THE GEORGICS AS THE REPRESENTATIVE POEM OF ITALY.
The consideration of the motives which influenced Virgil to undertake the
composition of the Georgics, of the form of art adopted by him, of the
national interest attaching to his subject, of the materials used by him
and the sources from which he derived them, of the author who most
influenced him in speculative idea and in the general manner of treating
his subject, leads to the conclusion that, in its essential
characteristics, the poem is a genuine work of Italian art and
inspiration. If the original motive influencing him was the ambition to
treat of rural life in the serious spirit of Hesiod, as he had done in the
lighter vein of Theocritus, that motive was soon lost in the strong
impulse to invest with charm and dignity the kind of life in which the
Italian mind placed its ideal of worth and happiness. By thus identifying
himself with a great national object Virgil raised himself to a higher
level of art than that attained by poets whose interests are purely
personal and literary.
Next to satire, there was no form of poetry which had more of a Roman
character than didactic poetry. By becoming a province of Roman art, this
form acquired all its dignity and capacity of greatness. And though the
Georgics, being a work of Italian culture as well as of Italian
inspiration, could not escape some relation, not in form only but in
materials and mode of expression, to Greek originals, there is no great
work of Latin genius, except the Satires and Epistles of Horace, in which
the debt thus incurred is so small. And not only is the debt small in
quantity, but it is incurred to authors much inferior to Virgil in
creative power and poetical feeling. In using borrowed materials he makes
the mind of Greece tributary to his own national design. But his most
valuable materials are derived either from personal observation, or from
Latin authors who had put on record the results of their observation: and
his largest debt, in imaginative feeling and conception, is incurred not
to any Greek author, but to the most powerful and original of Roman poets
and thinkers. The speculative idea, which gives something of philosophical
consistency to the poem, was, if not one of pure Italian conception, yet
made more truly real and vital through the experience of the force and
endurance exercised by the strong men of Italy in subduing the earth to
their will, and in constructing their great material works (‘operum
laborem’), such as their roads, baths, aqueducts, harbours, encampments,
and great draining works, by which they provided the comforts of life
(‘commoda vitae’) and defended themselves against their enemies or the
maligner influence of the elements.
The language of Virgil himself and the testimony of ancient commentators
confirm the impression, that the object of which he was most distinctly
conscious in the composition of the poem was the ‘glorification of
Italy,’—of the land itself in its fertility and beauty, and of the life
most congenial to Italian sentiment. Even to a greater extent than he may
have intended, Virgil, through the national mould in which his thought was
cast and the national colour of his sympathies, fulfils this
representative office. Where the poem seems to a modern reader to fail in
human interest, the interest which it had for the poet’s countrymen is
revived by dwelling in thought on this representative character. When the
associations appealed to are of Greek rather than of Italian origin, we
have to remember that the poem was addressed to a highly educated class of
readers, at the time when the Roman mind had been most enlarged and
enriched, but had not yet been satiated by Greek studies. Yet this kind of
appeal is quite subsidiary to that made to the native sensibilities of the
Romans. It is to commend to their love and admiration a purely Italian
ideal that Virgil employs the resources of Greek learning, as well as all
the strength and delicacy of his own genius.
A rapid review of the tastes, sympathies, and affections on the part of
his readers to which Virgil appeals, both in the body of his poem and in
its finer episodes, will show that they all contribute to produce this
representative character. Where some of the details of the poem seem to
fail in poetic interest, they still have the interest of being
characteristic of the Italian mind.
1. The poem professes to impart practical instruction on the best method
of cultivating the land, of propagating trees, of breeding cattle, horses,
etc., of profiting by the industry of bees:—
Quare agite, O, proprios generatim discite cultus,
Agricolae(401).
