance of his conception of Zeus,
who appears in him not as a beneficent Providence, but rather as a jealous
task-master. So too the constant inculcation of prayer and ceremonial
observances—
Umida solstitia atque hiemes orate serenas,
Agricolae—
Votisque vocaveris imbrem—
In primis venerare deos, atque annua magnae
Sacra refer Cereri(301)—
the specification of lucky and unlucky days, the reference to the old
Greek fables of Coeus, Iapetus, and Typhoeus, are, though not directly
imitated from Hesiod, yet conceived in his spirit.
But, besides appealing to primitive religious and mythological
associations, the poet of Andes aims at reproducing some flavour of the
sentiment of a remote antiquity and of the quaint _naïveté_ characteristic
of the sage of Ascra. The very use of such an expression as ‘_quo sidere_
terram Vertere,’—the thought of the husbandman’s labours as being
regulated not by the Roman Calendar(302), with its prosaic divisions of
the month by kalends, nones, and ides, but by the rise and setting of the
constellations,—the picturesque signs of the change of the seasons, as in
the line
Candida venit avis longis invisa colubris(303),—
the use of such quaint expressions as ‘nudus ara, sere nudus,’—seem all
intended to remind the reader that the subject is one ‘antiquae laudis et
artis,’—the most ancient and unchanging of the great arts of life,—that
too in which man’s dependence on Nature and the Spiritual power above
Nature is most vividly realised(304). This infusion into the practical
realities and prosaic details of his subject of something of the wonder
and ‘freshness of the early world’ Virgil derives from the relation which
he establishes between himself and his Boeotian prototype.
Though in spirit and poetical inspiration Virgil’s debt to Hesiod is
greater, yet the Georgics present more direct traces of imitation of the
Alexandrine poets. It is in accordance with the learning and science of
Alexandria that the subject is illustrated by local epithets, such as
‘Strymoniae grues,’ by reference to the products of distant lands—
nonne vides croceos ut Tmolus odores, etc.,—
by recondite mythological and astronomical allusions and by the
substitution of the names of various deities, such as Liber and Ceres, for
the natural products which were supposed to be their gifts. But to several
special authors his debt is more direct. Thus the passage, i. 233—
Quinque tenent caelum zonae, etc.,—
is copied from Eratosthenes. The account of the signs of the weather, from
i. 355 to 465, is taken from the Διοσημεῖα of Aratus, a work so popular at
Rome, that it was not only imitated and almost incorporated in his poem by
Virgil, but had been translated by Cicero in his youth, and was
subsequently translated by Germanicus. Again, the description at iii. 425,
of the dangerous serpent that haunts the Calabrian pastures, is closely
imitated from the extant Θηριακά of Nicander; nor can we doubt that there
were in the fourth Book imitations of the lost Μελισσουργικά of the same
author, who probably anticipated Virgil in the use which he made of
Aristotle’s observations on the habits of bees.
A comparison of the passages in the Georgics with those of which they are
imitations produces the impression not only of Virgil’s immense
superiority as a poet over the Alexandrine Metaphrastae, but of the
immense superiority of the Latin hexameter, as an organ for expressing the
beauty and power of Nature, over the exotic jargon and unmusical jingle
which those writers compounded out of their epic studies and their
scientific nomenclature. To take one or two instances of Virgil’s
imitations from these writers:—in the passage Georg. i. 233–246, Virgil
reproduces very closely scientific statements of Eratosthenes and Aratus.
But of the five lines which follow—
Illic, ut perhibent, aut intempesta silet nox
Semper et obtenta densentur nocte tenebrae,
Aut redit a nobis Aurora diemque reducit;
Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens adflavit anhelis,
Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper(305),—
where through the evanescent mists of early science we discern the
enduring substance of poetic creation, there is no trace in either of the
Greek writers. Again, in the passage at i. 410, imitated from Aratus—
Tum liquidas corvi presso ter gutture voces, etc.,—
the mere natural phenomenon is given in greater detail in the original
passage; but the lines which communicate to it the touch of tender
sympathy—
iuvat imbribus actis
Progeniem parvam dulcesque revisere nidos(306),—
and the following lines—
Haud equidem credo quia sit divinitus illis, etc.,—
which elevate the whole description into the higher air of imaginative
contemplation, are entirely Virgil’s own. So too in nearly all the
indications of stormy or bright weather, whether taken from natural
phenomena or the habits of animals, we find in the Latin poet some
suggestion of poetical analogy giving new life to the thing described, or
some touch of tender feeling, of which his original supplied him with no
hint whatever.
For the true poetry of the Georgics—the colour of human and sympathetic
feeling, the atmosphere of contemplative ideas, the ethical and national
associations with which the subject is surrounded—Virgil owes very little
to Greek inspiration. Much of this poetry is the mode in which his own
spirit interprets Nature and human life. But much also is due to the
genius of his great predecessor in Latin poetry, who, though ‘unnamed,’ is
‘not unowned,’ but felt to be a pervading presence in the thought and
feeling, the creative diction and the grander cadences, of the Georgics.
Yet this influence is perhaps as potent in the antagonism as in the
sympathy which it evokes. Virgil is no mere disciple of Lucretius, either
as regards his philosophy or his art. Though his imagination pays homage
to that of the older poet; though he acknowledges his contemplative
elevation; though he has a strong affinity with the deep humanity of his
nature; yet in his profoundest convictions and aspirations he proclaims
his revolt from him. The key to the secret of much in the composition of
the Georgics,—of the condition of mind out of which this work of genius
assumed the shape it has as a great literary possession,—is to be sought
in the collision between the force of thought, imagination, and feeling
which the active spirit of Lucretius stored up and left behind him as his
legacy to the world, and the nature, strongly susceptible indeed, but, at
the same time, firm in its own convictions, which first felt the shock of
that force, in its attractive, stimulating, and repellent power.