UC-NRLF B H 0M3 3fl2 m mSMSH Place History of Lecture given to Oxford Univer- xtension Students J9* by Sir rbert Warren, K.C.V.O., August, mdccccxxi 'FORD: BASIL BLACKWELL Two Shillings net : : .•. ? • : VIRGIL in Relation to the Place of ROM/! in the History of Civilization, A Lecture given to Oxford Univer- sity Extension Students, &g* by Sir Herbert Mfarren, K.C.V.O., if in August^ 7ndccccxxi OXFORD: BASIL BLACKJVELL y. \ l VIRGIL in relation to the place of Rome in the Iii story of Civilization. "TORBOLE (Lake of Garda), September 12, 1786, after (midday) dinner. How I long to have my friends for a moment with me that they might enjoy the prospect which stretched in front of me! "I might have been this evening in Verona, but a noble piece of nature's handiwork lay somewhat off my route, a magnificent spectacle, the Lake of Garda. I did not want to miss it, and rich is the reward which I have received for my detour. "From the chamber where I am sitting, a doorway gives on the courtyard beneath. I have dragged my table in front of this and sketched the view with a few lines. You can overlook the lake almost for its entire length; only at the end does it wind out of sight toward the left. The shore, closed in on both sides with hills and mountains, sparkles with innumerable little habitations. "After midnight the wind blows from North to South; the traveller therefore who wishes to go down the Lake ought to make his journey at this time, as several hours before sunrise the current of air changes round and streams northwards. At this moment, in the afternoon, it is blowing strongly against me and cooling the hot sun quite delightfully. 6 211M/3 VIRGIL, ROME ■ ' "Simultaneously my guide-book* tells me that the rjake;Was formerly called Benacus, and quotes a verse 01 Virgil' which makes mention of it: — Fluctibus et fremitu resonans, Benace, marino! "This is the first Latin verse, the meaning of which has come with living force before me, and which, at the moment when the wind is growing stronger, and yet stronger, and the lake is dashing ever higher waves against the quay, is as true now, as many centuries ago. So much has changed, but the wind still rages on the lake, the aspect of which is today, as of old, glorified by a line of Virgil. Written in latitude forty-five degrees, fifty minutes". The above extract is taken from that fascinating record of inward and outward experience, Goethe's autobiographic account of his Journey to Italy, in which, as ever with Goethe, the head and the heart, the artist and poet, the man of science and of letters, the intelligent tourist and the passionate pilgrim, are so multifariously blended. Either Goethe's excellent German guide-book with which, however passionate his pilgrimage, he char- acteristically went provided, or Goethe himself, has made a slight verbal error in the quotation. Virgil's real line, with its unusual elision, Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marino. is finer still in its appeal alike to the eye and the ear, and would have made Goethe's point yet more effectively. * Yulkmunn. AND THE HIST* >RY 01 CIVILIZ VTION 5 The line is taken from a well-known context, a pas- Sage in the Georgics\ — * Anne lacus tantosl le, Lari maxume, teoue, Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Bentice % marinot There is another poetic allusion to this couplet, better known to the English reader: — ".I 'i J in my head, for half the day, The rich Virgilian rustic measure Of Lari Maxume all the way." — Tennyson : The Daisy. A century and a half after Goethe's journey, another poet of a different nationality, the famous Victorian Laureate visited this same region, the lake-land of Loinbardy. Tennyson however, when the suggestion came to him, was gazing, not on Garda, but on Como, and the line which surged up in memory for him was the first, and not the second, of Virgil's description. Yet the coincidence is significant. So much in truth has changed, but the hills and waters remain, and still, after well nigh two thousand years, Virgil is their truest singer, and still, for those who have learned it in youth, his sweet, melancholy, magic music echoes through their valleys, and round their shores. For Virgil too is a "lake poet", and a poet of nature, and an Italian, no less than a Roman singer, and this was Virgil's home land. Noiv thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Caesar's dome — Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound for ever of Imperial Rome — * Georgic II, 159 — 10. 6 VIRGIL, ROME It is the irony of the world and its history, that the strong are at the disposal of the weak. The dreamer outlives the doer, the singer the soldier, the annalist the actor, an emperor survives only in an epigram, an empire in an epic. Never was this better exemplified than in the for- tune of the greatest and most famous empire of the ancient world, the Roman Empire. It has left lan- guages and laws, temples and theatres, baths and bridges, roads and acqueducts. Its coins may be picked up from Cadiz to the Caspian, nay to China, on the Scottish border, or amid the sands of the Sudan. Its graves are "scattered far and wide, by mount and stream and sea". But its soul, its spirit — where are these to be found? The answer is, in its poets. Of them truly it may be said Spiritus intus a/it — et alitur. The first of the Emperors, the founder of the Empire, the first, in the technical sense, of the 'Caesars,' was sent as a lad to what may be called the "university" of the Rome of his day. In the class-room of the most fashionable lecturer of the hour on grammar, rhetoric, and literature, a Greek of course, by name Epidius, the nephew and heir of the greatest man in Rome, a smart, brilliant, able boy, whose striking good looks we know from bust and statue, the "young Augustus", looking round on his seniors, might see a lanky, sallow, pensive youth, in appearance like a shy, tall, awkward, sun-burnt, peasant girl, a rustic genius, the son of a successful, self-made yeoman, from the half Italian, half Gaulish countryside in the north, which his uncle AND THE HISTORY 01 CIVILIZATION 7 had recently enfranchised, and annexed to Italy and Rome. "Miss Virgil", "the maiden of the Mai City", they had called him in the school at Naples from which he had come. For s>me reason he was a favourite with the "smart set", the "bloods", the "handsome young men", as he, in turn, styled them. He was a poet, a budding Catullus, they said. " I lad he not written an admirable epigram on a notorious highwayman of his own north, 'Old Sling ! , and later, some delightful lines on the 'musty "Mods" lecturers', those 'Crusty Christophers', dry grasshoppers, grating out their shrill, scrannel music?" "Poetry, he says now, is, at best, a snare. He's