CHAPTER VI.
IMITATORS OF HESIOD.
Although it would be impossible to point to any direct imitation of Hesiod in poetry subsequent to Virgil's, and though even his is only imitation within certain conditions, it seems incumbent on us to notice briefly the influence, for the most part indirect and unconscious, which his poetry, especially his didactic poetry, has had upon later poets. Those shorter epic scraps, of which the 'Shield of Hercules' is a sample, have their modern presentment, if anywhere, in idyls and professed fragments; but the differences here betwixt the old and the new are so considerable as to make it unsafe to press the likeness. For the 'Theogony' we have one or two modern parallels, though it, too, has served rather for a mine into which Christian apologists might dig for relics of heathen mythology, than as a type to be reproduced at the risk of that endlessness which is associated with genealogies. But as regards Hesiod's 'Works and Days,' there can be no question that its form, and its union of practical teaching with charm of versification, possessed an attraction for subsequent generations of poets, and, having been more or less borrowed from and remodelled, according to the demands of their subjects, by the poetical grammarians of Alexandria, was handed over as an example to the Alexandrianising poets of Rome. "The 'Phænomena' of Aratus," writes Professor Conington, in his introduction to the 'Georgics' "found at least two distinguished translators: Lucretius and Manilius gave the form and colour of poetry to the truths of science; Virgil and Horace to the rules of art; and the rear is brought up by such poets as Gratius, Nemesianus, and Serenus Sammonicus." But the 'Phænomena' of Aratus, and its Roman parallel, the 'Astronomica' of Manilius, though conversant with a portion of the same topics as Hesiod's didactic poem, essay a loftier flight of admonitory poetry; and in them the advance of time has substituted for the simplicity and directness of Hesiod, rhetorical turns and artifices, and the efforts of picturesque description. It is the same with Ovid's contemporary, Gratius Faliscus, if we may judge of him by his fragmentary 'Cynegetica.' In carrying out his design of a didactic poem on the chase and its surroundings, he barters simplicity for a forced elevation of moral tone, and spoils the effect of his real insight into his subject by a fondness for sententious maxims "in season and out of season." Nemesianus, who wrote two centuries or more after Gratius, seems to have so completely made Virgil his model that the influence of Hesiod is imperceptible in his poetry, which is diffuse and laboured, and instinct with exaggerated imitation of the Augustan poets. On the whole, it is only between Hesiod and Virgil that solid ground for comparison exists; and such as institute this comparison will be constrained to admit Mr Conington's conclusion, that the 'Works and Days' as distinctly stimulated Virgil's general conception of the Georgics, as the Idyls of Theocritus that of his Bucolics, or the Iliad and Odyssey that of his Æneid. Uncertainty as to the extent of the fragmentariness of the model undoubtedly bars a confident verdict upon the closeness of the copy. Propertius may have had other and lost works of Hesiod in his mind's eye when he addressed his great contemporary as repeating in song the Ascræan sage's precepts on vine-culture as well as corn-crops (iii. 26, v. 77). Yet enough of direct imitation survives in the large portion of the first book of the Georgics (wherein Virgil treads common ground) to show that, with many points of contrast, there are also many correspondences between the old Bœotian bard and his smoother Roman admirer; and that where Virgil does copy, his copying is as unequivocal as it is instructive for a study of finish and refinement. Each poet takes for his theme the same "glorification of labour" which Dean Merivale discerns as the chief aim of the Georgics, the difference consisting in the homeliness of the manner of the Greek poet and the high polish of that of the Roman. Each also recognises the time of man's innocency, when this labour was not yet the law of his being; and the treatment by each of the myth of a golden or Saturnian age is not an inappropriate ground on which to trace their likeness and unlikeness. As Hesiod's passage was not quoted in our second chapter, its citation will be forgiven here, the version selected being that of Mr Elton:—
A golden race the immortals formed on earth
Of many-languaged men: they lived of old,
When Saturn reigned in heaven, an age of gold.
Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind,
Free from the toils and anguish of our kind.
Nor e'er decrepit age misshaped their frame,
The hand's, the foot's proportions still the same.
Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by:
Wealthy in flocks; dear to the blest on high:
Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die.
Theirs was each good; the life-sustaining soil
Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil.
They with abundant goods 'midst quiet lands
All willing shared the gathering of their hands."
