Chapter XI (2)

is conceived with a kind of grim power, showing that the imagination of Virgil does not merely reproduce, but endows with a new life the figures which he borrows most closely from his original. But the life-like realism, the combined humour and terror of Homer’s representation, are altogether absent from the Aeneid. These marvellous creations appear natural in the Odyssey, and in keeping with the imaginative impulses and the adventurous spirit of the ages of maritime discovery: but they stand in no real relation to the feelings and beliefs with which men encountered the occasional dangers and the frequent discomforts of the Adriatic or the Aegean in the Augustan Age.

In his conception of these real dangers of the sea, which have to be met in the most advanced as well as the most primitive times, Virgil’s inferiority to Homer, both in general effect and in lifelike detail, is very marked. The wonderful realism of the sea adventures in the fifth Book of the Odyssey produces on the mind the impression that the poet is recalling either a peril that he himself had encountered, or one that he had heard vividly related by some one who had thus escaped ‘from the issue of death:’ and that there was in the poet too the genuine delight in danger, the spirit

‘That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine,’

which has been attributed to the companions of his hero’s wanderings.

Odysseus, like Aeneas, feels his limbs and heart give way before the sudden outburst of the storm; but, though swept from the raft and overwhelmed for a time under the waves, he never loses his presence of mind or his courage—

ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ὣς σχεδίης ἐπελήθετο τειρόμενός περ,
ἀλλὰ μεθορμηθεὶς ἐνὶ κύμασιν ἐλλάβετ’ αὐτῆς,
ἐν μέσσῃ δὲ καθῖζε τέλος θανάτου ἀλεείνων(614).

The poet of the Odyssey may have encountered such storms as are described in the passage here referred to, and we cannot doubt that in such case he bore his part bravely, ‘redeeming his own life and securing the safe return of his comrades.’ If Virgil in some unadventurous voyaging ever happened to be ‘caught in a storm in the open Aegean,’ it probably was in the position of a helpless sufferer that he contemplated the wild commotion of the elements.

On the other hand he shows a keen enjoyment of the pleasure of sailing past famous and beautiful scenes with a fair wind and in smooth water—

Linquimus Ortygiae portas pelagoque volamus
Bacchatamque iugis Naxon, viridemque Donysam,
Olearon, niveamque Paron, sparsasque per aequor
Cycladas, et crebris legimus freta consita terris.
Nauticus exoritur vario certamine clamor(615).

The first sight of land from the sea is vividly brought before the eye in such passages as these—

Quarto terra die primum se attollere tandem
Visa, aperire procul montis, ac volvere fumum(616).

Iamque rubescebat stellis Aurora fugatis,
Cum procul obscuros collis humilemque videmus
Italiam(617).

Crebrescunt optatae aurae, portusque patescit
Iam propior, templumque apparet in arce Minervae(618).

The disappearance of the shores left behind, and the opening up of new scenes in the rapid onward voyage, leave on the mind a fresh feeling of novelty and life in such passages as—

Protinus aerias Phaeacum abscondimus arces,
Litoraque Epiri legimus, portuque subimus
Chaonio, et celsam Buthroti accedimus urbem(619);

and in this in which the historic associations of famous cities are evoked—

Apparet Camarina procul, campique Geloi,
Immanisque Gela, fluvii cognomine dicta.
Arduus inde Acragas ostentat maxima longe
Moenia, magnanimum quondam generator equorum(620), etc.

These and similar passages—such as that describing the moon-light sail past the enchanted shores of Circe—remind us of the great change which had come over the world between the age of the Odyssey and that of the Aeneid. The one poem is pervaded by the eager curiosity of the youthful prime of the world, attracting the most daring and energetic spirits to the discovery and peopling of new lands; the other by that more languid curiosity, awakened by the associations of the past,—by the longing for some change to break the routine of a too easy life,—and by the refined enjoyment of beauty, urging men to encounter some danger and more discomfort for the sake of visiting scenes famous in history, rich in natural charms, or in works of art, the inheritance from more creative times.

In his scenes of battle, Virgil is as inferior to the poet of the Iliad as he is to the poet of the Odyssey in those of sea adventure. In the details of single fights, in the account of the wounds inflicted on one another by the combatants, in the enumeration of the obscurer warriors who fall before the champions of either side—

his addit Amastrum
Hippotaden, sequiturque incumbens eminus hasta
Tereaque Harpalycumque et Demophoönta Chromimque(621),

he follows closely in the footsteps of Homer. He is, however, more sparing of these details, so as to avoid the monotony of Homer’s battle-fields and single combats. The Iliad was originally addressed to a people of warriors—

οἶσιν ἄρα Ζεὺς
ἐκ νεότητος ἔδωκε καὶ ἐς γῆρας τολυπεύειν
ἀργαλέους πολέμους, ὄφρα φθιόμεσθα ἕκαστος(622).

And although through the mouth of the wisest of his heroes, Homer expresses some sense of weariness of the

‘war and broils, which make
Life one perpetual fight’—

αἶψα τε φυλόπιδος πέλεται κόρος ανθρώποισι—

yet all accepted this life as their destiny; and those who first listened to the song of the poet would feel no satiety in the details of battle and records of martial prowess, glorifying perhaps the reputed ancestors of those chiefs whom they themselves followed to the field or to the storming of cities. To Virgil’s readers, the record of such a time as that described in the Iliad would come like echoes from an alien world. In so far as the Romans of the Augustan Age had any vital passion corresponding to the interest with which Homer’s Greeks must have witnessed in imagination the spectacle of wounds and death in battle, it was in the basest form which the lust of blood has ever assumed among civilised men,—the passion for the gladiatorial shows. It is clear that Virgil himself, though he can feel and inspire the fire of battle at some critical moment—

ingeminant hastis et Troes et ipse
Fulmineus Mnestheus(623);

though he can express a Roman contempt for death,—

Est hic, est animus lucis contemptor(624),

and can sympathise with the energetic daring of his Italian heroes and heroine,—Turnus, Lausus, Pallas(625), and Camilla,—yet shares the sentiment with which his hero looks forward to peace as the crown of his labours, and regards the wars which he was compelled to wage as a hated task imposed on him by the Fates—

Nos alias hinc ad lacrimas, eadem horrida bella,
Fata vocant(626).

