Chapter XCIV (7)

It is. So many hundred people about the Encampment--sometimes among them suspicious strangers in paletots in search of the picturesque, and perhaps the pecuniary--that it is well to intrust the key to my own body-guard. It does not weigh an ounce. And _that_ lock is not to be picked by the ghost of Huffey White.

SEWARD.

But of the volume in hand, sir?

NORTH.

"In that fine passage in the Second Book of the Georgics," says Mr Alison, "in which Virgil celebrates the praises of his native country, after these fine lines--

'Hic ver assiduum, atque alienis mensibus æstas;
Bis gravidæ pecudes, bis pomis utilis arbos.
At rabidæ tigres absunt, et sæva leonum
Semina: nec miseros fallunt aconita legentes:
Nec rapit immensos orbes per humum, neque tanto
Squameus in spiram tractu se colligit anguis.'

There is no reader whose enthusiasm is not checked by the cold and prosaic line which follows,--

'Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem.'

The tameness and vulgarity of the transition dissipates at once the emotion we had shared with the Poet, and reduces him, in our opinion, to the level of a mere describer."

SEWARD.

Cold and prosaic line! Tameness and vulgarity! I am struck mute.

NORTH.

I have no doubt that Mr Alison distressed himself with "_Adde_." It is a word from a merchant's counting-house, reckoning up his gains. And so much the better. Virgil is making out the balance-sheet of Italy--he is inventorying her wealth. Mr Alison would have every word away from reality. Not so _the_ Poet. Every now and then, they--the Poets--amuse themselves with dipping their pencils into the real, the common, the everyday, the homely. By so doing they arrest belief, which above everything they desire to hold fast. I should not wonder if you might catch Spenser at it, even. Shakspeare is full of it. There is nothing else prosaic in the passage; and if Virgil had had the bad taste to say "Ecce" instead of "Adde," I suppose no fault would have been found.

SEWARD.

But what can Mr Alison mean by the charge of tameness and _vulgarity_?

NORTH.

I have told you, sir.

SEWARD.

You have not, sir.

NORTH.

I have, sir.

SEWARD.

Yes--yes--yes. "Adde" is vulgar! I cannot think so.

NORTH.

The Cities of Italy, and the "operum labor," always have been and are an admiration. The words "Egregias urbes" suggest the general stateliness and wealth--"operumque laborem," the particular buildings--Temples, Basilicas, Theatres, and Great Works of the lower Utility. A summary and most vivid expression of a land possessed by intelligent, civilised, active, spirited, vigorous, tasteful inhabitants--also an eminent adorning of the land.

SEWARD.

Lucretius says, that in spring the Cities are in flower--or on flower--or a flower--with children. And Lucan, at the beginning of the _Pharsalia_, describes the Ancient or Greek Cities desolate. They were fond and proud of their "tot egregiæ urbes" as the Modern Italians are--and with good reason.

NORTH.

How judiciously the Critics stop short of the lines that would overthrow their criterion always! The present case is an extraordinary example. Had Mr Alison looked to the lines immediately following, he would not have objected to that One. For

"Tot congesta manu præruptis oppida saxis,
Fluminaque antiquos subter labentia muros"

is very beautiful--brings the whole under the domain of Poetry, by singular Picturesqueness, and by gathering the whole past history of Italy up--fetching it in with a word--_antiquos_.

SEWARD.

I can form no conjecture as to the meaning of Mr Alison's objections. He quotes a few fine lines from the "Praise of Italy," and then one line which he calls prosaic, and would have us to hold up our hands in wonder at the lame and impotent conclusion--at the sudden transformation of Virgil the poet into Virgil the most prosaic of Prosers. You have said enough already, sir, to prove that he is in error even on his own showing;--but how can this fragmentary--this piecemeal mode of quotation--so common among critics of the lower school, and so unworthy of those of the higher--have found favour with Mr Alison, one of the most candid and most enlightened of men? Some accidental prejudice from mere carelessness--but, once formed, retained in spite of the fine and true Taste which, unfettered, would have felt the fallacy, and vindicated his admired Virgil.

NORTH.

The "Laudes"--to which the Poet is brought by the preceding bold, sweeping, winged, and poetical strain about the indigenous vines of Italy--have two-fold root--TREES and the glory of LANDS. Virgil kindles on the double suggestion--the trees of Italy compared to the trees of other regions. They are the trees of primary human service and gladness--Oil and Wine. For see at once the deep, sound natural ground in human wants--the bounty of Nature--of Mother Earth--"whatever Earth, all-bearing Mother, yields"--to her human children. That is the gate of entrance; but not prosaically--but two gate-posts of a most poetical mythus-fed husbandman. For we have Jason's fire-mouthed Bulls _ploughing_, and Cadmus-sown teeth of the dragon springing up in armed men. Then comes, instead, mild, benign, Man-loving Italy--"gravidæ fruges"--the heavy-eared corn--or rather big-teeming--the juice of Bacchus--the Olives, and the "broad herds of Cattle." Note--ye Virgilians--the Corn of Book First--the Oil and Wine of Book Second--and the Cattle of Book Third--for the sustaining Thought--the organic life of his Work moves in his heart.

BULLER.

And the Fourth--Bees--honey--and honey-makers are like Milkers--in a way small Milch-cows.

NORTH.

They are. Once a-foot--or a-wing--he hurries and rushes along, all through the "Laudes." The majestic victim-Bull of the Clitumnus--the incipient Spring--the double Summer--_the absence_ of all envenomed and deadly broods--tigers--lions--aconite--serpents. This is NATURE'S FAVOUR. Then _Man's Works_--cities and forts--(rock-fortresses)--the great lakes of Northern Italy--showing Man again in their vast edifications. Then Nature in veins of metals precious or useful--then Nature in her production of Man--the Marsi--the Sabellian youth--the Ligurian inured to labour--and the Volscian darters--then single mighty shapes and powers of Man--ROMANS--the Decii, the Marii, the Camilli,

"Scipiadas duros bello, et te, maxime Cæsar."

