Snowing: the checkered fields below are traceable now only by the brown
lines of fences and the sparse trees that mark the hedge-rows. The white
of the houses and of the spires of the town is seen dimly through the
snow, and seems to waver and shift position like the sails and spars of
ships seen through fog. And straightway upon this image of ships and
swaying spars I go sailing back to the farm-land of the past, and
sharpen my pen for another day's work among _The Old Farm-Writers_.
I suspect Virgil was never a serious farmer. I am confident he never had
one of those callosities upon the inner side of his right thumb which
come of the lower thole of a scythe-snath, after a week's mowing. But he
had that quick poet's eye which sees at a glance what other men see only
in a day. Not a shrub or a tree, not a bit of fallow ground or of
nodding lentils escaped his observation; not a bird or a bee; not even
the mosquitoes, which to this day hover pestiferously about the
low-lying sedge-lands of Mantua. His first pastoral, little known now,
and rarely printed with his works, is inscribed _Culex_.[13]
Young Virgil appears to have been of a delicate constitution, and
probably left the fever-bearing regions of the Mincio for the higher
plain of Milan for sanitary reasons, as much as the other,--of studying,
as men of his parts did study, Greek and philosophy. There is a story,
indeed, that he studied and practised farriery, as his father had done
before him; and Jethro Tull, in his crude onslaught upon what he calls
the Virgilian husbandry, (chap. ix.,) intimates that a farrier could be
no way fit to lay down the rules for good farm-practice. But this story
of his having been a horse-doctor rests, so far as I can discover, only
on this flimsy tradition,--that the young poet, on his way to the South
of Italy, after leaving Milan and Mantua, fell in at Rome with the
master-of-horse to Octavianus, and gave such shrewd hints to that
official in regard to the points and failings of certain favorite horses
of the Roman Triumvir (for Octavianus had not as yet assumed the purple)
as to gain a presentation to the future Augustus, and rich marks of his
favor.
It is certain that the poet journeyed to the South, and that
thenceforward the glorious sunshine of Baiæ and of the Neapolitan shores
gave a color to his poems and to his life.
Yet his agricultural method was derived almost wholly from his
observation in the North of Italy. He never forgot the marshy borders of
the Mincio nor the shores of beautiful Benacus (Lago di Garda); who
knows but he may some time have driven his flocks afield on the very
battle-ground of Solferino?
But the ruralities of Virgil take a special interest from the period in
which they were written. He followed upon the heel of long and
desolating intestine wars,--a singing-bird in the wake of vultures. No
wonder the voice seemed strangely sweet.
The eloquence of the Senate had long ago lost its traditionary power;
the sword was every way keener. Who should listen to the best of
speakers, when Pompey was in the forum, covered with the spoils of the
East? Who should care for Cicero's periods, when the magnificent
conqueror of Gaul is skirting the Umbrian Marshes, making straight for
the Rubicon and Rome?
Then came Pharsalia, with its bloody trail, from which Cæsar rises only
to be slaughtered in the Senate-Chamber. Next comes the long duel
between the Triumvirate and the palsied representatives of the
Republican party. Philippi closes that interlude; and there is a new
duel between Octavianus and Antony (Lepidus counting for nothing). The
gallant lover of Cleopatra is pitted against a gallant general who is a
nephew to the first Cæsar. The fight comes off at Actium, and the lover
is the loser; the pretty Egyptian Jezebel, with her golden-prowed
galleys, goes sweeping down, under a full press of wind, to swell the
squadron of the conqueror. The winds will always carry the Jezebels to
the conquering side.
Such, then, was the condition of Italy,--its families divided, its
grain-fields trampled down by the Volscian cavalry, its houses red with
fresh blood-stains, its homes beyond the Po parcelled out to lawless
returning soldiers, its public security poised on the point of the sword
of Augustus,--when Virgil's Bucolics appear: a pastoral thanksgiving for
the patrimony that had been spared him, through court-favor.
There is a show of gross adulation that makes one blush for his manhood;
but withal he is a most lithesome poet, whose words are like honeyed
blossoms, and whose graceful measure is like a hedge of bloom that sways
with spring breezes, and spends perfume as it sways.
The Georgics were said to have been written at the suggestion of
Mæcenas, a cultivated friend of Augustus, who, like many another friend
of the party in power, had made a great fortune out of the wars that
desolated Italy. He made good use of it, however, in patronizing Virgil,
and in bestowing a snug farm in the Sabine country upon Horace; where I
had the pleasure of drinking goats' milk--"_dulci digne mero_"--in the
spring of 184-.
There can be no doubt but Virgil had been an attentive reader of
Xenophon, of Hesiod, of Cato, and of Varro; otherwise he certainly would
have been unworthy of the task he had undertaken,--that of laying down
the rules of good husbandry in a way that should insure the reading of
them, and kindle a love for the pursuit.
