CHAPTER X.NATURE IN LUCRETIUS AND VIRGIL.

When from the representations of Nature in Homer, and indeed in all the Greek poets, we turn to the rural descriptions of the Roman poets, we feel that we have passed into a wholly different atmosphere. If there were no other there is at least this cardinal distinction between them:—The Greeks had no antiquity behind them, at least no earlier literature to come between them and the open face of things. They saw at first hand with their own eyes, felt with their own hearts, described in their own words. The Romans, those at least of the literary age, before they wrote a line that has come down to us, had received the whole Hellenic learning and poetry poured in upon them, so that the very air of Italy was colored with the hues of Greece. This makes it so difficult, in studying the productions of any Roman poet—their descriptions of Nature not less than other things—to be sure that you have the features of Italian scenery pure and uncolored, and that they have not been tinged and refracted by the Hellenic medium of associations and language through which they werehabitually beheld. No doubt the Romans originally were and never ceased to be a country-loving people. The pictures that have come down to us of Cincinnatus, and of other worthies of the early Republic, represent even their greatest generals and dictators as living on paternal farms in rural thrift and simplicity. But there remains no poetry coeval with that primitive time. Before we reach their poets the day of small estates and patrician life in the fields is over, all Italy is held in vast domains by rich senators who themselves lived in the city, and committed the care of their lands to a bailiff with hordes of slaves.

In the last half-century of the Republic, to which belong the earliest Roman poets who describe Nature, the town life, varied by retirement to the Tiburtine or Sabine villa, was universal among the poets and their associates. Some of them had passed their childhood in the rustic life of distant provinces, and the remembrance of that life still lives in their poetry, as in Catullus, and more distinctively in Virgil. The earliest pictures of Nature that occur in any Roman poetry are to be found not in pastoral or idyl, but in the great philosophic poem that expounds an elaborate system of Nature. Lucretius was too earnest a preacher of his Atomic Philosophy to linger over descriptions of scenery for their own sake. Nevertheless, his wearisome expositions of materialistic system are relieved by many a beautiful illustration drawn directly from the Naturewhich his own eyes had seen, and portrayed with a clearness of outline and a startling vividness, in which, as Professor Sellar has truly said, he is unrivaled in antiquity save by Homer. The rigorous dogmatism of a mechanical philosophy is in him combined with the keenest eye to all the appearances of the outer world, minute as well as vast. Evidently he had lived much in the open air, had been a haunter of all waste places, wild mountain ranges, dripping caves, solitary sea-shores. He had noted all the sights, listened to the sounds and the silences, and observed the ways of the wild creatures that dwell there. His impressions he has stamped in many a noble line, that comes in with delightful freshness to illustrate his prolix argument. His eye was upon the smallest and most sequestered appearances, as the many-colored shells on the shore, and the dripping of water over moss-covered rocks; but still more familiarly did his imagination move with the great elemental movements of Nature, and when the storms and winds were up, he found himself “one among the many there.” According to the philosophy he had adopted, and earnestly propounded, all the most beautiful and mysterious aspects of things were the mere products of dead mechanic forces. But the genius of the poet at times shook itself free from the trammels of his creed, and rose to the contemplation, not of a dead mechanic world, but of one informed by a vast life, which movesthrough all material things, and makes them instinct with unity.

In the language of the philosophers, while consciously he taught only aNatura naturata, his imagination and sympathy grasped, in spite of him, aNatura naturans. It is impossible that any great poet, however his understanding may be caught in the meshes of mere materialism, can in his hours of inspiration rest contented with that. Assuredly Lucretius did not. Accordingly, we find him here and there breaking out into the earliest utterance of that mystical Pantheistic feeling about the life of Nature, which we shall find reappearing in Virgil, and which has recurred so powerfully in modern poetry.

Catullus, the poet contemporary with Lucretius, is too much absorbed in love and friendship, finds too exciting an interest in the society of man, to give much time to Nature. In his most original poems, or at least those in which he most speaks out his feelings, Nature holds little, almost no place. Two poems refer to his villa at Tibur, with, however, little mention of any rural pleasures connected with it.

