resolute and unconquerable in battle, sacrificing life rather than abandoning the post of duty, inspired with more than Oriental devotion to their head, Virgil was teaching a lesson applicable to the Roman Commonwealth under its new government. While labour is shown to be a condition of individual happiness, or at least contentment, it is not in individual happiness, but in the permanent greatness of the community that its ultimate recom[pg 276]pense is to be sought. Though the individual life may be short and meagre in its attractions, and generation after generation may spend itself in an unceasing round of toil,
At genus immortale manet, multosque per annos
Stat fortuna domus et avi numerantur avorum[425].
The training and discipline for the attainment of these virtues are to be sought in plain and frugal living, in hardy pastime as well as hardy industry[426], in obedience to parents and reverent worship of the gods—
Illic saltus et lustra ferarum,
Et patiens operum exiguoque adsueta iuventus,
Sacra deum sanctique patres[427],—
and in abstinence from the luxurious indulgence, the anxious business, and the enervating pleasures of a corrupt civilisation[428]. While the grace and beauty of the poem arise out of the feeling of the life of Nature, the dignity and sanctity with which the subject is invested are due to the sense of the intimate connexion between the cultivation of the land and the moral and religious life of the Italian race.
7. The poem may be called a representative work of genius in respect also of its artistic execution. It is the finest work of Italian art, made perfect by the long education of Greek studies. More than any work in Latin literature the Georgics approach to the symmetry of form, the harmony of proportion, the unity of design and tone, characteristic of the purest art of Greece. But it is not in any sense a copy formed after any Greek pattern. It was seen that out of the more rudimentary attempts of Greek literature in this particular form of poetry Virgil [pg 277]created a new and nobler type, which never has been, and probably never will be, improved on. The execution of the poem is characterised by the genial susceptibility and enthusiasm of the Italian temperament, by the firm structure of all Roman work and the practical moderation and dignity of the Roman mind, and by a kind of meditative and pensive grace peculiar to the poet himself. The thought of the poem is not separable from the sentiment pervading it. And in this respect there is a marked difference between the genius of Virgil and of Lucretius. However much the speculative activity of Lucretius is charged with feeling, yet the thought stands out, clearly defined, through the atmosphere surrounding it. The melancholy of Lucretius, though it was the result partly of disposition,—the reaction perhaps of a strongly passionate temperament,—and partly of his relation to his age, was yet a state of mind for which he could assign definite grounds. That of Virgil was probably also in a great measure the result of temperament; but it seems to be a mood habitual to one who meditated much inwardly on the misery of the world, who was moved by compassion for all sights of sorrow or suffering[429], and was yet unable to shape this sense of ‘the burthen of the mystery’ into articulate thought. The atmosphere of the poem has become one with its substance. The fusion of meditation and feeling derived from the individual genius of the poet imparts a distinctively original charm to the style of the Georgics.
The style is thus, in a great degree, Virgil’s own, and owes little to the borrowed beauties of Greek expression. Though the language of the Alexandrine poets is sometimes reproduced, yet the beauty of those transferred passages arises from the grace given to them, not from that borrowed from them. The same [pg 278]may be said of the use sometimes made of the quaint diction of Hesiod. In one or two striking passages, such as that