The King of Men--the Lord of the Earth--the pacificator of the distracted Empire--which, to a Roman, is as much as to say the World. Then--hail Saturnian Land! Mother of Corn! Saturnian, because golden Saturn had reigned there--Mother, I suppose the rather because in _his_ time corn sprung unsown--_sine semine_--She gave it from out of her own loving and cherishing bosom. _To Thee_, Italy, sing I my Ascræan or Hesiodic song. The Works and Days--the Greek Georgics are his avowed prototype--rude prototype to magnificence--like the Arab of the Desert transplanted to rear his empire of dazzling and picturesque civilisation in the Pyrenean Peninsula.

BULLER.

Take breath, sir. Virgil said well--

"Adde tot egregias urbes operumque laborem."

SEWARD.

Allow me one other word. Virgil--in the vivid lines quoted with admiration by Mr Alison--lauds his beloved Italy for _the absence_ of wild beasts and serpents--and he magnifies the whole race of serpents by his picture of One--the Serpent King--yet with subjects all equal in size to himself in our imagination. The Serpent is _in_ the Poetry, but he is _not in_ Italy. Is this a false artifice of composition--a vain ornament? Oh, no! He describes the Saturnian Land--the mother of corn and of men--bounteous, benign, golden, maternal Italy. The negation has the plenitude of life, which the fabulous absence of noxious reptiles has for the sacred Island of Ierne.

BULLER.

Erin-go-bragh!

SEWARD.

Suddenly he sees another vision--not of what is absent but present; and then comes the line arraigned and condemned--followed by lines as great--

"Adde tot egregias urbes, operumque laborem,
Tot congesta manu præruptis oppida saxis,
Fluminaque antiquos subter labentia muros."

The first line grasps in one handful all the mighty, fair, wealthy CITIES of Italy--the second all the rock-cresting _Forts_ of Italy--from the Alpine head to the sea-washed foot of the Peninsula. The collective One Thought of the Human Might and Glory of Italy--as it appears on the countenance of the Land--or visible in its utmost concentration in the girdled Towns and Cities of Men.

BULLER.

"Adde" then is right, Seward. On that North and you are at one.

NORTH.

Yes, it is right, and any other word would be wrong. ADDE! Note the sharpness, Buller, of the significance--the vivacity of the short open sound. Fling it out--ring it out--sing it out. Look at the very repetition of the powerful "TOT"--"_tot_ egregias"--"_tot_ congesta"--witnessing by one of the first and commonest rules in the grammar of rhetoric--whether Virgil speaks in prose or in fire.

BULLER.

In fire.

NORTH.

Mr Alison then goes on to say, "that the effect of the following nervous and beautiful lines, in the conclusion of the same Book, is _nearly destroyed_ by a similar defect. After these lines,

"Hanc olim veteres vitam coluêre Sabini,
Hanc Remus et Frater; sic fortis Etruria crevit,
Scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma;"

We little expect the following _spiritless_ conclusion:--

"_Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces._"

SEWARD.

Oh! why does Mr Alison call that line _spiritless_?

NORTH.

He gives no reason--assured by his own dissatisfaction, that he has but to quote it, and leave it in its own naked impotence.

SEWARD.

I hope you do not think it spiritless, sir.

NORTH.

I think it contains the concentrated essence of spirit and of power. Let any one think of Rome, piled up in greatness, and grandeur, and glory--and a Wall round about--and in a moment his imagination is filled. What sort of a Wall? A garden wall to keep out orchard thieves--or a modern wall of a French or Italian town to keep out wine and meat, that they may come in at the gate and pay toll? I trow not. But a Wall against the World armed and assailing! Remember that Virgil saw Rome--and that his hearers did--and that in his eyes and theirs she was Empress of the inhabited Earth. She held and called herself such--it was written in her face and on her forehead. The visible, tangible splendour and magnificence meant this, or they meant nothing. The stone and lime said this--and Virgil's line says it, sedately and in plain, simple phrase, which yet is a Climax.

SEWARD.

As the dreaded Semiramis was flesh and blood--corporeal--made of the four elements--yet her soul and her empiry spake out of her--so spake they from the Face of Rome.

NORTH.

Ay, Seward--put these two things together--the Aspect that speaks Domination of the World, and the Wall that girds her with strength impregnable--and what more could you possibly demand from her Great Poet?

SEWARD.

Arx is a Citadel--we may say an Acropolis. Athens had one Arx--so had Corinth. One Arx is enough to one Queenly City. But this Queen, within her one Wall, has enclosed Seven Arces--as if she were Seven Queens.

NORTH.

Well said, Seward. The Seven Hills appeared--and to this day do--to characterise the Supremacy of Rome. The Seven-Hilled City! You seem to have said everything--the Seven Hills are as a seven-pillared Throne--and all that is in one line--given by Virgil. Delete it--no not for a thousand gold crowns.

BULLER.

Not for the Pigot Diamond--not for the Sea of Light.

NORTH.

Imagine Romulus tracing the circuit on which the walls were to rise of his little Rome--the walls ominously lustrated with a brother's blood. War after war humbles neighbouring town after town, till the seas that bathe, and the mountains that guard Italy, enclose the confederated Republic. It is a step--a beginning. East and West, North and South, flies the Eagle, dipping its beak in the blood of battle-fields. Where it swoops, there fanning away the pride, and fame, and freedom of nations, with the wafture of its wings. Kingdoms and Empires that were, are no more than Provinces; till the haughty Roman, stretching out the fact to the limits of his ambitious desires, can with some plausibility deceive himself, and call the edges of the Earth the boundaries of his unmeasured Dominion.

SEWARD.

"O Italy! Italy! would Thou wert stronger or less beautiful!"--was the mournful apostrophe of an Italian Poet, who saw, in the latter ages, his refined but enervated countrymen trampled under the foot of a more martial people from far beyond the Alps.

NORTH.

