The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil Part 27

Yet the idea is one more adapted to be the inspiring influence of a great historical work, like the national history of Livy, or 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' than of a great poem, which must satisfy the human and moral sympathies of men as well as their sense of power.

Material greatness and civilisation, and the qualities of mind and character through which these effects are produced, exercise a great spell over the imagination and the masculine sympathies of the world. But the highest art does more than this-it enlarges man's sense of a spiritual life, it purifies his notions of happiness, it deepens his conviction of a righteous government of the world. Through the imagination it speaks to the soul. The idea of imperial Rome is rather that of the enemy than of the promoter of the spiritual life or of individual happiness: it impresses on the mind the thought of a vast and orderly, but not of a moral and humane government. The idea of the Roman Republic, as it s.h.i.+nes through the rude fragments of the Annals of Ennius in such utterances as these-

Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque(557),-

is suggestive of a n.o.bler energy of character, of more abundant public and private virtue, than the idea pervading and animating the polished verse of the Aeneid. The thought of the Rome of Ennius is a.s.sociated in our minds with the free political life of the Forum and the Campus Martius, and with the grave deliberations of the Senate, as well as with the exercise of military force and administrative sovereignty. The idea of Italy pervading the Georgics has everything to attract and nothing to repel our sympathies: and thus notwithstanding the inferior opportunities for awakening human interest which necessarily attach to a didactic when compared with an epic poem, the charm exercised by that poem is more unmixed and unchanging than that of the poem which evokes the proud memories of the Capitol. In the Aeneid, Virgil is really the panegyrist of despotism under the delusive disguise of paternal government. In so far as there is any conflict between right and wrong in the Aeneid, the wrong appears to be the 'victrix causa' 'which pleases the G.o.ds.' The religious idea of the Fates is invested with none of the ethical mystery with which the a.n.a.logous idea in Greek poetry is invested. They act in a hard, plain, arbitrary way, irrespective of right and wrong, regardless of personal happiness or suffering. The actors in the poem who move our sympathies are those who perish in blind resistance to, or blind compliance with, their decrees-Dido, Pallas, Turnus, and Lausus. The opposition between natural human feeling and the 'divom inclementia' is reverently accepted and acquiesced in by Virgil in the person of his hero.

The conclusion at which we arrive as to the value of the Aeneid as an epic poem representative of the Roman Empire, is that Virgil has given a true, adequate, and n.o.ble expression to an idea which actually has exercised a greater spell over the imagination and a greater influence over the daily lives of men, than any other which owed its origin to their secular interests: but that this idea, regarded from its political, religious, and personal side, is one which does not touch the heart, or enlighten the conscience: and this is an important drawback to the claim which the Aeneid may have to the highest rank as a work of art.

CHAPTER XI.

THE AENEID AS AN EPIC POEM OF HUMAN LIFE.

I.

The national, religious, and political ideas which form the central interest of the poem have been considered in the previous chapter. We have seen how Virgil was moved by an impulse similar to that which acted on Ennius in a ruder age, and in what way he strove to express the meaning which the idea of Rome has for all times, and to find an adequate symbol of the dominant sentiment of his own time. It remains to consider how far the poem sustains by its command over our sympathies the interest thus established in its favour; and to ascertain what value the Aeneid, as a poem of action, unfolding a spectacle of human life, manners, character, and pa.s.sion, possessed for the Romans and still possesses for ourselves.

The action of the poem, apart from its bearing on the destinies of the world, has a grandeur and dignity of its own. It is enacted on a great theatre, developes itself by incidents giving free play to the highest modes of human energy and pa.s.sion, and through the agency of personages already renowned in legend and poetry. In that mythical age which the poet recalls to life no spectacle could be imagined more deserving to fix the attention of the world than the fall of Troy, the building of Carthage, and the first rude settlement on the hills of Rome. Whatever else may be said of the personages of the story, they are conceived of as playing no common part in human affairs. In following their fortunes we breathe the air of that high poetic region which forms the undetermined border-land between mythology and history. We look back on the ruined state of the greatest city of legendary times, and we mark the first beginnings of the two Imperial cities which in historical times disputed the empire of the world. The poem evokes the a.s.sociations, ancient and recent, attaching to the various scenes through which the action pa.s.ses,-Troy, Carthage, Sicily, the sh.o.r.es of Latium, the Tiber, and the hills on which Rome was built. The vagueness of the time in which the action is laid enables the poet to connect together, in a most critical position of human affairs, the fortunes of the chief powers of Asia, Africa, and Europe. The spheres of man's activity in which the action moves-war and sea-adventure in search of undiscovered lands-give the fullest scope to energetic representation. In his conception of the voyage of Aeneas and of a great war determining the issue of his enterprise, Virgil followed the greatest epic examples, and found a subject to which he could impart the interest of adventurous incident and heroic achievement. In his conception of the part played in the action by the pa.s.sion of love, he introduced a more familiar and modern phase of life which the examples of the Greek tragedians and of the Alexandrine epic had proved to be capable of idealising treatment.