tired of 'words, words, words'. He wants to know the real truth about things. Poetry is pretty and charming, but he is going to follow philosophy. Lu- cretius is now the real bard, not Catullus, and he is going to "chuck Mods", as undergraduates say, and read for "Greats", to leave poetry, and attend the lectures of Siro, a Greek Epicurean philosopher, who has a cottage in his own north country, and is a friend of his father, but who is a spiritual father to his stu- dents, and will lead them on the 'pathway to reality', moral and metaphysical." So Virgil's young friends, doubtless, said of him, for so he said of himself. \ All this may have been about 50 B.C., when Virgil was twenty, and Augustus thirteen, for we can hardly suppose Augustus to have begun these studies earlier. Virgil himself seems to have gone to school at Cremona between the ages of twelve and thirteen, then to have 8 VIRGIL, ROME passed on, at seventeen or eighteen, to Milan, Naples, and Rome. Another pupil in the class-rooms of Epidius, was, it is said, Mark Antony, and there were doubtless others of note, not definitely recorded. Then came the Civil War, with Pharsalia in 48 B.C., the death of Julius in 44, Philippi in 42, Actium in 31. Augustus was made Governor of Apollonia before Julius' death, probably about B.C. 43, at the age of twenty. About 41 B.C., followed Virgil's domestic troubles, and his rescue by the powerful, high-born friends to whom he had become known in his student days. So "commenced" the greatest of Roman poets. Let us consider his career more systematically. He was born, as Dante notes, just in the end of the old era, and before the establishment of the new: born in the ascendancy of Julius, and under the "false and lying gods",* born forty years before the reign of the first emperor, and seventy before the birth of Christ. His birthplace was the tiny hamlet of Andes, per- haps the modern Pietola, a little outside Mantua. His father was a yeoman farmer, originally a farm-hand, perhaps bred a potter, an industrious apprentice, who had married his master's daughter, and been set to look after his fields and flocks, and further had in- creased his little property by buying up scraps of forest land, and keeping bees. All kinds of legends adorn Virgil's birth. One charming scene out of his childhood we have, painted by his own pencil. * Nacqui sub Julio, ancorche Fosse tardi, E vissi a Roma sotto il buono Augusto Al tempo degli Dei i'alsi c bugiardi. — Inferno /, 70S. AND THE HIST IRY I IF CIVILIZATK IN 9 He was reared "among woods and orchards", and one dewy autumn morning, when he was entering on his twelfth year, and could just begin to reach the bi >ughs of the trees, he saw his mother in their orchard with a little girl, who was picking up the shining apples from the wet grass. Like Dante, it would m, meeting in his childhood the child Beatrice, he fell madly in love with her. The passage is one which Voltaire and Macaulay alike declare the most beauti- ful in all his works. The next year he was sent to school. The object of his early admiration was the wild, Byronic, Cat- tullus, who, born in his own lake-country, was a friend of the smart, high Tory set at Rome, who had been with the fashionable Memmius to Bithynia, and returned, in his own Pontic-built yacht, still to be seen, in Virgil's boyhood, laid up in the little harbour at Sirmto, and whose grande passion for the beaux yeux of the Juno-like Clodia, the scandalous sister of the scandalous Clodius, was the talk of the town, but who also was the friend of the respectable silver-tongued Cicero, and the eloquent little "bantam" barrister and poet Calvus. Virgil, and his father too, became friends later of the scientific Greek professor of Epicurean philosophy, Siro, who had a modest villa, a cottage not far from their own, in the lake country. He taught Virgil to admire the tenets of Epicurus, and perhaps, the unfinished, but trenchant and tremendous poems of the ill-starred Lucretius, who made half-mad by in- tense study and the shattering of his old faiths, now writing, now raving, believing in neither a heaven 10 VIRGIL, ROME nor a hell for men, and deleteriously dosed by His passionate, pleasure-loving wife, had committed sui- cide, leaving his masterpiece incomplete. His death the chroniclers note, took place on the very day on which Virgil came of age. During the earlier years of the war Virgil began to write and publish his Eclogues. The times however became more and more troubled, and anon the storm broke upon his own quiet home. It was invaded by soldiery, and by the land-commissioners of the government, who proposed to divide it among them. There was a nasty fracas on the farm. Virgil's father and lie himself had to fly from their fields, perhaps more than once, and take refuge with Siro. But by and by his great friends intervened, and he was quieted in the possession of his homestead. Then he returned to Rome. He began at some time it would seem, to read and prepare for practice at the Bar. But though a "lord of language" he was unready of speech, and his real bent was for learning and science. His love of poetry also came back once and again, and his friends were the poets. Chief among them was a witty satiric young clerk in the Treasury, a "Somerset House young man" who hailed from Southern Italy. When the war broke over the Italo-Greek world, Horace, for that was his name, had been out at Athens. There, a loyalist un- dergraduate, he had joined the cause and colours of Pompey. When it was all over he had come back to Italy. He too had lost his property. It was the common fate of the poets. Propertius had lost his AND THE III-!' >1 \ < >F CIVILIZATK IN I l too, and perhaps Tibullus also, and had been lucky than Virgil. Virgil and Horace became inseparable bosom friends. When they dined together Virgil would bring a box of spikenard ointment, for Horace was a young elegant, Horace a brittle of wine, to their modest meal, x^s the years went on Virgil became a popular author and hero. He spent most of his time however, like Tennyson in the Isle of Wight, near Naples, where he had studied as a lad, and came little to Rome. When he came, he kept out of the way. When the poets were pointed at, walking down the street, as celebrities, Horace was delighted, but Virgil bolted into the nearest shop to hide. But willy-nilly they both of them became friends of the great, admitted behind the scenes, and drawn in to share, sympathize and cooperate with, the high imperial plans of Augustus and Maecaenas. "Back to the land", "efficiency", "order", "the trad- itional faith", "the simple life", "our young Prince and our old institutions", these were the catchwords and the watch words in those post-war years. The republic had proved a