This is the obvious and ostensible purpose of the poem; and the truth and
accuracy of the instruction were important elements in the estimate which
the countrymen of the poet formed of its value. Columella and Pliny, while
controverting him on a few minor points(402), attest his practical
knowledge as an agriculturist and a naturalist. Similar testimony is given
by some modern writers competent to speak with authority on these
subjects(403). Neither ancient nor modern critics regard him as free from
liability to mistake, and the tendency of his mind to believe in
marvellous deviations from natural law exposed him to errors into which
less imaginative writers were not likely to fall; but the substantial
accuracy of his observations and acquired knowledge seems to be attested
both by positive and negative evidence. It is not a question as to whether
the operations described in Virgil satisfy the requirements of skilled or
even of unskilled farming in the present day, or whether he does not fall
into mistakes in natural history which a modern reader, with no scientific
knowledge of the subject, may easily detect; but whether he has adequately
represented the methods of ancient Italian agriculture, and whether he is
a trustworthy exponent of the scientific beliefs of his age, and an
accurate observer of those phenomena which were as accessible to an
ancient as to a modern enquirer. On these points he satisfied the best
critics among his countrymen. The general truth of his observation is
further attested by the survival in Southern Europe, into comparatively
recent times, of some of the processes described by him, which seem most
remote from our ordinary experience(404). It is attested also by the
accuracy of his description of the unchanging phenomena of Nature, and of
the habits of animals.
A modern reader may think the value of his poetry little, if at all
enhanced, by the rank which he may claim among the ‘scriptores rei
rusticae.’ It may seem matter for regret that so much of the faculty,
which should have given permanent delight to the world, should have been
employed in conveying temporary instruction. His very fidelity to the
office of a teacher detracts somewhat from his poetic office. Though it
satisfies our curiosity to know how the ancient Italians tilled their
lands and cultivated the vine, yet this satisfaction is quite distinct
from the joy which the poetical treatment of a poetical subject gives to
the imagination. It is not as repertories of useful information that the
great writers of Greece and Rome are to be studied. Their importance in
this way has long since been superseded. Each generation adds to the stock
of knowledge in the world, modifies the results arrived at by the
preceding generation, and dispenses with the works in which these results
have been embodied. But a work of power, stimulating moral and
intellectual feeling,—whether in the form of poem, history, speech, or
philosophic dialogue,—may acquire from long antiquity even a stronger hold
over the imagination than it originally possessed(405). In the didactic
poems of Lucretius and Virgil the information conveyed by them possesses
permanent value, in so far as it is coloured by human feeling,—in so far
as we recognise the passion or affection by which the poet was stirred in
acquiring his knowledge and in conveying it to sympathetic readers. And as
the scientific enthusiasm of Lucretius animates the driest details of his
argument, so the love entertained for his subject by Virgil,—as an
Italian, the son of a small Italian land-holder,—
Veneto rusticis parentibus nato inter silvas et frutices educto(406),—
writing for Italians, for whom every detail of farm labour had a
fascination unintelligible to us,—brightens with the gleam of human and
poetical feeling the technical teaching of the traditional precepts of
Italian husbandry. The position of a teacher assumed by him,—a position
which no great Greek or English poet could gracefully maintain,—impresses
us with the thorough adaptation of the form of the poem to the sober
practical understanding of the Italian race. Horace mentions this love of
teaching and learning as one of the notes distinguishing the Roman from
the Greek genius:—
Maiores audire, minori dicere per quae
Crescere res posset, minui damnosa libido(407).
It adds to our sense of Virgil’s thoroughness as an artist to know that he
faithfully performed the office which he undertook; and the fact of his
undertaking this office helps to bring home to us the practical,
unspeculative genius of those to whom his poem was in the first place
addressed.