Yet even in the incidents of his battle-pieces Virgil does not follow Homer slavishly. The warlike action of the poem is not a mere succession of single combats, or a confused _mêlée_ of battle, surging ‘this way and that,’ between the rampart that guards the ships and the walls of the city. It is said that the greatest soldier of modern times, in the enforced leisure of his last years, condescended to express a criticism, not indeed a favourable one, on Virgil’s skill as a tactician; and it is an element of novelty in the representation of the Aeneid that it suggests at least some image of the combined operations of modern warfare. But it is in the play which Virgil gives to the other human emotions of his personages, tempering and counteracting the blind rage of battle, that the poet of a more advanced era most conspicuously appears. The ancient world at its best, whether we judge of it from the representations of its poets, or the recorded acts of its greatest men and most powerful and enlightened States, did not rise to that height of chivalrous generosity which scorns to take an enemy at a disadvantage, or to wipe away the memory of defeat or disaster by a cruel revenge. Achilles in his treatment of Hector, Caesar in his treatment of Vercingetorix, the Spartans in dealing with Plataeae, the Syracusans with the remnant of the defeated Athenians, the Athenians themselves with the helpless defenders of Melos, the Romans with the Samnites who spared their lives at the Caudine Forks,—all alike fall below the standard of nobleness which men of temper inferior to that of the great men and nations of antiquity often reached in mediaeval times. Those who appear to come nearest this standard in ancient times,—who could at least honour courage in an enemy or refuse to press too heavily upon him in his defeat,—are the Carthaginian Hannibal and his not unworthy conqueror. Virgil cannot be said, in this respect, to rise altogether superior to the spirit of the old Greek and Roman world. In the Aeneid it is thought no shame, but rather a glory, for soldiers to slay defenceless or wounded men in battle or in the dim confusion of a night foray. Yet the sentiments of his warriors engaged in battle are more tempered with humanity than those of the heroes of the Iliad. There is no word of throwing the bodies of the slain to dogs and vultures. There is no such deadly struggle over the bodies of Lausus or Pallas as over that of Patroclus. Turnus and Aeneas alike act on the principle expressed in the request of the dying champion of Italy,—

Ulterius ne tende odiis(627).

Not only is the warlike passion less cruel in the Aeneid, but the feeling of the sanctity which invests the dead is stronger. The only passage in the Aeneid which might have exposed Virgil to the reproach of Lucretius, as forgetting in the supposed interests of religion the certain claims of humanity, is that in which Aeneas, following the example of Achilles, sets aside the captive youths for immolation to the Manes of Pallas.

But the chief source of interest in the Virgilian battle-pieces is the pathetic sympathy awakened for the untimely death of some of the nobler personages of the story. The tender compassion called forth by the blight which fell in his own time upon the earliest of the ‘breves et infaustos populi Romani amores(628),’ and reappeared again in the deaths of Drusus and Germanicus—that compassion which dictates the words

si qua fata aspera rumpas
Tu Marcellus eris(629),

appears in his description of the fates of Pallas and Lausus, of Euryalus and Camilla. The reverence for the purest of human affections which shines through the lines

Transiit et parmam mucro levia arma minacis,
Et tunicam, molli mater quam neverat auro(630),

and

At vero, ut voltum vidit morientis et ora,
Ora modis Anchisiades pallentia miris,
Ingemuit miserans graviter dextramque tetendit,
Et mentem patriae subiit pietatis imago(631),

may be discerned also in some of the minor incidents of the poem, as in these lines—

Vos etiam, gemini, Rutulis cecidistis in arvis,
Daucia, Laride Thymberque, simillima proles,
Indiscreta suis gratusque parentibus error(632).

The emotions awakened by the deaths of Mezentius and of Turnus are of a sterner character. So too the poet’s compassion for the heroine of his later books, Camilla, falling by the hand of an ignoble antagonist, is mixed with a sense of scornful satisfaction at the retribution which immediately followed—

Extemplo teli stridorem aurasque sonantis
Audiit una Arruns haesitque in corpore ferrum.
Illum expirantem socii atque extrema gementem
Obliti ignoto camporum in pulvere linquunt;
Opis ad aetherium pinnis aufertur Olympum(633).

Virgil’s susceptibility to local associations and to impressions of a remote antiquity must also be taken into account as supplying materials and stimulus to his inventive faculty. No poet so often appeals to the imaginative interest attaching to the earlier condition of places or things of old renown or famous in the later history of the world. Thus the building of Carthage, the first view of the Tiber—

Hunc inter fluvio Tiberinus amoeno
Verticibus rapidis et multa flavus harena
In mare prorumpit(634)—

the gathering of the Italian races from ‘mountainous Praeneste, from the tilled lands around Gabii, from the banks of the cool Anio, and the rivulets sparkling among the Hernican hills,’—the contrast between the primitive pastoral aspect of the Tarpeian Rock and the Capitol, of the site of the Forum and the Carinae, and the familiar spectacle of outward magnificence which they presented in the Augustan Age,—are brought before the mind with a more stimulating power than the experiences of storm or battle through which the hero of the poem is conducted. The local associations of Mount Eryx, of the lake of Avernus, of the fountain Albunea, of the valley of Amsanctus, of the Arician grove, of the site of Ardea, are evoked with impressive effect. The names of the promontories Palinurum, Misenum, and Caieta are invested with an interest derived from their connexion with the imaginary incidents and personages of the poem. The ritual observances and the legend connected with the Ara Maxima suggest the description of ceremonies and the narrative of events in the earlier half of Book viii.; and the custom—so ancient that its original meaning was forgotten—of opening the gateway of Janus Quirinus on the rare occasions when a state of war arose out of a state of unbroken peace, is traced back to a time antecedent to the existence either of Rome or Alba—

