i86 



NATURE 



[October 17, 19 12 



here stagnant, now in "spate," now parched 

 threads, the consequence of these mountains; 

 her volcanic energies, slumbering or active — these 

 have always been the same. They make the mise- 

 en-scene ; they give the colour and the form to 

 the pictures which her poets have drawn in all 

 ages. They are the eternal factors on which the 

 tillers of her soil, the cultivators of her woodlands, 

 have counted, and with which they have contended, 

 from age to age. 



The Romans and the ancient Italians were a 

 race of "country men " and "country gentlemen." 

 The rich and fashionable loved to go to " town " 

 for the season. The poorer, when they could 

 get so far, loved more and more the excitement 

 of the city shows and spectacles too, but there 

 were many among both who also loved the 

 country, and not a few who, especially in middle and 

 later life, loved the country more. Like Burke at 

 Beaconsfield or Warren Hastings at Daylesford, 

 like Gladstone at Hawarden or Disraeli at 

 Hughenden, Cicero and Hortensius enjoyed, even 

 if they kept one eye ever on Rome, the refreshment 

 of their villcgiatwa. Horace, though for a time, 

 like Browning, a lover of society, a dandy, and a 

 diner-out, yet more and more came to prefer his 

 Sabine farm. Virgil, like Tennyson, made rare 

 and shy incursions into the metropolis, but like 

 Tennyson again at Farringford or Aldworth, so 

 Virgil at Naples or Nola preferred the secessus, 

 the solitude of sea and upland. 



Sir Archibald has brought out another 

 resemblance between these two poets, for just as 

 Tennyson never forgot the smallest detail of the 

 " wold " and " marsh " and " table-shore " of Lin- 

 colnshire, so Virgil, as he points out, drew from 

 memory, but with astonishing fidelity, the scenery 

 of the northern home he had long left. It is true 

 that in his early poems he introduces, by a sort 

 of mirage, the scenery of Theocritus' Sicily, 

 into the plains of Lombardy, but the greater part 

 of his drawing is, as Sir Archibald Geikie points 

 out, "from the life." For Virgil was by birth 

 and nurture a countryman — indeed, a peasant. 

 He was " brought up among orchards and wood- 

 lands." He knew the country, and he was a 

 most accurate observer of nature. Sir Archibald 

 Geikie quotes as an instance the famous passage 

 in which he describes the wave rushing up, 

 breaking in foam, flooding the sandy coves, then 

 retreating, at first dragging the spinning pebbles 

 with it, then finally thinning out, as it retires, into 

 a sliding, shallow tide — "picturing," as he says, 

 " in four pregnant words, one of the great dynami- 

 cal processes of the sea." "Virgil," he adds, 

 " knew nothing of the scientific meaning of the 

 facts he noted, but no man of science could have 



KO. 2242, VOL. go] 



observed them more accurately or described them 

 with more concise precision." He dwells, too, on 

 the appeal to another sense, the ear : the 

 representation by an alliteration of rough "r's" — 

 " nunc rapidus retro atque aestu revoluta 

 resorbens," of what Tennyson, as he recalls, 

 describes as " the scream of the maddened beach 

 dragged down by the wave." 



Sir Archibald Geikie doubts whether Virgil had 

 seen the Lake of Como. He thinks that he 

 probably knew the Lake of Garda, from which his 

 own Mincius takes its course. Another scientific 

 poet and lover of nature had no doubt. No one 

 who has read it will forget the passage in which 

 Goethe describes how, at the beginning of his 

 " Italian Journey," he came to the shores of Garda ; 

 how he found the south wind blowing up the lake, 

 lashing it into loud and dangerous waves ; and 

 how, as he waited and listened to their murmur, 

 he realised after eighteen centuries the fidelity of 

 Virgil's line : — 



Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens Benace marine. 



The truth is, Virgil was a great "naturalist," 

 and must always furnish the greater part of the 

 material for any writer who tries to estimate the 

 Roman appreciation of nature. That he does so 

 for Sir Archibald Geikie, a glance at the index 

 will show. One of the best passages in the volume 

 is a page of eloquent, if condensed, prose 

 summing up Virgil's love of woods and wood- 

 lands. But Virgil was something more than an 

 observer. He was by education not a little of 

 a philosopher also. It is here that he joins hands 

 with Lucretius, whom Sir Archibald Geikie calls 

 a philosopher and man of science, and of whom 

 he says : — 



"Among all the poets of ancient or modern 

 times he stands out as the one who may perhaps 

 most fittingly be called the poet of nature." 



If Virgil sprang from a peasant stock, Lucretius 

 was of a noble family. His vivid pictures of thei 

 blasd Roman noble ordering his smart team ofl j 

 "jennets" and tearing from Rome to his place in" 

 the country, and then as rapidly back again, is 

 drawn from habits with which he was familiar. 

 But he himself, as these pages remind us, loved 

 the country, mountain, sea and shore, and was in 

 particular specially fond of animals. He loved 

 still more the scientific speculations which these 

 sights, or the contemplation of sun and moon, 

 or the "wide and starry sky," suggest to the 

 thoughtful student. His science he derived, like 

 all Romans, from Greece. 



It is not part of Sir Archibald's scheme to in- 

 clude the "love and knowledge of nature among 

 the Greeks," except in so far as this is implied 