2. Not only the instruction directly conveyed in the poem, but the
frequent illustrations from geography, mythology, and astronomy, have much
less meaning to us than they had to the contemporaries of the poet. Yet
they help to make us realise the relation in which the Rome and Italy of
the Augustan Age stood to the rest of the world and to the culture of the
past. By the references to the varied products of other lands we are
reminded of the active commercial intercourse between Rome and the East,—a
feature of the age of which we are also often reminded in the Odes,
Satires, and Epistles of Horace. We see how the success of the Roman arms
had made the products of the whole world—the ‘saffron dye of Tmolus,’ the
‘ivory of India,’ the ‘spices of Arabia,’ the ‘iron of the Chalybians,’
the ‘medicinal drugs of Pontus,’ the ‘brood-mares of Epirus(408)’—part of
the possessions of Rome. We are reminded too of the fact that many Romans
and Italians were settled as colonists in the provinces of the Empire, and
that Virgil had them also in view in the instruction which he
imparts(409). The frequent allusions to Greek mythology and to the
constellations, on the other hand, help to remind us that the art and
science of the past, as well as the material products of the world, had
now been diverted to the enjoyment and use of the new inheritors of
intellectual culture.
3. It was seen how assiduously Virgil, in the body of his poem, inculcates
the necessity and duty of labour. And though the ‘glorification of labour’
was found to be rather a derivative and tributary stream than the main
current of interest in the poem, yet it is impossible to doubt that to the
mind of Virgil this assiduous toil of the husbandman, on a work so
congenial and surrounded with such accessories of peaceful happiness, had
a special attraction, even independent of its results. This recognition of
the dignity of labour owes nothing to a Greek original. A life of
intellectual leisure was the ideal of the Greeks. Hesiod indeed does dwell
on the necessity of labour, as the ground both of worldly well-being and
divine approval,—and this is another point of affinity between him and
Virgil,—but the line in which he claims consideration for work,
Ἔργον δ’ οὐδὲν ὄνειδος, ἀεργίη δέ τ’ ὄνειδος(410),
is apologetic in tone; and, moreover, Hesiod can hardly be regarded as a
typical Greek. There seems to be no word in the Greek language equivalent
to the grave Roman word ‘industria.’ Perhaps it is owing to the disesteem
in which labour was held by Greek writers that industry is scarcely ranked
among virtues, nor idleness among vices, even by modern moralists. When
long after the time of Homer a new poet arose in Greece, appealing to a
great popular sentiment, it was in their passion for the great public
games that he found the point of contact with the hearts of his
countrymen. The Romans, on the other hand, show a great capacity for
labour in every field of exertion,—in war and the government of men, in
law and literature, in business transactions, in the construction of vast
works of utility, and in cultivating the land. And of these, next to war
and government, the last was most congenial to the national mind. The land
was to the Romans the chief field of their industry and the original
source of their wealth, as the sea was the scene of occupation and
adventure to the Greeks, and, through the outlet which it gave to the
results of their artistic ingenuity, the great source of their prosperity.
The Odyssey is a poem inspired, in a great degree, by the impulse which
first sent the Greek nation forth on its career of maritime and colonising
enterprise. The Georgics are inspired by that impulse which first started
the Latin race on its career of conquest, and which continued to animate
the struggle with the reluctant forces of Nature, as it had animated the
struggle with the other races of Italy for the possession of the soil.
4. Again, we find that the poem is pervaded by the poetical feeling of
Nature. And Virgil, more than any other poet, presents that aspect of
Nature in which the outward world appeared to the educated Italian mind.
The personality and individual life attributed to natural objects, such as
trees, rivers, winds, etc., belongs to a stage of conception between the
Greek anthropomorphism and the recognition by the imagination of universal
law and interdependence of phenomena. Modern poets consciously personify
natural objects with more boldness and varied sympathy than Virgil. His
conception of the life and personal attributes of natural objects appears
to be less a conscious creative effort of the imagination, than an
unconscious impression from outward things; an impression produced in a
state of passive contemplation, rather than of active adventure; and an
impression produced by qualities of a serene and tender beauty, rather
than by those of a bolder or sublimer aspect. In all these respects Virgil
represents a stage in the culture of the imagination between that of the
early Greek poets and artists, and that of the most imaginative poets and
painters of modern times. The familiar beauty of the outward world, as it
was felt by a Roman or Italian, was expressed in the Latin word ‘amoenum.’
