William Young Sellar, Terrot Reaveley Glover, and Margaret Bryant

“ Virgil’s susceptibility to the beauty of nature appears in the truth with which his Work suggests the charm of Italy—the fresh life of an Italian spring, the delicate hues of the wild flowers and the quiet beauty of the pastures and orchards of his native district. The representative character of the poems is enhanced by the fidelity and grace with which he has expressed the Italian peasant’s love of his home and of all things associated with it. The supreme charm of the diction and rhythm is universally recognized. ”

“ No object could be of more consequence in the eyes of a statesman whose master inherited the policy of the popular leaders than the revival of the great national industry, associated with happier memories of Rome, which had fallen into abeyance owing to the long unsettlement of the revolutionary era as well as to other causes. Virgil’s previous life and associations made it natural for him to identify himself with this object, while his genius fitted him to enlist the imagination of his countrymen in its favour. ”

“ The personages of the action are prominent in poetry and legend, or by their ethnical names stir the sentiment of national enthusiasm—Aeneas and Anchises, Dido, Acestes, Evander, Turnus. The spheres of activity in which they are engaged are war and sea adventure. The passion of love is a powerful addition to the older sources of interest. The Aeneid revives, by a conventional compromise between the present and the remote past, some image of the old romance of Greece; it creates the romance of “that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds.” ”

“ For the first half of his life he prepared himself to be the poet of his time and country with a high ambition and unresting industry. The second half of his career was a religious consecration of all his powers of heart, mind and spirit to his high office.
Virgil’s fame as a poet rests on the three acknowledged works of his early and mature manhood—the pastoral poems or Eclogues, the Georgics and the Aeneid—all written in that hexameter verse which Tennyson has called
“The stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.” ”

“ There is not only a less varied interest, there is greater inequality of workmanship in the later books, owing to the fact that they had not received their author’s final revisal. Yet in them there are many lines and passages of great power, pathos and beauty. Virgil brought the two great instruments of varied and continuous harmony and of a rich, chastened and noble style to the highest perfection of which the Latin tongue was capable. The rhythm and style of the Aeneid is more unequal than the rhythm and style of the Georgics, but is a larger and more varied instrument. ”

“ Virgil’s true and vet idealizing interpretation of the imperial idea of Rome is the basis of the greatness of the Aeneid as a representative poem. It is on this representative character and on the excellence of its artistic execution that the claim of the Aeneid to rank as one of the great poems of the world mainly rests. The inferiority of the poem to the Iliad and the Odyssey as a direct representation of human life is so unquestionable that we are in danger of underrating the real though secondary interest which the poem possesses as an imitative epic of human action, manners and character. ”

“ The charm of primitive simplicity is present in some passages of the Aeneid, the spell of luxurious pomp in others. The delight of voyaging past beautiful islands is enhanced by the suggestion of the adventurous spirit which sent the first explorers abroad. Where Virgil is least real, and most purely imitative, is in the battle-scenes of the later books. They afford scope, however, to his patriotic desire to do justice to the martial energy of the Italian races ”

“ He was also by universal acknowledgment the greatest literary artist whom Rome produced. Virgil had a more catholic sympathy with the whole range of Greek poetry, from Homer and Hesiod to Theocritus and the Alexandrians, than any one else at any period of Roman literature. The effort of the preceding generation to attain to beauty of form and finish of artistic execution found in him, at the most susceptible period of his life, a ready recipient of its influence. ”

“ A more powerful influence on the form, ideas, sentiment and diction of the Georgics was exercised by the great philosophical poem of Lucretius, of which Virgil had probably been a diligent student since the time of its first appearance, and with which his mind was saturated when he was engaged in the composition of the Georgics. Virgil is at once attracted and repelled by the genius and attitude of the philosophic poet. He is possessed by his imaginative conception of nature, as a living, all-pervading power ”

“ The Georgics is not only the most perfect, but the most native of all the works of the ancient Italian genius. Even where he borrows from Greek originals, Virgil makes the Greek mind tributary to his national design. The Georgics, the poem of the land, is as essentially Italian as the Odyssey, the poem of the sea, is essentially Greek. ”

“ The truth of such a representation is to be judged, not by its relation to any actual state of things ever realized in the world, but by its relation to an ideal of the imagination—the ideal conception of how man, endowed with the gifts and graces of a civilized time, but yet not without the buoyancy of a more primitive age, might play his part under circumstances which would afford scope for the passions and activities of a vigorous personality, and for the refined emotions and subtle reflection of an era of high intellectual and moral cultivation. ”

“ It was his ambition to be the Homer, as he had been the Theocritus and Hesiod, of his country.
Various objects had thus to be combined in a work of art on the model of the Greek epic: the revival of interest in the heroic foretime; the satisfaction of national sentiment; the expression of the deeper currents of emotion of the age; the personal celebration of Augustus. A new type of epic poetry had to be created. It was desirable to select a single heroic action which should belong to the cycle of legendary events celebrated in the Homeric poems, and which could be associated with Rome. ”

“ In Dido Roman poetry has added to the great gallery of men and women, created by the imaginative art of different times and peoples, the ideal of a true queen and a true woman. On the episode of which she is the heroine the most passionate human interest is concentrated. It has been objected that Virgil does not really sympathize with his own creation, that he gives his approval to the cold desertion of her by Aeneas. ”

“ The note of his supremacy among all the poetic artists of his country is that subtle fusion of the music and the meaning of language which touches the deepest and most secret springs of emotion. He touches especially the emotions of reverence and of yearning for a higher spiritual life, and the sense of nobleness in human affairs, in great institutions, and great natures ”

“ Virgil makes a much larger use than Lucretius of ornament borrowed from older poetry, art, science and mythology. There is uniformity of chastened excellence in the diction and versification of the Georgics, contrasting with the imaginative force of isolated expressions and the majesty of isolated lines and passages in Lucretius. The “vivida vis” of imagination is more apparent in the older poet; the artistic perfection of Virgil is even more conspicuous in the Georgics than in the Eclogues or the Aeneid.
The principal episodes of the poem. ”

“ In order to escape the common lot he placed all his treasures in a castle defended by images unceasingly wielding iron flails, and directed his confidential servant to hew him in pieces, which he was to salt and place in a barrel, in the cellar, under which a lamp was to be kept burning. The servant was assured that after seven days his master would revive, a young man. ”

“ Glover, Studies in Virgil (1904) . Essays in the following: F. W. H. Myers, Essays [Classical] (1883) , the most famous English essay on Virgil; J. R. Green, Stray Studies (1876) (an excellent study of Aeneas) ; W. Warde Fowler, A Year with the Birds (on Virgil’s bird-lore) ; Nettleship, Essays in Latin Literature (1884) ; Tyrrell, Latin Poetry (1898) ; Patin, Essais sur la poésie Latine (4th ed. 1900) (one of the finest critics of Latin literature) ; Goumy, Les Latins (1892) (a volume of very bright essays) ; J. W. Mackail, Latin Literature (3rd ed. 1899) . (T. R. G.)
The Virgil Legend. ”