On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

HOMER.

When we turn from the Hebrew to the Greek poetry, as represented by the father of it, Homer, we find ourselves in another atmosphere. It is not merely that in the regard which the great poet casts on Nature, mythology, a fading and only half-alive mythology, still lingered. It is not this only, but it is that in his thoughts of Nature there is not the same awful reverence, the same profound pathos; but there is more of the artistic sense of beauty, that artistic sense which is only fully developed when the profounder feelings are comparatively laid asleep.

No land known to the ancients, perhaps I might say no land ever known to men, has supplied such visual stimulus to the imagination as Greece;—scenery so richly diversified, a land beyond all others various in features and elements, mountains with their bases plunged into the sea, valleys intersected by great rivers, rich plains and meadows inlaid between the hill-ranges, deeply indented shores, promontories wood-clad or temple-crowned looking out on the many-islanded, Ægean;—around it, on every side, seas so beautiful, above it such a canopy of sky, changing through every hour and every season, and calling forth from sea and land every color which sunlight and gloom can elicit.

If of all nations the Greeks were endowed with the keenest sensibility to beauty, and if Homer was their chief and representative poet, it could hardly be but that scenery so varied should melt into his imagination and reflect itself in his poetry. And so it is. Homer lived most probably on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, where he had ever before his eye the island-studded Ægean, behind him the rich valleys opening down to the coast, and eastward the great mountain ranges where these rivers are cradled; could it be that of all this his poetry should give no sign? I cannot agree with Mr. Ruskin’s criticism of the Homeric scenery. You will find it in the third volume of his “Modern Painters,” chapter xiii., on Classical Landscape. Like everything which Mr. Ruskin writes, it is interesting and suggestive, but I cannot think it adequate or wholly true. Of the Greeks he says: “They shrank with dread or hatred from all the ruggedness of lower nature—from the wrinkled forest bark and the jagged hill-crest, and irregular inorganic storm of sky, looking to these for the most part as adverse powers, and taking pleasure only in such portions of the lower world as were at once conducive to the rest and health of the human frame, and in harmony with the laws of its gentler beauty.” Again he says: “As far as I recollect, without a single exception, every Homeric landscape, intended to be beautiful, is composed of a fountain, a meadow, and a shady grove.” Again: “It is sufficiently notable that Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells delightedly on all the flat bits; and so I think invariably the inhabitants of mountainous countries do; but the inhabitants of the plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains.”

Now, in this passage, the general assertion seems to be much too sweeping, and, in the special instance of Homer, I think it is not true. Mr. Ruskin backs his position by reference to various passages in the Odyssey which seem to bear him out, but in any fair estimate we must take in the Iliad as well as the Odyssey.

In the Iliad the descriptions of Nature are not so detailed as in the Odyssey. Indeed, they occur almost entirely in similes; but these the poet fetches from every realm and feature of Nature—from the mountain, the forest, the sea, especially as seen darkening under the coming of the western breeze; from the cloudy and the midnight sky; from all kinds of wild animals, the lion, the fawn, the hawk, and the boar. In his battle-scenes it is to all the sterner and fiercer aspects of Nature, and habits of wild beasts, that he has recourse for his comparisons. And would he have so often invoked the aid of these wild forces and creatures of his imagination had not he delighted in them?

So when Teucer slays Mentor, it is thus, as rendered by Lord Derby:—

“Down he fell,

As by the woodman’s axe, on some high peak

Falls a proud ash, conspicuous from afar,

Leveling its tender leaves upon the ground.”

It is thus the charge of Hector is described when he beat back the Greeks and penned them at their ships:—

“On poured the Trojan masses; in the van

Hector straight forward drove in full career.

As some huge bowlder, from its rocky bed

Detached, and by the wintry torrent’s force

Hurled down the steep cliff’s face, when constant rains

The massive rock’s firm hold have undermined;

With giant bounds it flies; the crashing wood

Resounds beneath it; still it hurries on,

Until, arriving at the level plain,

Its headlong impulse checked, it rolls no more.”

Or take another similitude drawn from the sea. When the poet wishes to describe how the Achæan phalanxes come on to battle, this is the image he employs:—

“And as a goatherd from his watch-tower crag

Beholds a cloud advancing o’er the sea

Beneath the west wind’s breath; as from afar

He gazes, black as pitch, it sweeps along

O’er the dark face of ocean, bearing on

A hurricane of rain; he, shuddering, sees

And drives his flock beneath the sheltering cave.

So thick and dark about the Argives stirred,

Impatient for the war, the stalwart youths,

Black masses, bristling close with spear and shield.”