Good Manners giving a vital energy and efficacy to good Laws--in these few words, gentlemen, may be comprised the needful constituents of National Happiness and Prosperity--the foremost conditions.

TALBOYS.

Ay--ay--sir. For good Laws without good Manners are an empty breath--whilst good Manners ask the protecting and preserving succour of good Laws. But the good Manners are of the first necessity, for they naturally produce the good Laws.

NORTH.

What does history show, Talboys, but nations risen up to flourish in wealth, power, and greatness, that with corrupted and luxurious manners have again sunk from their pre-eminence; whilst another purer and simpler people has in turn grown mighty, and taken their room in the world's eye--some hardy, simple, frugal race, perhaps, whom the seeming disfavour of nature constrains to assiduous labour, and who maintain in the lap of their mountains their independence and their pure and happy homes.

TALBOYS.

The Luxury--the invading Goth and Hun--the dismembering--and new States uprisen upon the ruins of the World's fallen Empire. There is one line in Collins' _Ode to Freedom_--Mr North--which I doubt if I understand.

NORTH.

Which?

TALBOYS.

"No, Freedom, no--I will not tell
How Rome before thy weeping face
Pushed by a wild and artless race
From off its wide, ambitious base,
With heaviest sound a giant-statue fell--
What time the northern Sons of Spoil awoke,
And all the blended work of strength and grace,
With many a rude repeated stroke,
And many a barbarous yell, to thousand fragments broke."

NORTH.

Which?

TALBOYS.

"How Rome before thy _weeping face_."

NORTH.

Freedom wept at Rome's overthrow--though she had long been Freedom's enemy--and though her destroyers were Freedom's children--and "Spoil's Sons"--for how could Freedom look unmoved at the wreck "of all that blended work of strength and grace"--though raised by slaves at the beck of Tyrants? It was not always so.

BULLER.

Let me, Apollo-like, my dear sir, pinch your ear, and admonish you to return to the point from which, in discursive gyrations, you and Seward have been----

NORTH.

Like an Eagle giving an Eaglet lessons how to fly----

BULLER.

You promised solemnly, sir, not to mention Eagles this evening.

NORTH.

I did not, sir.

BULLER.

But, then, Seward is no Eaglet--he is, and long has been, a full-fledged bird, and can fly as well's yourself, sir.

NORTH.

There you're right. But then, making a discursive gyration round a point is not leaving it--and there you're wrong. Silly folk--not you, Buller, for you are a strong-minded, strong-bodied man--say "keep to the point"--knowing that if you quit it one inch, you will from their range of vision disappear--and then they comfort themselves by charging you with having melted among the clouds.

BULLER.

I was afraid, my dear sir, that having got your Eaglet on your back--or your Eaglet having got old Aquila on his--you would sail away with him--or he with you--"to prey in distant isles."

NORTH.

You promised solemnly, sir, not to mention Eagles this evening.

BULLER.

I did not, sir. But don't let us quarrel.

SEWARD.

What does Virgil mean, sir, by "Rerum," in the line which Mr Alison thinks should have concluded the strain--

"Scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma."

NORTH.

"Rerum"--what does he mean by "Rerum?" Let me perpend. Why, Seward, the legitimate meaning of Res here is a State--a Commonwealth. "The fairest of Powers--then--of Polities--of States."

SEWARD.

Is that all the word means here?

NORTH.

Why, methinks we must explain. Observe, then, Seward, that Rome is the Town, as England the Island. Thus "England has become the fairest among the Kingdoms of the Earth." This is equivalent, good English; and the only satisfactory and literal translation of the Latin verse. But here, the Physical and the Political are identified,--that is, England. England is the name at once of the Island--of so much earth limited out on the surface of the terraqueous globe--and of what besides? Of the Inhabitants? Yes; but of the Inhabitants (as the King never dies) perpetuated from generation to generation. Moreover, of this immortal inhabitation, further made one by blood and speech, laws, manners, and everything that makes a people. In short, England, properly the name of the land, is intended to be, at the same time, the name of the Nation.

"England, with all thy faults, I love Thee still."

There Cowper speaks to both at once--the faults are of the men only--moral--for he does not mean fogs, and March east winds, and fever and agues. I love thee--is to the green fields and the white cliffs, as well as to all that still survives of the English heart and thought and character. And this absorption, sir, and compenetration of the two ideas--land into people, people into land--the exposition of which might, in good hands, be made beautiful--is a fruitful germ of Patriotism--an infinite blending of the spiritual and the corporeal. To Virgil, Rome the City was also Rome the Romans; and, therefore, sir, those Houses and Palaces, and that Wall, were to him, as those green fields, and hills, and streams, and towns, and those cliffs are to Us. The girdled-in compendium of the Heaven's Favour and the Earth's Glory and Power.

"Scilicet et RERUM facta est pulcherrima ROMA,
Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces."

Do you all comprehend and adopt my explanation, gentlemen?

TALBOYS.

I do.

BULLER.

I----do.

SEWARD.

I ask myself whether Virgil's "Rerum Pulcherrima" may not mean "Fairest of Things"--of Creatures--of earthly existences? To a young English reader, probably that is the first impression. It was, I think, mine. But fairest of earthly States and Seats of State is so much more idiomatic and to the purpose, that I conceive it--indubitable.

NORTH.

You all remember what Horatio sayeth to the soldiers in Hamlet, on the coming and going of the Ghost.

'In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
Stars shone with trains of fire, dews of blood fell;
Disasters veiled the sun, and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands,
Was sick almost to Doomsday with eclipse.'

What does Horatio mean by high and palmy state? That Rome was in a flourishing condition?

BULLER.

That, I believe, sir, is the common impression. Hitherto it has been mine.

NORTH.

Let it be erased henceforth and for ever.

BULLER.

It is erased--I erase it.

NORTH.

Read henceforth and for ever high and palmy State. Write henceforth and for ever State with a towering Capital. RES! "Most high and palmy State" is precisely and literally "_Rerum Pulcherrima_."

SEWARD.

