ABSTRACT
IT is the veriest commonplace to call the Romans a “practical” race; and no one who knows their achievements in arms and law, in politics and architecture, would disagree. But this unimpeachable truth is often taken to imply that a genius for the practical must be opposed to poetry—an implication which Shakespeare’s countrymen might well mistrust. There is, however, this much excuse for the antithesis (as far as Latin poetry is concerned), that Virgil’s countrymen themselves felt the difficulty, and they have too often been taken at their own valuation. “Others might win fame in bronze or breathing marble; it was Rome’s mission to impose peace, to spare the conquered, to crush the proud”—Virgil’s disclaimer of art has contributed to obscure the real merits of Roman sculpture, which, though of course derived from Greece, was a complete expression of the Latin character; and, in the same way, the modesty of Latin poets, in the face of their Greek “originals”, has done them a real disservice. Few races, after all (except perhaps the Greeks and the English), have actually produced three poets who can rank before Catullus, Lucretius, and Virgil. No race, certainly, has shewn a greater will for poetry, whatever its achievement; and though we may not be Stoic enough to value the Will above the Issue, we must allow 28that the will was at least sometimes successful, as the three (or, if we add Horace, the four) great Roman poets surely prove. My present aim, however, is not to estimate the number of poets, but to point out that, whether there were few or many, the need of poetry was so widely recognized that it may be called the universal feeling of cultured Romans. The enormous reputation of the Poet, during the great period of Roman civilization, shows that, however exceptional the genius of a Lucretius or a Virgil, the appreciation of genius was not confined to a few. Virgil was not a voice crying in the wilderness: he was Romanus, the spokesman of his race.