The well-known lines on his return to his home at Sirmio, on the Lago di Garda, for all their wonderful charm, breathe more of the love of home and rest after long voyaging than of enjoyment in Nature for her own sake. His more elaborate and artistic poems contain some beautiful natural images and similes, expressed withthat unstudied felicity and clear sense of beauty which distinguished him. But they do not come to more than side glances by the way, as he hurries on to his human theme. It has, however, been remarked, that while to Lucretius, to Horace, even to Virgil, the sea is a thing of dread rather than of admiration, from which they shrank as a treacherous creature, Catullus felt the grandeur of its immensity, and rejoiced in the laughter of the waves in calm, and in their changing colors beneath the storm.

Germans have written learned books, some to maintain, others to deny, that the ancient Greeks and Romans had any feeling for Nature, or, as the phrase goes, were inspired by the sentiment of Nature. Schiller has gone as far as to deny that Homer had any more caring for Nature than he had for the garment, the shield, the armor, which he describes with equal relish. In the face of such an assertion we have but to read a few passages from Homer above cited, and innumerable others like them. No doubt the ancients had not that intimate, delicate, dwelling sympathy for Nature which we call the modern feeling. But there is hardly a tone of sentiment which Nature in modern times has evoked, of which some faint prelude at least might not be found among them. Passages from the dialogue, and especially from the choruses, of Sophocles and Euripides, might, had we time, have been cited, which speak of natural objects with almost as much fondness as though they had been written yesterday.

One side of this feeling, which is dwelt on as peculiarly a birth of recent times, is the passion for mountains. And no doubt the feeling of the Latin poets as they thought of them was for the most part shuddering and affright. Yet Virgil, though he generally speaks the same language, seems at times to catch something of their free and far delight, as when he speaks of Father Apennine roaring with all his holm-oaks, and rejoicing to heave his snow-white summit into the sky. In such a passage it would seem as though the power of hills was for a moment on him, and he caught a prophetic glimpse of that mountain-rapture which was reserved for this century at last adequately to express. Quinctilian, however, represents the current feeling of his countrymen when he says, “Species maritimis, planis, amœnis,”—Beauty belongs to countries that lie beside the sea, level and pleasant.

But granting that the feeling for Nature among the Romans was thus limited, if one wished to prove that it was real, one would be content to point to Virgil alone. His preëminence as a poet of the country was early recognized by his friend and contemporary, Horace:—

“Molle atque facetumVirgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”—

“Molle atque facetum

Virgilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”—

To Virgil the Muses of the country gave the gift of delicacy and artistic skill. When Horace thus wrote of his friend only the Eclogues had as yet appeared. But the two greater poems whichVirgil afterwards produced, among their other merits, elevate him, as a lover and describer of natural scenes, to a place which his earlier poems alone would not have won for him.

With regard to the Eclogues, the purely imitative and conventional character of their language, personages, and sentiment, is well known. But for long it was believed that their scenery at least was real, borrowed from Mantua and the banks of his native Mincio. But later critics have shown that imitation penetrated even here, and that as the sentiments and substance of the Eclogues are all borrowed from Theocritus, not less is the framework of scenery in which these are set. The vine-clad cave in which the shepherd reclines, the briery crag from which he sees his goats hanging, the mountains that cast long shadows toward evening, these, it is said, are nowhere to be seen in the neighborhood of Mantua, but belong entirely to Sicily. Some even assert that neither the ilex, the chestnut, nor the beech grows anywhere near the banks of the Mincio. Yet even amid the prevailingly Sicilian scenery there are touches here and there, where he reverts to what his own eyes had seen, as where he describes his farm as covered with bare stones and slimy bulrushes, and the Mincio as weaving for his green banks a fringe of tender reeds.

Even though the imagery of the Eclogues may be borrowed from the Sicilian poet, yet here, as every where, Virgil is no mere translator, butproves by the tender grace of the language in which he clothes the borrowed imagery his feeling for original Nature. In the fifth Eclogue, when two shepherds have been playing each his finest strain, partly to please, partly to emulate the other, at the close, Menalcas says to Mopsus:—

“Such is thy song to me, O singer divine!As is sleep upon the grass to weary men, as in summer heat,Thirst to slake with pleasant water from the leaping brook.”

“Such is thy song to me, O singer divine!

As is sleep upon the grass to weary men, as in summer heat,

Thirst to slake with pleasant water from the leaping brook.”

And then when Menalcas has sung his strain this is the reply of Mopsus:—

“What gifts, what shall I render thee for such a song?For not so delightful to my ear is the sighing of the coming south wind,Nor the beating of billows upon the shore,Nor the sound of streams down-falling through the rocky glens.”