Or again, when, after Agamemnon has retired wounded from the battle, Hector comes forth and slips his Trojans on the Achæan host, as some hunter slips his white-teethed hounds on a wild boar or a lion, and himself

“Fell on their battle, as some roaring storm

Leaps down and heaves the sleeping violet sea.”

One after another he lays low the chiefs, and their names fill three hexameters.

“Of the leaders these

He slew, then on the nameless people fell

As when with hurricane deep the west wind smites

White summer clouds high piled by the clear south,

And volumed wave on wave comes shoreward rolled,

And the white flying foam is scattered high

Before the loud blast of far-wandering wind.”

Let me now give one instance of Homer’s feeling for the aspect of the nightly heavens. It shall be taken from the place of the Iliad where the Trojans, after a day of successful battle, having driven back the Greeks, rest for the night. And here I shall quote, not, as in the above passage, from Lord Derby’s translation, but from a rendering of the passage by the Poet-Laureate. It is the only passage of Homer in which we have the Laureate’s handiwork:—

“So Hector said, and sea-like roared his host,

Then loosed their sweating horses from the yoke,

And each beside his chariot bound his own,

And oxen from the city, and goodly sheep

In haste they drove, and honey-hearted wine

And bread from out their houses brought, and heaped

Their firewood, and the winds from off the plain

Rolled the rich vapor far into the heaven.

And there all night upon the bridge of war

Sat glorying, many a fire before them blazed;

As when in heaven the stars about the moon

Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,

And every height comes out, and jutting peak

And valley, and the immeasurable heavens

Break open to their highest, and all the stars

Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart;

So many a fire between the ships and stream

Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy.

A thousand on the plain; and close by each

Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;

And champing golden grain the horses stood

Hard by their chariots waiting for the dawn.”

These few samples of the similes scattered thick throughout the Iliad show that Homer laid all the appearances of Nature under contribution, and the wildest and grandest not less than those that are home-like.

True it is that Homer in the Iliad nowhere stops to paint scenery for its own sake. He does this less than Virgil or most later epic poets. He is so full of business and of human action that he cannot stay for description. But in such passages as the Catalogue of the Grecian Host in the second book, there are brief but fine touches of geographical landscape, as he tells of the many lands whence they came; or again in his fixed but most suggestive epithets of places, as “the windy Ilion,” “many-fountained Ida,” and the deep-whirlpooled Scamander; Lacedæmon in the hollow of the hills; Messe, haunt of wild doves; vine-clad Epidaurus; windy Enerpe; Orchomenus rich in flocks.

I would that I could linger over this subject and quote some more passages, such as that where Achilles, long absent, returns to the conflict, and the immortal gods come down to range themselves, some with the Greeks, some on the side of Troy; and heaven and earth, the mountains and the rivers and the sea and the nether world beneath, all are moved to take part in the great issue.

But I must pass on to the scenery of the Odyssey. No doubt this poem contains much more description of landscape than the Iliad, and in that description, as Mr. Ruskin says, there seems to be a preference for the tame and domestic rather than for the wild in Nature. But is there not enough in the subject and circumstance of the two poems to account for such difference? Ulysses, the much-traveled, much-suffering man, who had endured so many things by land and sea, his home-sick heart is yearning for his native Ithaca. That his heart should be weary of the sea and the mountains and all wild untractable things is only too natural. It is quite in keeping with and as a set-off against this feeling of home-weariness that the poet, in describing such a wanderer, should dwell with peculiar emphasis on all that is warm and comfortable and home-like in scenery.

Let me give one or two samples from Worsley’s translation of the Odyssey, which I am disposed to think is the best poetic translation of any classical poet that we have in English. Mr. Worsley rendered the hexameters of Homer into the Spenserian stanza, and he so perfectly caught the whole rhythm and cadence of Spenser, and this answers so well to the spirit of the Odyssey, the most romantic of Greek poems, that I know no more delightful reading than those picturesque and melodious stanzas.

Here is one sample. Ulysses, having left Calypso’s island on a raft, is shipwrecked in mid-seas, and this is the description of his coming to land on the island of Phæacia:—

“Two nights and days in the tumultuous swell

He wandered. Often did his heart forebode

Utter extinction in the yawning hell,

But when the fair-haired Dawn arising glowed,

And in the eastern heaven the thin light showed,

Came a calm-deepening day, windless and clear.

Then when Odysseus on a tall wave rode,

And his keen eyes along the heaving mere

Stretched in extreme desire, he saw the land rise near.

“As when a father, on the point to die,

Who for long time in sore disease hath lain,

By the strong Fates tormented heavily,

Till the pulse faileth for exceeding pain,

Feels the life stirring in his bones again;

While glad at heart his children smile around,

He also smiles—the gods have loosed his chain;

So welcome seemed the land with forest crowned,

And he rejoicing swam, and yearned to feel the ground.

