LATIN LITERATURE
BY
J. W. MACKAIL
II.
THE AUGUSTAN AGE.
VIRGIL.
Publius Vergilius Maro was born at the village of Andes, near Mantua, on
the 15th of October, 70 B.C. The province of Cisalpine Gaul, though not
formally incorporated with Italy till twenty years later, had before
this become thoroughly Romanised, and was one of the principal recruiting
grounds for the legions. But the population was still, by blood and
sympathy, very largely Celtic; and modern theorists are fond of tracing
the new element of romance, which Virgil introduced with such momentous
results into Latin poetry, to the same Celtic spirit which in later ages
flowered out in the Arthurian legend, and inspired the whole creative
literature of mediaeval Europe. To the countrymen of Shakespeare and
Keats it will not seem necessary to assume a Celtic origin, on abstract
grounds, for any new birth of this romantic element. The name Maro may or
may not be Celtic; any argument founded on it is of little more relevance
than the fancy which once interpreted the name of Virgil's mother, Magia
Polla, into a supernatural significance, and, connecting the name
Virgilius itself with the word "Virgo", metamorphosed the poet into an
enchanter born of a maiden mother, the Merlin of the Roman Empire.
Virgil's father was a small freeholder in Andes, who farmed his own land,
practised forestry and bee-keeping, and gradually accumulated a
sufficient competence to enable him to give his son -- an only child, it
would appear, of this marriage -- the best education that the times could
provide. He was sent to school at the neighbouring town of Cremona, and
afterwards to Milan, the capital city of the province. At the age of
seventeen he proceeded to Rome, where he studied oratory and philosophy
under the best masters of the time. A tradition, which the dates make
improbable, was that Gaius Octavius, afterwards the Emperor Augustus, was
for a time his fellow-scholar under the rhetorician Epidius. In the
classroom of the Epicurean Siro he may have made his first acquaintance
with the poetry of Lucretius.
For the next ten years we know nothing of Virgil's life, which no doubt
was that of a profound student. His father had died, and his mother
married again, and his patrimony was sufficient to support him until a
turn of the wheel of public affairs for a moment lost, and then
permanently secured his fortune. After the battle of Philippi, the first
task of the victorious triumvirs was to provide for the disbanding and
settlement of the immense armies which had been raised for the Civil war.
The lands of cities which had taken the Republican side were confiscated
right and left for this purpose; among the rest, Virgil's farm, which was
included in the territory of Cremona. But Virgil found in the
administrator of the district, Gaius Asinius Pollio, himself a
distinguished critic and man of letters, a powerful and active patron. By
his influence and that of his friends, Cornelius Gallus and Alfenus
Varus -- the former a soldier and poet, the latter an eminent jurist, who
both had been fellow-students of Virgil at Rome -- Virgil was compensated
by an estate in Campania, and introduced to the intimate circle of
Octavianus, who, under the terms of the triumvirate, was already absolute
ruler of Italy.
It was about this time that the "Eclogues" were published, whether
separately or collectively is uncertain, though the final collection and
arrangement, which is Virgil's own, can hardly be later than 38 B.C. The
impression they made on the world of letters was immediate and universal.
To some degree no doubt a reception was secured to them by the influence
of Maecenas, the Home Minister of Octavianus, who had already taken up
the line which he so largely developed in later years, of a public patron
of art and letters in the interest of the new government. But had Virgil
made his first public appearance merely as a Court poet, it is probable
that the "Eclogues" would have roused little enthusiasm and little
serious criticism. Their true significance seems to have been at once
realised as marking the beginning of a new era; and amid the storm of
criticism, laudatory and adverse, which has raged round them for so many
ages since, this cardinal fact has always remained prominent. Alike to
the humanists of the earlier Renaissance, who found in them the sunrise
of a golden age of poetry and the achievement of the Latin conquest over
Greece, and to the more recent critics of this century, for whom they
represented the echo of an already exhausted convention and the beginning
of the decadence of Roman poetry, the "Eclogues" have been the real
turning-point, not only between two periods of Latin literature, but
between two worlds.