“What gifts, what shall I render thee for such a song?

For not so delightful to my ear is the sighing of the coming south wind,

Nor the beating of billows upon the shore,

Nor the sound of streams down-falling through the rocky glens.”

Of these and such-like images the first hints may have been from Theocritus, but assuredly they have won a new charm in their passage through the mind of Virgil.

But if the scenery of the Eclogues partakes in some measure of the conventional mould in which the whole of the poems are cast, theGeorgicsare poetry in earnest, dealing with a real subject, and describing, in many places at least, real landscapes. Doubtless here, too, as everywhere, Virgil is the learned poet; his mind comes to his subject laden with the spoils of all antiquity. As he describes natural objects, all the associations which ancient Mythology andGreek poetry had thrown around them use spontaneously before him. Thus he would often seem to look at things not at first-hand with his own eyes, but through the media which former poets had fashioned for him. But this, if we think of it, is one element of the consummate art of the Georgics. The poet had to raise a homely subject above the dust of commonplace, to add dignity to objects and processes which in themselves might seem undignified, or even vulgar. Therefore he takes the husbandman back to earlier times, and invests his toils with all the veneration and sanctity which primeval tradition has shed around them, and teaches him to feel that in his pursuits he is one with the first forefathers of the race. This archaic coloring, richly yet delicately suffused, invests the poem with a peculiar charm. Just so a modern poet, wishing to throw around the life of shepherd and husbandman, even in our own days, an air of ancient reverence, might still revert to Bible stories of the patriarchs—to Jacob and Rachel meeting by the well, to Ruth in the corn-field, and David among the sheep-cotes of Bethlehem. But making full allowance for all that is archaic and mythological in the allusions to distant ages and Eastern lands, there remains a large background of landscape in which the plains of Mantua and Campania lie spread before us, and the intense skies of Italy bend overhead.

Such a passage as the following is surely thework of one who had watched and loved the alternations of the Italian summer:—

“But when glad summer at the west winds’ callShall send the flocks to woods and pastures free,Then ’neath the star of dawn on the cool fieldsLet browse thy sheep and goats, while morn is young,And the fresh dew lies hoary on the grass—The dew on tender blade, to cattle dear.When the fourth hour of day brings parching thirst,And in the trees cicadas’ notes are loud,Then bid the herd at wells and deep clear poolsDrink the stream running from full oaken troughs.But in the deep noon heat a shady valeSeek, if perchance some oak of antique bulkThere spread his giant boughs; or some grove darkWith many a holm-oak’s gloom reposeth nighIn hallowed shadow. Then at set of sunOnce more supply clear streams and drive afieldThy flock, when eventide cools all the air,And the moon dewy-moist repairs the lawnsWith freshness, while the shores with halcyon notesResound, the copses with the goldfinch song.”

“But when glad summer at the west winds’ call

Shall send the flocks to woods and pastures free,

Then ’neath the star of dawn on the cool fields

Let browse thy sheep and goats, while morn is young,

And the fresh dew lies hoary on the grass—

The dew on tender blade, to cattle dear.

When the fourth hour of day brings parching thirst,

And in the trees cicadas’ notes are loud,

Then bid the herd at wells and deep clear pools

Drink the stream running from full oaken troughs.

But in the deep noon heat a shady vale

Seek, if perchance some oak of antique bulk

There spread his giant boughs; or some grove dark

With many a holm-oak’s gloom reposeth nigh

In hallowed shadow. Then at set of sun

Once more supply clear streams and drive afield

Thy flock, when eventide cools all the air,

And the moon dewy-moist repairs the lawns

With freshness, while the shores with halcyon notes

Resound, the copses with the goldfinch song.”

It has generally been held that one of the most prominent notes of Virgil’s genius was his sympathy with Nature. To this the late Professor Conington, whose opinion on whatever concerned Virgil deserves all respect, used to demur, and to maintain rather that his chief characteristic lay in an elaborate and refined culture, manifesting itself in the most consummate delicacy and grace. But though Virgil was before all things the poet of learned culture and artistic beauty, this did not hinder, rather prompted him, to turn on Nature a sympathetic and loving eye. The perception of a sympathy between the feelingsand vicissitudes of man and the world that surrounds him appears nowhere so strongly as in his latest poem, the Æneid. It may have been that as his subject led him much into battles and adventures, alien to his taste, he seized all the more eagerly every opportunity of reverting to that Nature which had been his earliest delight.