“But now within a voice-throw of the rocks

The sound of waters did his ears appall.

Full on the coast the great waves’ thunder-shocks

Roll, and afar the wet foam-vapors fall.

No roadstead there, no haven seemed at all,

Nor shelter where a ship might rest at ease;

But from the main-earth darted a wild wall

Of headlands. Then Odysseus’ heart and knees

Were loosened; and his soul thus spake in the deep seas.”

Then follows a fine description of his struggle with the breakers, and how his flesh was torn and his skin peeled against the sharp rocks:—

“He from the echoing breakers swam right fain,

Skirting the coast; if chance his eyes explore

Or far or near some haven of the main,

Or mild declivity of shelving shore.

But when he came the river-month before,

And his gaze rested on the long white gleam,

By rocks unchafed and windless evermore,

Here to his thought best landing-place did seem,

And in his soul he prayed, feeling the calm sweet stream.”

Then the landing and climbing up into the wood, and hiding himself under a mound of gathered leaves:—

“Where o’er his weary head,

Athene all night long pain-healing slumber shed.”

But I recommend every one to read the last hundred lines of the fifth book of the Odyssey. It is one of the most natural and beautiful descriptions of sea-coast scenery, heightened in its interest by the presence of man in strife with the waters, that is to be found in any poet.

The whole of this passage is commented on by Mr. Ruskin at length, but I think his comments are one-sided and overdone. No doubt the shipwrecked man kisses the corn-growing land when at last he reaches it, and gladly covers himself with the dead leaves. But it is not, as Mr. Ruskin says, that the Greek mind shrank from wild things, and took pleasure only in things subservient to human use. It is because it was the action natural to a shipwrecked man just escaped from the hateful sea to hug the land he had so much toil to reach; and it was natural for a poet, when describing his hero tossed and drenched for days amid the hungry foam, to bring out in strong contrast all the warmth and comfort of the dry cheerful earth.[14]

One sample of Homer’s home-painting must be given, where we see—

“All things are in order stored—

A home of ancient peace;”—

“Outside the court-yard stretched a planted space

Of orchard, and a fence environed all the place.

“There, in full prime, the orchard-trees grew tall,

Sweet-fig, pomegranate, apple fruited fair,

Pear and the healthful olive. Each and all

Both summer droughts and chills of winter spare.

All the year round they flourish. Some the air

Of zephyr warms to life, some doth mature,

Apple grows old on apple, pear on pear,

Fig follows fig, vintage doth vintage lure;

Thus the rich revolution doth for age endure.

“With well-sunned floor for drying, there is seen

The vineyard. Here the grapes they cull, there tread.

Here falls the blossom from the clusters green,

There the first blushings by the suns are shed.

Last, flowers forever fadeless, bed by bed;

Two streams: one waters the whole garden fair;

One through the court-yard, near the house is led,

Whereto with pitcher all the folk repair.

All these the God-sent gifts to King Alcinous were.”

I might go on to quote the description of Calypso’s cave, and many another landscape with which this Greek romance abounds. Indeed, it would take a summer day to exhaust the passages descriptive of Nature in the Odyssey and the Iliad alone, before we could arrive at an adequate idea of the Homeric view of Nature. This only I will say and pass on—that in the Odyssey you do find that the scenes most lovingly depicted are home scenes of order, comfort, and repose. But this is not because, as Mr. Ruskin says, the Greek mind abhorred the wildness of nature, but because, with such a character to describe as Ulysses, battered by the strokes of doom, travel-weary and home-sick, the natural framework to such a human figure, that which gives at once contrast and relief, is a setting taken from the reposeful side of Nature. Of storm and trouble you have had enough in the human character. Nature here must furnish the background of repose. But in the Iliad, if we look at the similes, we find them taken from every form and aspect of Nature—the wild and vast as well as the homely and the minute. The poet gathers images from every element, earth, sky, and sea, mountain and meadow; but all are used, not for their own sakes, not to dwell on themselves alone, but to bring out by similitude the force of the human passions and actions, which are the substance of the epic. But the poet who could so use Nature, making her a storehouse of images whence he drew at will, must have lived familiarly in the eye of Nature, loving her in all her aspects with a true though unconscious love.

CHAPTER X.
NATURE IN LUCRETIUS AND VIRGIL.

