In thus relieving the dryness of technical detail, by availing himself of every aspect of beauty associated with it, and by imparting the vivacity of human relations and sensibility to natural objects, Virgil makes use of the same resources as elicit springs of poetic feeling from many of the dry and stony wastes through which the argument of Lucretius leads him. There are others however employed by Virgil, which Lucretius uses more sparingly or not at all. There are, in the first place, all those which arise out of the conception of the ‘human force,’ impersonated in the ‘sturdy ditcher,’ the ‘farmer roused to anger,’ the ‘active peasant,’ contrasting with and conflicting with that other conception of the life of Nature. And as in Lucretius the speculative ideas, penetrating through every region of the wide domain traversed by him, elicit some poetic life out of its barrenest places, so the two speculative ideas, of Nature as a living force, and of man’s labour, vigilance, forethought in their relation to that force, impart a feeling of imaginative delight to Virgil’s account of the most common details of the husbandman’s toil. The strength and vivacity thus imparted to the style has been well illustrated by Professor Conington in his Introduction to the Georgics. It may be noted however that, even in this imaginative recognition of the strength and force of man in conflict with the force of [pg 235]Nature, Virgil is still following in the tracks of Lucretius. Such expressions as
Ingemere et terram pressis proscindere aratris—
ferro molirier arva—
magnos manibus divellere montes—
in the older poet first opened up this vein which was wrought with such effectual results by his successor. But Conington has, in his notes, drawn attention to another vein of feeling, which is all Virgil’s own, and which enables him to give further variety and charm to these homely details. The husbandman has not only his hard and incessant struggle—‘labor improbus’—but he has the delight of success, the joy of contemplating the new beauty and richness, created by the strength of his arm. This feeling breaks out in the ‘Ecce’ of the line already quoted,—
Ecce supercilio clivosi tramitis undam;
in the ‘iuvat’ of
iuvat Ismara Baccho
Conserere, atque olea magnum vestire Taburnum[354];—
and in the ‘canit’ of the line