Mos erat Hesperio in Latio, quem protinus urbes
Albanae coluere sacrum, nunc maxima rerum
Roma colit, etc.
* * * * *
Ipse Quirinali trabea cinctuque Gabino
Insignis reserat stridentia limina Consul;
Ipse vocat pugnas, sequitur tum cetera pubes,
Aereaque adsensu conspirant cornua rauco(635).

Perhaps the most original and not the least impressive of those personages whom Virgil introduces into his composite representation—the Sibyl—is conceived under the strong sense of the mystery and sanctity which invested the oracles of the Sibylline books.

The personal and national susceptibilities of Virgil’s imagination and the circumstances of the age in which he lived are thus seen largely to modify that representation of life and manners of which the main outlines are suggested by the Homeric poems, and of which many of the details are derived from the Cyclic poems, from the Greek tragedies founded on the events which followed on the death of Hector, and from the Italian traditions and aetiological myths which Cato had preserved in his ‘Origines,’ and Varro and other writers in their works on antiquities. Virgil’s power as an epic poet does not consist in original invention of incident or action, but in combining diverse elements into a homogeneous whole, and in imparting poetic life to old materials, many of them not originally conceived in a poetic spirit. The interest which he thus imparts to his narrative is different from, and inferior to, that attaching to the original representation in the Homeric poems. Had Virgil’s representation been as faithfully drawn from the life as that of Homer, it still would have been less interesting, from the fact that ancient Romans are less interesting in their individuality than the Greeks of the great ages of Greek life, and from the fact also that the manners of an advanced age do not affect the imagination in the way in which those of a nation’s youth affect it. Not only was Virgil’s own genius much less creative than that of Homer, his materials possessed much less plasticity. There is no need of any act of reconstructive criticism to enable us to feel the immediate power of the Iliad and the Odyssey. To do justice to the power of the Aeneid we must endeavour to realise in imagination the state of mind of those who received the poem in all the novelty of its first impression,—at once ‘rich with the spoils of time,’ and ‘pregnant with celestial fire.’

IV.

The most important element in the Aeneid, regarded as a poem of heroic action, remains still to be considered, viz. the conception and delineation of individual character. The greatest of epic poets in ancient times was also endowed with the most versatile dramatic faculty. And this faculty was displayed not only in the conception of a great variety of noble types of character, but also in the modes in which these conceptions were embodied. The Greek language is greatly superior to the Latin in its adaptability to natural dialogue. In this respect Cicero’s inferiority to Plato is as marked as Virgil’s inferiority to Homer. The language of Homer and the language of Plato are equally fitted for the expression of the greatest thoughts and feelings, and for the common intercourse of men with one another. Neither that of Virgil nor of Cicero adapts itself easily to the lively play of emotion or to the rapid interchange of thought. The characters of Homer, like the characters of Shakspeare, reveal themselves in their complete individuality, as they act and re-act on one another in many changing moods of passion and affection. The personages of Virgil are revealed by the poet, partly in his account of what they do, and partly through the medium of set speeches expressive of some particular attitude of mind. Virgil’s imagination is the imagination of the orator rather than of the dramatist. It is not a complete and complex man, liable to various moods, and standing in various relations to other men, but it is some powerful movement of the θυμός in man, that the oratorical imagination is best fitted to express. Milton also, like Virgil, reveals the characters of his personages with the imaginative power of an orator rather than with that of a dramatist. But he possesses another resource in the analytical power with which he makes his chief personage reveal his inmost nature and most secret motives in truthful communing with himself. It is through the soliloquies in the ‘Paradise Lost’ that we can best realise the whole conception of Satan, in his ruined magnificence, and in his lost but not forgotten capacity of happiness and nobleness. The soliloquies of these personages perform for the epic poet the part performed by the elaborate introspection and discussion of motives in modern prose fiction. Homer also avails himself frequently of the soliloquy, as he does of natural dialogue and more formal oratory. In the Aeneid the chief personage is often introduced, like the heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey,

‘This way and that dividing the swift mind;’

but the process generally ends in the adoption, without any weighing of conflicting duties or probabilities, of the obvious course indicated by some supernatural sign. The soliloquies of Dido are to be regarded rather as passionate outbursts of prayer to some unknown avenging power than as communings with her own heart. The single soliloquy, if it may be called such, which brings the speaker nearer to us in knowledge and sympathy, is the proud and stately address in which Mezentius seems to make the horse, which had borne him victorious through every former war, a partaker of his sorrow and his forebodings—

Rhaebe, diu, res si qua diu mortalibus ulla est,
Viximus(636), etc.

But not only are the media through which Virgil brings his personages before us less varied and flexible than those of Homer, but the characters themselves are more tamely conceived, and less capable of awakening human interest. And this is especially true of the character of Aeneas as contrasted with those of Achilles and of Odysseus. The general conception of Aeneas is indeed in keeping with the religious idea of the Aeneid. He is intended to be an embodiment of the courage of an ancient hero, the justice of a paternal ruler, the mild humanity of a cultivated man living in an age of advanced civilisation, the saintliness of the founder of a new religion of peace and pure observance, the affection for parent and child, which was one of the strongest instincts in the Italian race. A life-like impersonation of such an ideal would have commanded the reverence of all future times. Yet at no time has the character of Aeneas excited any strong human interest. No later poet or moralist set it up, as Horace sets up the characters of Achilles and of Ulysses, as a subject of ethical contemplation. Ovid in the deepest gloom of his exile retains enough of his old levity to jest at his single lapse from saintly perfection—

Et tamen ille tuae felix Aeneidos auctor
Contulit in Tyrios arma virumque toros(637).