When from the representations of Nature in Homer, and indeed in all the Greek poets, we turn to the rural descriptions of the Roman poets, we feel that we have passed into a wholly different atmosphere. If there were no other there is at least this cardinal distinction between them:—The Greeks had no antiquity behind them, at least no earlier literature to come between them and the open face of things. They saw at first hand with their own eyes, felt with their own hearts, described in their own words. The Romans, those at least of the literary age, before they wrote a line that has come down to us, had received the whole Hellenic learning and poetry poured in upon them, so that the very air of Italy was colored with the hues of Greece. This makes it so difficult, in studying the productions of any Roman poet—their descriptions of Nature not less than other things—to be sure that you have the features of Italian scenery pure and uncolored, and that they have not been tinged and refracted by the Hellenic medium of associations and language through which they were habitually beheld. No doubt the Romans originally were and never ceased to be a country-loving people. The pictures that have come down to us of Cincinnatus, and of other worthies of the early Republic, represent even their greatest generals and dictators as living on paternal farms in rural thrift and simplicity. But there remains no poetry coeval with that primitive time. Before we reach their poets the day of small estates and patrician life in the fields is over, all Italy is held in vast domains by rich senators who themselves lived in the city, and committed the care of their lands to a bailiff with hordes of slaves.

In the last half-century of the Republic, to which belong the earliest Roman poets who describe Nature, the town life, varied by retirement to the Tiburtine or Sabine villa, was universal among the poets and their associates. Some of them had passed their childhood in the rustic life of distant provinces, and the remembrance of that life still lives in their poetry, as in Catullus, and more distinctively in Virgil. The earliest pictures of Nature that occur in any Roman poetry are to be found not in pastoral or idyl, but in the great philosophic poem that expounds an elaborate system of Nature. Lucretius was too earnest a preacher of his Atomic Philosophy to linger over descriptions of scenery for their own sake. Nevertheless, his wearisome expositions of materialistic system are relieved by many a beautiful illustration drawn directly from the Nature which his own eyes had seen, and portrayed with a clearness of outline and a startling vividness, in which, as Professor Sellar has truly said, he is unrivaled in antiquity save by Homer. The rigorous dogmatism of a mechanical philosophy is in him combined with the keenest eye to all the appearances of the outer world, minute as well as vast. Evidently he had lived much in the open air, had been a haunter of all waste places, wild mountain ranges, dripping caves, solitary sea-shores. He had noted all the sights, listened to the sounds and the silences, and observed the ways of the wild creatures that dwell there. His impressions he has stamped in many a noble line, that comes in with delightful freshness to illustrate his prolix argument. His eye was upon the smallest and most sequestered appearances, as the many-colored shells on the shore, and the dripping of water over moss-covered rocks; but still more familiarly did his imagination move with the great elemental movements of Nature, and when the storms and winds were up, he found himself “one among the many there.” According to the philosophy he had adopted, and earnestly propounded, all the most beautiful and mysterious aspects of things were the mere products of dead mechanic forces. But the genius of the poet at times shook itself free from the trammels of his creed, and rose to the contemplation, not of a dead mechanic world, but of one informed by a vast life, which moves through all material things, and makes them instinct with unity.

In the language of the philosophers, while consciously he taught only a Natura naturata, his imagination and sympathy grasped, in spite of him, a Natura naturans. It is impossible that any great poet, however his understanding may be caught in the meshes of mere materialism, can in his hours of inspiration rest contented with that. Assuredly Lucretius did not. Accordingly, we find him here and there breaking out into the earliest utterance of that mystical Pantheistic feeling about the life of Nature, which we shall find reappearing in Virgil, and which has recurred so powerfully in modern poetry.

Catullus, the poet contemporary with Lucretius, is too much absorbed in love and friendship, finds too exciting an interest in the society of man, to give much time to Nature. In his most original poems, or at least those in which he most speaks out his feelings, Nature holds little, almost no place. Two poems refer to his villa at Tibur, with, however, little mention of any rural pleasures connected with it.

The well-known lines on his return to his home at Sirmio, on the Lago di Garda, for all their wonderful charm, breathe more of the love of home and rest after long voyaging than of enjoyment in Nature for her own sake. His more elaborate and artistic poems contain some beautiful natural images and similes, expressed with that unstudied felicity and clear sense of beauty which distinguished him. But they do not come to more than side glances by the way, as he hurries on to his human theme. It has, however, been remarked, that while to Lucretius, to Horace, even to Virgil, the sea is a thing of dread rather than of admiration, from which they shrank as a treacherous creature, Catullus felt the grandeur of its immensity, and rejoiced in the laughter of the waves in calm, and in their changing colors beneath the storm.

