What then under these irremediable conditions is it best for man to do? Lucretius has no other answer to give him than to study the laws of Nature, so as to understand his position, and thus to limit his wants and reconcile himself to what he cannot alter. Yet in other passages of the poem, which Virgil also remembered[318], he did recognise the fact that human skill and the knowledge acquired by observation had done much to enrich and beautify the earth:—
Inde aliam atque aliam culturam dulcis agelli
Temptabant, fructusque feros mansuescere terram
Cernebant indulgendo blandeque colendo[319].
But he seems to have no idea of further progress. Though he contemplates with imaginative sympathy the trials of the ‘grandis arator’ and the ‘vetulae vitis sator,’ he has no guidance to offer them. The lessons taught by Lucretius are not those of active energy, applicable to every condition of life, but the lessons of a resigned quietism and a contemplative energy, adapted only to men of leisure, enjoying ample resources for the gratification of their intellectual tastes.
That this opinion of the decay in the natural productiveness of the earth made a strong impression on the Roman mind may be inferred from the fact that Columella opens his treatise by arguing against it. And that the idea of the struggle with Nature was one familiar to the prose writers on such subjects appears from an expression in the first book of the same writer: ‘that the land ought to be weaker than the husbandman, since he has to struggle with it.’ Cicero too puts into Cato’s [pg 208]mouth[320] the sentiment that the earth, if rightly dealt with, never refuses the ‘imperium’ of man. And this too is Virgil’s doctrine: and it was to give that guidance which Lucretius, though he discerned the evil, did not supply, that the didactic directions of the Georgics were given.
The Lucretian idea of Nature, both in its philosophical and poetical significance, runs through the Georgics; but it is modified by other considerations, and it is rather latent than prominent in the poetry and in the practical teaching of the poem. The mind of Virgil is not possessed, as the mind of Lucretius was possessed, by the thought of the immensity of her sphere and the universality of her presence. He sees her presence in the familiar scenes and objects around him. The idea adds variety, grace, and liveliness to his description of every detail of rural industry. A sense of the ministering agency of Nature is a more pervading element in his poetry than that of her power and majesty. Objects are still regarded by him as separate and individual. The conceptions of Nature which created mythology contend in his mind with the half-apprehended conceptions of universal law and of the interdependence of phenomena on one another. Thus the poetical element in his descriptions of the life of plants and trees, or of the forces of flood and storm, does not spring from such deep sources in the imagination as the same element in the descriptions of the older poet. But neither is it limited to the perception of the ‘outward shows’ of things which gratify the eye, or the sounds which delight the ear. Even in the Eclogues the intuition into Nature is deeper than that. The study of Lucretius has enriched the Georgics with the most pervading charm of the poem—the sense of a secret, unceasing, tranquil power (like that ascribed by Wordsworth to May—
Thy help is with the weed that creeps
Along the barest ground, etc.),
communicating to outward things the grace and tenderness [pg 209]of human sentiment, the variety and vivacity of human energy.