As compared with the hero of the Odyssey, Aeneas is altogether wanting in energy, spontaneity, intellectual resource, and insight. The single quality in which he is strong is endurance. The principle which enables him to fulfil his mission is expressed in the line—

Quidquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est(638).

His courage in battle springs from his confidence in his destiny—

Tum socios maestique metum solatur Iuli
Fata docens(639).

One of the few touches of nature which redeem his character from tameness is the momentary feeling of the rage of battle roused by the resistance of Lausus—

saevae iamque altius irae
Dardanio surgunt ductori(640).

The occasion in which he seems most worthy of his place as a leader of men is after the death of Mezentius, where the self-restraint of his address contrasts favourably with the intemperate ardour expressed in some of the speeches of Turnus—

Maxima res effecta, viri: timor omnis abesto(641).

He appears as a passive recipient both of the devotion and of the reproaches of Dido. He undergoes no passionate struggle in resigning her. The courtesy and kindliness of his nature elicit no warmer expression of regret than the words—

nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae,
Dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus(642).

The only exercise of thought required of him is the right interpretation of an omen, or the recollection of some dubious prediction at some critical moment. Even the strength of affection which he feels and which he awakens in the hearts of his father and son does not move us in the way in which we are touched by the feelings which unite Odysseus to Penelope and Telemachus, to Laertes and the mother who meets him in the shades, and tells him that she had ‘died neither by the painless arrows of Artemis nor by wasting disease’—

ἀλλά με σός τε πόθος σά τε μήδεα, φαίδιμ’ Ὀδυσσεῦ,
σή τ’ ἀγανοφροσύνη μελιηδέα θυμὸν ἀπηύρα(643).

The failure of Aeneas to excite a lively personal interest is not to be attributed solely to a failure of power in the poet’s imagination. In the part he plays he is conceived of as one chosen by the supreme purpose of the gods, as an instrument of their will, and thus necessarily unmoved by ordinary human impulses. In the words of M. de Coulanges, ‘Sa vertu doit être une froide et haute impersonnalité, qui fasse de lui, non un homme, mais un instrument des dieux(644).’ The strength required in such an instrument is the strength of faith, submission, patience, and endurance; and it is with this strength that Aeneas encounters the many dangers and vicissitudes to which he is exposed, and withdraws from the allurements of ease and pleasure. The very virtues of his character act as a check rather than as a stimulus to those natural impulses out of which the most living impersonations are formed. To compare great things in art with what are not so great, the impression produced by the superiority of Aeneas to ordinary passion is like the impression produced by the superior tolerance and enlightenment of some of Scott’s heroes, when contrasted with the more animated impulses and ruder fanaticism of the other personages in his story. That he is, on the one hand, the passive receptacle of Divine guidance, and, on the other, the impersonation of a modern ideal of humanity, playing a part in a rude and turbulent time, are the two main causes of the tame and colourless character of the protagonist of the Aeneid. And as loyalty to a leader is the sole form of political, as distinct from patriotic virtue which Virgil acknowledges, the other Trojan chiefs—the faithful Achates, the speaker Idomeneus, the more martial figures of Mnestheus and Serestus—do little more than play the part of the ἄγγελος or of the κωφὰ πρόσωπα in a Greek tragedy. The interest awakened by Anchises arises solely from the halo of sacred associations investing him. Iulus, as the eponymous ancestor of the Iulii, seems to be a favourite of the author; yet he fails to interest us as a youth of high spirit and promise. Telemachus we know and sympathise with in his rising rebellion against the insolence of the suitors—

νῦν δ’ ὅτε δὴ μέγας εἰμί, καὶ ἄλλων μῦθον ἀκούων
πυνθάνομαι, καὶ δή μοι ἀέξεται ἔνδοθι θυμός(645),

in his longing for the return of his father to redress his wrongs, in his kindly hospitality, and sense of the outraged honour of his house—

νεμεσσήθη δ’ ἐνὶ θυμῷ
ξεῖνον δηθὰ θύρῃσιν ἐφεστάμεν(646).

That Iulus fails to awaken a similar interest, that we do not share his ardour in the chase or the glow of pride with which he lays his first enemy low, is due to the fact that the poet’s imagination fails in the vital realisation of his conception.

Most of the minor characters who appear in the Aeneid require no analysis. Creusa, Anna, and Andromache are vague impersonations of womanly tenderness and fidelity of affection. Lavinia, the shadowy Helen of the story, appears only for a moment, and though she is described by images suggestive of beauty and of a delicate nurture—

mixta rubent ubi lilia multa
Alba rosa(647),

we are left without the knowledge by which to measure the extent of the wrong done to her and Turnus by the enforced severance of their affections. Amata exhibits the blind animal rage of a mother whose affections have been outraged, but her figure wants the firm outlines and substance of the Hecuba of the Iliad. The prophetic office of Helenus enables him to advance the action of the story by preparing the mind of Aeneas for his immediate future: the jealous interference of Iarbas accelerates the doom of Dido: Acestes performs the part of a kindly host to the Trojans in Sicily. But of any individual traits of character they exhibit no trace whatever. Drances serves as a vehicle of impassioned oratory, and as a kind of foil to the generous impulsiveness of Turnus—just as the timid craft of Arruns is a foil to the splendid rashness of Camilla;—and perhaps he is not much less real to our imaginations than Polydamus, who is the only personage of the Iliad that we think of rather as the embodiment of an abstract quality,—moderation,—than as a living man. But in the delineation of Drances there is no sign of that power which, by a few graphic strokes of description and the force of dramatic insight, has made Thersites stand forth for all times as the type of an envious and ignoble demagogue. Though there is more effort of thought in the delineation of Latinus as swayed to and fro by his religious sense of duty and the influence of others, and though there is true pathos in the words with which he allows the declaration of war to be made—