I suspect that Virgil was not only a reader of all that had been written
on the subject, but that he was also an insistant questioner of every
sagacious landholder and every sturdy farmer that he fell in with,
whether on the Campanian hills or at the house of Mæcenas. How else does
a man accomplish himself for a didactic work relating to matters of
fact? I suspect, moreover, that Virgil, during those half-dozen years in
which he was engaged upon this task, lost no opportunity of inspecting
every bee-hive that fell in his way, of measuring the points and graces
of every pretty heifer he saw in the fields, and of noting with the eye
of an artist the color of every furrow that glided from the plough. It
is inconceivable that a man of his intellectual address should have
given so much of literary toil to a work that was not in every essential
fully up to the best practice of the day. Five years, it is said, were
given to the accomplishment of this short poem. What say our poetasters
to this? Fifteen hundred days, we will suppose, to less than twice as
many lines; blocking out four or five for his morning's task, and all
the evening--for he was a late worker--licking them into shape, as a
bear licks her cubs.
But _cui bono_? what good is in it all? Simply as a work of art, it will
be cherished through all time,--an earlier Titian, whose color can never
fade. It was, besides, a most beguiling peace-note, following upon the
rude blasts of war. It gave a new charm to forsaken homesteads. Under
the Virgilian leadership, Monte Gennaro and the heights of Tusculum
beckon the Romans to the fields; the meadows by reedy Thrasymenus are
made golden with doubled crops. The Tarentine sheep multiply around
Benacus, and crop close those dark bits of herbage which have been fed
by the blood of Roman citizens.
Thus much for the magic of the verse; but there is also sound farm-talk
in Virgil. I am aware that Seneca, living a few years after him,
invidiously objects that he was more careful of his language than of his
doctrine, and that Columella quotes him charily,--that the collector of
the "Geoponics" ignores him, and that Tull gives him clumsy raillery;
but I have yet to see in what respect his system falls short of
Columella, or how it differs materially, except in fulness, from the
teachings of Crescenzi, who wrote a thousand years and more later. There
is little in the poem, save its superstitions, from which a modern
farmer can dissent.[14]
We are hardly launched upon the first Georgic before we find a pretty
suggestion of the theory of rotation,--
"Sic quoque mutatis requiescunt foetibus arva."
Rolling and irrigation both glide into the verse a few lines later. He
insists upon the choice of the best seed, advises to keep the drains
clear, even upon holy-days, (268,) and urges, in common with a great
many shrewd New-England farmers, to cut light meadows while the dew is
on, (288-9,) even though it involve night-work. Some, too, he says,
whittle their torches by fire-light, of a winter's night; and the good
wife, meantime, lifting a song of cheer, plies the shuttle merrily. The
shuttle is certainly an archaism, whatever the good wife may be.
His theory of weather-signs, taken principally from Aratus, agrees in
many respects with the late Marshal Bugeaud's observations, upon which
the Marshal planted his faith so firmly that he is said to have ordered
all his campaigns in Africa in accordance with them.
In the opening of the second book, Virgil insists, very wisely, upon
proper adaptation of plantations of fruit-trees to different localities
and exposures,--a matter which is far too little considered by farmers
of our day. His views in regard to propagation, whether by cuttings,
layers, or seed, are in agreement with those of the best Scotch
nursery-men; and in the matter of grafting or inoculation, he errs (?)
only in declaring certain results possible, which even modern gardening
has not accomplished. Dryden shall help us to the pretty falsehood:--
"The thin-leaved arbute hazel-grafts receives,
And planes huge apples bear, that bore but leaves.
Thus mastful beech the bristly chestnut bears,
And the wild ash is white with blooming pears,
And greedy swine from grafted elms are fed
With falling acorns, that on oaks are bred."
It is curious how generally this belief in something like promiscuous
grafting was entertained by the old writers. Palladius repeats it with
great unction in his poem "De Insitione," two or three centuries
later;[15] and in the tenth book of the "Geoponics," a certain
Damogerontis (whoever he may have been) says, (cap. lxv.,) "Some rustic
writers allege that nut-trees and resinous trees ([Greek: ta rhêtinên
echonta]) cannot be successfully grafted; but," he continues, "this is a
mistake; I have myself grafted the pistache nut into the terebenthine."
Is it remotely possible that these old gentlemen understood the
physiology of plants better than we?
As I return to Virgil, and slip along the dulcet lines, I come upon this
cracking laconism, in which is compacted as much wholesome advice as a
loose farm-writer would spread over a page:--
"Laudato ingentia rura,
Exiguum colito."[16]
The wisdom of the advice for these days of steam-engines, reapers, and
high wages, is more than questionable; but it is in perfect agreement
with the notions of a great many old-fashioned farmers who live nearer
to the heathen past than they imagine.
The cattle of Virgil are certainly no prize-animals. Any good committee
would vote them down incontinently:--
----"Cui turpe caput, cui plurima cervix,"
(iii. 52,) would not pass muster at any fair of the last century.
The horses are better; there is the dash of high venture in them; they
have snuffed battle; their limbs are suppled to a bounding gallop,--as
where in the Æneid,
"Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum."
The fourth book of the Georgics is full of the murmur of bees, showing
how the poet had listened, and had loved to listen. After describing
minutely how and where the homes of the honey-makers are to be placed,
he offers them this delicate attention:--
"Then o'er the running stream or standing lake
A passage for thy weary people make;
With osier floats the standing water strew;
Of massy stones make bridges, if it flow;
That basking in the sun thy bees may lie,
And, resting there, their flaggy pinions dry."