The poems destined to so remarkable a significance are, in their external
form, close and careful imitations of Theocritus, and have all the vices
and weaknesses of imitative poetry to a degree that could not well be
exceeded. Nor are these failings redeemed (as is to a certain extent true
of the purely imitative work of Catullus and other poets) by any
brilliant jewel-finish of workmanship. The execution is uncertain,
hesitating, sometimes extraordinarily feeble. One well-known line it is
impossible to explain otherwise than as a mistranslation of a phrase in
Theocritus such as one would hardly expect from a well-grounded
schoolboy. When Virgil follows the convention of the Greek pastoral his
copy is doubly removed from nature; where he ventures on fresh
impersonation or allegory of his own, it is generally weak in itself and
always hopelessly out of tone with the rest. Even the versification is
curiously unequal and imperfect. There are lines in more than one Eclogue
which remind one in everything but their languor of the flattest parts of
Lucretius. Contemporary critics even went so far as to say that the
language here and there was simply not Latin.
Yet granted that all this and more than all this were true, it does not
touch that specific Virgilian charm of which these poems first disclosed
the secret. Already through their immature and tremulous cadences there
pierces, from time to time, that note of brooding pity which is unique in
the poetry of the world. The fourth and tenth Eclogues may be singled out
especially as showing the new method, which almost amounted to a new
human language, as they are also those where Virgil breaks away most
decidedly from imitation of the Greek idyllists. The fourth Eclogue
unfortunately has been so long and so deeply associated with purely
adventitious ideas that it requires a considerable effort to read it as
it ought to be read. The curious misconception which turned it into a
prophecy of the birth of Christ outlasted in its effects any serious
belief in its historical truth: even modern critics cite Isaiah for
parallels, and are apt to decry it as a childish attempt to draw a
picture of some actual golden age. But the Sibylline verses which
suggested its contents and imagery were really but the accidental grain
of dust round which the crystallization of the poem began; and the
enchanted light which lingers over it is hardly distinguishable from that
which saturates the "Georgics. Cedet et ipse mari vector, nec nautica
pinus mutabit merces" -- the feeling here is the same as in his mere
descriptions of daily weather, like the "Omnia plenis rura natant fossis
atque omnis navita ponto umida vela legit;" not so much a vision of a
golden age as Nature herself seen through a medium of strange gold. Or
again, in the tenth Eclogue, where the masque of shepherds and gods
passes before the sick lover, it is through the same strange and golden
air that they seem to move, and the heavy lilies of Silvanus droop in the
stillness of the same unearthly day.
Seven years following on the publication of the "Eclogues" were spent by
Virgil on the composition of the "Georgics". They were published two
years after the battle of Actium, being thus the first, as they are the
most splendid, literary production of the Empire. They represent the art
of Virgil in its matured perfection. The subject was one in which he was
thoroughly at home and completely happy. His own early years had been
spent in the pastures of the Mincio, among his father's cornfields and
coppices and hives; and his newer residence, by the seashore near Naples
in winter, and in summer at his villa in the lovely hill-country of
Campania, surrounded him with all that was most beautiful in the most
beautiful of lands. His delicate health made it easier for him to give
his work the slow and arduous elaboration that makes the "Georgics" in
mere technical finish the most perfect work of Latin, or perhaps of any
literature. There is no trace of impatience in the work. It was in some
sense a commission; but Augustus and Maecenas, if it be true that they
suggested the subject, had, at all events, the sense not to hurry it. The
result more than fulfilled the brilliant promise of the "Eclogues".
Virgil was now, without doubt or dispute, the first of contemporary
poets.