Whatever be the cause, the pictures of Nature, whether in description or in simile, are more frequent, more intimate, more tender, than in either of his earlier productions. It has been noticed, for instance, that at the beginning of the sixth book, as the Sibyl draws nigh, the earth rumbles, the mountains quake, as if sharing the human dread at her approach; and that throughout the fourth book there is maintained a fine sympathy between the aspects of the outer world and the passions which agitate the human actors.

It is thus he sets off the tumult in the soul of the lovelorn and wronged queen in contrast with the calm and silence of night:—

“Now night it was, and everything on earth had won the graceOf quiet sleep; the woods had rest, the wildered waters’ face:It was the tide when stars roll on amid their courses due,And all the tilth is hushed, and beasts, and birds of many a hue,And all that is in waters wide, and what the waste doth keepIn thicket rough, amid the hush of night tide lay asleep,And slipping off the load of care forgat their toilsome part.But ne’er might that Phœnician queen, that most unhappy heart,Sink into sleep, or take the night into her eyes and breast,Her sorrows grow, and love again swells up with all unrest.”

“Now night it was, and everything on earth had won the grace

Of quiet sleep; the woods had rest, the wildered waters’ face:

It was the tide when stars roll on amid their courses due,

And all the tilth is hushed, and beasts, and birds of many a hue,

And all that is in waters wide, and what the waste doth keep

In thicket rough, amid the hush of night tide lay asleep,

And slipping off the load of care forgat their toilsome part.

But ne’er might that Phœnician queen, that most unhappy heart,

Sink into sleep, or take the night into her eyes and breast,

Her sorrows grow, and love again swells up with all unrest.”

Is not the feeling here what would be called quite modern? For its tone, might it not have been written yesterday? This contrast between Nature’s repose and the tumult of the human heart, thus consciously felt and expressed, belong to a late and self-conscious age. In Homer you may see such contrasts, as when Helen, looking from the walls of Troy, misses her true brothers from among the Achaian host, and says that they kept aloof from the war, fearing the reproach which she had brought on herself and them. And the poet adds:—

“So spake she, but them already the life-giving earth coveredIn Lacedæmon there, in their dear native land.”

“So spake she, but them already the life-giving earth covered

In Lacedæmon there, in their dear native land.”

Here the contrast is only half consciously felt, hinted at obliquely, not brought into prominence. To emphasize and dwell on the contrast, as Virgil does, is modern, one of the many points in which the Latin poet’s feeling is like that of our own day.

Many more passages might be cited where Virgil turns aside from his epic narrative to dwell over natural scenes. The elaborate description of the storm in the first book; the sail through the Ionian Islands; the night passed on the Sicilian coast with Ætna heard thundering overhead through the dark, in the third book; the island, in the fifth book, which is made the goal round which the racing-boats row; the fleet entering the mouth of the Tiber while the calm morning lies ruddy on the sea;—these are a few which come to mind.

But it is in the many similes scattered throughout the Æneid that the Virgilian grace and tenderness is seen at its best. It has been the fashion with the commentators to trace back every one of Virgil’s similes to Homer or some other Greek poet. And the two I shall now give have not wholly escaped this imputation, though there seems small foundation for it in their case.

In the boat-race, when Mnestheus, having run his boat into a narrow and sheltered passage among rocks, has with difficulty scraped through and shot again into open sea, this is Virgil’s comparison:—

“As a dove scared suddenly from a cave,Where she has her home and dear nestlings in the crannied rock,Hurries fieldward in her flight, and with flurried pinionsLoudly flaps the roof—soon gliding in calm airSkims her smooth way, sailing aloof on moveless wings.”

“As a dove scared suddenly from a cave,

Where she has her home and dear nestlings in the crannied rock,

Hurries fieldward in her flight, and with flurried pinions

Loudly flaps the roof—soon gliding in calm air

Skims her smooth way, sailing aloof on moveless wings.”

Again, when Æneas, led by the Sibyl, descends to the nether world, and arrives at the shores of the river Styx, the ghosts of the dead come flocking round him in crowds:—

“Numerous as the leaves in the woods that at first touch of autumn’s coldGliding fall; or numerous as the birds that flock together shoreward from the deep,When wintry weather drives them across the sea, and sends them into sunny lands.”