—E. 147-162.
Virgil does not set himself to reproduce the myth of the metallic ages of mankind; but having assuredly the original of the passage just quoted before him, has seen that certain features of it are available for introduction into his account of Jove's ordinance of labour. He dismisses, we shall observe, the realistic allusions to the sickness, death, and decrepit old age, which in the golden days were "conspicuous by their absence," and of which Hesiod had made much. These apparently only suggest to him a couple of lines, in which mortal cares are made an incentive to work, instead of a destiny to be succumbed to; and the death of the body is transferred to the sluggish lethargy of nature. To quote a very recent translator of the Georgics, Mr R. D. Blackmore:—
And care a whetstone for the wit of man;
Nor suffered he his own domains to lie
Asleep in cumbrous old-world lethargy.
Ere Jove, the acres owned no master swain,
None durst enclose nor even mark the plain;
The world was common, and the willing land
More frankly gave with no one to demand."
—Georg. i. 121-128.
In the same spirit Virgil, in the second book of the Georgics, idealises the serenity of a rural existence, when he says of him who lives it:—
Spontaneous bring, he gathers for his need."
—Georg. ii. 500.
It is the idea of this spontaneity of boon nature which he has caught from Hesiod, as worth transferring; and the task is achieved with grace, and without encumbrance. In the description of the process of making a plough, Virgil appears to copy Hesiod more closely than in the above passage; and if we may accept Dr Daubeny's translation of the passage in the Georgics, the accounts correspond with a nicety almost incredible, considering the interval between the two poets. The curved piece of wood (or buris) of Virgil; the eight-foot pole (temo) joined by pins to the buris (or basse, as it is called in the south of France); the bent handle (stiva) and the wooden share (dentale),—have all their counterparts in the directions for making this implement given by Hesiod;—and the learned author of 'Lectures on Roman Husbandry' considers that both the Bœotian and the Roman plough may be identified with the little improved Herault plough, still in use in the south of France.[1] The storm-piece of the earlier poet, again, is obviously present to the mind of the graphic improver of it in the Augustan age; though, in place of one point, the latter makes at least half-a-dozen, and works up out of his predecessor's hints a masterpiece of elaborate description. It need scarcely be remarked, for it must strike every reader of these poets, whether at first hand or second, that Virgil constructs his "natural calendar" upon the very model of Hesiod's. He catches the little hints of his model with reference to the bird-scarer who is to follow the plough-track; about the necessity of stripping to plough or sow; about timing ploughing and seed-time by the setting of the Pleiads; and about divers other matters of the same rural importance. To quit the first book of the Georgics, we see Hesiod's influence occasionally exerting itself in the third; for, à propos of the sharp-toothed dog which Hesiod prescribes in his 'Works and Days' (604, &c.), and would have the farmer feed well, as a protection from the night-prowling thief, we find a parallel in Virgil:[2]—
With fattening whey support that honest race:
Swift Spartan whelps, Molossian mastiffs bold:—
With these patrolling, fear not for the fold,
Though nightly thieves and wolves would fain attack,
And fierce Iberians never spare thy back."
—Blackmore, 94, 95.
And a lover of Hesiod's simple muse would be struck again and again, in the perusal of the four Georgics, with expansions of some germ from the older poet, calculated to make him appreciate more thoroughly the genius of both the original and the imitator. The landmarks and framework, as it were, of both, are the risings and settings of stars, the migrations of birds, and so forth; and though with Hesiod it was simplicity and nature that prompted him to avail himself of these, it is no small compliment that Virgil saw their aptitude for transference, and turned what was so spontaneous and unstudied to the purposes of art and culture. It is no fault, by the way, of Virgil, that he has not reproduced more fully and faithfully Hesiod's catalogue of "Lucky and Unlucky Days," at the end of his poem. The original is obscure and ambiguous. Virgil has caught all the transmutable matter in his passage of the first Georgic.[3]
As has been already said, when we have done with Virgil the resemblances of his successors and imitators to Hesiod are very faint and indistinct. To pass to our own poetry, it is natural to inquire, Have we aught of a kindred character and scope, that can claim to be accounted in any degree akin to Hesiod's 'Works and Days'? It need hardly be said that there is not a shadow of resemblance between him and Darwin or Bloomfield, though we have somewhere seen their names, as poets, set in juxtaposition. He is their master as a poet; he is their superior in simplicity. He is essentially ancient; they are wholly and entirely modern in thought, form, and expression. The didactic style, no doubt, has lent Hesiod's form to many of the compositions of the Augustan period of English literature. "We have had," says Mr Conington, in his introduction to the Georgics, "Essays on Satire, Essays on unnatural Flights in Poetry, Essays on translated Verse, Essays on Criticism, Essays on Man, Arts of preserving Health, Arts of Dancing, and even Arts of Cookery; the Chase, the Fleece, and the Sugar-cane." But, with his usual clear-sightedness, the late Oxford Professor of Latin saw that all these have grasped simply the form, and let go the spirit, of their model. The real parallel is to be found between the Ascræan farmer-poet and the quaint shrewd "British Varro" of the sixteenth century—
"Who sometime made the points of husbandry"—
Thomas Tusser, gentleman: a worthy whose "five hundred points, as well for the champion or open country as for the woodland or several," are quite worth the study of individual readers, not to say of agricultural colleges; so much wisdom, wit, and sound sense do they bring together into verse, which is, in very many characteristics, truly Hesiodian.