failure. The empire was ■a. fait accompli. The "philosopher king" of Plato was the solution, a "still strong man in a blatant land, who could rule, and dared not lie". To preach this gospel Virgil was absolutely and entirely suited. Was he not himself a child of the Empire? Julius Caesar, who had given Virgil's own pro- vincial people their position, who was the friend of the father of Catullus, and had treated the passionate poet with tact and generosity, ignoring his petulant 12 VIRGIL, ROME outbursts, and asking him to dinner, was Virgil's youthful hero, and he was prepared to see in Caesar's house, the saviours of society, and the guiding star of Rome. But he did not reach this position all at once. His poems mark the stages of his career, and the evolution of his genius, first the Eclogues, then the Georgics, then the Aeneid, this last never quite finished, for he died when only a little over fifty. He began, as young poets do, with the experiences of his boyhood, and the studies of his youth. It must be remembered and realised that all, or almost all poetry at Rome at this time was largely an artificial and exotic growth. Catullus and Lucre- tius, Virgil's early loves, were both intensely Roman and Italian in their emotions, but both, on their intellectual and artistic side were dominated by Greek models and influences. The politics, the military and naval science, the law, the public religion, the customs and fashions of the Romans of Virgil's day, were Roman but, the science, the aesthetics, the ethics, the reasoned individual faith of the time, were bor- rowed almost entirely from Greece. To capture the Roman world, the poet must fuse and blend both. The secret of the new school at Rome to which Virgil belonged was to give fresh value to the exotic flower and fruit by grafting them on a hardy, native stock; to lend a richer hue and fragrance to the wilding rose, first by this impregnation, and then by the most careful selection and pruning of the resulting garden- plant. In this art Virgil was a consummate master. Indeed his triumph is to have achieved the result AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATK >N 13 more completely than any one else. If tl. may be compared to the gardener* Virgil is the greatest gardener in literature. No one, figuratively, grew more glorious garden- blooms than he, outvying even the famed "rosaries of Paestum." It is not without significance that he lias painted for us in the Georgics a picture of a garden. He intended to have written a separate Georgic on Gardening. - ! - He has given us the vignette of the Coryciiis senex. The Georgics may be called a sort of Earthly Paradise. The flower garden and the kitchen garden, the landscape, the terrace, the wild plot, the parterre, the alley, the bush, the tree, the rock, the maze, the lake, the cascade, the statue, the vase, all the "dainty devices" of the cultivator who bends nature to his purpose, he can use them all; nor is the beehive in the corner forgotten. But Virgil has a deeper and a grander aim. To "cultivate his garden" is not enough. Nature is not to be studied only for utilitarian ends. He desires to understand both this world and the next, to find salvation in both. Politically, peace for mankind was to be found in the Roman rule, and indeed it was so found in "the majesty of the Pax Romanar The Empire which had been I'epee was to be la paix. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; Hae iibi em tit artes ; pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subject is et debet tare super bos 1 * cf. Tennyson's "Amphion" and "The Flower. 1 ' t Georgic iv, 116 — et seqq. 14 VIRGIL, ROME Personally, and for the soul, it was to be found in the doctrine of "the Soul of the Word," the belief that we men are tiny sparks of the one, pure, divine fire, and that after the cares and contagion of this trouble- some world we are to be reunited and resumed into the ineffable being of the immanent God who fills, and is, the universe. What then is the highest human virtue? It is flietas, loving duty, dutiful love ; to accept, with the heart and head together, the divine order in things great and small, the law of the gods alike of "hearth and heaven," Penates et magni Di. Virgil's hero for better and for worse is Pius Aeneas* Something of the same kind is to be found in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which has many affi- nities with the Aeneid. Arthur, we are told, is not merely the legendary Celtic King. He is also the human soul at war with the passions.-]- It is further suggested in the Dedication that there is no small resemblance between the "ideal knight" of the Id) Us and Prince Albert, "Albert the Good." All this gives a certain allegorical character to the Idylls, some- thing like that of the " Faery Queen," whose eponym Spenser found in the Queen and Empress Elizabeth, and Disraeli again in the Queen and Empress Victoria. There is a similar element of allegory in Pius Aeneas. A clever, if flippant undergraduate of my day described * Quel giusto Figliuol d'Anchise. — Inferno I, 7$. t "shadowing Sense at war with Soul, Ideal manhood closed in real man.'' — Tennyson's lines " To the Queen" at the end of the Idylls. AND THE HISTORY I IF CIVILIZATION 15 King Arthur as a "blameless prig." That is not alto- gether fair to Arthur, but is not altogether unfair to Pins Aeneas. The real justification of pictas, the deeper si' the Aeneidy the real key and clue, are to be found in the Sixth Book, as that of the Idylls in the Idyll of the "Holy Grail." This Book contains the fusion of two worlds, the seen, and the unseen. When Aeneas has visited the world below, he is to be reconciled to, and to be able to deal with, the world of Earth. Is his visit a dream, and a false dream, or a reality? We are left uncertain. The return to earth is made, significantly, through the ivory gate. But whichever he meant, it was Virgil's vast task to find an inner faith and sanction for the hard, practical, conquering Roman, and for the Roman Empire, and for this task he was strangely prepared and fitted. He was a peasant, or at any rate, the son of a pea- sant, he was a man of the people, and also a court favourite; a patriot and a patronized poetdaureate He was, shall we say? like the brilliant son of a Welsh farmer who had been sent to Oxford. He sang, as he said himself, pascua, rura, duces, of flocks and fields and warrior Kings. Virgil is indeed a paradox among poets. He is to celebrate the Roman Empire. It has barely been established and by the sword, when already, though Virgil only dimly divined its full implication, it is the "Hol) r " Roman* Empire, for it was this "Holy * The name or epithet "Augustus" itself probably means "holy" or "dedicated/' 1 6 VIRGIL, ROME Empire," as its historian says "that the crafty nephew of Julius won for himself, against the powers of the East, beneath the cliffs of Actium."