Thus Horace describes his retreat among the Sabine hills, as not only dear
to him personally, but as beautiful in itself:—
Hae latebrae dulces, etiam, si credis, amoenae(411).
And it is to the attributes summed up in that word that Virgil imparts the
ideal life of the imagination.
But not only is the feeling of Nature in the Georgics characteristic of
the highest culture of the Italian mind, but the spectacle of Nature,—
‘The outward shows of sky and earth’
brought before us,—is that which still delights the eye and moves the
imagination in the various districts of Italy. The description of Spring
at Georg. ii. 323–345,
Ver adeo frondi nemorum, ...
... exciperet caeli indulgentia terras,
is one of which (though we can always feel its beauty) we cannot often
verify the accuracy in our more northern latitudes. It is to an Italian
spring, more than to any season in any other European country, that the
words of the third Eclogue ‘nunc formosissimus annus,’ are applicable. The
varied pastoral beauty of the long summer day described at Georg. iii.
323–338,—from the early dawn when the fields are fresh beneath the
morning-star; through the gathering warmth of the later hours, when the
groves are loud with the chirping of the grasshoppers and the herds
collect around the deep water-pools; through the burning heat of midday,
from which the shade of some huge oak or some grove of dark ilexes affords
a shelter; till the coolness of evening tempers the air, and the moon
renews with dew the dry forest-glades,—is a beauty quite distinct from the
charm of freedom and solitude,—yet not too remote from human
neighbourhood,—of the changing aspects of the sky, and of the picturesque
environment of hill, river, and moorland, which abides in the pastoral
regions of our own and other northern lands. The ‘sweet interchange of
hill and valley(412),’ mountain range and rich cultivated land, which
northern and central Italy exhibits, must have made such scenes as that
described at ii. 186–188,
Qualem saepe cava montis convalle solemus
Despicere(413), etc.,
and again the opening scene of the poem, at i. 43,
Vere novo gelidus canis cum montibus umor
Liquitur, et Zephyro putris se glaeba resolvit(414),
familiar to Roman readers. And while the ‘caeli indulgentia’
characteristic of the Italian climate is felt as a pervading genial
presence through the various books of the poem, the sudden and violent
vicissitudes to which that climate is especially liable form part of the
varied and impressive spectacle presented to us. The passage i. 316–321,
Saepe ego cum flavis ... stipulasque volantis,
records a calamity to which the labours of the Italian husbandman were
peculiarly exposed. In the description of the storm of rain, immediately
following, the words ‘collectae ex alto nubes’ remind us, like the
description of a similar storm in Lucretius (vi. 256–261), that Virgil, as
Lucretius may have done, must often have watched such a tempest gathering
over the sea that washes the Campanian shores. The inundation of the Po is
described among the omens accompanying the death of Caesar, in lines which
may have been suggested by some scene actually witnessed by the poet, and
which with vivid exactness represent for all times the destructive forces
put forth by the great river that drains the vast mountain-ranges of
Northern Italy:—
Proluit insano contorquens vertice silvas
Fluviorum rex Eridanus, camposque per omnes
Cum stabulis armenta tulit(415).