Nam mihi parta quies, omnisque in limine portus:
Funere felici spolior(648);—

yet he does not live before us as Priam lives in the scene with Helen on the walls of the town, and he has no power to move our hearts with the awful compassion which the grief of Priam awakens in the last books of the Iliad. Perhaps the most impressive of the secondary personages in the Aeneid is Evander, as he appears in the dignity of his simple state in the eighth Book, and in the dignity of his great sorrow in the eleventh. Pallas and Lausus, Nisus and Euryalus, afford occasions for pathetic situations, rather than perform any part affording scope for the display of character. The romantic career of Camilla interests us; and she has the further attraction to modern readers of reminding them of a martial heroine of actual history: but we scarcely recognise in the vivid delineation of her deeds those complex elements which in their union form a whole character for our imaginations, whether in the representations of literature or in our experience of life.

The chief personal interest of the story is centred in those whose fortunes and action bring them into antagonism with the decrees of Fate, and who perish in consequence,—in Turnus, Mezentius, and Dido. Patriotism, courage, and passion are exhibited in a fatal but not ignoble struggle with the purposes and chosen instruments of Omnipotence. The tragic interest of this antagonism stimulates the imagination of the poet to a more energetic delineation of character. And in the representation of this struggle it is quite true, as has been well shown by Mr. Nettleship, that Virgil’s own sympathies go with the ‘victrix causa’ which ‘pleased the gods,’ not with the ‘victa’ which pleases our modern sensibilities. He professes not to question but

‘To justify the ways of God to men.’

The death of Mezentius satisfies poetical as well as political justice. Turnus brings his doom upon himself by the intemperate vehemence and self-confidence with which he asserts his personal claims. Though Aeneas and Dido are both represented as ‘forgetful of their better name,’ yet, as happens in real life more generally than in fiction, it is the woman only who suffers the penalty of this forgetfulness. Yet though in all these cases the doom of the sufferers is brought about in part through their own fault, Virgil does not, as an inferior artist might do, endeavour to augment the sympathy with his chief personage, by an unworthy detraction from his antagonist. No scorn of treachery or cowardice, no indignation against cruelty, mingles with the feeling of admiration which the general bearing of Turnus excites. The basis of his character seems to be a generous vehemence and proud independence of spirit. If Aeneas typifies the civilising mission of Rome and is to be regarded as an embodiment of the qualities which enabled her to give law to the world, Turnus typifies the brave but not internecine resistance offered to her by the other races of Italy, and is an embodiment of their high and martial spirit—of that ‘Itala virtus’ which, when tempered by Roman discipline, gave Rome the strength to fulfil her mission. The cause which moves Turnus to resist the Trojans is no unworthy one, either on patriotic grounds or on grounds personal to himself. If the Greeks were justified in making war against the Trojans on account of Helen, the Italians may be justified in making war against the same people on account of Lavinia. His appeals to his countrymen are addressed to the most elemental of patriotic impulses—

nunc coniugis esto
Quisque suae tectique memor: nunc magna referto
Facta, patrum laudes(649).

He slays his enemy in fair battle, and though he shows exultation in his victory, yet he does not sully it by any ferocity of act or demeanour—

qualem meruit Pallanta remitto,
Quisquis honos tumuli, quidquid solamen humandi est
Largior(650).

After his hopes of success are shaken by the first defeat of the Latins, and by the failure of the mission to Diomede, and when the timidity of Latinus and the envy of Drances urge the abandonment of the struggle, he still retains a proud confidence in his Italian allies—

Non erit auxilio nobis Aetolos et Arpi,
At Messapus erit, felixque Tolumnius(651), etc.

He is ready, like an earlier Decius, to devote his life in single combat against the new Achilles, armed with the armour of Vulcan—

vobis animam hanc soceroque Latino
Turnus ego, haut ulli veterum virtute secundus,
Devovi: ‘Solum Aeneas vocat.’ Et vocet oro:
Nec Drances potius, sive est haec ira deorum,
Morte luat, sive est virtus et gloria, tollat(652).

He sees ‘the inspiring hopes of triumph disappear, but the austerer glory of suffering remains, and with a firm heart he accepts that gift of a severe fate(653)’—

Usque adeone mori miserum est? Vos o mihi Manes
Este boni, quoniam Superis aversa voluntas:
Sancta ad vos anima atque istius inscia culpae
Descendam, magnorum haut unquam indignus avorum(654).

In the final encounter he yields, not to the terror inspired by his earthly antagonist, but to his consciousness of the hostility of Heaven—

di me terrent et Iuppiter hostis(655).

His last wish is that the old age of his father, Daunus, should not be deprived of the consolation of his funeral honours. Although the headlong vehemence of his own nature, no less than his opposition to the beneficent purposes of Omnipotence, seems to justify his fate, yet, as in the Ajax of Sophocles, the αὐθαδία in Turnus is rather the flaw in an essentially heroic temper, than his dominant characteristic. The poet’s sympathy with the high spirit of youth, as manifested in love and war, and his pride in the strong metal out of which the Italian race was made, have led him, perhaps involuntarily, to an embodiment of those chivalrous qualities, which affect the modern imagination with more powerful sympathy than the qualities of a temperate will and obedience to duty which he has striven to embody in the representation of Aeneas.