* Truly, in Virgil, out of the lion came honey, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. While Augustus worked, Virgil waited and watched. While Augustus battled, Virgil brooded, and blessed.j- It is the part of the poet. As M. Andre Chevrillon points out,+ Tennyson, and Kipling the successor of Tennyson, have done something of the same kind in England for the last, and the present generation. They have found a faith for the British Empire. Virgil's poems all exhibit the same character, the same ingredients, the same elements blended in the same strange, various richness, but they are on an ascending scale of grandeur and complexity. Can we at all reconstruct the world in which Virgil moved? What was it like? For the ordinary English reader the answer is ready to hand. It was the world of the New Testament. The best picture of the Roman Empire in its daily life, both outward and inward, is to be found in the Acts of the Apostles. That mar- vellous and masterly narrative gives us a plain, unvarnished, vivid, truthful portraiture of life as it went forward upon the shores of the Mediterranean, in Palestine, Greece and Italy, in the days before Christianity, the days of which Virgil is the most complete spiritual and artistic interpreter and prophet. * Lord Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, the opening paragraph. t Georgic IV. 559— end. X Andre Chevrillon, Trois Etudes dc littiraturc Auglaise. AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION \J In its pagi s are to be seen all the types and factors of Virgil's day, excepting that in Virgil's time the Em- pire was still in the making, in the days of St. Paul it was an established fact. The physical scenery is the same, as the traveller makes his way by mountain, river and plain, across sunny or stormy seas, by island and harbour, or along some famous Roman road. And the spiritual scenery and setting are the same too. Take that most notable scene in the Acts, St. Paul at Athens, portrayed by Raphael in his famous cartoon. Virgil had been at Athens too, and at not so very long an interval before, only the space of an ordinary life, some seventy years. A greybeard of eighty, one of those Epicurean philosophers who sat on the Areopagus, still ea^er to hear some "new thing," the dernier cri in speculative thought, might have remembered seeing the famous rich Roman poet- laureate of his childhood, a figure in the train of the Emperor, to be stricken down a little later with sudden fever, known too, it is not improbable, by personal visits to the Garden and the teachers of his own sect. For Athens had not greatly changed ; the philosophic sects with their Colleges, Walks, Gardens and Porticoes were still the same, and their views were still the views which, as has been noted, Virgil and Horace and their fellows had heard in the lecture-rooms of their pre- decessors at Rome or when they came to Athens, "Inter silvas Acadttni quaerere verum."* Who were St. Paul's hearers and hecklers? "Certain philosophers of the Epicureans and Stoics." Who was * To hunt for Truth in Maudlin's learned Grove. — Pofe : Imitation of Horace Ep. II, ii. I 8 VIRGIL, ROME the poet whom he cites as "one of your own?" Aratus, to whom both Virgil and his forerunner Lucretius owe so much. "For we are also his offspring," he quotes, as elsewhere he quotes the epicurean motto, common to Isaiah and Horace, "Let us eat and drink for to- morrow we die." This then is the world in which, and these are the prevailing tenets amid which, Virgil, a true seeker after God, was groping, "if haply he might feel after and find him." For to Virgil this was the greatest matter of all, and this it is indeed, which forms a large part of the mystery and the pathos of Virgil. He could not be content with any creed, or with no creed, with the superficial acceptance, the superstition and idolatry, of the unquestioning masses, or with the negative creed accepted, by Lucretius with melancholy enthusiasm, with sensual and brutal indifference by Memmius, and with the worldling's insouciance by Horace. Virgil's relation to Lucretius is very interesting. Lucretius' tenets, as everyone knows, were the tenets of his intellectual hero Epicurus. In these tenets Virgil too had been brought up. Like Horace, he could say that he had been taught that the gods lived aloof, "lying beside their nectar" and caring nought for men. "Jews might believe, not Romans." Crcda t Ju d( icus Apel/a, Non ego, namque deos didici securum agere aevum. — Hor. S. I, V., ioo. AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION l<> All know the splendid passage in the I i about Lucretius — beginning Felix, qui potuit tenon cognoseere causas. — < rE< >RGIC II, 49O. "And he was happy, if to know Causes of things, ami tar b His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness." — M. Arnold, "Memorial Verses." But Virgil does not, and could not, rest content with this negation. His was one of those "swift souls that yearn for light." "Ah sure within him and without, Could his dark wisdom find it out, There must be answer to his doubt." He yearned to find the truth, the ultimate secret of the universe. He intended, when he had finished the Aeneid, to devote the rest of his life to "philosophy," that is, to science and religion. He was cut off before he could do so. It is a tragic record. His earliest poem had been upon the theme of a shepherd saved from a marsh snake by a gnat. By a strange irony it was the malaria mosquito that killed him as he was finishing the Aeneid. He sought the light only to sigh out life as he found it, Quaesivit caelo lucem ingemuitque reperta. — Aen. IV, 692. Italy, it must be remembered, was, to the ancients, "Hesperia" the "Western World," and it is indeed in Jtaly that the real western world, to-day, as of old, in one direction be«ins, and in the other ends. 20 VIRGIL, ROME It has been the part of Rome, it is still her part, perhaps it will be her part yet more in the future, to link together the ancient and the modern civilizations, Paganism and Christianity, to stand between Babylon and Jerusalem, Troy and Athens, cm the one hand and London and Paris, Berlin and Madrid on the other. Virgil, the great poet of Rome, more than any other single man or mind, effects the spiritual portion of this liaison. He came at the right moment, he enjoyed the experience, he possessed the education and the genius requisite. He knew the ground, he knew Italy, from the confines of Italian Gaul on which he was born, to Magna Graecia, where he sojourned ; he knew Greece, and probably the Levant. He had experience both of the Republic and