Germans have written learned books, some to maintain, others to deny, that the ancient Greeks and Romans had any feeling for Nature, or, as the phrase goes, were inspired by the sentiment of Nature. Schiller has gone as far as to deny that Homer had any more caring for Nature than he had for the garment, the shield, the armor, which he describes with equal relish. In the face of such an assertion we have but to read a few passages from Homer above cited, and innumerable others like them. No doubt the ancients had not that intimate, delicate, dwelling sympathy for Nature which we call the modern feeling. But there is hardly a tone of sentiment which Nature in modern times has evoked, of which some faint prelude at least might not be found among them. Passages from the dialogue, and especially from the choruses, of Sophocles and Euripides, might, had we time, have been cited, which speak of natural objects with almost as much fondness as though they had been written yesterday.

One side of this feeling, which is dwelt on as peculiarly a birth of recent times, is the passion for mountains. And no doubt the feeling of the Latin poets as they thought of them was for the most part shuddering and affright. Yet Virgil, though he generally speaks the same language, seems at times to catch something of their free and far delight, as when he speaks of Father Apennine roaring with all his holm-oaks, and rejoicing to heave his snow-white summit into the sky. In such a passage it would seem as though the power of hills was for a moment on him, and he caught a prophetic glimpse of that mountain-rapture which was reserved for this century at last adequately to express. Quinctilian, however, represents the current feeling of his countrymen when he says, “Species maritimis, planis, amœnis,”—Beauty belongs to countries that lie beside the sea, level and pleasant.

But granting that the feeling for Nature among the Romans was thus limited, if one wished to prove that it was real, one would be content to point to Virgil alone. His preëminence as a poet of the country was early recognized by his friend and contemporary, Horace:—

“Molle atque facetum

Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”—

To Virgil the Muses of the country gave the gift of delicacy and artistic skill. When Horace thus wrote of his friend only the Eclogues had as yet appeared. But the two greater poems which Virgil afterwards produced, among their other merits, elevate him, as a lover and describer of natural scenes, to a place which his earlier poems alone would not have won for him.

With regard to the Eclogues, the purely imitative and conventional character of their language, personages, and sentiment, is well known. But for long it was believed that their scenery at least was real, borrowed from Mantua and the banks of his native Mincio. But later critics have shown that imitation penetrated even here, and that as the sentiments and substance of the Eclogues are all borrowed from Theocritus, not less is the framework of scenery in which these are set. The vine-clad cave in which the shepherd reclines, the briery crag from which he sees his goats hanging, the mountains that cast long shadows toward evening, these, it is said, are nowhere to be seen in the neighborhood of Mantua, but belong entirely to Sicily. Some even assert that neither the ilex, the chestnut, nor the beech grows anywhere near the banks of the Mincio. Yet even amid the prevailingly Sicilian scenery there are touches here and there, where he reverts to what his own eyes had seen, as where he describes his farm as covered with bare stones and slimy bulrushes, and the Mincio as weaving for his green banks a fringe of tender reeds.

Even though the imagery of the Eclogues may be borrowed from the Sicilian poet, yet here, as every where, Virgil is no mere translator, but proves by the tender grace of the language in which he clothes the borrowed imagery his feeling for original Nature. In the fifth Eclogue, when two shepherds have been playing each his finest strain, partly to please, partly to emulate the other, at the close, Menalcas says to Mopsus:—

“Such is thy song to me, O singer divine!

As is sleep upon the grass to weary men, as in summer heat,

Thirst to slake with pleasant water from the leaping brook.”

And then when Menalcas has sung his strain this is the reply of Mopsus:—

“What gifts, what shall I render thee for such a song?

For not so delightful to my ear is the sighing of the coming south wind,

Nor the beating of billows upon the shore,

Nor the sound of streams down-falling through the rocky glens.”

Of these and such-like images the first hints may have been from Theocritus, but assuredly they have won a new charm in their passage through the mind of Virgil.

But if the scenery of the Eclogues partakes in some measure of the conventional mould in which the whole of the poems are cast, the Georgics are poetry in earnest, dealing with a real subject, and describing, in many places at least, real landscapes. Doubtless here, too, as everywhere, Virgil is the learned poet; his mind comes to his subject laden with the spoils of all antiquity. As he describes natural objects, all the associations which ancient Mythology and Greek poetry had thrown around them use spontaneously before him. Thus he would often seem to look at things not at first-hand with his own eyes, but through the media which former poets had fashioned for him. But this, if we think of it, is one element of the consummate art of the Georgics. The poet had to raise a homely subject above the dust of commonplace, to add dignity to objects and processes which in themselves might seem undignified, or even vulgar. Therefore he takes the husbandman back to earlier times, and invests his toils with all the veneration and sanctity which primeval tradition has shed around them, and teaches him to feel that in his pursuits he is one with the first forefathers of the race. This archaic coloring, richly yet delicately suffused, invests the poem with a peculiar charm. Just so a modern poet, wishing to throw around the life of shepherd and husbandman, even in our own days, an air of ancient reverence, might still revert to Bible stories of the patriarchs—to Jacob and Rachel meeting by the well, to Ruth in the corn-field, and David among the sheep-cotes of Bethlehem. But making full allowance for all that is archaic and mythological in the allusions to distant ages and Eastern lands, there remains a large background of landscape in which the plains of Mantua and Campania lie spread before us, and the intense skies of Italy bend overhead.