And while the general representation of Nature, in the freshness or serene
glory of her beauty and in her destructive energy, is true to that aspect
which she presents in Italian scenery, the characteristic features and
products of particular localities in the various regions of Italy are
recalled to memory with truthful effect. The love of Nature in Lucretius
appears apart from local associations. In Horace this feeling seems to
link itself to places dear to him from the memories of childhood, or from
the personal experience of later years. In Virgil the feeling is both
general as in Lucretius, and combined with attachment to or interest in
particular places as in Horace. But Virgil is able to feel enthusiasm not
only for places dear to him through personal association, but for all
which appeal to his sentiment of national pride. As was seen in the last
chapter, the episode, which perhaps more than any other brings out the
inspiring thought of the poem, is devoted to a celebration of the varied
beauties of the land; and the names of Clitumnus, of Larius, and Benacus
are still dearer to the world because they are for ever intermingled with
‘the rich Virgilian rustic measure(416).’ In the body of the poem also we
find many local references to the northern, central, and southern regions
of Italy. The light bark, hollowed out of the alder, is launched on the
rapid flood of the Po; the starwort, out of which wreaths are made to
adorn the altars of the gods, is gathered by shepherds by the winding
banks of the Mella (a river in Northern Italy mentioned also by Catullus);
the meadow-land which unfortunate Mantua lost is adduced as a type of the
best kind of pasture, and the land in the neighbourhood of Capua and the
region skirting Mount Vesuvius as that most suitable for corn-crops. We
read also of the rose-beds of Paestum,—of the olives clothing the sides of
the Samnian Taburnus,—of the woodland pastures of Sila,—of those by the
banks of the Silarus, on Alburnus green with ilexes, and by the dry
torrent-bed of the Tanager,—and of the yellow cornfields through which the
dark Galaesus flows. The Aeneid affords further testimony of the interest
which Virgil awakens in the region which forms the distant environment of
Rome. But the sentiment of the Georgics is a sentiment of peace inspired
by the land, quite different from that inspired by the Imperial City, and
from the memories of war and conquest with which the neighbourhood of Rome
is associated. And though the aspect which Nature generally presents in
the poem is that of her nobler mood, yet that air of indolent repose which
characterises her presence in the Eclogues is not altogether absent from
the severer poem. The sense of rest after toil—‘molles sub arbore
somni,’—the quiet contemplation of wide and peaceful landscapes,—‘latis
otia fundis,’—relieve the strain of strenuous labour which is enforced as
the indispensable condition of realising the glory of the land.
5. The religious and ethical thought of the poem is also in accordance
with what was happiest and best in the old Italian faith and life. The
poetical belief in many protecting agencies—
Dique deaeque omnes studium quibus arva tueri(417)—
watching over the labours of the husbandman, and present at his simple
festival and ceremonies, is in accordance with the genial character of the
rustic Paganism of Italy and with the attributes of the great gods of the
land, Faunus and Saturnus. Human life appeared to Hesiod as well as to
Virgil to be in immediate dependence on the gods. But the graver aspect of
Virgil’s faith is purer and happier than that of Hesiod; as the trust in a
just and beneficent father is purer and happier than the fear of a jealous
task-master. But on the other hand, the faith of Virgil is less noble than
that of Aeschylus and of Sophocles. It is more of a passive yielding to
the longing of the human heart and to the impulses of an aesthetic
emotion, than that union of natural piety with insight into the mystery of
life which no great poets, Pagan or Christian (unless it may be Dante),
exhibit in equal measure with the two great Athenian dramatists. In the
religious spirit of Virgil, which accepts and does not question, which
finds its resource in prayer rather than in reverent contemplation and
searching out of the ways of God, we may recognise a true note of his
nationality,—a submissive attitude in presence of the Invisible Power,
derived from the race whose custom it was to veil the head in sacrifice
and in approaching the images of their gods(418).
6. Equally true to the national character is the ethical ideal upheld in
the Georgics. The negative elements in that ideal were seen to be
exemption from the violent passions and pleasures of the world. And in
these negative elements the ideal of the Georgics coincides with that of
Lucretius. But, on the positive side, Virgil’s ideal implies the active
performance of duties to the family and to the State. One has only to
remember the low esteem in which women were held and the indifference to
family ties in the palmiest days of Athenian civilisation, or to recall
the ideal State of Plato’s imagination, to perceive how true to Italian,
and how remote from Greek sentiment, are the pictures presented in such
passages as these—
Interea dulces pendent circum oscula nati;
Casta pudicitiam servat domus—
and this—
Interea longum cantu solata laborem
Arguto coniunx percurrit pectine telas(419).