“Numerous as the leaves in the woods that at first touch of autumn’s cold

Gliding fall; or numerous as the birds that flock together shoreward from the deep,

When wintry weather drives them across the sea, and sends them into sunny lands.”

The full beauty, however, of passages like these cannot be felt when they are detached from the whole scene, in which they are inlaid. Æneastraveling far into the nether gloom, through Pluto’s empty halls and ghastly realms of the dead, is a picture almost too dismal. But how exquisitely does Virgil relieve his own heart and that of the reader, by letting in on that sad world these glimpses of a land still gladdened by the sun!

If you compare Virgil with Homer, where they describe the same natural objects, or even where the Latin poet borrows his similes directly from the Greek, you cannot but feel how wide is the difference between them. There is no more the entire outwardness, the self-forgetting serenity of Homer’s descriptions, the colorless transparency as of a mountain range, whose every stone and blade of grass lies reflected in the clear depths of an unmoving lake. Received into Virgil’s heart the outward world becomes colored with some of the melancholy of the poet and his time. Not that to Virgil’s eye there was any sadness in Nature herself, but in his hands Nature becomes so humanized, it so lends itself to human joys and sorrows, that these cast their own gleams, and still more their shadows, on that, in itself, unimpassioned countenance. This sympathy between man and Nature Virgil apprehended more feelingly than any other Roman poet; and in this, as in so many other things, we find in him an anticipation of the modern time. As compared with Lucretius, Virgil deals with Nature in a less sublime, but more human way. Lucretius demandsthe explanation of Nature and her processes, Virgil seeks to enter into her feeling, to catch her sentiment. As a French author has expressed it: “Lucretius is not so much arrested by the beauty of Nature, as roused by its mystery, to extort the secret of it. I admire thee, he seems to say, but on condition that I may investigate and understand thee.” In Lucretius man and Nature stand over against each other, observer and observed: they do not meet and interpenetrate each other. Between Virgil and the outward world there is no such philosophic barrier; his feelings flow freely forth to it, and there find more or less satisfaction,—satisfaction as from a familiar companion; whether familiar by the associations of childhood or through the cherished learning of later years.

Lucretius had, as we know, a philosophic faith about Nature, which satisfied his understanding, if it did not satisfy what was deeper in him than understanding—that high imagination and poetic instinct which at times craved a more spiritual interpretation. Virgil, on the other hand, had no consistent theory regarding that Nature which he apprehended so feelingly. In general he acquiesced in the orthodox mythology which he had received from the tradition of the poets. And yet, while he accepted it for poetic, or even patriotic reasons, he must, when he thought of it, have felt strange misgivings. For the mythologic faith had entirely ceased, to be real to himself or to hiseducated countrymen. That he longed at times to penetrate the secret of Nature, and to know the causes of things, he himself assures us. But there is no evidence in his poetry that he ever rose to as clear a conception of one all-ruling Divine Power as even Cicero had probably reached. There are, however, two well-known passages, one in the fourth Georgic, the other in the sixth Æneid, in which Virgil expresses a mystic and pantheistic theory as to an all-pervading life of the world, which, if it cannot be called his philosophic belief, seems to have been to him at least more than a mere poetic fancy. Lucretius, impelled by the craving of his imagination for life, not death, had in the opening of his poem and elsewhere allowed such a feeling, as it were, to escape him, but had never recognized it as an article of his faith. In Virgil it approaches more nearly to a consciously held belief, or at least to a possible solution of the mystery of Nature. It has been reserved for modern times to give fuller expression to the same tendency of thought, sometimes as a mere feeling, sometimes as a conviction. But however such a view may have expressed passing phases, either of thought or feeling, it has never, either now or in ancient times, approached to be a solution which can satisfy at once reason, heart, and conscience.

Since these remarks on Virgil were in the press, Professor Sellar’s work on Virgil has appeared. If I could have read it before writingthe above pages, I should probably have said more of Virgil’s treatment of Nature, or less. As it is, I have allowed what I had said to remain unchanged. Those who wish to see this and every other aspect of Virgil’s poetry treated in the most thorough and instructive way, will be amply rewarded by the study of Professor Sellar’s book.

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