At your bidding--you cannot err.

NORTH.

I err not unfrequently--but not now, nor I believe this evening. Horatio, the Scholar, speaks to the two Danish Soldiers. They have brought him to be of their watch because he is a Scholar--and they are none. This relation of distinction is indeed the ground and life of the Scene.

"Therefore I have entreated him, along
With us to watch the minutes of the night;
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes, and speak to it."

TALBOYS.

"Thou art a Scholar--speak to it, Horatio."

NORTH.

You know, Talboys, that Scholars were actual Conjurors, in the mediæval belief, which has tales enow about Scholars in that capacity. Horatio comes, then, possessed with an especial Power; he knows how to deal with Ghosts--he could lay one, if need were. He is not merely a man of superior and cultivated intellect, whom intellectual inferiors engage to assist them in an emergency above their grasp--but he is the _very_ man for the work.

TALBOYS.

Have not the Commentators said as much, sir?

NORTH.

Perhaps--probably--who? If they have in plenitude, I say it again--because I once did not know it--or think of it--and I suppose that a great many persons die believing that the Two resort in the way of general dependence merely on Horatio.

TALBOYS.

I believed, but I shall not die believing so.

NORTH.

Therefore, the scholarship of Horatio, and the non-scholarship of Bernardo and Marcellus, strikes into the life, soul, essence, ground, foundation, fabric, and organisation of this First Ghost Scene--sustain and build the whole Play.

TALBOYS.

Eh?

NORTH.

Eh? Yes. But to the point in hand. The Ghost has come and gone; and the Scholar addresses his Mates the two Non-Scholars. And show me the living Scholar who could speak as Horatio spake. Touching the matter that is in all their minds oppressively, _he_ will transport _their_ minds a flight suddenly off a thousand years, and a thousand miles or leagues--their untutored minds into the Region of History. He will take them to Rome--"_a little ere_"--and, therefore, before naming Rome, he lifts and he directs their imagination--"In the most high and palmy STATE." There had been Four Great Empires of the World--and he will by these few words evoke in their minds the Image of the last and greatest. And now observe with what decision, as well as with what majesty, the nomination ensues--OF ROME.

TALBOYS.

I feel it, sir.

NORTH.

Try, Talboys, to render "State" by any other word, and you will be put to it. You may analogise. It is for the Republic and City, what Realm or Kingdom is to us--at once Place and indwelling Power. "State"--properly Republic--here specifically and pointedly means Reigning City. The Ghosts walked in the City--not in the Republic.

TALBOYS.

I think I have you, sir--am not sure.

NORTH.

You have me--you are sure. Now suppose that, instead of the solemn, ceremonious, and stately robes in which Horatio attires the Glorious Rome, he had said simply, "in Rome," or "at Rome," where then his @psychagôgia@--his leading of their spirits? Where his own scholar-enthusiasm, and love, and joy, and wonder? All gone! And where, Talboys, are they who, by here understanding "state" for "condition"--which every man alive does--

TALBOYS.

Every man alive?

NORTH.

Yes, you did--confess you did. Where are they, I ask, who thus oblige Horatio to introduce his nomination of Rome--thus nakedly--and prosaically? Every hackneyer of this phrase--_state_--as every man alive hackneys it--is a nine-fold Murderer. He murders the Phrase--he murders the Speech--he murders Horatio--he murders the Ghost--he murders the Scene--he murders the Play--he murders Rome--he murders Shakspeare--and he murders Me.

TALBOYS.

I am innocent.

NORTH.

Why, suppose Horatio to mean--"in the most glorious and victorious _condition_ of Rome, on the Eve of Cæsar's death, the graves stood tenantless"--You ask--WHERE? See where you have got. A story told with two determinations of Time, and none of Place! Is that the way that Shakspeare, the intelligent and intelligible, recites a fact? No. But my explanation shows the Congruity or Parallelism. "In the _most high and palmy_ State,"--that is, City of Rome--ceremonious determination of Place--"a little ere the _mightiest_ Julius fell,"--ceremonious determination of Time.

TALBOYS.

But is not the use of State, sir, for City, bold and singular?

NORTH.

It is. For Verse has her own Speech--though Wordsworth denies it in his Preface--and proves it by his Poetry, like his brethren Shakspeare and Milton. The language of Verse is rapid--abrept and abrupt. Horatio wants the notion of Republic; because properly the Republic is high and palmy, and not the wood, stone, and marble. So he manages an expeditious word that shall include both, and strike you at once. The word of a Poet strikes like a flash of lightning--it penetrates--it does not stay to be scanned--"probed, vexed, and criticised,"--it illuminates and is gone. But you must have eyes--and suffer nobody to shut them. I ask, then--Can any lawful, well-behaved Citizen, having weighed all this, and reviewed all these things, again violate the Poesy of the Avonian Swan, and his own muse-enlightened intelligence, by lending hand or tongue to the convicted and condemned VULGARISM?

TALBOYS.

Now, then, and not till now, we Three know the full power of the lines--

"Scilicet et Rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma,
Septemque una sibi muro circumdedit arces."

NORTH.

Another word anent Virgil. Mr Alison says--"There is a still more surprising instance of this fault in one of the most pathetic passages of the whole Poem, in the description of the disease among the cattle, which concludes the Third Georgic. The passage is as follows:--

"Ecce autem duro fumans sub vomere Taurus
Concidit, et mixtum spumis vomit ore cruorem
Extremosque ciet gemitus; it tristis arator,
Moerentem abjungens fraternâ morte juvencum,
Atque opere in medio defixa relinquit aratra."