Such a passage as the following is surely the work of one who had watched and loved the alternations of the Italian summer:—

“But when glad summer at the west winds’ call

Shall send the flocks to woods and pastures free,

Then ’neath the star of dawn on the cool fields

Let browse thy sheep and goats, while morn is young,

And the fresh dew lies hoary on the grass—

The dew on tender blade, to cattle dear.

When the fourth hour of day brings parching thirst,

And in the trees cicadas’ notes are loud,

Then bid the herd at wells and deep clear pools

Drink the stream running from full oaken troughs.

But in the deep noon heat a shady vale

Seek, if perchance some oak of antique bulk

There spread his giant boughs; or some grove dark

With many a holm-oak’s gloom reposeth nigh

In hallowed shadow. Then at set of sun

Once more supply clear streams and drive afield

Thy flock, when eventide cools all the air,

And the moon dewy-moist repairs the lawns

With freshness, while the shores with halcyon notes

Resound, the copses with the goldfinch song.”

It has generally been held that one of the most prominent notes of Virgil’s genius was his sympathy with Nature. To this the late Professor Conington, whose opinion on whatever concerned Virgil deserves all respect, used to demur, and to maintain rather that his chief characteristic lay in an elaborate and refined culture, manifesting itself in the most consummate delicacy and grace. But though Virgil was before all things the poet of learned culture and artistic beauty, this did not hinder, rather prompted him, to turn on Nature a sympathetic and loving eye. The perception of a sympathy between the feelings and vicissitudes of man and the world that surrounds him appears nowhere so strongly as in his latest poem, the Æneid. It may have been that as his subject led him much into battles and adventures, alien to his taste, he seized all the more eagerly every opportunity of reverting to that Nature which had been his earliest delight.

Whatever be the cause, the pictures of Nature, whether in description or in simile, are more frequent, more intimate, more tender, than in either of his earlier productions. It has been noticed, for instance, that at the beginning of the sixth book, as the Sibyl draws nigh, the earth rumbles, the mountains quake, as if sharing the human dread at her approach; and that throughout the fourth book there is maintained a fine sympathy between the aspects of the outer world and the passions which agitate the human actors.

It is thus he sets off the tumult in the soul of the lovelorn and wronged queen in contrast with the calm and silence of night:—

“Now night it was, and everything on earth had won the grace

Of quiet sleep; the woods had rest, the wildered waters’ face:

It was the tide when stars roll on amid their courses due,

And all the tilth is hushed, and beasts, and birds of many a hue,

And all that is in waters wide, and what the waste doth keep

In thicket rough, amid the hush of night tide lay asleep,

And slipping off the load of care forgat their toilsome part.

But ne’er might that Phœnician queen, that most unhappy heart,

Sink into sleep, or take the night into her eyes and breast,

Her sorrows grow, and love again swells up with all unrest.”

Is not the feeling here what would be called quite modern? For its tone, might it not have been written yesterday? This contrast between Nature’s repose and the tumult of the human heart, thus consciously felt and expressed, belong to a late and self-conscious age. In Homer you may see such contrasts, as when Helen, looking from the walls of Troy, misses her true brothers from among the Achaian host, and says that they kept aloof from the war, fearing the reproach which she had brought on herself and them. And the poet adds:—

“So spake she, but them already the life-giving earth covered

In Lacedæmon there, in their dear native land.”

Here the contrast is only half consciously felt, hinted at obliquely, not brought into prominence. To emphasize and dwell on the contrast, as Virgil does, is modern, one of the many points in which the Latin poet’s feeling is like that of our own day.

Many more passages might be cited where Virgil turns aside from his epic narrative to dwell over natural scenes. The elaborate description of the storm in the first book; the sail through the Ionian Islands; the night passed on the Sicilian coast with Ætna heard thundering overhead through the dark, in the third book; the island, in the fifth book, which is made the goal round which the racing-boats row; the fleet entering the mouth of the Tiber while the calm morning lies ruddy on the sea;—these are a few which come to mind.

But it is in the many similes scattered throughout the Æneid that the Virgilian grace and tenderness is seen at its best. It has been the fashion with the commentators to trace back every one of Virgil’s similes to Homer or some other Greek poet. And the two I shall now give have not wholly escaped this imputation, though there seems small foundation for it in their case.

