VIRGIL AM) THE TRANSITION FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN LITERATURE BY ISTER MARY DOROTHEA DIEDERICH.S.S.N.D. Submitted in Partial Fulfilment cf the Requirements for the Degree of Master cf Arts. 1926 OUTLINE. CHAPTER ONE. A. Virgil. His long popularity due to the force of his genius. 1. His chief works a. ) The Bucolics. Short pastoral poems attracted at­ tention and gained him fame. b. ) The Georgies. - his most finished work. c. ) The Aeneid. Characteristics of his greatest poem. Its widespread and enduring appeal. d. ) An appreciation of the work and genius of Virgil expressed in Tennyson’s poem, "To Virgil." B. The immediate acceptance of Virgil’s works in his own age. 1. Virgil, the interpreter of a great national ideal. x 2. Imperial favor. 3. Patronage of Maecenas. 4. Allusions in Martial, Juvenal to the high esteem in which Virgil was held. 5. Style of Tacitus coloured by Virgilian diction. C. Reactions in the succeeding age. 1. Assiduous copying of the poet gave Virgil’s reputation a set back. 2. Grammarians and commentators. D. Virgil’s prestige and predominance not substantially impaired 1. The ambition of Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus and Statius. 2. Aelius Donatus, the first to attribute allegorical significance to the Aeneid. 3. Scrtes Virgilianae. = “• ;s ; ; ;'j.; V - M CHAPTER II. A. The Barbarian Invasions 1. Decay of literary activity. 2. Traditions of refined life fast disappearing. 138840 B. The Christian Church the preserver of classic civilization. 1. Establishment of monasteries of Cassiadorus at Squilace and of St. Benedict at Monte Cassino. 2. The Church safeguarded means to rise again to higher level of civilization. Provision for schools. 3. Strenuous exertions of Christians did not allow classics to be irrevocably lost, 4. Monastic discipline. 5. Copying of manuscripts. 6. Preservation of Latin language by clergy. 7. Significance of monk’s work. CHAPTER III. A. Virgil in the Middle Ages. 1. First indication of classical culture in Britain and Ireland in the sixth century. a. ) Cadoc. b. ) Gildas. c. ) Nennius. d. ) Aldhelm. e. ) Venerable Bede. 2. Classical revival in Gaul in the eighth century. Alcuin. B. Virgil - the magician in the Virgilian legends. 1. Poets worship at his tomb. 2. Fourth Eclogue proclaimed a prophecy of the birth of Christ. 3. Service for St. Paul’s day at Mantua an expression of universal love and admiration for the poet. C. Virgil and Dante. D. Virgil and Petrarch. E. Force of Yirgilian tradition evident in Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered F. The Renaissance Period. 1. Virgil’s influence on Vida. 2. Rhetorical eulogies of Virgil a portrayal of Renaissance enthusiasm. 3. Bembo. Vittorino da Feltre. 4. Interest in Virgilian literature in France. Ronsard's Granciade. 5. Popularity of Dido story in Italy, France and Germany. CHAPTER IV. A. Virgil among the Elizabethans. 1. Spenser. 2. Shakespeare. 3. Ben Jonson. B. Virgil and Milton. C. The development of the pseudo-classic theory and practice during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1. Dryden. 2. Pope. 3. Swift. D. Eighteenth century prose writers. 1. Burke. 2. Doctor Johnson. 3. Pope. The mock-epic affords opportunities for Virgilian imitations. The Dunciad. E. Didactic poets of the eighteenth century. 1. James Thomson. 2. Ccwper. CHAPTER V. A. Virgilian influence upon Friedrich Schiller. CHAPTER VI. A. The Romantic Movement in England. 1. Comparative neglect of Latin. 2. Tide of harsh and unsympathetic criticism. x 3. Scarcity of Virgilian allusions in the poetry of Byron and Shelley. 4. Lander. B. Historical criticism. 1. Popularity of Greek literature. C. The Victorian Era. 1. Latin quotations used by Parliamentary orators. 2. Noted prose writers who quote Virgil. a. ) George Eliot. b. ) William Makepeace Thackeray. c. ) Macaulay. D. Innumerable translations of Virgil in the nineteenth century a clear indication of interest in his poetry. E. Poets of the nineteenth century influenced by the Master Poet. 1. Wordsworth. 2. Keats. 3. Tennyson F. Conclusion. - 1 - CHAPTER ONE. Some writer has said, "If Yirgil were the sole remaining monument of the Roman civilization he would he sufficient," Possibly many a reader would contest a state­ ment broad as this; all without exception, however, will a- gree that from the days when Virgil’s contemporaries copied his style and wrote epics in imitation of the Aeneid, that the influence of the "Master Poet" upon the literature of the world has been a vital, a constant force. Probably because more than any other poet of antiquity Virgil represents the dominant mood of our own times has he again become a poet of such supreme importance. Even today in this age of aeroplanes, of radio, in short in this practical 20th century, do we hear echoes of his Eclogues in a newspaper column, quotations from his great epic from a soldier in the trenches. Just as a Homer, a Shakespeare remain