Endowed with an ear for music and a taste for farming, a compound of the singing-man (of St Paul's and Norwich cathedrals) and of the Suffolk grazier, a liberally-educated scholar withal for his day, this Tusser possessed several qualifications for the rank of our "English Hesiod." But unlike, so far as we know, the father of didactic poetry, neither his farming nor his poetry brought him success or profit; and his own generation regarded him as one who, with "the gift of sharpening others by his advice of wit," combined an inaptitude to thrive in his own person. He was born in 1523, and died in 1580. His 'Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry' was printed in 1557; and no one will gainsay, after perusal of them, the opinion that, in the words of Dr Thomas Warton,[4] "this old English Georgic has much more of the simplicity of Hesiod than of the elegance of Virgil." Homely, quaint, and full of observation, his matter is curiously akin to that of the old Bœotian, after a due allowance for the world's advance in age; while the manner and measures are Tusser's own, and notable, not indeed as bearing any resemblance to the Hesiodic hexameters, but for a facility and variety consistent with the author's musical attainments, which are demonstrated in his use—indeed it may be his invention—of more than one popular English metre.
Although Tusser was indebted to Eton and King's College for his education, we have no reason to suppose that he had such acquaintance with Hesiod as could have suggested the shape and scope of his poem. It is better to attribute the coincidence of form to the practical turn and homely bent of the muse of each. That there is such coincidence will be patent to the most cursory reader: the arrangement by months and by seasons, the counsels as to thrift and good economy, the eye to a well-ordered house, ever and anon provoke comparison. Warton, indeed, by a slip of the pen, denies the English Hesiod the versatility which indulges in digressions and invocations, and avers that "Ceres and Pan are not once named" by Tusser. But in an introduction to his book may be found at once a refutation of this not very serious charge, and, what is perhaps more to the point, a profession of the author's purpose in the volume, which has entitled him to a place of honour among early English poets. He writes as follows:—
And tilth well done in season due;
Yet needing salve, in time t' anoint,
Is all in all, and needful true:
As for the rest,
Thus think I best,
As friend doth guest,
With hand in hand to lead thee forth
To Ceres' camp, there to behold
A thousand things as richly worth
As any pearl is worthy gold."
—Mavor's Tusser, xiii.
In the body of the work, expressions, sentiments, and sage counsels again and again remind us of Hesiod's lectures to Perses. The lesson that "'tis ill sparing the liquor at the bottom of the cask" reappears in such stanzas as—
But keep it for profit to serve thine own turn:
A fool and his money be soon at debate,
Which after, with sorrow, repents him too late."
—xxiii. 11.
The fool at the bottom, the wise at the brim:
Who careth nor spareth till spent he hath all,
Of bobbing, not robbing, be careful he shall."
—xxviii. 34.
At the same time he commends, quite in Hesiod's style, a prudent avoidance of the law-courts:—
And tend to such doings as stands thee upon.
Fear God, and offend not the prince nor his laws,
And keep thyself out of the magistrate's claws."
—xxix. 39.