_The unhappy image_ in the second line is less calculated to excite compassion than disgust, and is singularly ill-suited to the tone of tenderness and delicacy which the Poet has everywhere else so successfully maintained, in describing the progress of the loathsome disease." The line here objected to is the life of the description--and instead of offence, it is the clenching of the pathos. First of all, it is that which the Poet always will have and the Critics wont--the _Necessitated_--the Thing itself--the Matter in hand. It shapes--features--characterises that particular Murrain. Leave it out--'the one Ox drops dead in the furrow, and the Ploughman detaches the other.' It's a great pity, and very surprising--but that is NO PLAGUE. Suddenly he falls, and blood and foam gush mixed with his expiring breath. _That is a plague._ It has terror--affright--sensible horror--life vitiated, poisoned in its fountains. _Vomit_--a settled word, and one of the foremost, of the reversed, unnatural vital function. Besides, it is the true and proper word. Besides, it is vivid and picturesque, being the word of the Mouth. _Effundit_ (which they would prefer)--(I do not mean it would stand in the verse) is general--might be from the ears. _Vomit_ in itself says mouth. The poor mouth! whose function is to breathe, and to eat grass, and to caress--the visible organ of life--of vivification--and now of mortification. Taken from the dominion of the holy powers, and given up to the dark and nameless destroyer. "_Vomit ore cruorem!_" The verse moans and groans for him--it may have in it a death-rattle. How much more helpless and hopeless the real picture makes Arator's distress! Now, "_it tristis_" comes with effect.

SEWARD.

Yes, Virgil, as in duty bound to do, faced the Cattle Plague in all its horrors. Had he not, he would have been false to Pales, the Goddess of Shepherds--to Apollo, who fed the herds of Admetus. So did his Master, Lucretius--whom he emulated--equalled, but not surpassed, in execution of the dismal but inevitable work. The whole land groaned under the visitation--nor was it confined to Cattle--it seemed as if the brute creation were about to perish. But his tender heart, near the close, singled out, from the thousands, one yoke of Steers--in two lines and a half told the death of one--in two lines and a half told the sadness of its owner--and in as many lines more told, too, of the survivor sinking, because his brother "was not"--and in as many more a lament for the cruel sufferings of the harmless creature--lines which, Scaliger says, he would rather have written than have been honoured by the Lydian or the Persian king.

BULLER.

Perhaps you have said enough, Seward. It might have been better, perhaps, to have recited the whole passage.

NORTH.

Here is a sentence or two about Homer.

BULLER.

Then you are off. Oh! sir--why not for an hour imitate that Moon and those Stars? How silently they shine! But what care you for the heavenly luminaries? In the majestic beauty of the nocturnal heavens vain man will not hold his peace.

SEWARD.

Is that the murmur of the far-off sea?

NORTH.

It is--the tide, may be, is on its return--is at "Connal's raging Ferry"--from Loch Etive--yet this is not its hour--'tis but the mysterious voice of Night.

BULLER.

Hush!

NORTH.

By moonlight and starlight, and to the voice of Night, I read these words from Mr Alison--"In the speech of Agamemnon to Idomeneus, in the Fourth Book of the Iliad, a circumstance is introduced altogether inconsistent both with the _dignity of the speech, and the Majesty of Epic Poetry_:--

'Divine Idomeneus! what thanks we owe
To worth like thine, what praise shall we bestow!
To Thee the foremost honours are decreed,
First in the fight, and every graceful deed.
For this, in banquets, when the generous bowls
Restore our blood, and raise the warriors' souls,
Though all the rest with stated rules be bound,
Unmixed, unmeasured, are thy goblets crowned.'"

SEWARD.

That is Pope. Do you remember Homer himself, sir?

NORTH.

I do.

@Idomenehy, pheri mhen se thiô Danahôn tachyphôlôn,
hêmhen henhi ptolhemô hêd' hallohiô hephi hergô,
êd' hen dahith', hote pher te gerohysion ahithopa ohinon
'Argehiôn ohi haristoi henhi krêthêrsi kherôntai.
ehiper ghar t' halloi ge karêkomhoôntes 'Achaiohi
daitrhon phinôsin, shon dhe plehion dhepas ahiehi
hestêch', hôsper hemohi, piheein, hote thymhos hanhôgoi.
hall' horseu pholemhond', ohios pharos ehycheo ehinai.@

I believe you will find that in general men praise more truly, that is justly, deservedly, than they condemn. They praise from an impulse of love--that is, from a capacity. Nature protects love more than hate. Their condemnation is often mere incapacity--want of insight. Mr Alison had elegance of apprehension--truth of taste--a fine sense of the beautiful--a sense of the sublime. His instances for praise are always well--often newly chosen, from an attraction felt in his own genial and noble breast. The true chord struck then. But he was somewhat too dainty-schooled--school-nursed, and school-born. A judge and critic of Poetry should have been caught wild, and tamed; he should carry about him to the last some relish of the wood and the wilderness, as if he were ever in some danger of breaking away, and relapsing to them. He should know Poetry as a great power of the Universe--a sun--of which the Song--whosesoever--only catches and fixes a few rays. How different in thought was Epos to him and to Homer! Homer paints Manners--archaic, simple manners. Everybody feels--everybody says this--Mr Alison must have known it--and could have said it as well as the best--

SEWARD.

But the best often forget it. They seem to hold to this knowledge better now, Mr North; and they do not make Homer answerable as a Poet, for the facts of which he is the Historian--Why not rather accept than criticise?

NORTH.

I am sorry, Seward, for the Achæan Chiefs who had to drink @daitron@--that is all. I had hoped that they helped themselves.

SEWARD.

Perhaps, sir, the Stint was a custom of only the @oinon gerousion@--a ceremonious Bowl--and if so, undoubtedly with religious institution. The Feast is not honorary--only the Bowl: for anything that appears, Agamemnon, feasting his Princes, might say, "Now, for the Bowl of Honour"--and Idomeneus alone drinks. Or let the whole Feast be honorific, and the Bowl the sealing, and crowning, and characterising solemnity. Now, the distinction of the Stint, and the Full Bowl, selected for a signal of different honouring, has to me no longer anything irksome. It is no longer a grudged and scanted cheer--but lawful Assignment of Place.

TALBOYS.

The moment you take it for Ceremonial, sir, you don't know what profound meaning may, or may not be in it. The phrase is very remarkable.

NORTH.

When the "Best of the Argives" mix in the Bowl "the honorific dark-glowing wine," or the dark-glowing wine of honour--when @hote@--quite a specific and peculiar occasion, and confined to the wine--you would almost think that the Chiefs themselves are the wine-mixers, and not the usual ministrants--which would perhaps express the descent of an antique use from a time and manners of still greater simplicity than those which Homer describes. Or take it merely, that in great solemnities, high persons do the functions proper to Servants. This we do know, that usually a servant, the @Tamieus@, or the @oinochoos@, does mix the Bowl. By the way, Talboys, I think you will be not a little amused with old Chapman's translation of the passage.

TALBOYS.

A fiery old Chap was George.

NORTH.

It runs thus--

"O Idomen, I ever loved thyself past all the Greeks,
In war, or any work of peace, at table, everywhere;
For when the best of Greeks, besides, mix ever at our cheer
My good old ardent wine with small, and our inferior mates
Drink ever that mixt wine measured too, thou drink'st without those
rates
Our old wine _neat_; and ever more thy bowl stands like to mine;
To drink still when and what thou wilt; then rouse that heart of
thine;
And whatsoever heretofore thou hast assumed to be,
This day be greater."

TALBOYS.

Well done, Old Buck! This fervour and particularity are admirable. But, methinks, if I caught the words rightly, that George mistakes the meaning of @gerousôn@--honorary; he has @gerôn gerontos@, an _old man_, singing in his ears; but old for wine would be quite a different word.

NORTH.

And he makes Agamemnon commend Idomeneus for drinking generously and honestly, whilst the others are afraid of their cups--as Claudius, King of Denmark, might praise one of his strong-headed courtiers, and laugh at Polonius. Agamemnon does not say that Idomeneus' goblet was _not_ mixed--was _neat_--rather we use to think that wine was always mixed--but whether "with small," as old Chapman says, or with water, I don't know--but I fancied water! But perhaps, Seward, the investigation of a Grecian Feast in heroic time, and in Attic, becomes an exigency. Chapman is at least determined--and wisely--to show that he is not afraid of the matter--that he saw nothing in it "altogether inconsistent with the dignity of the speech and the majesty of Epic Poetry."

SEWARD.

Dignity! Majesty! They stand, sir, in the whole together--in the Manners taken collectively by themselves throughout the entire Iliad--and then taken as a part of the total delineation. Apply our modern notions of dignity and majesty to the Homeric Poetry, and we shall get a shock in every other page.

NORTH.

The Homeric, heroic manners! Heyne has a Treatise or Excursus--as you know--on the @hautarkeia@--I think he calls it--of the Homeric Heroes--their waiting on themselves, or their self-sufficiency--where I think that he collects the picture.

SEWARD.

I am ashamed to say I do not know it.

NORTH.

No matter. You see how this connects with the scheme of the Poem--in which, prevalent or conspicuous by the amplitude of the space which it occupies, is the individual prowess of heroes in field--conspicuous, too, by its moment in action. This is another and loftier mode of the @hautarkeia@. The human bosom is a seat or fountain of power. Power goes forth, emanates in all directions, high and low, right and left. The Man is a terrestrial God. He takes counsel with his own heart, and he acts. "He conversed with his own magnanimous spirit"--or as Milton says of Abdiel meeting Satan--"And thus his own undaunted heart explored."

SEWARD.

Yes, Mr North, the Man is as a terrestrial God; but--with continual recognition by the Poet and his heroes--as under the celestial Gods. And I apprehend, sir, that this two-fold way of representing man, in himself and towards them, is that which first separates the Homeric from and above all other Poetry, is its proper element of grandeur, in which we never bathe without coming out aggrandised.

NORTH.

Seward, you instruct me by----

SEWARD.

Oh, no, sir! You instruct me----

NORTH.

We instruct each other. For this the heroes are all Demigods--that is, the son of a God, or Goddess, or the Descendant at a few Generations. Sarpedon is the Son of Jupiter, and his death by Patroclus is perhaps the passage of the whole Iliad that most specially and energetically, and most profoundly and pathetically, makes the Gods intimate to the life and being of men--presents the conduct of divinity and humanity with condescension there, and for elevation here. I do not mean that there is not more pomp of glorification about Achilles, for whom Jupiter comes from Olympus to Ida, and Vulcan forges arms--whose Mother-Goddess is Messenger to and from Jupiter, and into whose lips, when he is faint with toil and want of nourishment--abstaining in his passion of sorrow and vengeance--Minerva, descending, instils Nectar. But I doubt if there be anything so touching--_under this relation_--and so intimately aggrandising as that other whole place--the hesitation of Jupiter whether he shall VIOLATE FATE, in order to save his own flesh and blood from its decreed stroke--the consolatory device of Juno (in remonstrating and dissuading) that he shall send Apollo to call Death and Sleep--a God-Messenger to God-Ministers--to bear the dead body from the battle-field to his own land and kin for due obsequies. And, lastly, those _drops of blood_ which fall from the sky to the earth, as if the heart-tears of the Sire of all the worlds and their inhabitants.

BULLER.

You are always great, sir, on Homer. But, pray, have you any intention of returning to the @hautarkeia@?

NORTH.

Ha! Buller--do you speak? I have not wandered from it. But since you seem to think I have, think of Patroclus lighting a fire under a tripod with his own hands, to boil meat for Achilles' guests--of Achilles himself helping to lay the ransomed body of Hector on the car that was to take it away. This last is honorific and pathetic. Ministrations of all degrees for themselves, in their own affairs, characterise them all. From the least of these to Achilles fighting the River-God--which is an excess--all holds together--is of one meaning--and here, as everywhere, the least, and the familiar, and most homely, attests, vouches, makes evident, probable, and facile to credence, the highest, most uncouth, remote, and difficult otherwise of acceptation. Pitching the speculation lower, plenitude of the most robust, ardent, vigorous life overflows the Iliad--up from the animal to the divine--from the beautiful tall poplar by the river-side, which the wheelwright or wainwright fells. Eating, drinking, sleeping, thrusting through with spears, and hacking the live flesh off the bone--all go together and help one another--and make the "Majesty and Dignity"--or what not--of the Homeric Epos. But I see, Buller, that you are _timing me_--and I am ashamed to confess that I have exceeded the assigned limit. Gentlemen, I ask all your pardons.