the Empire, and was the contemporary, as boy and man, of all Rome's very greatest figures, of Caesar and Pompey, Antony and Augustus, Cicero and Maecenas, Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace. He was an immense student, familiar with all the range of Greek art and thought, poetry and philos- ophy. He could absorb it all and hand it on in a new, individual form and language, for before transmitting it he made it all his own. He is the most imitative — fortunate is it for the part he was to play that he is so — yet at times, the most original poet in the world. I began this lecture by noting how the surge and roar of Garda still echo in his lines. Not Wordsworth's "Loud is the Vale" is more spontaneous or true. Sir Archibald Geikie has shown in detail how equally vivid and true to nature is his description of AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 21 the breaker on the Italian beach. Here he is like Horn t. i ist as Tennyson is like Homer, because both are like eternal nature, and things which arc equal to the same thing are (unless Einstein has changed all that) equal to one another. He imitates Theocritus, but he knew the shepherd and the goat-herd, the boor and the belle of the coun- tryside, for himself. He imitates Hesiod and Aratus, but he knew the star and the soil, the arable and the pasture, the forest and the marsh, the stud and the stock, the beasts and birds and bees, the wolf, the fox and the mole; the goose, the crane and the crow; the snake, the lizard and the frog; for himself. He imitates Homer — and here, perhaps, his experience fell short. He had not seen the Homeric battle or the Homeric life. But he was nearer them than we are. He had studied his Sophocles and his Apollonius Rhodius. Dido recalls both Ajax and Medea, but Dido is no echo nor Camilla either, and Virgil had done what Homer had not, he had lived in the days of Clodia and Cleopatra. And there is something, for better and for worse, in Virgil which Homer does not possess. Homer is often not fully understood. He is not barbarous or rude or uncultured: he is artistic, even artificial. He presents the picture of a life highly, and deeply civilized. But in Virgil there is something more still There is the note of mysticism. There is nuance, there is double meaning, there is other-worldliness. Nothing is more significant than this. It pervades all his writing. 22 VIRGIL, ROME The Eclogues or Bucolics are, in name and in fact, an extraordinary mixture of originality and artifi- ciality, of " simplicite and simplesse" of the first-hand and the second-hand, of personal observation and heartfelt emotion, with touches and adornments bor- rowed from every previous writer. The inise en scene is half mirage, half matter of fact. It is Lombardy and Sicily at once. Amaryllis and Neaera, half country lasses, are mixed with Nymphs and Naiads. Milton, in his Elizabethan youth, in his early, happy, semi-cavalier pieces, shows something of the same blending, and Tennyson has it too in more than one of his earlier youthful poems. But the paradox is strongest in Virgil. Amid all his artificiality there is something in him that speaks to the soul in all ages and in its deeper moods. Pan and the "Old Man o' the Woods" and the "Sister Nymphs" are for him country deities who have a revelation of their own to be placed over against that of Epicurus and Lucretius.* The tipsy Satyr, when he is caught and bound with flowers by the laughing shepherds, Silenus, whose very name is a byword, sings a philosophic poem, the story of creation, and tries to solve the riddle of the painful earth. He sings "how the world was made, how the atoms in the vasty void were drawn together and formed the elements, earth and the air of heaven, and the sea, and the fluent flame, how these were the beginning of all things, and how, from these, the orb of the world, at first soft and viscous, was compacted, how gradually the hard * Georgic ii, Afi^ctsqq. Fortunatus et ille AND THE HISTORY I >i CIVILIZ V TH >N 23 earth grew from this and was distinguished from the deep, how the sun came, a new deity, to rule the sky, and the clouds retired and the rain fell from an ever higher heaven, how man was created, and the Golden Age drew on, and how then Prometheus stole the fire of Jove and was punished by the vulture." In another Eclogue^ as all know, there are visions and prophecies that the fust age of man's innocency will return, and the Virgin of Righteousness will tread the earth once more, unafraid, when a Heavenlv Babe shall be born, and the lion and the ox shall feed and lie down together. No wonder that later eras read into Virgil the strange divinings of a saint and seer, and that the Christian Church, which had from the first welcomed the testimony of natural religion to the brotherhood of man and the father- hood of God, found in him something which it would fain appropriate and sanctify. At the moment, hower, Virgil was discovered and annexed for more immediate and material ends. The Eclogues took the town. To-day they would have been filmed, perhaps by the Government as "back to the land" propaganda, and we should have had Mopsus and Menalcas on the cinematic stage. In Rome of the early empire they could only be presented as a sort of revue. But they were put on the stage, and there is a pretty story that when Virgil looked into the theatre the whole audience rose to its feet and cheered for Caesar and Virgil. Follio, the literary statesman, was "charmed with the rustic Muse"* which was so true and so popular, * Eclogue iii, 84. 24 VIRGIL, ROME and the rulers saw and suggested how Virgil's genius might be utilized. The result was the Gcorgics. Again Virgil, but now on a greater scale, mingled earth and heaven, mirage and reality, science and art. Again, and more powerfully, he images the unseen world in the old Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, into which he pours his own observation of nature and his own emotion over the death of the young. The Gcorgics are very fine, and still more, very perfect, poetry. They display many, if not quite all, the notes in Virgil's gamut, his pathos and his rhe- toric, his command, at once of the clearest distinction and the subtlest suggestion, of realism and roman- ticism, precision and nuance, above all, his marvellous music. The struggle for existence, alike of the strong and the weak, the wondrous achievement of man, the possibilities open to his industry and his daring, the charm and potency of economy, rural and domestic, the growth of the state, the praise, the love of Italy, the insanity of war and party strife, the golden vision of peace, the wisdom and duty, of loyalty to Caesar and his star, all are here. They are too, as all know, highly finished in