Quite in Hesiod's groove, too, is Tusser's opinion about borrowing and lending; and his adagial way of discouraging the claims of relations and connections to a share in our farm profits savours curiously of the counsel of the 'Works and Days:'—
Nor also by spending, by such as come in:
Nor put to thine hand betwixt bark and the tree,
Lest through thine own folly so pinched thou be.
As lending to neighbour in time of his need
Wins love of thy neighbour, and credit doth breed:
So never to crave, but to live of thine own,
Brings comforts a thousand, to many unknown."
—xxvii. 30, 31.
We have seen, too, how Hesiod makes a point of prescribing very strictly the staff which a farmer may keep without detriment to his purse and garner, of cautioning against too many helps, and so forth. Tusser is a little in advance of the Bœotian farmer-poet as to the full complement of hinds and dairy-maids; but the spirit of the following stanza is in exact keeping with the tone of the elder bard:—
Lest charge above measure upon thee do creep;
And Jankin and Jennykin cozen thee so,
To make thee repent it ere year about go."
—xxx. 45.
It might be shown by other quotations that Tusser, like Hesiod, attaches due importance to the performance of religious ceremonies, and inculcates in fitting language seasonable offerings of thankfulness to a bounteous Providence; that he upholds well-timed hospitality, and commends a principle of liberality towards man or beast, if they deserve it. Of course, too, even in his shrewd homeliness, he does not so entirely as Hesiod calculate his hospitalities and liberalities with a sole eye to getting a quid pro quo. But it is perhaps more to the purpose to cite a few additional stanzas of Tusser's "Advice to Husbandmen," according to the season or month, with a stray verse or two which, mutatis mutandis, may serve to show that the spirit of Tusser was in effect the same which animated Hesiod so many centuries before him. This quatrain from "December's Husbandry" is an obvious parallel, to begin with:—
And gather the same, as he walketh about;
And after, at leisure, let this be his hire,
To beath them and trim them at home by the fire."[5]
—Ix. 9.
Here again, in "June's Husbandry," is good provision for hay-making and hauling:—
Lest work and the workman unoccupied stand:
Love seldom to borrow, that thinkest to save,
For he that once lendeth twice looketh to have.
Well clouted and greased, ere hay-time begin:
Thy hay being carried, though carter had sworn,
Cart's bottom well boarded is saving of corn."
—p. 163.
And here sound practical counsel (sadly neglected too often) for insuring a safe corn-harvest:—
The corn that is ripe doth but shed as it stand.
Be thankful to God for His benefits sent,
And willing to save it by honest intent."
—p. 182.
One would have liked to be able to think that so sound a counsellor had made a better trade of farming than he seems to have done. His ideas of being himself captain of every muster of his hands (p. 169), of encouraging them by extra wages at time of stress, and indeed all his suggestive hints, are fresh and pertinent even at this latter day; and if Thomas Tusser were more read, he would not fail of being oftener quoted. How timely, for example, is this advice to the farmer, which in a Christian land should find thorough acceptance, no matter what may have been the demands upon him of the ill-advised amongst his labourers!—
Please such as did help thee man, woman, and child:
Thus doing, with alway such help as they can,
Thou winnest the praise of the labouring man."
—p. 188.
But, to complete our parallel with Hesiod, Tusser has his descriptions of the winds and planets; is alive to the wisdom of the "farm and fruit of old," as well as of the improved courses of husbandry in his own day: and if he now and then strikes out paths which have no parallel in Hesiod, even in such cases the homeliness and naïveté of his counsel savours of the ancient poet in whose footsteps he so distinctly treads. Though the domestic fowl does not figure in the 'Works and Days,' and the domestic cat is equally unmentioned by the Bœotian didactic poet, the following mention of them both by Tusser reminds us of his practical economic views, and would not have been deemed by him beneath the dignity of the subject, had poultry and mousers asserted the importance in old days which they now demand:—
Is nought for the poulter, and worse for the poor;
So now to keep hogs, and to starve them for meat,
Is as to keep dogs for to bawl in the street.
As cat, a good mouser, is needful in house,
Because for her commons she killeth the mouse;
So ravening curs, as a many do keep,
Makes master want meat, and his dog to kill sheep."
—p. 48, 49.
Dr Thomas Warton, indeed, was disposed to regard Tusser as the mere rude beginner of what Mason perfected in his 'English Garden;' but it is a reasonable matter of taste whether the latter work at all comes up to the former in aught save an elegance bordering on affectation; and certainly there is nothing in Mason to suggest the faintest comparison with Hesiod's didactic poem. Tusser's work is probably its closest parallel in all the intervening ages.