In the boat-race, when Mnestheus, having run his boat into a narrow and sheltered passage among rocks, has with difficulty scraped through and shot again into open sea, this is Virgil’s comparison:—

“As a dove scared suddenly from a cave,

Where she has her home and dear nestlings in the crannied rock,

Hurries fieldward in her flight, and with flurried pinions

Loudly flaps the roof—soon gliding in calm air

Skims her smooth way, sailing aloof on moveless wings.”

Again, when Æneas, led by the Sibyl, descends to the nether world, and arrives at the shores of the river Styx, the ghosts of the dead come flocking round him in crowds:—

“Numerous as the leaves in the woods that at first touch of autumn’s cold

Gliding fall; or numerous as the birds that flock together shoreward from the deep,

When wintry weather drives them across the sea, and sends them into sunny lands.”

The full beauty, however, of passages like these cannot be felt when they are detached from the whole scene, in which they are inlaid. Æneas traveling far into the nether gloom, through Pluto’s empty halls and ghastly realms of the dead, is a picture almost too dismal. But how exquisitely does Virgil relieve his own heart and that of the reader, by letting in on that sad world these glimpses of a land still gladdened by the sun!

If you compare Virgil with Homer, where they describe the same natural objects, or even where the Latin poet borrows his similes directly from the Greek, you cannot but feel how wide is the difference between them. There is no more the entire outwardness, the self-forgetting serenity of Homer’s descriptions, the colorless transparency as of a mountain range, whose every stone and blade of grass lies reflected in the clear depths of an unmoving lake. Received into Virgil’s heart the outward world becomes colored with some of the melancholy of the poet and his time. Not that to Virgil’s eye there was any sadness in Nature herself, but in his hands Nature becomes so humanized, it so lends itself to human joys and sorrows, that these cast their own gleams, and still more their shadows, on that, in itself, unimpassioned countenance. This sympathy between man and Nature Virgil apprehended more feelingly than any other Roman poet; and in this, as in so many other things, we find in him an anticipation of the modern time. As compared with Lucretius, Virgil deals with Nature in a less sublime, but more human way. Lucretius demands the explanation of Nature and her processes, Virgil seeks to enter into her feeling, to catch her sentiment. As a French author has expressed it: “Lucretius is not so much arrested by the beauty of Nature, as roused by its mystery, to extort the secret of it. I admire thee, he seems to say, but on condition that I may investigate and understand thee.” In Lucretius man and Nature stand over against each other, observer and observed: they do not meet and interpenetrate each other. Between Virgil and the outward world there is no such philosophic barrier; his feelings flow freely forth to it, and there find more or less satisfaction,—satisfaction as from a familiar companion; whether familiar by the associations of childhood or through the cherished learning of later years.

Lucretius had, as we know, a philosophic faith about Nature, which satisfied his understanding, if it did not satisfy what was deeper in him than understanding—that high imagination and poetic instinct which at times craved a more spiritual interpretation. Virgil, on the other hand, had no consistent theory regarding that Nature which he apprehended so feelingly. In general he acquiesced in the orthodox mythology which he had received from the tradition of the poets. And yet, while he accepted it for poetic, or even patriotic reasons, he must, when he thought of it, have felt strange misgivings. For the mythologic faith had entirely ceased, to be real to himself or to his educated countrymen. That he longed at times to penetrate the secret of Nature, and to know the causes of things, he himself assures us. But there is no evidence in his poetry that he ever rose to as clear a conception of one all-ruling Divine Power as even Cicero had probably reached. There are, however, two well-known passages, one in the fourth Georgic, the other in the sixth Æneid, in which Virgil expresses a mystic and pantheistic theory as to an all-pervading life of the world, which, if it cannot be called his philosophic belief, seems to have been to him at least more than a mere poetic fancy. Lucretius, impelled by the craving of his imagination for life, not death, had in the opening of his poem and elsewhere allowed such a feeling, as it were, to escape him, but had never recognized it as an article of his faith. In Virgil it approaches more nearly to a consciously held belief, or at least to a possible solution of the mystery of Nature. It has been reserved for modern times to give fuller expression to the same tendency of thought, sometimes as a mere feeling, sometimes as a conviction. But however such a view may have expressed passing phases, either of thought or feeling, it has never, either now or in ancient times, approached to be a solution which can satisfy at once reason, heart, and conscience.

Since these remarks on Virgil were in the press, Professor Sellar’s work on Virgil has appeared. If I could have read it before writing the above pages, I should probably have said more of Virgil’s treatment of Nature, or less. As it is, I have allowed what I had said to remain unchanged. Those who wish to see this and every other aspect of Virgil’s poetry treated in the most thorough and instructive way, will be amply rewarded by the study of Professor Sellar’s book.