But his responsibilities grew with his greatness. The scheme of a great
Roman epic, which had always floated before his own mind, was now
definitely and indeed urgently pressed upon him by authority which it was
difficult to resist. And many elements in his own mind drew him in the
same direction. Too much stress need not be laid on the passage in the
sixth Eclogue -- one of the rare autobiographic touches in his work -- in
which he alludes to his early experiments in "singing of kings and
battles." Such early exercises are the common field of young poets. But
the maturing of his mind, which can be traced in the "Georgics," was
urging him towards certain methods of art for which the epic was the only
literary form that gave sufficient scope. More and more he was turning
from nature to man and human life, and to the contemplation of human
destiny. The growth of the psychological instinct in the "Georgics" is
curiously visible in the episode of Aristaeus, with which the poem now
ends. According to a well-authenticated tradition, the last two hundred
and fifty lines of the fourth "Georgic" were written several years after
the rest of the poem, to replace the original conclusion, which had
contained the praises of his early friend, Cornelius Gallus, now dead in
disgrace and proscribed from court poetry. In the story of Orpheus and
Eurydice, in the later version, Virgil shows a new method and a new
power. It stands between the idyl and the epic, but it is the epic method
towards which it tends. No return upon the earlier manner was thenceforth
possible; with many searchings of heart, with much occasional
despondency and dissatisfaction, he addressed himself to the composition
of the "Aeneid".
The earlier national epics of Naevius and Ennius had framed certain lines
for Roman epic poetry, which it was almost bound to follow. They had
established the mythical connection of Rome with Troy and with the great
cycle of Greek legend, and had originated the idea of making Rome itself
-- that "Fortuna Urbis" which later stood in the form of a golden statue
in the imperial bedchamber -- the central interest, one might almost say
the central figure, of the story. To adapt the Homeric methods to this
new purpose, and at the same time to make his epic the vehicle for all
his own inward broodings over life and fate, for his subtle and delicate
psychology, and for that philosophic passion in which all the other
motives and springs of life were becoming included, was a task incapable
of perfect solution. On his death-bed Virgil made it his last desire that
the "Aeneid" should be destroyed, nominally on the ground that it still
wanted three years' work to bring it to perfection, but one can hardly
doubt from a deeper and less articulate feeling. The command of the
Emperor alone prevented his wish from taking effect. With the unfinished
"Aeneid," as with the unfinished poem of Lucretius, it is easy to see
within what limits any changes or improvements would have been made in
it had the author lived longer: the work is, in both cases, substantially
done.
The "Aeneid" was begun the year after the publication of the "Georgics,"
when Virgil was forty years of age. During its progress he continued to
live for the most part in his Campanian retirement. He had a house at
Rome in the fashionable quarter of the Esquiline, but used it little. He
was also much in Sicily, and the later books of the "Aeneid" seem to show
personal observation of many parts of Central Italy. It is a debated
question whether he visited Greece more than once. His last visit there
was in 19 B.C. He had resolved to spend three years more on the
completion of his poem, and then give himself up to philosophy for what
might remain of his life. But the three years were not given him. A
fever, caught while visiting Megara on a day of excessive heat, induced
him to return hastily to Italy. He died a few days after landing at
Brundusium, on the 26th of September. His ashes were, by his own request,
buried near Naples, where his tomb was a century afterwards worshipped as
a holy place. The "Aeneid," carefully edited from the poet's manuscript
by two of his friends, was forthwith published, and had such a reception
as perhaps no poem before or since has ever found. Already, while it was
in progress, it had been rumoured as "something greater than the
"Iliad," "and now that it appeared, it at once became the canon of Roman
poetry, and immediately began to exercise an overwhelming influence over
Latin literature, prose as well as verse. Critics were not indeed wanting
to point out its defects, and there was still a school (which attained
greater importance a century later) that went back to Lucretius and the
older poets, and refused to allow Virgil's preeminence. But for the
Roman world at large, as since for the world of the Latin races, Virgil
became what Homer had been to Greece, "the poet." The decay of art and
letters in the third century only added a mystical and hieratic element
to his fame. Even to the Christian Church he remained a poet sacred and
apart: in his profound tenderness and his mystical "yearning after the
further shore," as much as in the supposed prophecy of the fourth