BULLER.

Timing you--my dear sir! Look--'tis only my snuff-box--your own gift--with your own haunted Head on the lid--inspired work of Laurence Macdonald.

NORTH.

Give it me--why there--there--by your own unhappy awkwardness--it has gone--gone--to the bottom of the deepest part of the Loch!

BULLER.

I don't care. It _was_ my chronometer! The Box is safe.

NORTH.

And so is the Chronometer. Here it is--I was laughing at you--in my sleeve.

BULLER.

Another Herman Boaz!--Bless my eyes, there is Kilchurn! It must be--there is no other such huge Castle, surely, at the head of the Loch--and no other such mountains--

NORTH.

You promised solemnly, sir, not to say a single word about Loch Awe or its appurtenance, this Evening--so did every mother's son of us at your order--and t'was well--for we have seen them and felt them all--at times not the less profoundly--as the visionary pomp keeps all the while gliding slowly by--perpetual accompaniment of our discourse, not uninspired, perhaps, by the beauty or the grandeur, as our imagination was among the ideal creations of genius--with the far-off in place and in time--with generations and empires

"When dark oblivion swallows cities up,
And mighty States, characterless, are grated
To dusty nothing!"

SEWARD.

In the declining light I wonder your eyes can see to read print.

NORTH.

My eyes are at a loss with Small Pica--but veritable Pica I can master, yet, after sunset. Indeed, I am sharpest-sighted by twilight, like a cat or an owl.

BULLER.

Have you any more annotations on Alison?

NORTH.

Many. The flaws are few. I verily believe these are all. To elucidate his Truths--in Taste and in Morals--would require from us Four a far longer Dialogue. Alison's Essays should be reprinted in one Pocket Volume--wisdom and Goodness are in that family hereditary--the editing would be a Work of Love--and in Bohn's Standard Library they would confer benefit on thousands who now know but their name.

SEWARD.

My dear sir, last time we voyaged the Loch, you said a few words--perhaps you may remember it--about those philosophers--Alison--the "Man of Taste," as Thomas Campbell loved to call him--assuredly is not of the number--who have insisted on the natural Beauty of Virtue, and natural Deformity of Vice, and have appeared to place our capacity of distinguishing Right from Wrong chiefly, if not solely, on the sense of this Beauty and of this Deformity--

NORTH.

I remember saying, my dear Seward, that they have drawn their views too much from the consideration of the state of these feelings in men who had been long exercised in the pure speculative contemplation of moral Goodness and Truth, as well as in the calmness and purity of a tranquil, virtuous life. Was it so?

SEWARD.

It was.

NORTH.

In such minds, when all the calm faculties of the soul are wedded in happy union to the image of Virtue, there is, I have no doubt, that habitual feeling for which the term Beauty furnishes a natural and just expression. But I apprehend that this is not the true expression of that serious and solemn feeling which accompanies the understanding of the qualities of Moral Action in the minds of the generality of men. They who in the midst of their own unhappy perversions, are visited with knowledge of those immutable distinctions, and they who in the ordinary struggles and trials incident to our condition, maintain their conduct in unison with their strongly grounded principles and better aspirations, would seldom, I apprehend, employ this language for the description of feelings which can hardly be separated, from the ideas of an awful responsibility involving the happiness and misery of the accountable subjects of a moral order of Government.

SEWARD.

You think, sir, that to assign this perception of Beauty and Deformity, as the groundwork of our Moral Nature, is to rest on too slight a foundation that part of man's constitution which is first in importance to his welfare?

NORTH.

Assuredly, my dear friend, I do. Nay, I do not fear to say that the Emotion, which may properly be termed a Feeling of Beauty in Virtue, takes place at those times when the deepest affection of our souls towards Good and Evil acts less strongly, and when the Emotion we feel is derived more from Imagination--and--

SEWARD.

And may I venture to suggest, sir, that as Imagination, which is so strong a principle in our minds, will take its temper from any prevalent feelings, and even from any fixed and permanent habits of mind, so our Feeling of Beauty and Deformity shall be different to different men, either according to the predominant strength of natural principles, or according to their course of life?

NORTH.

Even so. And therefore this general disposition of Imagination to receive its character will apply, no doubt, where the prevailing feelings and habits are of a Moral cast; and hence in minds engaged in calm intellectual speculation, and maintaining their own moral nature rather in innocence and simplicity of life than in the midst of difficult and trying situations and in conflict with passions, there can be no doubt that the Imagination will give itself up to this general Moral Cast of Mind, and feel Beauty and Deformity vividly and uniformly in the contemplation of the moral quality of actions and moral states of character.

SEWARD.

But your words imply--do they not, sir? that such is the temper of their calmer minds, and not the emotion which is known when, from any great act of Virtue or Crime, which comes suddenly upon them, their Moral Spirit rises up in its native strength, to declare its own Affection and its own Judgment?

NORTH.

Just so. Besides, my excellent friend, if you consider well the feeling which takes possession of us, on contemplating some splendid act of heroic and self-devoting Virtue, we shall find that the sort of enthusiastic transport which may kindle towards him who has performed it, is not properly a moral transport at all; but it is a burst of love and admiration. Take out, then, from any such emotion, what Imagination, and Love, and Sympathy have supplied, and leave only what the Moral Spirit recognises of Moral Will in the act, and you will find that much of that dazzling and splendid Beauty which produced the transport of loving admiration is removed.

SEWARD.

And if so, sir, then must it be very important that we should not deceive ourselves, and rely upon the warmth of emotion we may feel towards generous and heroic actions as evidence of the force of the Moral Principle in our own breasts, which requires to be ascertained by a very different test--

NORTH.