The vigorous sketch of Mezentius, as he appears in Book x., has received from some critics more admiration than the sustained delineation of Turnus through all the vicissitudes of feeling and fortune through which he passes. Chateaubriand says, that this figure is the only one in the Aeneid that is ‘fièrement dessinée.’ Landor describes him as ‘the hero transcendently above all others in the Aeneid.’ And there is certainly a vague grandeur of outline in this conception of the ‘contemptor divom’ and oppressor of his people, who is ‘not only the most passionate in his grief for Lausus, but likewise gives way to manly sorrow for the mute companion of his warfare,’ indicative of a bolder invention than that which is usually ascribed to Virgil. It is remarkable that poets whose spirit is most purely religious,—both in the strength of conviction and the limitation of sympathy produced by the religious spirit—Aeschylus, Virgil, and Milton—seem to be moved to their most energetic creativeness by the idea of antagonism to the supreme will on the part of a human, or superhuman but limited will: and that they cannot help raising in their readers a glow of admiration as well as a sense of awe in their embodiment of this clash between finite and infinite power. The sketch of Mezentius cannot indeed be compared with two of the most daring conceptions and perfected creations of human genius,—the Prometheus of Aeschylus and the Satan of Milton,—yet, if it does not enlist our ethical sympathies like the former of these, like the second it receives the tribute of that involuntary admiration, which is given to courage, even when allied with moral evil, so long as it is not absolutely divorced from the capability of sympathetic and elevated emotion.

In the part which Dido plays in the poem, Virgil finds a source of interest in which he had not been anticipated by Homer. And although the passion of love, unreturned or betrayed, had supplied a motive to the later Greek tragedy and to the Alexandrine epic, it was still not impossible for a new poet to represent this phase of modern life with more power and pathos than any of his predecessors. It was comparatively easy to produce a more noble and vital impersonation than the Medea of Apollonius. But the Dido of Virgil may compare favourably with the creations of greater masters,—with the Deianeira of Sophocles, with the Phaedra and the Medea of Euripides. And Virgil’s conception is at once more impassioned than that of Sophocles, and nobler and more womanly than those of Euripides. Her character, as it is represented before the disturbing influence of this new passion produced by supernatural artifice, is that of a brave and loyal, a great and queenly, a pure, trusting, and compassionate nature. The most tragic element in the development of her love for Aeneas is the struggle which it involves with her high-strung sense of fidelity to the dead—

Ille meos primus qui me sibi iunxit amores
Abstulit: ille habeat secum servetque sepulchro(656).

The first feeling awakened in her mind by Aeneas is compassion for his sufferings, and the desire to make the Trojans sharers in the fortune which had attended her own enterprise. When by the unsuspected agency of the two goddesses she has been possessed by the fatal passion, it is to no ignoble influence that she succumbs. It is the greatness and renown of one whom she recognises as of the race of the gods, which exercise a spell over her imagination—

Multa viri virtus animo, multusque recursat
Gentis honos; haerent infixi pectore voltus
Verbaque, nec placidam membris dat cura quietem(657).

No weakness, no unwomanly ferocity mingles with the reproaches which she utters on first awakening to the betrayal of her trust. A feeling of magnanimous scorn makes her rise in rebellion against the plea that her desertion was the result of divine interposition—

Scilicet is Superis labor est! ea cura quietos
Sollicitat(658);

and a lofty pathos animates her trust in a righteous retribution, the knowledge of which will comfort her among the dead—

Spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt,
Supplicia hausurum scopulis et nomine Dido
Saepe vocaturum. Sequar atris ignibus absens,
Et, cum frigida mors anima seduxerit artus,
Omnibus umbra locis adero:—dabis, improbe, poenas:
Audiam, et haec Manes veniet mihi fama sub imos(659).

The awe inspired by supernatural portents, by restless visions in the night, by the memory of ancient prophecies, by the voice of her former husband summoning her from the chapel consecrated to his Manes, confirms her in her resolution to die. Her passion goes on deepening in alternations of indignation and recurring tenderness. It reaches its sublimest elevation in the prayer for vengeance, answered long afterwards in the alarm and desolation inflicted upon Italy by the greatest of the sons of Carthage—

Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,
Qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos,
Nunc, olim, quocunque dabunt se tempore vires(660).

In her last moments she finds consolation in the great memories of her life—

Urbem praeclaram statui: mea moenia vidi:
Ulta virum, poenas inimico a fratre recepi:
Felix, heu! nimium felix, si litora tantum
Nunquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae(661).

Her latest prayer is that, even though no outward retribution overtake her betrayer, yet the bitterness of his own heart may be her avenger—

moriemur inultae,
Sed moriamur, ait: sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras.
Hauriat hunc oculis ignem crudelis ab alto
Dardanus, et secum nostrae ferat omina mortis(662).

Once more she appears among the Shades, and maintains her lofty bearing there as in the world above. No sympathy with his hero makes the poet here forget what was due to her. She listens in scornful silence to the tearful protestations of her ‘false friend(663),’ and passes on without any sign of forgiveness or reconciliation—

Tandem corripuit sese atque inimica refugit
In nemus umbriferum, coniunx ubi pristinus illi
Respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem(664).

V.

