III.
It is easy for those who wish to depreciate the art of Virgil to point out very many instances of imitation and artificial treatment in the Eclogues, and to establish their manifest inferiority to the Greek idyl in direct truth and vividness of representation. They are not purely objective, like the Greek idyl, nor purely subjective as the Latin elegy generally is. They are very much inferior to the Greek originals in dramatic power; and the idyl is really a branch of dramatic poetry. Like the pure drama, it depends on the power of living in the thoughts, situations, and feelings of beings quite distinct from the poet himself. Some of the Eclogues, those in which the passion of love and the Italian passion for the land are the motives, are dramatic in spirit, though the conception of the situation is not consistently maintained. But in most cases, where he is not merely imitative, the dramatic form is to Virgil as a kind of veil under which he may partially reveal what moved him most in connexion with his own personal fortunes, and may express his sympathies with literature, with outward nature, and with certain moods and sentiments of the human heart. It is not in virtue of the originality and consistency of their conception, but of their general truth of feeling and the perfection of the medium through which that feeling is conveyed, that those who admire the Eclogues must vindicate their claim to poetic honour.
The reserve with which all his personal relations are indicated, and the allusive way in which the story of his fortunes is told, are in keeping with the delicacy and modesty of Virgil’s nature. He tells us nothing directly of his home-life or occupations, though his attachment to the scenes familiar to him from childhood is felt in the language with which Meliboeus felicitates Tityrus on the restitution of his land, and in that in which Moeris and Lycidas discourse together. We know of no actual Galatea or Amaryllis associated with the joy or the pain of his youth; though his subtle perception of the various moods of the passion of love can hardly be a mere poetic intuition, unen[pg 162]lightened by personal experience. The eminent men with whom he was brought into contact, Octavianus, Pollio, Varus, and Gallus, are not individualised; though the different feelings of reverential or loyal respect, of colder deference, or admiring enthusiasm, which they severally excited in him, can be clearly distinguished. In the undesigned revelation of himself, which every author makes in his writings, there are few indications of the religious and moral feeling and of the national sentiment which are among the principal elements in Virgil’s maturer poems: but we find abundantly the evidence of a mind open to all tender and refined influences, free from every taint of envy or malice, serious and pensive, and finding its chief happiness in making the charm, which fascinated him in books, in Nature, and in life, heard in the deep and rich music of the language, of which he first drew out the full capabilities:—
Saepe ego longos
Cantando puerum memini me condere soles[253].
The Eclogues also present Virgil to us as not only a poet, but, as what he continued to be through all his life, a student of the writings of the past. Like Milton he was eminently a learned poet, and, like Milton, he knew the subtle alchemy by which the duller ore of learned allusion is transmuted into gold. The tales of the Greek mythology and the names of places famous in song or story act on his imagination, not so much through their own intrinsic interest, as through the associations of literature. It is under this reflex action that he recalls to memory the tales of Pasiphae, of Scylla and Nisus, of Tereus and Philomela; introduces Orpheus, Amphion, and Linus as the ideal poets of pastoral song; and alludes to Hesiod, Euphorion, and Theocritus in the phrases ‘the sage of Ascra,’ ‘the verse of Chalcis,’ ‘the Sicilian Shepherd.’ It is in this spirit that he associates the musical accompaniment of his song with the names of Maenalus and Eurotas, of Rhodope and Ismarus; and that he [pg 163]speaks of bees and thyme as ‘the bees and thyme of Hybla,’ of doves as ‘the Chaonian doves,’ of vultures as ‘the birds of Caucasus.’ He also characterises objects by local epithets, suggestive rather of the associations of geographical science than of poetry. Thus he speaks of ‘Ariusian wine,’ of ‘Cydonian arrows,’ ‘Cyrnean yews,’ ‘Assyrian spikenard,’ and the like. The interest in physical enquiries appears in the allusion in Ecl. iii. 40,
In medio duo signa Conon, etc.,
and in the rapid summary of the Epicurean theory of creation at vi. 31, etc.,
Namque canebat uti magnum per inane coacta, etc.