their workmanship, notwithstanding the strange fact that the last was completely transformed from its original design. Only those who do not like perfection, and there are many such, do not like them. But it is the Acneid that makes Virgil's real great- ness and that sets him among the super-poets. And perhaps the chief reason is just this, that his Epic sums up the spirit of a great empire, that it is the very AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 25 voice of ancienl Italy and eternal Rome. How came it to be written? "On n'ex/cute que mal ce qu'on n',i pas concn soi-mime? is the imm< >rtal saying of Charli >tte Corday. Is the Aeneid an exception? Is it a com- manded poem? It was written, in a sense, to order, l>nt it was, and perhaps Augustus knew this, an early, first love of the poet's own. As a young poet, he had planned an Epic, in twelve hooks, on "kings and battles" the tale of the rise of Rome, but "Apollo twitched his ear," and bade him hesitate. Much the same is the story, some may remember, of Tennyson's Idylls. The early "Morte d s Arthur' 1 represents the beginning of an Epic in twelve books on the rise of Britain and the wars of Arthur. Just now the Idylls are out of fashion with the critics, though not with the uncritical masses, even as Virgil was out of fashion in certain highbrovved circles in the generation after his death, though not with the masses. But though he died before he had satisfied himself, and wished to have the Aeneid burnt at his death, it achieved its end at once, more rapidly and completely perhaps, than any known poem of the same magnitude. What is its character, and what its secret? Love thou thy land, with love far-brought From out the storied Past, and used Within the Present, but transfused Thro 1 future time by power of thought. Virgil's love of Italy and Rome, as it speaks in the Aeneid has all these three characters. He tells the story of Rome's far off beginnings, of her colossal conflict for the rule of the world; he introduces, with extraordinary skill, her present greatness; and foretells her long meridian of glory. 26 VIRGIL, ROME The fall of Troy, the secular hate of Carthage, the exploits of the republican heroes, Alba and the in- fant Rome, the battle of Actium, all are brought in. The whole of Italy, the islands of the Levant, Egypt, the East, are alluded to, just as by skilful touches, the heroes of the Homeric poems, Diomede and Ulysses are introduced into the thread of the narrative. But it is the meek who shall inherit the earth. The "grandeur that was Rome" is worthily reflected in Virgil. No one sounds her triumphs with more clear or immortalizing voice. But there was another note known perhaps better to the proud Roman than to the livelier, and lighter Greek, though known to him too, the transiency of triumphs. Did not the slave ride in the conqueror's car to remind him that he was mortal? Virgil was the voice of Rome, and of proud Rome, a proud voice, but a voice with tears in it too. What is his most famous, his most Virgilian, his most untranslatable line? It is the line that tells of the tears, the idle tears, that wait on fame, and on the contemplation of man's great, yet little, lot. Sunt hie etiam sua praemia /audi, Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt — Aen. I, 461-2. Here too is the guerdon of glory • ah ! where is our valour not sung ? But here too are tears for man's story, and hearts by mortality wrung '. Virgil everywhere has praise for human achievement and for man in his strength, but tears also, it may be proud tears, for human failure, tears alike for friend and foe, tears for Polydorus, for Dido, for Marcellus; AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 2f for Camilla and Lausus no less than for Nisus and Euryalus and the incomparable Pallas: \ . alias hint ad lacrimas eadem horrida belli Fata vocant; salve aeternum mi/ii, maxume Palla, Aeternutnque vale. Ai \. XI, 96-99. Us to new tears the old aire destinies Of warfare summon still ; Hail, gallant Pallas, ]-]>rever! and forever fate thee well! The poets are best understood by the poets, and perhaps the greatest by the greatest. I began with Goethe's appreciation. I pass to a greater than Goethe. Dante's relation to Virgil is one of the transcendent things in literature. Its general features are well known, but its minute and detailed value is not always noted. What did Dante find in Virgil? These main things — a love of Italy, a glorious style, a pagan piety, a belief in an under-world and after life, a picture of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, a belief in a Holy, a divinely appointed, Empire of Rome over the world. And these remain the great notes of Virgil. They are the notes brought out by that other great poet of empire, our own Tennyson, in that marvellous Ode "written at the request of the Mantuans" for the nine- tenth centenary of their great poet's death. In ten successive stanzas, with a music and magic of phrase and diction, which are the very counterpart of Virgil's own, Tennyson touches off the charac- teristics of the ancient master, his theme and his manner, his poetry and philosophy, his grandeur and his gentleness, his wistfulness and his glamour. 28 VIRGIL, ROME It was no late-born or light predilection that in- spired these lines, it was the love of a life-time. This Tennyson told me himself, as he tells it to the world in his Ode. "/ that loved thee since my day began" It may be read in many pages in his poems: "At procul in sola secret ae Troades acta Amissum Anchisen flebatit, cunctaeque profundum Pontum adspectabant flentes. ' Heu tot vada fessis, Et tatitum superesse maris' vox omnibus una. Urbem or ant, taedet pelagi perferre labor em." — Aen. V, 612 — 16. "They sat them down upon the yellow sand, Betzveen the sun and moon upon the shore: And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, Of child, and wife, and slave ; but ever more Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. Then some one said. "We will returti no more;" And all at o?ice they sang "Our island home Is far beyond the wave: we will no longer roam." — The Lotus Eaters. Cum subito e silvis made confecta suprema Ignoti nova forma viri miserandaque cultu Trocedit, supplexque manus ad litora tendit. Respicimus: dira illuvies inmissaque barba, Consertum tegumen spinis, at cetera Grains." — Aen. Ill, 590—5. Downward from his mountain grove, Slept the long-hair 'd long-bearded solitary, Brown, looking hardly human, strangely clad. — Enoch Arden. AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 2>j The resemblance Is general, and one rather of the affinity of kindred spirits than of deliberate imitation. But Tennyson himself gave me, as an instan his own wonderful expression — "All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word," the phrase — cunctantem ratuunt. I did not at the moment remember that he had himself written "the lithe reluctant bough." Do you recollect the stanza in the "Dream of Fair Women"— " Corpses across the threshold, heroes tail Dislodging pinnacle and parapet Upon the tortoise creeping to the wall, Lances in ambush set?" It is a vignette almost in the original words from the Second A cue id. "Sic Martem indomitum Danaosque ad tecta ruenles, Ceruimus, obsessumque acta testudine linien. Haerent parietibus scalae, postesque sub ipsos Nituntur gradibus, ciipeosque ad tela sinisiris Protecti objiciunt, prensant fastigia dextris, Dardanidae contra turres ac tecta domoruni Culmina convellunt." — Aen. II, 440 — 7. But another young English poet had earlier been fired, as indeed thousands of boys have doubtless been, by the same picture. " The woes of Troy, towers smothering o'r their blaze, Stiff-holden shields, far-piercing spears, keen blades, Struggling, and blood, and shrieks." — Exdymion II, 8-9. Keat knew his Virgil much better than is generally recognized. He made, we are told, in youth a tran- slation of the Aeneid, and he alludes to, and borrows from it again and acrain. 30 VIRGIL, ROME " Tho' Dido silent is in andergrove " he writes, in "Isabella," and he mentions her "grief" again, in the " Imitation of Spenser," while he also makes more than one allusion in his letters to the "Sibyl's leaves in Virgil." He too notes Virgil's alternation between the grand and the sad. In the poor, early, yet significant poem, the 'Ode to Apollo,' after speaking of Homer vaguely as the poet of war, he writes dully, but with know- ledge, of Virgil : — Then through thy Temple wide, melodious swells The sweet majestic tone of Maro's lyre The soul delighted on each accent dtvells — Enraptured dtvells — not daring to respire, The while he tells of grief around a funeral pyre: the allusion in the last line being doubtless to the funeral of Pallas, already referred to in this lecture. But what has not been noticed is that he makes a far more serious and important borrowing, the bor- rowing of a faith. In the memorable letter on "Soul- making," which he writes to George and Georgiana Keats, in which he tries to beat out and explain his ideas of the nature of the Soul and the Intelligence, and their relation to God, he says, that the Intelligence is a spark of the divinity, but that it does not become a soul till, by its earthly experience it acquires an Identity. At death this spark returns to God. This doctrine is the central doctrine of Eiulymion "Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Our ready minds to fellotvship divine, A fellowship with Essence till we shine Full alchemised and free of space. Behold The clear religion of Heaven." — Endymion I, 766. AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 31 Keats himself, in ;i letter to his publisher John Taylor,says that he had spent much tim<: and trouble over this passage. "My having written that argu- ment," he says, "will perhaps be of the greatest service to me of anything I ever did.'" But where did Keats find this "clear religion?" He found it in Virgil. It is the doctrine of the Anima Mundi, set out, as all know, in a famous passage in the Sixth Aeneid. And whence did Virgil get it? From his Greek teachers. He and Horace both learnt it in the class- room. Horace treated it jestingly, as he treated at times many things human and divine. He describes how indigestion, the result of yesterday's debauch, clogs the mind as well as the body, Qui/i cot pus onustum Hestertiis vitiis animum quoque praegravat una, Atque adfigit Jiunw divinae particulam aurae. — Sat. II, 2. 76 — 9. Virgil treated it seriously. He was a genuine seeker after God, and he desired to find a faith for himself and others. Pope's employment of the idea is akin to Virgil's. '• / 'ital spark of Heavenly fix me Quit, quit, this mortal frame" Byron's, in "Don Juan" is akin to that of Horace. It is a curious coincidence that Byron should intro- duce it a propos of Keats himself in the well known lines about the Quarterly Review, "Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle Should let itself be snuffed out by an article" 32 VIRGIL, ROME For it may safely be said that Byron neither knew nor cared what Keats' own creed was, and would never have credited him with any knowledge of the classics, though, by another coincidence, Keats was very nearly being sent to school at Harrow. To this doctrine then Keats attached great import- ance. It was, for the time at any rate, very real to him. He thought it, he writes, a "grander system of salvation than the Christian religion." He thought it would explain difficulties which Christians labour under, for instance, the salvation of children. This he did not draw from Virgil. Dante knew his Virgil better. He did not indeed introduce the doctrine of the Aniuia Mundi, though he may have sublimated it in a sense, in his account of Purgatory and Paradise. But he did not forget the infants, or Virgil's tender-heartedness and gentle- ness. Homer, for Dante, as for Keats, wears the sword of force and sovereignty, but Virgil is for Dante as truly "gentle Virgil"* as Sophocles for the Athenians was "gentle Sophocles" or Shakespeare for Ben Jon- son "gentle Shakespeare." He is the "Amma cortcsc Manlovana." But he is more than this. One of the most famous passages in Virgil's picture of the underworld is the description of the heartpiercing sound which is the first to be heard as the daring invader lands on the unearthly shore, the wailing of the infant souls who have died untimely before they enjoyed life. * E quell' ombra gentil, per cui si noma Pietoia piu che villa Manlovana. — Purg. xviit, S2 — S. AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION 33 It is with them— coi parvoli innocently with the innocent little ones, neither in Earth, nor Heaven, neither in Hell, nor Purgatory, but in Limbo, that Dante fixes Virgil's own eternal lot. A relation of mine, a lady deeply versed in Dante, has stressed this (joint by making it the theme of a touching sonnet. She heads it with two quotations, one from Dante himself, one from Virgil: — QUIVI STO IO COI PARVOLI INNOCENTI. Purg. vii., jr. Sunt lacrymae rerum. O Christian Poet', by the cruel creed Of an unchristlike, dark theology, Forced to adjudge the sinner's destiny To him, the pure in spirit, mild in deed, Your friend, who came to help you in your need: Wherefore through ways of Hell and Purgatory You followed him with bowed head, reverently, As though your sorrow would for pardon plead. Your own compassion taught you his. That fine, Magnanimous and kindred poet-soul } 'ou knew : you knew his chastened heart would share Homer's