"THE BEES" OF VIRGIL.
All modern writers have triumphed over the ignorance displayed by the poet Virgil in his fable of Aristæus, who draws life out of the womb of death, and causes his bees to spring from the entrails of immolated bulls.[Q] But, for myself, I have never laughed at it. I know, I feel, that every word of this great sacred poet has a weighty value, an authority which I would designate as that of an augur and a pontiff. And the fourth book of the Georgics, particularly, was a holy work, issuing from the inmost recesses of the heart. It was a pious homage rendered to sorrow and to friendship; an eulogium on the proscribed Gallus, Virgil's dearest friend. This eulogium, undoubtedly, was struck out by the prudent Mæcenas; and Virgil then substituted his Resurrection of the Bees: a song full of immortality, which, in the mystery of Nature's transformations, embodies our highest hope, that death is not a death, but the beginning of a new life.
[Q] The passage to which Michelet refers is found in the fourth book of the Georgics, and is thus translated by Dryden:—
"The secret in an easy method lies:
Select four brawny bulls for sacrifice,
Which on Lycæus graze, without a guide;
Add four fair heifers yet in yoke untried:
For these, four altars in their temple rear,
And then adore the woodland powers with prayer.
From the slain victims pour the streaming blood,
And leave their bodies in the shady wood:
Nine mornings thence, Lethean poppy bring,
T' appease the manes of the poet's king:
And, to propitiate his offended pride,
A fatted calf and a black ewe provide:
This finished, to the former woods repair.
His mother's precepts he performs with care;
The temple visits, and adores with prayer.
Four altars raises, from his herds he calls,
For slaughter, four the fairest of his bulls;
Four heifers from his female store he took,
All fair, and all unknowing of the yoke.
Nine mornings thence, with sacrifice and prayers,
The powers atoned, he to the grove repairs.
Behold a prodigy! for, from within
The broken bowels, and the bloated skin,
A buzzing noise of bees his ears alarms,
Straight issue through the sides assaulting swarms;
Dark as a cloud they make a wheeling flight,
Then on a neighbouring tree, descending light:
Like a large cluster of black grapes they show,
And make a large dependence from the bough."
Would he have descended to the empty pleasure of inserting a popular fable in that consecrated portion of his poem which had been occupied by his friend's name? I will never believe it. The fable, if it be one, must necessarily possess some serious foundation, and a truthful side. We are not dealing here with the worldly poet, the urbane singer, like Horace, the elegant favourite of Rome. It is not the charming improvisatore of the court of Augustus, the gay and indiscreet Ovid, who betrays the loves of the gods. Virgil is the child of Earth, the pure and noble figure of the old Italian peasant, the religious interrogator, the reverently simple interpreter of the secrets of Nature. But he may be mistaken in his words,—that he may have ill-applied the names,—this is not impossible; but so far as the facts are concerned, it is an entirely different matter: whatever he describes, I firmly believe he saw.