alive after hundreds of years, so Virgil retains his uplifting and enlarging influence. Within the limits of this sketch, however, it would be impossible to traverse in the most summary way the immense field of history and certainly impossible to pursue the Virgilian influence through its detailed working in all the parts of the various periods of literature. The thorough erudition of scholars such as Comparetti, Tunison, Mackail - 2 - preclude from the outset any attempt at tracing the Virgilian influence in all the great poets or writers of the past; all that I purpose to do in the limits of this paper is merely to bring to cur thought some conception in general of the continuity of the influence of Virgil, how it reaches hack to the very life time of the poet and has grown into the inmost substance of modern literary thought, Virgil no doubt owes his long popularity to the sheer force of his genius, for his was not the career of a mighty Caesar, nor his the popularity of the genial Horace, His love of letters and of country life, as veil as his feeble health, ill adapted for the strifes of the forum, or the hardships of military service prevented his indulging an ambition for a public career and caused him to withdraw to his farm at Andes, where he occupied himself with hus­ bandry. Contemporaries tell us that he was shy and retiring by nature and that his life was singularly uneventful. The days spent on his father’s farm tilling fields and raising timber and bees gave Virgil the knowledge which he turned to such good account in the Georgies. In the year 42 he began to write his Bucolics to which the name Eclogues was after­ wards given by critics. It was these short pastoral poems, ten in number which at once attracted attention and gained him fame and friends and gave promise of future greatness in the author himself. Though these poems are said to be marked by a certain artificiality which is a frequent characteristic - 3 - cf imitative and allegorical poetry, their merit,nevertheless, consists in their versification which was smoother and more polished than the hexameters which the Remans had yet seen. With the publication of his most finished work, "the best poem of the best poet," as Dryden calls the Georgies in the dedicatory preface to his own translation, Virgil took his place at the head of both contemporaries and predecessors. According to Merivale the object of the Georgies was "to re­ commend the principles of the ancient Remans, their love of home, of piety and order; to magnify their domestic happiness and greatness, to make men proud of their country on better grounds than the mere glory of its arms and extent of its conquest ........ To comprehend the moral grandeur of the Georgies, in point of style the most perfect piece of Roman literature, we must regard it as the glorification of labor." And here it may be said that no translation can convey their music or give more than a faint image of Yirgilian color and tone. Due to the greater glory of the Aeneid the beauty of the Georgies has perhaps been obscured, yet Virgil never proved himself so surely a "lord of language"as he did in dealing with the unpromising subjects of "tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd." His greatest poem, the poem by which Virgil became the voice of Rome, had long been meditated. The Aeneid, to which the poet gave the last eleven years of his life embodied 4 - the best that was in him - his passionate love for his country, his veneration for his emperor, his meditations ever the significance and purposes of human life. Virgil intended to devote three years more to polishing and elabo­ rating the poem but he died without having given it his final touches. "In language always elegant, often grand and sublime, in feeling sweet, pure and noble - it is no happy accident, but to its own intrinsic perfection, that the Aeneid owes the immortality of fame. True it is that the Aeneid in­ curred the criticism of being a mere imitation, but in answer, as Seneca well puts it, “Virgil never stole, but only openly imitated. Whatever he took, he wrought over and made his own; it is the unmistakable air of Rome that breathes from every page; the stamp of Virgil is on the whole work." And is it Virgil's syntax and prosody that moved the great St. Augustine, that made Dante his disciple and Milton his follower? Is it the plea for a higher patriotism that alone fascinates us < No, we acclaim, there is something in it which still speaks to us after nineteen centuries. It is, according to one writer “the expression of the tenderness of a great spirit, brooding over the cost of human life and the horrors of struggle and warfare, longing for the time of a perpetual pax Romana : the expression of his sense of the pathos of existence epitomized in the oft quoted lacrimae rerum and also of his assurance of the continual presence of a Deity who is a pervading and guiding force." This is the - 5 - true Virgilian charm.