and in the same Ode:—
Condit quisque diem collibus in suis,
Et vitem viduas ducit ad arbores[278].
And in the brief summing up of the whole glories of the Augustan reign contained in his latest Ode he begins with the words,—
Tua, Caesar, aetas
Fruges et agris rettulit uberes[279].
All Virgil’s early associations and sympathies would lead him to identify himself with this object and with the interests and [pg 178]happiness of such representatives of the old rural life of Italy as might still be found, or might arise again under a secure administration. In proposing to himself some serious aim for the exercise of his poetic gift, it was natural that he should have fixed on that of representing this life in such a way as to create an aspiration for it, and to secure for it the sympathy of the world. The language in which he speaks of the poem as a task imposed on him by Maecenas need not be taken literally: but it is no detraction from Virgil’s originality to suppose that he, like Horace, was encouraged by the minister to devote his genius to a purpose which would appeal equally to the sympathies of the statesman and of the poet. The testimony of Virgil’s biographer on this subject, which may probably be traced to the original testimony of Melissus, the freedman of Maecenas, is neither to be disregarded nor unduly pressed, any more than the language in which Virgil himself makes acknowledgment of his indebtedness. It is impossible to say what chance seed of casual conversation may have been the original germ of what ultimately became so large and goodly a creation. If, in the composition of the Georgics, Virgil employed his art as an instrument of government, we cannot doubt that he did so not only because he recognised in the subject of the poem one suited to his own genius, but because his past life and early associations brought home to him the desolation caused in the rural districts by the Civil Wars, the moral worth of that old class of husbandmen who had suffered from them, and the public loss arising from the diminution in their number and influence. To idealise the life of that class by describing, with realistic fidelity and in the language of purest poetry, the annual round of labour in which it was passed; to suggest the ever-present charm arising from the intimate contact with the manifold processes and aspects of Nature into which man is brought in this life of labour; to contrast the simplicity and sanctity of such life with the luxury and lawless passions of the great world; and to associate this ideal with the varied beauty of Italy and the historic memories of Rome, were objects worthy of one who [pg 179]aspired to fulfil the office of a national poet. It is no detraction from the originality of his idea to suppose that some such suggestion as that attributed to Maecenas gave the original impulse to the poem. Not only the art, genius, and learning, but the religious faith and feeling, the moral and national sympathies, which give to it its peculiar meaning and value, are all the poet’s own. His strong feeling for his subject was as little capable of being communicated from without, as the genius with which he adorns it[280].
With such feelings as those which were moving the imagination of Virgil, a modern poet might have shaped his subject into the form of a poetic idyl, in which the joys and sorrows of men and women living during this national crisis might have been represented in union with the varied aspects of the scenery and the chief modes of rural industry in Italy. Such a form of art would have enabled the poet to add the interest of individual character and action to his abstract delineation of the ‘acer rusticus’ or the ‘duri agrestes’ engaged in a hard struggle with the forces of Nature. And one or two passages, containing some sketch drawn directly from peasant life, as for instance i. 291–296,
Et quidam seros hiberni ad luminis ignes, etc.,
and iv. 125–146,