In its inner inspiration, as well as its outward expression, the Augustan poetry was the maturest development of the national mind. The inspiring influences of Latin poetry were the idea of Rome, the appreciation of Greek art, the genial Italian life. We have seen how the first establishment of the Empire gave to the national idea a temporary importance and prominence which it had not had since Ennius first awoke his countrymen to the consciousness of their destiny. It was only in the Augustan Age, or during the few years preceding it, that the taste of the Romans was sufficiently educated to appreciate the perfect art of the Greeks. The whole of Italy was now for the first time united in one nation. A new generation had been born and grown to manhood since the Social War. The pride in Rome and the love of the whole land might now be felt by all men born between the Alps and the Straits of Sicily. The districts far removed from the capital, ‘by the sounding Aufidus’ or ‘the slow-winding Mincius,’ still kept [pg 58]alive the traditions of a severer morality and the habits of a simpler and happier life[87]. They were still able to nourish the susceptible mind of childhood with poetic fancies[88]. In the following generation the idea of the empire was one no longer of inspiring novelty, but rather of a dull oppression. The taste for Greek literature had lost its freshness and quickening power. The natural enjoyment of life, the susceptibility to beauty in art and nature, the love of simplicity, were no longer possible to minds enervated and hearts deadened by the unrelieved monotony of luxurious living.
CHAPTER II.
Virgil’s place in Roman Literature.
Virgil is the earliest in time and much the most important in rank among the extant poets of the Augustan Age. It is only in comparatively recent times that any question has arisen as to the high position due to him among the great poets of all ages. His pre-eminence not only above all those of his own country, but above all other poets with the exception of Homer, was unquestioned in the ancient Roman world. His countrymen claimed for him a rank on a level with, sometimes even above, that of the great father of European literature. And this estimate of his genius became traditional, and was confirmed by the general voice of modern criticism. For eighteen centuries, wherever any germ of literary taste survived in Europe, his poems were the principal medium through which the heroic age of Greece as well as the ancient life of Rome and Italy was apprehended. No writer has, on the whole, entered so largely and profoundly into the education of three out of the four chief representatives of European culture—the Italians, the French, and the English—at various stages of their intellectual development. The history of the progress of taste might be largely illustrated by reference to the place which the works of Virgil have held, in the teaching of youth and among the refined pleasures of manhood, between the age of Dante and the early part of the present century.
Since that time, however, an undoubted reaction has set in against the prestige once enjoyed by Latin poetry. And from this reaction Virgil has been the chief sufferer. The peculiar [pg 60]gifts, social and intellectual, of Horace have continued to secure for him many friends in every country and in every generation. The spirit of Lucretius is perhaps more in unison with the spirit of the present than with that of any previous age, owing to changes both in imaginative feeling and in speculative curiosity and belief through which the world is now passing. The sincerity and unstudied grace of Catullus are immediately recognised by all who read his works. But in regard to Virgil, if former centuries assigned him too high a place, the criticism of the present century, in Germany at least, and for a certain time in England, has been much less favourable. French criticism has indeed remained undeviatingly loyal, and regards him as the poet, not of Rome only, but of all those nations which are the direct inheritors of the Latin civilisation[89]. And in England, at the present time, the estimate of his genius, expressed both by writers of acknowledged reputation and in the current criticism of the day, is much more favourable than it was some thirty years ago.
It would be neither desirable nor possible to enter on a critical examination of the value of a writer, who has been so much admired through so long a time, without taking some account of the prestige attaching to his name. It may be of use therefore to bring together some of the more familiar evidences of his reputation and influence in former times, to show the existence of a temporary reaction of opinion and to assign causes for it, and to indicate the grounds on which his pre-eminence as the culminating point in Latin literature and his high position among the poets of the world appear to rest.