CHAPTER XI.
NATURE IN CHAUCER, SHAKESPEARE, AND MILTON.

To pass from the Virgilian view of Nature to that of our earliest English poet, though it brings us nearer our own age in time, is really to recede from it in feeling to a remote and primitive antiquity. No poet ever loved Nature more than Chaucer did; but it was with a simple, unreflective, child-like love. The Morning Star of English Song, as he has been called, man of the world and skilled in affairs, at home in courts and with the great, conversant with the ways of all men, high and low, could turn aside from the gorgeous imagery that filled his poetic vision, from the profusion of mediæval ceremonies and cavalcade, of high processions with soldiers in armor, caparisoned horses and bedizened ladies, from gallant knights with lordly manners, and homely country-people, from sights and stories fetched from many lands,—to dwell tenderly on the plain sights and sounds of external nature, and to sing of them with the transparency and sweetness of a child. It was Nature in her “first intention,” her most obvious aspects, that attracted him. Once, indeed, in the “Assembly of Foules,” he speaks of “that noble Goddesse of Nature.” This, however, is not his usual language, but rather a conventional way of speaking caught from the Latin poets he had read. Again, in a more serious strain, the same poem speaks thus:—

“Nature, the vicare of the Almightie Lord;”

but it is not on Nature as a great whole, much less as an abstraction, that his thought usually dwells. It is the outer world in its most concrete forms and objects, with which he delights to interweave his poetry—the homely scenes of South England, the oaks and other forest trees, the green meadows, quiet fields, and comfortable farms, as well as the great castles where the nobles dwelt. One associates him with the green lanes and downs of Surrey and Kent, their natural copsewoods and undulating greenery. I know not that the habitual forms of English landscape, those which are most rural and most unchanged, have ever since found a truer poet, one who so brings before the mind the scene and the spirit of it uncolored by any intervention of his own thought or sentiment. And his favorite season—it is the May-time. Of this he is never tired of singing. When there comes a really spring-like day in May, the east wind gone, and the west wind blowing softly, the leaves coming out, and the birds singing, at such a season one feels instinctively this is the Chaucer atmosphere and time. One passage has been cited in a former chapter in which Chaucer speaks of the daisy very lovingly. Other passages might be cited in which he turns again and again to the same flower, proving that it was a favorite with one poet before either Burns or Wordsworth.

Let me give one more passage which gives the characteristic landscape of Chaucer and his feeling about it:—

“When shourés sote of rain descended soft,

Causing the ground felé times and oft

Up for to give many a wholesome air,

And every plainé was y-clothed fair

“With newé green, and maketh smallé flow’rs

To springen here and there in field and mead

So very good and wholesome be the show’rs,

That they renewen that was old and dead

In winter time, and out of every seed

Springeth the herbé, so that every wight

Of this seasón waxeth right glad and light.

...

“Up I rose three hourés after twelfe

About the springing of the gladsome day,

And on I put my gear and mine array,

And to a pleasant grove I ’gan to pass

Long ere the brighté sun uprisen was;

“In which were oakés great, straight as a line,

Under the which the grass so fresh of hue

Was newly sprung; and an eight foot or nine

Evéry tree well from his fellow grew,

With branches broad laden with leavés new,

That sprungen out against the sunné sheen,

Some very red, and some a glad light green,

“Which (as me thought) was a right pleasant sight;

And eke the birdés songés for to hear

Would have rejoicéd any earthly wight;

And I, that could not yet in no mannere

Hearen the nightingale of all the year,

Full busily heark’ned with heart and ear.

If I her voice perceive could anywhere.”

This is exactly the Chaucer landscape. The forest trees are described each after their kind; even the varieties of color of oak leaves in spring-time he notes, some coming out “very red,” some of a golden green hue—a fact not noticed, as far as I remember, by any other poet; the soft green grass, as soft as velvet under foot, he is never done praising; the note of each song-bird he knows and delights in. These, with here and there a quaint old garden described, such is the scenery in which his human portraits are inlaid. He is altogether one of the most amply descriptive of English poets till we arrive at quite recent times. And it is one sign of the permanence and stability of England, even amidst all change, that among the copsewoods of Kent and the lanes of Surrey just such scenes may be seen any spring-day now as Chaucer loved to describe nearly five hundred years ago. This unchanged landscape is everywhere in his poetry blended with the mediæval manners and costumes that have long since passed, as a modern poet, in phrase like Chaucer’s own, has well sung:—

“He listeneth to the lark,

Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark

Of painted glass, in leaden lattice bound,

He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,

Then writeth in a book like any clerk.”