pale doom, shut out from grace divine, Unmurmuring. One cry bioke from control — " The innocent — the children — they are there l" It is obviously impossible to do justice to Virgil in one brief lecture. There are ever so many topics, points and stories which might be touched on. There is the beautiful story of St. Paul visiting his tomb, and indeed, St. Paul must have been very near it, for it lay on the branch road from Puteoli to Naples, and, as 34 VIRGIL, ROME will be remembered it was at Puteoli that St. Paul landed after his famous voyage, to pass perhaps over this very track, joining in any case, later, the great Appian highway, that Dover Road of Italy, with its historic milestones, stopping-places and hostelries, at which, like Virgil and Horace, if a less fashionable traveller, than they, he too could arrange to meet his friends. There are many stories current in the Middle Ages about Virgil's powers as a magician. There is the pathetic Oxford story of the ill-starred King Charles, fato profngus, making trial of the Sortes Vergilianae at the Bodleian. There are too ever so many stories hinging on quotations from Virgil made alike in ancient and modern times. I might give you specimens, few or many of the ''Beauties of Virgil." But you must read him for yourselves. How then shall you read him? An endless literature began to grow up about Virgil directly he was dead, if not before, and it is still grow- ing. It is very significant of his imperial vogue that the first really good commentary on Virgil was pro- duced in Syria, and that the best portrait preserved of him is a fine mosaic found at Tunis, near the site of the ancient Carthage where his Aeneas had seen his own a thousand years earlier: Se quoque pri/icipibus permixtum agnovit Achivis. — AfcNElD I, 488. Much has been done recently to elucidate and illuminate the personality and the poetry of Virgil. In particular, the value of the so-called Appendix Vergil2an<i,\\\z minor poems preserved under his name, ami THE HISTORY < ll I l\ [LIZATION 35 has been exhaustively explored by scholars, in 1 1 many, in his own Italy, and, not least, in England. We sec him now, as we see almost all ports, if we look carefully, not an isolated figure, but like Shake- speare, or Dante, or Victor Hugo, or Tennyson, or Browning, or Rossetti and William Morris, one of a youthful poetic coterie, giving and taking, suggesting and interchanging, encouraging, and criticizing. We see him, like Tennyson, borrowing in age from his own youth. The ideas again, the customs, the cults, the religion as well as the realities, of the Rome of his day, have been recovered, both by the spade and by the comparative method, and we can place Virgil in his true perspective and setting. Oxford and Cambridge alike have done much in the past for Virgilian study. It is only necessary, if indeed it is necessary, to mention the names of Conington, Nettleship, and Haverfield; of Dr. Mackail and Mr. J. Jackson ; of Kennedy, Sidgwick, F. \V. H. Myers; of Mr. T. E. Page, and Dr. T. R. Glover; of Professor Phillimore and Professor Conway. Nor ought the contribution of Professor Sellar from Scot- land and Dr. Henry from Ireland to be forgotten in any account of English Virgilian Scholarship. Much is being done at this moment by the authors of the striking series of Virgilian Studies, published by Mr. Blackwell, here in Oxford. Mr. Sargeaunt, Mr. Royds, Miss Crump, Professor H. E. Butler, have each contri- buted their share. But none of them, they would all say, has done as much as he, who was their chief and their inspirer, that truly fine and ripe Oxford scholar, so modest, so sincere, so thorough, the doyen of $6 VIRGIL. Roman studies in Oxford, whom we miss parti- cularly at this gathering, but whose spirit pervades our proceedings, that equal lover and student of natural and human history, of natural and human music, the late Dr. William Warde Fowler. It is obvious that you cannot read all this literature at once, perhaps ever. Let me commend as a selec- tion, the edition with notes, of Mr. T. E. Page, the translations in verse of Dryden and William Morris, and, for the Georgics, of R. D. Blackmore, the author of "Lorna Doone," who had the advantage of being a market-gardener, as well as a poet and an Oxford scholar: in prose, of Conington, Dr. Mackail, and Mr. J. Jackson, and the criticism of F. W. H. Myers, of Dr. Mackail, and Mr. H. W. Garrod, and, if you would go further, Professor Domenico Comparetti's invaluable volumn "Virgil in the Middle Ages." Such then is Virgil, one of the most appealing figures and spirits in all history. He is great and glorious, but he is also gentle and tender, brilliantly successful, yet ever humble ; praised, patronized, petted by princes, but all unspoilt ; anima Candida, a "white soul" as Horace called him, anima natiu aliter Christiana, as the Church has recognized him. He links the republic with the empire, he links Rome with Italy. He stands between two worlds, the an- cient and the modern. Musical, magical, mystical, there is something unearthly about his gentle splen- dour, like that of the moon which reflects at once the parting and the coming sun, shining at times as bright as day, at times pale and spectral, always with its weird shadows and suggestions, and its strange, still beauty. [SHBPPARD, PRINTER, 0X1 Uniform Volumes, 6s. net each. By W. WARDE FOWLER, D.Litt. ^J " Three admirable Virgilian studio- >lai i y"— The Times Literary Sup} VIRGIL'S GATHERING OF THE CLANS, i Observations on Aeneid VII., 601-8 1; Text and Parallel Translation. Second E AENEAS AT THE SITE OF ROME. Beii vations on Aeneid VIII. With Text Second E THE DEATH OF TURNUS. Observations Aeneid XII. With Text. By J. SARGEA UNT, M.A. H THE TREES, SHRUBS AND PLANTS OF VIRGIL. 1f "A masterly catalogue." — The Athentenum. \ "Indispensable ... a really delightful book." — The Ox) i Ma By T. F. ROYDS, M.A., B.D. THE BEASTS, BIRDS, AND BEES OF VlRGlL A Naturalist's Handbook to the Georgics. W Preface by W. Warde Fowler. Second £,:'; • If "We should not be surprised if it became indis; . Tii),', VIRGIL AND ISAIAH. A study of Ti With Text, Notes, and Translations into English Verse and into Old Testament English. If "Delightfully discursive and full of interesting i ition suggestive inferences." — The W By M. M. CRUMP, M.A. * THE GROWTH OF THE AENEID. If "The subject might be considered a dry one her arguments with such skill and pei 1 with such animation, that no reader will regret the time he may spend over it." — The West' By Prof. H. E. BUTLER. THE SIXTH BOOK OF THE AENEID. ^ "Excellent and almost always helpful ... no whit less in nist than its predi The Glasgow JJ OXFORD 621003 mm Wm WSkhzk '■/.■■ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES CD5135H5S0