CHAPTER VII.
The Georgics as the representative poem of Italy.
The consideration of the motives which influenced Virgil to undertake the composition of the Georgics, of the form of art adopted by him, of the national interest attaching to his subject, of the materials used by him and the sources from which he derived them, of the author who most influenced him in speculative idea and in the general manner of treating his subject, leads to the conclusion that, in its essential characteristics, the poem is a genuine work of Italian art and inspiration. If the original motive influencing him was the ambition to treat of rural life in the serious spirit of Hesiod, as he had done in the lighter vein of Theocritus, that motive was soon lost in the strong impulse to invest with charm and dignity the kind of life in which the Italian mind placed its ideal of worth and happiness. By thus identifying himself with a great national object Virgil raised himself to a higher level of art than that attained by poets whose interests are purely personal and literary.
Next to satire, there was no form of poetry which had more of a Roman character than didactic poetry. By becoming a province of Roman art, this form acquired all its dignity and capacity of greatness. And though the Georgics, being a work of Italian culture as well as of Italian inspiration, could not escape some relation, not in form only but in materials and mode of expression, to Greek originals, there is no great work of Latin genius, except the Satires and Epistles of Horace, in which the debt thus incurred is so small. And not only is the [pg 262]debt small in quantity, but it is incurred to authors much inferior to Virgil in creative power and poetical feeling. In using borrowed materials he makes the mind of Greece tributary to his own national design. But his most valuable materials are derived either from personal observation, or from Latin authors who had put on record the results of their observation: and his largest debt, in imaginative feeling and conception, is incurred not to any Greek author, but to the most powerful and original of Roman poets and thinkers. The speculative idea, which gives something of philosophical consistency to the poem, was, if not one of pure Italian conception, yet made more truly real and vital through the experience of the force and endurance exercised by the strong men of Italy in subduing the earth to their will, and in constructing their great material works (‘operum laborem’), such as their roads, baths, aqueducts, harbours, encampments, and great draining works, by which they provided the comforts of life (‘commoda vitae’) and defended themselves against their enemies or the maligner influence of the elements.
The language of Virgil himself and the testimony of ancient commentators confirm the impression, that the object of which he was most distinctly conscious in the composition of the poem was the ‘glorification of Italy,’—of the land itself in its fertility and beauty, and of the life most congenial to Italian sentiment. Even to a greater extent than he may have intended, Virgil, through the national mould in which his thought was cast and the national colour of his sympathies, fulfils this representative office. Where the poem seems to a modern reader to fail in human interest, the interest which it had for the poet’s countrymen is revived by dwelling in thought on this representative character. When the associations appealed to are of Greek rather than of Italian origin, we have to remember that the poem was addressed to a highly educated class of readers, at the time when the Roman mind had been most enlarged and enriched, but had not yet been satiated by Greek studies. Yet this kind of appeal is quite subsidiary to that made to the [pg 263]native sensibilities of the Romans. It is to commend to their love and admiration a purely Italian ideal that Virgil employs the resources of Greek learning, as well as all the strength and delicacy of his own genius.
A rapid review of the tastes, sympathies, and affections on the part of his readers to which Virgil appeals, both in the body of his poem and in its finer episodes, will show that they all contribute to produce this representative character. Where some of the details of the poem seem to fail in poetic interest, they still have the interest of being characteristic of the Italian mind.
1. The poem professes to impart practical instruction on the best method of cultivating the land, of propagating trees, of breeding cattle, horses, etc., of profiting by the industry of bees:—
Quare agite, O, proprios generatim discite cultus,
Agricolae[401].