The appreciation of Wordsworth is a certain touchstone of the genuineness of Virgil’s feeling for Nature. It is true that the sentiment to which he gives expression in the Eclogues is only one, and not the most elevated, of the many modes in which the spirit of man responds to the forms and movement of the outward world. But the mood of the Eclogues is one most natural to man’s spirit in the beautiful lands of Southern Europe. The freshness and softness of Italian scenes are present in the Eclogues, in the rich music of the Italian language, while it still retained the strength, fulness, and majesty of its tones. These poems are truly representative of Italy, not as a land of old civilisation, of historic renown, of great cities, of corn-crops, and vineyards,—‘the mighty mother of fruits and men;’—but as a land of a soft and genial air, beautiful with the tender [pg 173]foliage and fresh flowers and blossoms of spring, and with the rich colouring of autumn; a land which has most attuned man’s nature to the influences of music and of pictorial art. As a true and exquisite symbol of this vein of sentiment associated with Italy, the Eclogues hold a not unworthy place beside the greater work—the ‘temple of solid marble’—which the maturer art of Virgil dedicated to the genius of his country, and beside the more composite but stately and massive monument which perpetuates the national glory of Rome.
CHAPTER V.
Motives, Form, National Interest, and Sources of the Georgics.
I.
The appearance of the Eclogues marked Virgil out among his contemporaries as the poet of Nature and rural life. That province was assigned to him, as epic poetry was to Varius and tragedy to Pollio. It is to the Eclogues only that the lines in which Horace characterises his art can with propriety be applied. These lines were written before the appearance of the Georgics, and probably before any considerable part of the poem had been composed[272]. The epithets which admirably characterise the receptive attitude of Virgil’s mind in the composition of his pastoral poems are quite inapplicable to the solid and severe workmanship and the earnest feeling of his didactic poem. The Eclogues are the poems of youth, and of a youth passed in study and in contact with Nature rather than with the serious interests of life. Though Virgil indicates in them the ambition which was moving him to vaster undertakings, yet he shows at the same time his consciousness of the comparative triviality of his art. The class of poem to which the word ludere is [pg 175]applied was, even when not of a licentious character, regarded by the more serious minds of Rome, such as Cicero[273] for instance, with a certain degree of contempt, as being among the ‘leviora studia,’ partaking more of the ‘Graeca levitas’ than of the ‘Roman gravitas[274].’ The genuine Roman spirit demanded of its highest literature, as of its native architecture, that it should either have some direct practical use, or contribute in some way to enhance the sense of national greatness.
The literary impulse directing Virgil to the composition of the Georgics was probably the wish to be the Hesiod, as he had already been the Theocritus, of Rome. The poets of the Augustan Age selected some Greek prototype whose manner they professed to reproduce and make the vehicle for the expression of their own thought and experience. Thus Horace chose Alcaeus, Propertius chose Callimachus as his model. Virgil assigns to Pollio the praise of alone composing poems ‘worthy of the buskin of Sophocles.’ In the Georgics he professes to find his own prototype in Hesiod:—
Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen.