It has already been said that the Georgics were undertaken at the request of Maecenas. [29] From more than one passage in the Eclogues we should infer that Virgil was not altogether content with the light themes he was pursuing; that he had before his mind's eye dim visions of a great work which should give full scope to the powers he felt within him. But Virgil was deficient in self-reliance. He might have continued to trifle with bucolic poetry, had not Maecenas enlisted his muse in a practical object worthy of its greatness. This was the endeavour to rekindle the old love of husbandry which had been the nurse of Rome's virtue, and which was gradually dying out. To this object Virgil lent himself with enthusiasm. To feel that his art might be turned to some real good, that it might advance the welfare of the state, this idea acted on him like an inspiration. He was by early training well versed in the details of country life. And he determined that nothing which ardour or study could effect should be wanting to make his knowledge at once thorough and attractive. For seven years he wrought into their present artistic perfection the technical details of husbandry; a labour of love wrought out of study and experience, and directed, as Merivale well says, to the glorification of labour itself as the true end of man.
Virgil's treatment is partially adapted from the Alexandrines; but, as he himself says, his real model is Hesiod. [30] The combination of quaint sententiousness with deep enthusiasm, which he found in the old poet, met his conception of what a practical poem should be. And so, although the desultory maxims of the Works and Days give but a faint image of the comprehensive width and studied discursiveness of the Georgics, yet they present a much more real parallel to it than the learned trifling of Aratus or Nicander. For Virgil, like Lucretius, is no trifler: he uses verse as a serious vehicle for impressing his conviction; he acknowledges, so to say, the responsibility of his calling, [31] and writes in poetry because poetry is the clothing of his mind. Hence the Georgics must be ranked as a link in the chain of serious treatises on agriculture, of which Cato's is the first and Varro's the second, designed to win the nation back to the study and discipline of its youth. And that Columella so understood it is clear both from his defending his opinions by frequent quotation from it as a standard authority, and from his writing one book of his voluminous manual in verses imitated from Virgil. The almost religious fervour with which Virgil threw himself into the task of arresting the decay of Italian life, which is the dominant motive of the Aeneid, is present also in the Georgics. The pithy condensation of useful experience characteristic of Cato,
"Utiliumque sagax rerum et divina futuri
Sortilegis non discrepuit sententia Delphis," [32]
the fond antiquarianism of Varro, "laudator temporis acti," unite, with the newly-kindled hope of future glories to be achieved under Caesar's rule, to make the Georgics the most complete embodiment of Roman industrial views, as the Aeneid is of Roman theology and religion. [33] Virgil aims at combining the stream of poetical talent, which had come mostly from outside, [34] with the succession of prose compositions on practical subjects which had proceeded from the burgesses themselves. Cato and Varro are as continually before his mind as Ennius, Catullus, and Lucretius. A new era had arrived: the systematising of the results of the past he felt was committed to him. Of Virgil's works the Georgics is unquestionably the most artistic. Grasp of the subject, clearness of arrangement, evenness of style, are all at their highest excellence; the incongruities that criticism detects in the Eclogues, and the unrealities that often mar the Aeneid, are almost wholly absent. There is, however, one great artistic blemish, for which the poet's courage, not his taste, is to blame. We have already spoken of his affection for Gallus, celebrated in the most extravagant but yet the most ethereally beautiful of the Eclogues; [35] and this affection, unbroken by the disgrace and exile of its object, had received a yet more splendid tribute in the episode which closed the Georgics. Unhappily, the beauties of this episode, so honourable to the poet's constancy, are to us a theme for conjecture only; the narrow jealousy of Augustus would not suffer any honourable mention of one who had fallen under his displeasure; and, to his lasting disgrace, he ordered Virgil to erase his work. The poet weakly consented, and filled up the gap by the story, beautiful, it is true, but singularly inappropriate, of Aristacus and Orpheus and Eurydice. This epic sketch, Alexandrine in form but abounding in touches of the richest native genius, [36] must have revealed to Rome something of the loftiness of which Virgil's muse was capable. With a felicity and exuberance scarcely inferior to Ovid, it united a power of awakening feeling, a dreamy pathos and a sustained eloquence, which marked its author as the heir of Homer's lyre, "magnae spes altera Romae." [37]
