Montibus audiri fragor, aut resonantia longe
Litora misceri et nemorum increbrescere murmur[433];—
but generally the stream flows on, neither in rapid torrent nor with abrupt transitions, but ‘with a tranquil deep strength,’ fed by pure and abounding sources of affection, of contemplation, of moral and religious feeling, of delight from eye and ear, from memory and old poetic association.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Roman Epic before the time of Virgil.
The distinction between what is called the primitive and the literary epic has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. The two kinds of narrative poem belong to totally different epochs in civilisation; they are also the products of very different national temperaments and faculties. It is somewhat remarkable that those literatures which are richest in literary epics—the ancient Latin, the modern Italian, and the English—are those which possess few or no native poems either of the type realised in the Nibelungen-Lied, the Song of Roland, and poems of that class, or of the type realised in the Iliad and Odyssey; nor is there, in connexion with the earlier traditions of the Italian or the English race, that cycle of heroic adventure and personages in which such poems have their origin. The composition of the Aeneid and of the Paradise Lost implies powers of combination, of arranging great masses of materials, of concentration of the mind on a single object, more analogous to those which produced the vast historical work of Livy and ‘The Decline and Fall’ of Gibbon, than to the spontaneity, the naïveté, the rapidity of conception and utterance, and that immediate sympathy between poet and people, to which we owe the continuous poems developed out of some germ of popular ballad or national legend. It was the peculiar glory of Greece, that in the earlier stage of her literary development she manifested not only a perfection of expression and of art, but a maturity of intelligence, a true insight into the meaning of life, a nobility of imagination in union with a clearness and sanity of judgment, which the most advanced eras of other literatures [pg 281]scarcely equal. Thus the two great Greek epics are unique in character, and, while they have, in the highest degree, the excellences of each class, they can properly be ranked under neither. While exhibiting, better than any other writings, man and the outward world in ‘the first intention,’—man in the energy and buoyancy of the national youth, and Nature in the vividness of impression which she makes on the mind and sense in their most healthy activity,—they are at the same time masterpieces of art and great monuments of the national mind. The Greek imagination with no appearance of effort produced works of such compass and harmonious proportion as only long years of labour and reflection in collecting and combining materials in accordance with a predetermined purpose produced in other literatures.
We are not called upon to consider here the conditions out of which the earlier type of epic poetry is developed, or to enquire why the Latin race failed to create at least some inartistic legendary poem of sufficient length to be ranked in that form of literature. Perhaps no answer could be given to the question excepting that the Latin race had not sufficient creative force to produce such a work,—which is simply another way of stating the fact that it did not produce epic poems. The Romans were from a very early period interested in their past history and traditions. They seem to have shaped, either out of real incidents in their national and family history, or out of their chief national characteristics, stories of strong human interest[434], which only want the ‘vates sacer’ to be converted into poems. Every great family seems to have had its own traditions, glorifying the exploits and preserving the memory of illustrious ancestors; and whatever may have been the case in regard to the legendary stories connected with the fortunes of the State, some of these traditions were undoubtedly expressed in rude Saturnian verse, and chanted at family gatherings and at funeral banquets. The memory of these ancestral lays—if we may apply that word to them—survived till the time of [pg 282]Cicero, Horace, and apparently even of Tacitus[435], though no actual trace of them appears to have existed even in the age of the elder Cato. But the influence of these rude germs of poetry—if they exercised any influence on Latin literature at all—was confined to the structure of Roman history. An enquiry into the origin and growth of Roman epic poetry need not concern itself with them.
Neither is it necessary here to go back into the vexed and probably insoluble question of the genesis of the Homeric poems. That these stand in most intimate relation with the Virgilian epic is a patent fact; and the nature of this intimate relation will be examined in some of the subsequent chapters. But they first began to act on the Roman imagination and art many centuries after they assumed their present form. The Romans accepted them as they did the lyrical and dramatic poetry of Greece, and were absolutely unconcerned with the questions as to their origin which interest modern curiosity. For the adequate understanding of the form and substance of the Roman epic as it was shaped by its greatest master, a competent knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey must be presupposed; but it is unnecessary in a work on Latin literature to discuss the origin and character of the epic poetry of the Greeks on the same scale on which their idyllic and didactic poetry has been discussed in previous chapters.