Eclogue, they found and reverenced what seemed to them like an
unconscious inspiration. The famous passage of St. Augustine, where he
speaks of his own early love for Virgil, shows in its half-hysterical
renunciation how great the charm of the Virgilian art had been, and still
was, to him: "Quid miserius misero," he cries, "non miserante se ipsum,
et flente Didonis mortem quae fiebat amando Aeneam, non flente autem
mortem meam quae flebat non amando te? Deus lumen cordis mei, non te
amabam, et haec non flebam, sed flebam Didonem exstinctam, ferroque
extrema secutam, sequens ipse extrema condita tua relicto te![6] To the
graver and more matured mind of Dante, Virgil was the lord and master
who, even though shut out from Paradise, was the chosen and honoured
minister of God. Up to the beginning of the present century the supremacy
of Virgil was hardly doubted. Since then the development of scientific
criticism has passed him through all its searching processes, and in a
fair judgment his greatness has rather gained than lost. The doubtful
honour of indiscriminate praise was for a brief period succeeded by the
attacks of an almost equally undiscriminating censure. An ill-judged
partiality had once spoken of the "Aeneid" as something greater than a
Roman "Iliad:" it was easy to show that in the most remarkable Homeric
qualities the "Aeneid" fell far short, and that, so far as it was an
imitation of Homer, it could no more stand beside Homer than the
imitations of Theocritus in the "Eclogues" could stand beside Theocritus.
The romantic movement, with its impatience of established fames, damned
the "Aeneid" in one word as artificial; forgetting, or not seeing, that
the "Aeneid" was itself the fountain-head of romanticism. Long after the
theory of the noble savage had passed out of political and social
philosophy it lingered in literary criticism; and the distinction between
"natural" and "artificial" poetry was held to be like that between light
and darkness. It was not till a comparatively recent time that the
leisurely progress of criticism stumbled on the fact that all poetry is
artificial, and that the "Iliad" itself is artificial in a very eminent
and unusual degree.
No great work of art can be usefully judged by comparison with any other
great work of art. It may, indeed, be interesting and fertile to compare
one with another, in order to seize more sharply and appreciate more
vividly the special beauty of each. But to press comparison further, and
to depreciate one because it has not what is the special quality of the
other, is to lose sight of the function of criticism. We shall not find
in Virgil the bright speed, the unexhausted joyfulness, which, in spite
of a view of life as grave as Virgil's own, make the "Iliad" and
"Odyssey" unique in poetry; nor, which is more to the point as regards
the "Aeneid," the narrative power, the genius for story-telling, which is
one of the rarest of literary gifts, and which Ovid alone among the Latin
poets possessed in any high perfection. We shall not find in him that
high and concentrated passion which in Pindar (as afterwards in Dante)
fuses the elements of thought and language into a single white heat. We
shall not find in him the luminous and untroubled calm, as of a spirit in
which all passion has been fused away, which makes the poetry of
Sophocles so crystalline and irreproachable. Nor shall we find in him the
peculiar beauties of his own Latin predecessors, Lucretius or Catullus.
All this is merely saying in amplified words that Virgil was not
Lucretius or Catullus, and that still less was he Homer, or Pindar, or
Sophocles; and to this may be added, that he lived in the world which the
great Greek and Latin poets had created, though he looked forward out of
it into another.
Yet the positive excellences of the "Aeneid" are so numerous and so
splendid that the claim of its author to be the Roman Homer is not
unreasonable, if it be made clear that the two poems are fundamentally
disparate, and that no more is meant than that the one poet is as eminent
in his own form and method as the other in his. In our haste to rest
Virgil's claim to supremacy as a poet on the single quality in which he
is unique and unapproachable we may seem tacitly to assent to the
judgment of his detractors on other points. Yet the more one studies the
"Aeneid," the more profoundly is one impressed by its quality as a
masterpiece of construction. The most adverse critic would not deny that
portions of the poem are, both in dramatic and narrative quality, all but
unsurpassed, and in a certain union of imaginative sympathy with their
fine dramatic power and their stateliness of narration perhaps
unequalled. The story of the last agony of Troy could not be told with
more breadth, more richness, more brilliance than it is told in the
second book: here, at least, the story neither flags nor hurries; from
the moment when the Greek squadron sets sail from Tenedos and the signal-
flame flashes from their flagship, the scenes of the fatal night pass
before us in a smooth swift stream that gathers weight and volume as it
goes, till it culminates in the vision of awful faces which rises before
Aeneas when Venus lifts the cloud of mortality from his startled eyes.