That the passion of Dido is powerfully conceived and delineated, that it satisfies modern feeling more legitimately than the representation of the unhallowed impulses of Phaedra, or of the cruel and treacherous rancour of Medea, will scarcely be questioned. Yet perhaps it is doing no injustice to the genius of Virgil to say that his power in dealing with human life consists generally in conceiving some state of feeling, some pathetic or passionate situation, rather than in the creation and sustained development of living characters. How the great impersonations of poetry and prose fiction, which are more real to our imaginations than the personages of history or those whom we know in life, come into being, is a question which probably their authors themselves could not answer. Though reflexion on human nature and deliberate intention to exemplify some law of life may precede the creative act which gives them being, and though continued reflexion may be needed to sustain them in a consistent course, yet no mere analytic insight into the springs of action can explain the process by which a great artist works. The beings of his imagination seem to acquire an existence independent of the experience and of the deliberate intentions of their author, and to inform this experience and mould these intentions as much as they are informed and moulded by them. Virgil’s imagination in the creation of Dido seems to be possessed in this way. She grows more and more real as her passion deepens. Virgil’s intention in this representation may have been to show the tragic infatuation of a woman’s love—

furens quid femina possit:

but his sympathetic insight into this passion—an insight already shown in the Eclogues—stimulates the forces of his imagination to a nobler as well as a more vital creation than in any other of his impersonations. Dido ranks for all times as one of the great heroines of poetry. So long as she appears on the scene the interest in the exhibition of her nature overpowers all other interests. But this is not the case with Virgil’s other personages. We are more interested in what they say and in what happens to them than in what they are. In other words, it is by his oratorical and descriptive, rather than by his dramatic faculty, that he secures the attention of his readers. As oratory was one of the most important powers in ancient life, so it became a prominent element in ancient epic and dramatic poetry,—in Homer, Ennius, and Virgil, as well as in Sophocles, Euripides, and the Roman tragedians. The oratory of the Aeneid shows nothing of the speculative power—of the application of great ideas to life—which gives the profoundest value not only to many speeches in Sophocles, but also to some of those in the Iliad, and notably to such as proceed from the mouth of Odysseus. It cannot equal the vivid naturalness of the speeches of Nestor, nor the impassioned grandeur of those of Achilles. Neither is it characterised by the subtle psychological analysis which is the most interesting quality in the rhetoric of Euripides. On the other hand, it is not disfigured by the forensic special pleading and word-fencing which is an occasional flaw in the dramatic art of Sophocles, and a pervading mannerism in that of the younger poet. The impression of grave political deliberation is left on the mind by some of the fragments of Ennius more effectually than by anything uttered in the councils of gods or men in the Aeneid. But it is in the greatest of modern epics that the full force of intellect and feeling animating grave councils of state is most grandly idealised. The speeches in Virgil, though they want the intellectual power and the majestic largeness of utterance of those in Milton, are, like his, stately and dignified in expression; they are disfigured by no rhetorical artifice of fine-spun argument or exaggerated emphasis; they are rapid with the vehemence of scorn and indignation, fervid with martial pride and enthusiasm, or, occasionally, weighty with the power of controlled emotion. They have the ring of Roman oratory, as it is heard in the animated declamation of Livy, and sometimes seem to anticipate the reserved force and ‘imperial brevity’ of Tacitus. They give a true voice to ‘the high, magnanimous Roman mood,’ and to the fervour of spirit with which that mood was associated. And this effect is sometimes increased by the use which the polished poet of the Augustan Age makes of the grave, ardent, but unformed utterances—‘rudes et inconditae voces’—of the epic and tragic poets of the Republic.

The descriptive faculty of Virgil is quite unlike that of Homer, but yet it has great excellences of its own. In the Iliad and Odyssey man appears ‘vigorous and elastic such as poetry saw him first, such as poetry would ever see him(665);’ and the outward world is described in the clear forms and the animated movement which impress themselves immediately on the sense and mind of men thus happily organised. Virgil too presents to us the varied spectacle of human life and of the outward world under many impressive aspects. But these aspects of things do not affect the mind with the immediate impulse which the natural man receives from them, and of which he retains the vivid picture in his mind. As in his pastoral poems and in the Georgics Virgil seems to abstract from the general aspect of things the characteristic sentiment which Nature inspires in particular places and at particular times, and to see the scene which he describes under the influence of that sentiment, so in the Aeneid various human ‘situations’ are conceived under the influence of some sense of awe or wonder, of beauty or pathos, of local or antique association; and the whole description is so presented as to bring this central interest into prominent relief. The thought of the whole situation, not the sequence of events in time or causal connexion, is what determines the grouping and subordination of details.

Thus in the description of the storm in Book i., the dominant feeling by the light of which the circumstances are to be realised is that of sudden and overwhelming power in the elements and of man’s impotence to contend against them. In the description of the harbour in which the ships of Aeneas find refuge we feel the sense of calm and peace after storm and danger. In the interview between Venus and her son the impression left on the mind is that of a mysterious supernatural grace enhancing the charm of human beauty, such as is produced by the pictorial representations of religious art. We seem to look on the rising towers and dwellings of Carthage with that joyful sense of wonder and novelty with which the thought of the beginning of great enterprises, or of the discovery of unknown lands, and the first view of ancient and famous cities, such as Rome or Venice, appeal to the imagination. In the second Book the effect of the whole representation is enhanced by the sentiment of awe and mystery with which night, and darkness, and the intermittent flashes of light which break the darkness, impress the mind. Thus as a prelude to the terrible and tragical scenes afterwards represented, the apparition of Hector comes before Aeneas in the deepest stillness of the night—

Tempus erat quo prima quies mortalibus aegris
Incipit(666).

Then follow the confused sights and sounds of battle, like those of the νυκτομαχία in the seventh Book of Thucydides and of that in the Vitellian war of Tacitus,—the spectacle revealed by the light of the burning city—

Sigaea igni freta lata relucent(667);

the vivid gleams in which the death of Priam, the cowering figure of Helen, the majestic forms of the Olympian gods taking part in the work of destruction, are for a moment disclosed out of the surrounding darkness, the alarm and bewilderment of the escape from the house of Anchises and of the vain attempt of Aeneas to recover the lost Creusa—

Horror ubique, animos simul ipsa silentia terrent(668).