In a work like this it would be obviously out of place to offer any minute criticism either upon the beauties or the difficulties of the Georgics. We shall conclude this short notice with one or two remarks on that love of nature in Latin poetry of which the Georgics are the most renowned example. Dunlop has called Virgil a landscape painter. [38] In so far as this implies a faithful and picturesque delineation of natural scenes, whether of movement or repose, [39] the criticism is a happy one: Virgil lingers over these with more affection than any previous writer. The absence of a strong feeling for the peaceful or the grand in nature has often been remarked as a shortcoming of the Greek mind, and it does not seem to have been innate even in the Italian. Alpine scenery suggested no associations but those of horror and desolation. Even the more attractive beauties of woods, rills, and flowers, were hailed rather as a grateful exchange from the turmoil of the city than from a sense of their intrinsic loveliness; it is the repose, the comfort, ease, in a word the body, not the spirit of nature that the Roman poets celebrate. [40] As a rule their own retirement was not spent amid really rustic scenes. The villas of the great were furnished with every means of making study or contemplation attractive. Rich gardens, cool porticoes, and the shade of planted trees were more to the poet's taste than the rugged stile or the village green. Their aspirations after rural simplicity spring from the weariness of city unrealities rather than from the necessity of being alone with nature. As a fact the poems of Virgil were not composed in a secluded country retreat, but in the splendid and fashionable vicinity of Naples. [41] The Lake of Avernus, the Sibyl's cave, and the other scenes so beautifully painted in the Aeneid are all near the spot. From his luxurious villa the poet could indulge his reverie on the simple rusticity of his ancestors or the landscapes famous in the scenery of Greek song. At such times his mind called up images of Greek legend that blended with his delineations of Italian peasant life: [42]
"O ubi campi
Spercheiosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis
Taygeta; o qui me gelidis in vallibus Haemi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!"
The very name Tempe, given so often to shady vales, shows the mingled literary and aesthetic associations that entered into the love of rural ease and quiet. The deeper emotion peculiar to modern times, which struggles to find expression in the verse of Shelley or Wordsworth, in the canvass of Turner, in the life of restless travel, often a riddle so perplexing to those who cannot understand its source; the mysterious questionings which ask of nature not only what she says to us, but what she utters to herself; why it is that if she be our mother, she veils her face from her children, and will not use a language they can understand—
"Cur natum crudelis tu quoque falsis
Ludis imaginibus? Cur dextrae iungere dextram
Non datur, et veras audire et reddere voces?"
feelings like these which—though often but obscurely present, it would indeed be a superficial glance that did not read in much of modern thought, however unsatisfactory, in much of modern art, however imperfect —we can hardly trace, or, if at all, only as lightest ripples on the surface, scarcely ruffling the serene melancholy, deep indeed, but self- contained because unconscious of its depth, in which Virgil's poetry flows.
At what time of his life Virgil turned his thoughts to epic poetry is not known. Probably like most gifted poets he felt from his earliest years the ambition to write a heroic poem. He expresses this feeling in the Eclogues [43] more than once; Pollio's exploits seemed to him worthy of such a celebration. [44] In the Georgics he declares that he will wed Caesar's glories to an epic strain, [45] but though the emperor urged him to undertake the subject, which was besides in strict accordance with epic precedent, his mature judgment led him to reject it. [46] Like Milton, he seems to have revolved for many years the different themes that came to him, and, like him, to have at last chosen one which by mounting back into the distant past enabled him to indulge historical retrospect, and gather into one focus the entire subsequent development. As to his aptitude for epic poetry opinions differ. Niebuhr expresses the view of many great critics when he says, "Virgil is a remarkable instance of a man mistaking his vocation; his real calling was lyric poetry; his small lyric poems show that he would have been a poet like Catullus if he had not been led away by his desire to write a great Graeco-Latin poem." And Mommsen, by speaking of "successes like that of the Aeneid" evidently inclines towards the same view. It must be conceded that Virgil's genius lacked heroic fibre, invention, dramatic power. He had not an idea of "that stern joy that warriors feel," so necessary to one who would raise a martial strain. The passages we remember best are the very ones that are least heroic. The funeral games in honour of Anchises, the forlorn queen, the death of Nisus and Euryalus, owe all their charm to the sacrifice of the heroic to the sentimental. Had Virgil been able to keep rigidly to the lofty purpose with which he entered on his work, we should perhaps have lost the episodes which bring out his purest inspiration. So far as his original endowments went, his mind certainly was not cast in a heroic mould. But the counter-balancing qualifications must not be forgotten. He had an inextinguishable enthusiasm for his art, a heart