The episode of Nisus and Euryalus in the ninth book, and that of Camilla
in the eleventh, are in their degree as admirably vivid and stately. The
portraiture of Dido, again, in the fourth book, is in combined breadth
and subtlety one of the dramatic masterpieces of human literature. It is
idle to urge that this touch is borrowed from Euripides or that suggested
by Sophocles, or to quote the Medea of Apollonius as the original of
which Dido is an elaborate imitation. What Virgil borrowed he knew how to
make his own; and the world which, while not denying the tenderness, the
grace, the charm of the heroine of the "Argonautica," leaves the
"Argonautica" unread, has thrilled and grown pale from generation to
generation over the passionate tragedy of the Carthaginian queen.
But before a deeper and more appreciative study of the "Aeneid" these
great episodes cease to present themselves as detached eminences. That
the "Aeneid" is unequal is true; that passages in it here and there are
mannered, and even flat, is true also; but to one who has had the
patience to know it thoroughly, it is in its total effect, and not in the
great passages, or even the great books, that it seems the most
consummate achievement. Virgil may seem to us to miss some of his
opportunities, to labour others beyond their due proportion, to force
himself (especially in the later books) into material not well adapted to
the distinctive Virgilian treatment. The slight and vague portrait of the
maiden princess of Latium, in which the one vivid touch of her "flower-
like hair" is the only clear memory we carry away with us, might, in
different hands -- in those of Apollonius, for instance, -- have given a new
grace and charm to the scenes where she appears. The funeral games at the
tomb of Anchises, no longer described, as they had been in early Greek
poetry, from a real pleasure in dwelling upon their details, begin to
become tedious before they are over. In the battle-pieces of the last
three books we sometimes cannot help being reminded that Virgil is rather
wearily following an obsolescent literary tradition. But when we have set
such passages against others which, without being as widely celebrated as
the episode of the sack of Troy or the death of Dido, are equally
miraculous in their workmanship -- the end of the fifth book, for instance,
or the muster-roll of the armies of Italy in the seventh, or, above all,
the last hundred and fifty lines of the twelfth, where Virgil rises
perhaps to his very greatest manner -- we shall not find that the
splendour of the poem depends on detached passages, but far more on the
great manner and movement which, interfused with the unique Virgilian
tenderness, sustains the whole structure through and through.
In merely technical quality the supremacy of Virgil's art has never been
disputed. The Latin hexameter, "the stateliest measure ever moulded by
the lips of man," was brought by him to a perfection which made any
further development impossible. Up to the last it kept taking in his
hands new refinements of rhythm and movement which make the later books
of the "Aeneid" (the least successful part of the poem in general
estimation) an even more fascinating study to the lovers of language than
the more formally perfect work of the "Georgics," or the earlier books of
the "Aeneid" itself. A brilliant modern critic has noted this in words
which deserve careful study. "The innovations are individually hardly
perceptible, but taken together they alter the character of the hexameter
line in a way more easily felt than described. Among the more definite
changes we may note that there are more full stops in the middle of
lines, there are more elisions, there is a larger proportion of short
words, there are more words repeated, more assonances, and a freer use of
the emphasis gained by the recurrence of verbs in the same or cognate
tenses. Where passages thus characterised have come down to us still in
the making, the effect is forced and fragmentary; where they succeed,
they combine in a novel manner the rushing freedom of the old trochaics
with the majesty which is the distinguishing feature of Virgil's style.