The third Book is pervaded by the feeling of the sea,—not as in the Odyssey of its buoyant and inexhaustible life, nor yet of the dread which it inspired in the earliest mariners,—but in that more modern mood in which it unfolds to the traveller the animated spectacle of islands and coasts famous for their beauty or their historic and legendary associations. In the fifth Book, as is pointed out by Chateaubriand, the effect of the limitless and monotonous prospect of the open sea in producing a sense of weariness and melancholy, such as that expressed in ‘The Lotus-eaters’—

‘but evermore
Most weary seem’d the sea, weary the oar,
Weary the wandering fields of barren foam,’

is profoundly felt in the passage—

At procul in sola secretae Troades acta
Amissum Anchisen flebant cunctaeque profundum
Pontum adspectabant flentes; ‘heu tot vada fessis
Et tantum superesse maris,’ vox omnibus una(669).

It was seen how the sense of supernatural awe adds to the tragic grandeur of the despair and death of Dido, as in the lines, which bear some trace of a vivid passage in Ennius—

agit ipse furentem
In somnis ferus Aeneas: semperque relinqui
Sola sibi, semper longam incomitata videtur
Ire viam, et Tyrios deserta quaerere terra(670).

Thus too the mind is prepared for the spectacle revealed in the Descent into Hell by the awful sublimity of the Invocation—

Di quibus imperium est animarum umbraeque silentes(671).

The description of the funeral rites of Pallas produces that complex impression of sadness and solemnity mixed with proud memories and thoughts of the pomp and circumstance of war which affects men in the present day, when witnessing the spectacle of the funeral of some great soldier who has died full of years and honour—

Post bellator equus positis insignibus Aethon
It lacrimans guttisque umectat grandibus ora.
Hastam alii galeamque ferunt, nam cetera Turnus
Victor habet. Tum moesta phalanx Teucrique sequuntur
Tyrrhenique omnes et versis Arcades armis(672).

In the employment of illustrative imagery Virgil is much more sparing than Homer. The varied forces of Nature and of animal life supplied materials to the Greek poet by which to enhance the poetical sense of the situation which he describes; and all these forces are apprehended by him with a vivid feeling of wonder, and presented to the imagination with a truthful observation of outward signs, and with a sympathetic insight into their innermost nature. Virgil is not only more sparing in the use of these figures; he is also tamer and less inventive in their application. In those drawn from the life of wild animals he, for the most part, reproduces the Homeric imagery, though we note as one touch of realism in them that the wolf, familiar to Italy, frequently takes the place of the lion, which was probably still an object of terror in Western Asia at the time when Homer lived. Another class of images reproduced from Homer is that of those in which a mortal is compared to an immortal, as at i. 498—

Qualis in Eurotae ripis, aut per iuga Cynthi,
Exercet Diana choros, etc.,

though in this some variations are introduced from a simile in Apollonius. Another passage of the same kind is immediately derived from the Alexandrine poet—

Qualis, ubi hibernam Lyciam Xanthique fluenta(673), etc.

There is, however, another class of ‘similes’ used by Virgil in his epic, after the example of the Alexandrines, which can scarcely be said to fulfil the function of a poetical analogy, but merely to give a realistic outward symbol of some movement of the mind or passions, without any imaginative enhancement of the situation. Such, for instance, is the comparison at vii. 377, etc. of the mind of Amata to a top whipped by boys round an empty court,—a comparison suggested by a passage in Callimachus(674); and that again at viii. 22, etc. of the variations of purpose in the mind of Aeneas, produced by the surging sea of cares besetting him, to the variations of light reflected from the water in a copper cauldron,—a comparison directly imitated from Apollonius (iii. 754, etc.). There are others again of what may be called a somewhat conventional cast, which acquire individuality from the colour of local associations, such as the introduction (at xii. 715) of two bulls battling together (as they are also described in the Georgics)—

ingenti Sila, summove Taburno;

the comparison (at xii. 701 etc.) of Aeneas, towering in all his warlike power, to Athos or Eryx—

aut ipse, coruscis
Cum fremit ilicibus, quantus, gaudetque nivali
Vertice se attollens, pater Appenninus ad auras(675);

and that at ix. 680, etc., in which the two sons of Alcanor are likened to two tall oaks growing—

Sive Padi ripis Athesim seu propter amoenum(676).

But there are other comparisons in Virgil indicative of more original invention, observation, and reflexion, which serve the true purpose of imaginative analogies, viz. that of exalting the peculiar sentiment with which the poet desires the situation he is describing to be regarded. In the perception of these analogies it is not merely intellectual curiosity that is gratified by the apprehension of the τοῦτο ἐκεῖνο in the phenomena; but the imagination is enlarged by the recognition of analogous forces operating in different spheres, which separately are capable of producing a vivid and noble emotion. As an instance of this perception of the analogy between great forces in different spheres, the one of human, the other of natural activity, we may take the comparison of the Italian host advancing in orderly march after its tumultuous gathering from many quarters, to the movement of mighty rivers when their component waters have found their appointed bed—

Ceu septem surgens sedatis amnibus altus
Per tacitum Ganges, aut pingui flumine Nilus
Cum refluit campis et iam se condidit alveo(677).

Others again show the vivid interest mixed with poetical wonder which animated Virgil’s power of observation in his Georgics—as for instance that at i. 430 of the busy workers in Carthage to bees in early summer toiling among the flowery fields—an image ennobled also by Milton, who characteristically describes the bees as ‘conferring their state-affairs,’ while it is not to their political, but to their industrial, martial, and social or domestic aptitudes,

(cum gentis adultos
Educunt fetus)

that Virgil draws attention. Of the same class is the comparison at iv. 404, etc., of the Trojans preparing to leave the shores of Carthage to the movement of ants engaged in gathering together some heap of corn for their winter’s store—

It nigrum campis agmen, etc.