Friendship among men, and even the social friendliness which makes life
more pleasant and manners more humane, were ranked among the virtues by
Greek philosophy; and the first is treated by Aristotle, not only as a
single virtue, but as the condition under which all virtue can best be
realised: but natural affection is regarded as a mere instinct, and the
duties of family life do not fall under any of those conditions with which
ethical philosophy concerns itself. On the other hand, the legendary
history of the early Republic, and many great examples, in the midst of
the corruption of the later Republic and of the Empire, prove that the
ideal of domestic virtue and affection among the Romans was no mere
passing fancy or dream of an age of primitive innocence, but was in
harmony with the national conscience throughout the whole course of their
history.
In devotion to the good of the State no superiority can be claimed for the
Romans over the Athenians of the times of Cleisthenes, Themistocles, and
Pericles. And while each people, in its best days, was equally ready to
serve the Republic in war and by the performance of public duties, and
while the Roman perhaps more than the Athenian regarded the labour of his
hands as a service due from him(420), the Athenian freely gave the higher
energy of his genius to make the life of his fellow-citizens brighter and
nobler. And it is the peculiar glory of the Athenians of the fifth century
B.C.,—the glory claimed for them in one of the speeches attributed to
their great Statesman by their great Historian,—that they combined this
devotion to the common good with a high development of all personal
excellence. But in Athens this union of national and individual energy and
virtue was of very brief duration. On the other hand, the lasting
greatness of the Roman Commonwealth was purchased by the sacrifice of the
energies and accomplishments which add to the grace and enjoyment of
individual existence. The greatness and permanence of the race, not the
varied development of the individual, was the object aimed at and attained
in the vigorous prime of the Roman Republic(421).
If this aspect of national life is not directly brought before us by
Virgil in the Georgics, it is brought into strong light in the
representation of his mimic commonwealth—the
Mores et studia et populos et proelia(422)
of the community of bees. It scarcely needs the reminder of
ipsae regem parvosque _Quirites_
Sufficiunt(423)
to convince us that, in this representation of an industrious and warlike
community, earnest in labour from the love of the objects on which it was
bestowed and from pride in its results—
Tantus amor florum et generandi gloria mellis(424),—
resolute and unconquerable in battle, sacrificing life rather than
abandoning the post of duty, inspired with more than Oriental devotion to
their head, Virgil was teaching a lesson applicable to the Roman
Commonwealth under its new government. While labour is shown to be a
condition of individual happiness, or at least contentment, it is not in
individual happiness, but in the permanent greatness of the community that
its ultimate recompense is to be sought. Though the individual life may be
short and meagre in its attractions, and generation after generation may
spend itself in an unceasing round of toil,
At genus immortale manet, multosque per annos
Stat fortuna domus et avi numerantur avorum(425).
The training and discipline for the attainment of these virtues are to be
sought in plain and frugal living, in hardy pastime as well as hardy
industry(426), in obedience to parents and reverent worship of the gods—
Illic saltus et lustra ferarum,
Et patiens operum exiguoque adsueta iuventus,
Sacra deum sanctique patres(427),—
and in abstinence from the luxurious indulgence, the anxious business, and
the enervating pleasures of a corrupt civilisation(428). While the grace
and beauty of the poem arise out of the feeling of the life of Nature, the
dignity and sanctity with which the subject is invested are due to the
sense of the intimate connexion between the cultivation of the land and
the moral and religious life of the Italian race.
