Virgil

by W. Lucas Collins

Enough has perhaps been said to give some idea of the genius and character of Virgil’s pastoral poetry. It laid the foundation of a taste which was long prevalent in European literature, but which may be said to have now become obsolete. English poets were at one time strongly imbued with it. Spenser, Milton, Drayton, Pope, and Ambrose Phillips,—the last perhaps the most successful,—were all more or less imitators of Virgil in this line of poetry. But it would seem to require a more than ordinary revolution in literature ever to bring such a style into popularity again.

THE GEORGICS.

The Georgics of Virgil, like his Pastorals, are a direct and confessed imitation from Greek originals. The poem of Hesiod—“Works and Days”—which has come down to us, though apparently in an incomplete form, gives a mythological sketch of the early history of the world, with its five ages of the human race—the gold, the silver, the brazen, “the age of heroes,” and the present—which last, with the cynicism or melancholy which seems so inseparable from the poetic temperament, Hesiod looks upon as hopelessly degenerate, with the prospect of something even worse to come. To this traditional cosmogony the Greek poet adds directions as to farm operations in their several seasons, and notes of lucky and unlucky days. Virgil has borrowed from him largely on these two latter subjects. He is also considerably indebted to other Greek writers less known to us, and in whose case, therefore, his obligations are not so readily traced.

From his own countryman and immediate predecessor, Lucretius, the author of the great didactic poem “On the Nature of Things,” he drew quite as largely, but in another field. Virgil is said to have been born on the very day of Lucretius’s death, and he had an intense admiration for both his diction and his philosophy. There are passages in Virgil’s writings which would seem to show that his greatest ambition would have been to have sung, like Lucretius, of the secrets of nature, rather than either of heroic legends or of country life. And here and there, throughout these books of Georgics, wherever he has the opportunity, he forgets the farmer in the natural philosopher, and breaks off in the midst of some practical precepts to indulge in speculations on the hidden causes of nature’s operations, which would have sorely puzzled a Roman country gentleman or his bailiff, if we could suppose that the work was really composed with a view to their practical instruction.

He addresses his poem to his noble patron Mæcenas. And amongst the long list of divine powers whom, as the guardians of fields and flocks, he invokes to aid his song, he introduces the present Autocrat of Rome.

“Thou, Cæsar, chief, where’er thy choice ordain,
To fix ’mid gods thy yet unchosen reign—
Wilt thou o’er cities stretch thy guardian sway,
While earth and all her realms thy nod obey?
The world’s vast orb shall own thy genial power,
Giver of fruits, fair sun, and favouring shower;
Before thy altar grateful nations bow,
And with maternal myrtle wreathe thy brow.
O’er boundless ocean shall thy power prevail,
Thee her sole lord the world of waters hail?
Rule, where the sea remotest Thule laves,
While Tethys dowers thy bride with all her waves?
Wilt thou ’mid Scorpius and the Virgin rise,
And, a new star, illume thy native skies?
Scorpius, e’en now, each shrinking claw confines,
And more than half his heaven to thee resigns.
Where’er thy reign (for not if hell invite
To wield the sceptre of eternal night,
Ne’er would such lust of dire dominion move
Thee, Cæsar, to resign the realm of Jove:
Though vaunting Greece extol th’ Elysian plain,
Whence weeping Ceres wooes her child in vain)
Breathe favouring gales, my course propitious guide,
O’er the rude swain’s uncertain path preside;
Now, now invoked, assert thy heavenly birth,
And learn to hear our prayers, a god on earth.”
—Sotheby.

The first book is devoted to the raising of corn crops. The farmer is recommended to plough early, to plough deep, and to plough four times over—advice in the principles of which modern farmers would cordially agree. The poet also recommends fallows at least every other season, and not to take two corn crops in successive years. The Roman agriculturist had his pests of the farm, and complained of them as loudly as his modern fellows. The geese, and the cranes, and the mice, and the small birds, vexed him all in turn; and if he knew nothing of that distinctly English torment, the couch-grass,—squitch, twitch, or quitch, as it is variously termed, which is said to spring up under the national footstep wherever it goes, whether at the Cape or in Australia,—he had indigenous weeds of his own which gave him equal trouble to get rid of. The Roman plough seems to have been a cumbrous wooden instrument, which would break the heart alike of man and horse in these days; and its very elaborate description, in spite of the polished language of the poet, would shock one of our modern implement-manufacturers. He gives a few hints as to lucky and unlucky days, and fuller directions for prognosticating the weather from the various signs to be observed in the sky, and in the behaviour of the animal world; and he closes this first division of his poem, as he began it, with an apostrophe to Cæsar as the hope of Rome and Italy. It is one of the finest passages in the Georgics, and will bear translation as well as most. Dryden’s version is spirited enough, and though diffuse, presents the sense fairly to an English ear:—

“Ye home-born deities, of mortal birth!
Thou, father Romulus, and mother Earth,
Goddess unmoved! whose guardian arms extend
O’er Tuscan Tiber’s course, and Roman towers defend;
With youthful Cæsar your joint powers engage,
Nor hinder him to save the sinking age.
O! let the blood already spilt atone
For the past crimes of curst Laomedon!
Heaven wants thee there; and long the gods, we know,
Have grudged thee, Cæsar, to the world below;
Where fraud and rapine right and wrong confound;
Where impious arms from every part resound,
And monstrous crimes in every shape are crowned.
The peaceful peasant to the wars is prest;
The fields lie fallow in inglorious rest;
The plain no pasture to the flock affords,
The crooked scythes are straightened into swords:
And there Euphrates her soft offspring arms,
And here the Rhine rebellows with alarms;
The neighbouring cities range on several sides,
Perfidious Mars long-plighted leagues divides,
And o’er the wasted world in triumph rides.
So four fierce coursers, starting to the race,
Scour through the plain, and lengthen every pace:
Nor reins, nor curbs, nor threat’ning cries they fear,
But force along the trembling charioteer.”

The Second Georgic treats of the orchard and the vineyard, but especially of the latter. The apple, the pear, the olive, all receive due notice from the poet; but upon the culture of the vine he dwells with a hearty enthusiasm, and his precepts have a more practical air than those which he gives out upon other branches of cultivation. The soil, the site, the best kinds to choose, the different modes of propagation, are all discussed with considerable minuteness. It would seem that in those earlier times, as now, the vintage had a more poetical aspect than even the harvest-field. The beauty of the crop, the merriment of the gatherers, the genial effects of the grape when it has gone through the usual process of conversion, gave, as is still the case in all wine-producing countries, a holiday character to the whole course of cultivation. All other important crops contribute in some way to supply the actual needs of life: the vine alone represents distinctly its enjoyments. And when, at the beginning of the book, the poet invokes the god of wine to inspire his song, he does it with a thorough heartiness of welcome which assures us that, however temperate his own habits might be, he had not adopted any vow of total abstinence. Some of the ancient critics are said to have detected in Homer a taste for joviality, because in his verse he had always a kindly word for “the dark red wine:” they might have said the same of the writer of the Georgics. It is a cordial invitation which he gives to the jolly god:—

“Come, Father Bacchus, come! thy bounty fills
All things around; for thee the autumn hills,
Heavy with fruit, blush through their greenery;
In the full vats the vintage foams for thee:
Come, Father Bacchus, come! nor yet refuse
To doff thy buskins, and with noble juice
To stain thy limbs, and tread the grapes with me.”