Ay, Seward; and it is important also, that we should learn to acknowledge and to respect, in those who, without the capacity of such vivid feelings, are yet conscientiously faithful to the known Moral Law, the merit and dignity of their Moral Obedience. We must allow to Virtue, my dearest Seward, all that is her due--her countenance beautiful in its sweet serenity--her voice gentle and mild--her demeanour graceful--and a simple majesty in the flowing folds of her stainless raiment. So may we picture her to our imagination, and to our hearts. But we must beware of making such abstractions fantastic and visionary, lest we come at last to think of emotions of Virtue and Taste as one and the same--a fatal error indeed--and that would rob human life of much of its melancholy grandeur. The beauty of Virtue is but the smile on her celestial countenance--and may be admired--loved--by those who hold but little communion with her inner heart--and it may be overlooked by those who pay to her the most devout worship.

TALBOYS.

Methinks, sir, that the moral emotion with which we regard actions greatly right or greatly wrong, is no transport; it is an earnest, solemn feeling of a mind knowing there is no peace for living souls, except in their Moral Obedience, and therefore receiving a deep and grateful assurance of the peace of one soul more, in witnessing its adherence to its virtue; and the pain which is suffered from crime is much more allied to sorrow, in contemplating the wilful departure of a spirit from its only possible Good, than to those feelings of repugnance and hate which characterise the temper of our common human emotion towards crimes offering violence and outrage to humanity.

NORTH.

I believe that, though darkness lies round and about us seeking to solve such questions, a feeling of deep satisfaction in witnessing the adherence to Moral Rectitude, and of deep pain in witnessing the departure from it, are the necessary results of a moral sensibility; but taken in their elementary simplicity, they have, I think, a character distinct from those many other emotions which will necessarily blend with them, in the heart of one human being looking upon the actions of another--"because that we have all one human heart."

TALBOYS.

Who can doubt that Religion infuses power and exaltation into the Arts? The bare History teaches this. In Greece Poetry sang of Gods, and of Heroes, in whose transactions Gods moved. Sculpture moulded Forms which were attempted expressions of Divine Attributes. Architecture constructed Temples. _De facto_ the Grecian Arts rose out of Religion. And were not the same Arts, of revived Italy, religious?

BULLER.

They all require for their foundation and support a great pervading sympathy--some Feeling that holds a whole national breast. This is needed to munificently defraying the Costlier Arts--no base consideration at bottom. For it is _a_ life-bond of this life, that is freely dropped, when men freely and generously contribute their means to the honour of Religion. There is a sentiment in opening your purse.

SEWARD.

Yes, Buller--without that sentiment, no man can love noble Art. The true, deep, grand support of Genius is the confidence of universal sympathy. Homer sings because Greece listens. Phidias pours out his soul over marble, gold, and ivory, because he knows that at Olympia united Greece will wonder and will worship. Think how Poet is dumb and Sculptor lame, who foreknows that what he _would_ sing, what he _would_ carve, will neither be felt nor understood.

BULLER.

The Religion of a people furnishes the sympathy which both _pays and applauds_.

TALBOYS.

And Religion affords to the Artist in Words or Forms the highest Norms of Thought--sublime, beautiful, solemn--withal the sense of Aspiration--possibly of Inspiration.

NORTH.

And it guards Philosophy--and preserves it, by spiritual influence, from degradation worse than death. The mind is first excited into activity through the impressions made by external objects on the senses. The French metaphysicians--pretending to follow Locke--proceeded to discover in the mind a mere compound of Sensations, and of Ideas drawn from Sensations. Sensations, and Ideas that were the Relics of Sensations--nothing more.

TALBOYS.

And thus, sir, by degrees, the Mind appeared to them to be nothing else than a product of the Body--say rather a state of the Body.

NORTH.

A self-degradation, my friend, which to the utmost removes the mind from God. And this Creed was welcome to those to whom the belief in Him was irksome. That which we see and touch became to such Philosophers the whole of Reality. Deity--the Relation of the Creation to the Creator--the hope of a Futurity beyond the grave--vanished from the Belief of Materialists living in, and by, and to--Sensation.

SEWARD.

And with what a horrid sympathy was the creed welcomed!

NORTH.

Ay, Seward, I who lived nearer the time--perhaps better than you can--know the evil. Not in the schools alone, or in the solitude of philosophical thought, the doctrine of an arid speculation circulated, like a thin and unwholesome blood, through the veins of polite literature; not in the schools alone, but in the gorgeous and gay saloons, where the highly-born, the courtly, and the wealthy, winged the lazy hours with light or dissolute pleasures--there the Philosophy which fettered the soul in the pleasing bands of the Senses, which plucked it back from a feared immortality, which opened a gulf of infinite separation between it and its Maker, was cordially entertained--there it pointed the jest and the jibe. Scepticism a study--the zeal of Unbelief! Principles of false thought appeared suddenly and widely as principles of false passion and of false action. Doubts, difficulties, guesses, fine spinnings of the perverse brain, seized upon the temper of the times--became the springs of public and popular movements--engines of political change. The Venerations of Time were changed into Abominations. A Will strong to overthrow--hostile to Order--anarchical--"intended siege and defiance to Heaven." The irreligious Philosophy of the calmer time now bore its fruits. The Century had prepared the explosion that signalised its close--Impiety was the name of the Giant whom these throes of the convulsed earth had borne into the day, and down together went Throne and Altar--But where are we?

BULLER.

At the river mouth.

NORTH.

What! at home.

BULLER.

See the Tent-Lights--hear the Tent-Music.

NORTH.

Your arm, Talboys--till I disembark. Up to the Mount I shall then climb, unassisted but by the Crutch.

_Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._

Transcriber's Notes:

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical and spelling errors were corrected.

Italics markup is denoted by _underscores_.

Bold markup is denoted by =equals=.

Greek text has been transliterated and is denoted by @at signs@.

Provided anchor for unanchored footnote on pp. 133 and 172.