7. The poem may be called a representative work of genius in respect also
of its artistic execution. It is the finest work of Italian art, made
perfect by the long education of Greek studies. More than any work in
Latin literature the Georgics approach to the symmetry of form, the
harmony of proportion, the unity of design and tone, characteristic of the
purest art of Greece. But it is not in any sense a copy formed after any
Greek pattern. It was seen that out of the more rudimentary attempts of
Greek literature in this particular form of poetry Virgil created a new
and nobler type, which never has been, and probably never will be,
improved on. The execution of the poem is characterised by the genial
susceptibility and enthusiasm of the Italian temperament, by the firm
structure of all Roman work and the practical moderation and dignity of
the Roman mind, and by a kind of meditative and pensive grace peculiar to
the poet himself. The thought of the poem is not separable from the
sentiment pervading it. And in this respect there is a marked difference
between the genius of Virgil and of Lucretius. However much the
speculative activity of Lucretius is charged with feeling, yet the thought
stands out, clearly defined, through the atmosphere surrounding it. The
melancholy of Lucretius, though it was the result partly of
disposition,—the reaction perhaps of a strongly passionate
temperament,—and partly of his relation to his age, was yet a state of
mind for which he could assign definite grounds. That of Virgil was
probably also in a great measure the result of temperament; but it seems
to be a mood habitual to one who meditated much inwardly on the misery of
the world, who was moved by compassion for all sights of sorrow or
suffering(429), and was yet unable to shape this sense of ‘the burthen of
the mystery’ into articulate thought. The atmosphere of the poem has
become one with its substance. The fusion of meditation and feeling
derived from the individual genius of the poet imparts a distinctively
original charm to the style of the Georgics.
The style is thus, in a great degree, Virgil’s own, and owes little to the
borrowed beauties of Greek expression. Though the language of the
Alexandrine poets is sometimes reproduced, yet the beauty of those
transferred passages arises from the grace given to them, not from that
borrowed from them. The same may be said of the use sometimes made of the
quaint diction of Hesiod. In one or two striking passages, such as that
Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis, etc.,
Virgil has adopted the language of the Iliad(430); and though it is
impossible to improve on that, yet there is no slavish imitation of it;
only a new picture is painted, recalling, by some vivid touches, a former
piece by the great master. If detraction is to be made from the
originality of expression in the Georgics, the debt due by Virgil was
incurred to his own countryman. In adopting modes of expression from
Lucretius, Virgil brings down the bold creativeness of his original to a
tone more suited to the habitual sobriety of the Italian imagination. He
often fixes into the form of some general thought what appears in
Lucretius as a living movement or individualised action. And this tendency
to abstract rather than concrete representation is in accordance with the
Roman mould of mind. We notice also how much more sparingly he uses such
compound words as ‘navigerum,’ ‘silvifragis,’ etc., by which the earlier
poets endeavoured to force the harder metal of the Latin language into the
flexibility of Greek speech. Virgil felt that these innovations were
unsuited to the genius of the Latin tongue, and endeavoured to enlarge its
capacities by novel constructions and by using old words with a new
application rather than by novel formations of words. But this gain was
perhaps more than compensated by the loss which the language suffered in
idiomatic purity and clearness.
In rhythmical movement the poem exhibits the highest perfection of which
Latin verse is capable. Of Homer’s verse it has been happily said that it
has ‘a tranquil deep strength, reminding us of his own line,
Ἐξ ἀκαλαρρείταο βαθυρρόου ὠκεανοῖο(431).
The movement of Virgil’s verse reminds us rather of his own river—
qui per saxa volutus
Purior electro campum petit(432).
Occasionally we catch the sound of some more rapid rush and impetuous
fall, as in the hurry and agitation and culminating grandeur of these
lines—
Continuo, ventis surgentibus, aut freta ponti
Incipiunt agitata tumescere, et aridus altis
Montibus audiri fragor, aut resonantia longe
Litora misceri et nemorum increbrescere murmur(433);—
but generally the stream flows on, neither in rapid torrent nor with
abrupt transitions, but ‘with a tranquil deep strength,’ fed by pure and
abounding sources of affection, of contemplation, of moral and religious
feeling, of delight from eye and ear, from memory and old poetic
association.