The poet's last words suggest to us possibilities in the Latin tongue
which no successor has been able to realise." In these later books
likewise, the psychological interest and insight which keep perpetually
growing throughout Virgil's work result in an almost unequalled power of
expressing in exquisite language the half-tones and delicate shades of
mental processes. The famous simile in the twelfth "Aeneid" --
"Ac velut in somnis oculos ubi languida pressit
Nocte quies, nequiquam avidos extendere cursus
Velle videmur, et in mediis conatibus aegri
Succidimus, nec lingua valet, nec corpore notae
Sufficiunt vires aut vox et verba sequuntur -- "
is an instance of the amazing mastery with which he makes language have
the effect of music in expressing the subtlest processes of feeling.
But the specific and central charm of Virgil lies deeper than in any
merely technical quality. The word which expresses it most nearly is that
of pity. In the most famous of his single lines he speaks of the "tears
of things;" just this sense of tears, this voice that always, in its most
sustained splendour and in its most ordinary cadences, vibrates with a
strange pathos, is what finally places him alone among artists. This
thrill in the voice, "come colui che piange e dice," is never absent from
his poetry. In the "lonely words," in the "pathetic half-lines" spoken of
by the two great modern masters of English prose and verse, he
perpetually touches the deepest springs of feeling; in these it is that
he sounds, as no other poet has done, the depths of beauty and sorrow, of
patience and magnanimity, of honour in life and hope beyond death.
A certain number of minor poems have come down to us associated more or
less doubtfully with Virgil's name. Three of these are pieces in
hexameter verse, belonging broadly to the class of the "epyllion," or
"little epic," which was invented as a convenient term to include short
poems in the epic metre that were not definitely pastorals either in
subject or treatment, and which the Alexandrian poets, headed by
Theocritus, had cultivated with much assiduity and considerable success.
The most important of them, the "Culex," or "Gnat," is a poem of about
four hundred lines, in which the incident of a gnat saving the life of a
sleeping shepherd from a serpent, and being crushed to death in the act,
is made the occasion for an elaborate description of the infernal
regions, from which the ghost of the insect rises to reproach his
unconscious murderer. That Virgil wrote a poem with this title is alluded
to by Martial and Statius as matter of common undisputed knowledge; nor
is there any certain argument against the Virgilian authorship of the
extant poem, but various delicate metrical considerations incline recent
critics to the belief that it is from the hand of an almost contemporary
imitator who had caught the Virgilian manner with great accuracy. The
"Ciris," another piece of somewhat greater length, on the story of Scylla
and Nisus, is more certainly the production of some forgotten poet
belonging to the circle of Marcus Valerius Messalla, and is of interest
as showing the immense pains taken in the later Augustan age to continue
the Virgilian tradition. The third poem, the Moretum, is at once briefer
and slighter in structure and more masterly in form. It is said to be a
close copy of a Greek original by Parthenius of Nicaea, a distinguished
man of letters of this period who taught Virgil Greek; nor is there any
grave improbability in supposing that the "Moretum" is really one of the
early exercises in verse over which Virgil must have spent years of his
laborious apprenticeship, saved by some accident from the fate to which
his own rigorous judgment condemned the rest.
So far the whole of the poetry attributed to Virgil is in the single form
of hexameter verse, to the perfecting of which his whole life was
devoted. The other little pieces in elegiac and lyric metres require but
slight notice. Some are obviously spurious; others are so slight and
juvenile that it matters little whether they are spurious or not. One
elegiac piece, the "Copa," is of admirable vivacity and grace, and the
touch in it is so singularly unlike the Virgilian manner as to tempt one
into the paradox of its authenticity. That Virgil wrote much which he
deliberately destroyed is obviously certain; his fastidiousness and his
melancholy alike drove him towards the search after perfection, and his
mercilessness towards his own work may be measured by his intention to
burn the "Aeneid". Not less by this passionate desire of unattainable
perfection than by the sustained glory of his actual achievement, -- his
haunting and liquid rhythms, his majestic sadness, his grace and pity, --
he embodies for all ages that secret which makes art the life of life
itself.
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