It remains to inquire whether Hesiod's 'Theogony' has found with posterity as close an imitator as the work on which we have been dwelling. But this question is easily answered in the negative. The attempts of the so-called Orphic poets—the most considerable of whom were Cercops, a Pythagorean, and Onomacritus, a contemporary of the Pisistratids—to improve on the elder theogonies and cosmogonies, can hardly be mentioned in this category, being more mystical than mythical, and in the nature of refinements and abstractions, higher than the Hesiodic chaos. Nor, though full of mythologic learning even to cumbrousness, can the five hymns of the Alexandrian Callimachus be said to have aught of resemblance to the venerable system of Greek theogonies, which owes its promulgation to the genius of Hesiod. Studied and laboured to a fault, the legends which he connects with the subjects of each hymn in succession are tricked out with poetic devices very alien to the more direct muse of Hesiod; and though Callimachus professes to record the speeches of Zeus and Artemis, and to divine the thoughts and feelings that animate the Olympians, his readers cannot help feeling that he lacks the "afflatus" in which Hesiod implicitly believed and which, though it suited the sceptical Lucian to twit as assumed, and unattended by results, certainly imparts an air of earnestness to his poetry.[6] Furthermore—and this is the plainest note of difference—the hymns of Callimachus have little or no pretence to be "genealogies,"—a form of poetry, to say the truth, not sufficiently attractive to please an advanced stage of literary cultivation, and a form, too, that lacks any memorable imitation in Latin poetry. To glance at our own poetic literature, the nearest approach to the form and scope of the 'Theogony' is to be found, it strikes us, in Drayton's 'Polyolbion,' a poem characterised by the same endeavour to systematise a vast mass of information, and to genealogise, so to speak, the British hills, and woods, and rivers, which are personified in it.
Drayton, it cannot be denied, has infinitely more fancy, and lightens the burden of his accumulated detail by much greater liveliness and idealism; yet it is impossible not to be struck also with his enumeration of the streams and mountains of a given district, each invested with a personality, each for the nonce regarded as of kin to its fellow, as a singular revival of Hesiod's method in his 'Theogony;' a revival, to judge from a passage in his first song, surely not undesigned:—
Sung the ancient heroes' deeds (the monuments of kings),
And in your dreadful verse engraved the prophecies,
The aged world's descents, and genealogies;
If as those Druids taught, which kept the British rites
And dwelt in darksome caves, there counselling with sprites
(But their opinion failed, by error led away,
As since clear truth hath showed to their posterity),
When these our souls by death our bodies do forsake,
They instantly again do other bodies take;
I could have wished your spirits redoubled in my breast,
To give my verse applause to time's eternal rest."
—Polyolb., Song i. 30-42.
Our theory of a conscious reference to Hesiod's 'Theogony' by Drayton depends on the fourth verse of this extract; but, independently of this, almost any page in the 'Polyolbion' would furnish one or more illustrations of genealogism curiously Hesiodic. We might cite the rivers of Monmouth, Brecon, and Glamorgan, in the fourth song, or the Herefordshire streams in the seventh; but lengthy citations are impossible, and short extracts will ill represent the likeness which a wider comparison would confirm. In Pope's "Windsor Forest," the enumeration of the "seaborn brothers" of Old Father Thames, from "winding Isis" to "silent Darent,"
is indubitably a leaf out of Drayton's book, and so indirectly a tribute to Hesiod. Darwin's 'Botanic Garden,' and the 'Loves of the Plants,' affect indeed the genesis of nymphs and sylphs, of gnomes and salamanders; but the fanciful parade of these, amidst a crowd of metaphors, tropes, and descriptions, has nothing in it to remind us of Hesiod's 'Theogony,' unless it be a more tedious minuteness, and an exaggerated affectation of allegoric system. In truth, however, Hesiod's 'Theogony' is a work of which this or that side may be susceptible of parallel, but to which, in its own kind, and taken as a whole, none like nor second has arisen.
The 'Shield' and the 'Fragments' are of too doubtful authorship to call for the reflected light of parallelism; and so our task of laying before the reader a sketch of the life, works, and after-influence of the Ascræan poet is completed.