The actors moreover who play their part in these critical events are not 'common or mean.' The crisis is conceived of as one so momentous, from the issues involved in it, as to call forth the pa.s.sions and the energies of the old Olympian Powers. But even the human personages of the story appear with a prestige of glory and sanct.i.ty, and yet are sufficiently unfamiliar to excite new expectations. Aeneas, as the son of a mightier G.o.ddess(558), is distinguished in the Iliad by the honours of a higher lineage than Achilles. He is brave in war, the comrade of Hector, a hero deemed worthy to encounter Achilles himself as well as Diomede in battle. He is especially dear to the G.o.ds, and is marked out by prophecy as destined to bear, and transmit to his descendants, the rule over the remnant of the Trojans. To Anchises attaches the sanct.i.ty of one enjoying a closer communion with the immortals, of one at once favoured and afflicted above others, and elevated, like Oedipus, out of weakness and suffering here, into honour and influence beyond the grave. Iulus receives a reflected glory from the transcendent greatness of the Julian house. Dido or Elissa was a name famous in Phoenician legend, and a.s.sociated with the ancient renown of Tyre. Evander is ill.u.s.trious from his Arcadian origin, from his relation to Hercules, from the fame of his mother as one of the Italian Camenae. Even the mere ethnical names of Latinus and Turnus receive individuality by being introduced in the line of old Italian dynasties, and in direct connexion with Faunus, Picus, and other beings of the native mythology.

It may therefore be said that in the choice of the time and the scenes in which his action is laid, in the character of the action itself, and in the eminence of the personages taking part in it, Virgil fulfils all the conditions of his art which reflexion on the models of the past and on the circ.u.mstances in life most capable of interesting the imagination could teach him. The care with which he prepared himself for his task is as remarkable as the judgment with which he conceived its main conditions.

The conduct of his story shows the most intimate familiarity with the incidents and adventures contained in the Iliad and Odyssey, in the Cyclic poems and the dramas founded on them, in the Homeric hymns and the Alexandrine epic. It shows how Virgil so combines and varies the details thus suggested, as to recall many features of the Homeric age, and at the same time to produce the impression of something new in literary art. The revived image of that age must have affected the contemporaries of the poet in a manner different from its effect on us. To us both the Iliad and the Aeneid are ancient and unfamiliar: the one comes before us as an original picture of manners, the other as a copy taken in a long subsequent age. But to a Roman of the time of Augustus the life of the Homeric age must have appeared almost as remote as it does to us. The direct imitations of Homer in the Aeneid might produce on his mind the same mixed impression of novelty and familiarity which is produced on a modern reader by the reproduction and recasting of the doctrines, incidents, and language of the Bible in the two epic poems of Milton. The fascination of this world of supernatural agency and personal adventure, brought home to him for the first time in the most elevated tones of his own language, may have charmed the Roman reader in the same way as the revival of mediaeval romance in the literary languages of modern Europe charmed the readers of the latter part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth centuries. And if such were the first impressions produced by the poem, a closer examination of it must have shown that the imagination of Virgil had out of ancient materials built up something new in the world. If his representation of the heroic age wants the vivid truth and _navete_ of Homer's representation, yet it is impressive with the dignity of antique a.s.sociations, and rich with the colouring of his own human sensibilities.

But the Aeneid not only revives the romance of the Greek heroic age: it creates the romance of 'that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds.' It bestows the colour and warmth of human life on dim traditions, on vague names, on the memories of early warfare clinging to ancient towns, and on the origins of immemorial customs and ceremonies. The task of giving poetic life to the dry prose of Cato, to the dust of antiquarian learning, and to the rigid formalism of the old Roman ceremonial must have taxed the poet's powers more than that of reawakening the interest in the old Homeric life. Virgil accomplishes this result through his power of living at the same time in the past and in the present; of feeling powerfully the a.s.sociations of a remote antiquity, and the immediate action of all that was most impressive to thought and imagination in the age in which he lived.

The earlier works of Virgil had proved his strength in descriptive and didactic poetry, and in the expression of personal feeling, of national sentiment, and of ethical contemplation; but they had given no indication of epic, and little of dramatic genius. Although the episode of the 'Pastor Aristaeus' is a specimen of succinct, animated, and pathetic narrative, it must be remembered that this was a late addition to the Georgics, and was probably written after considerable way had been made in the composition of the Aeneid. An epic poet, over and above his purely poetic susceptibility, must possess the art and faculty of a prose historian. Homer has in an unequalled degree the clearness, vividness, and movement in telling his story, which characterise such writers as Herodotus. The account given of Virgil's mode of composition proves that he took great pains both with the plan and the execution of his narrative.

He is said to have arranged the first draught of his story in prose, and then to have worked on the various parts of it as they interested him at the time of composition. There are clear indications that the books were not written in the order in which they stand; and a few inconsistencies of statement between the earlier and later books were left uncorrected at the time of the author's death. The poem, in the careful arrangement of its materials, bears the stamp of the manner in which it was composed. Like that of every other great Roman, the genius of Virgil was thoroughly orderly and systematic. But along with the power of order Virgil had what many Roman writers want, the power of variety. The narrative of the Aeneid is full of movement, succinct or ample according to the prominence intended to be given to its different parts. The various streams of action are kept separate, yet not too far apart to cause any confusion or forgetfulness when the time comes to unite them. There is at once weight and energy in the movement of the main current: it neither hurries nor flags, but advances for the most part steadily, 'quadam intentione gravitatis.' If it wants the buoyancy and vivacity of the narrative of Herodotus, it shows the concentrated energy which distinguishes the works of the great Roman historians. It brings before us rather a series of grave events, bearing on a great issue and following an inevitable course, than the vicissitudes of individual fortunes and the play of human pa.s.sions and impulses: and in this it is in accordance both with the actual history of Rome, and with the record of it contained in literature.

Virgil cannot be said to have failed either in the conception of his subject, in the collection and preparation of his materials, or in the art and faculty demanded for impressive narrative. Yet all feel that the Aeneid is much inferior to the Homeric poems in natural human interest, as it is much inferior in reflective interest to the greatest extant dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The poem, as a whole, produces the impression rather of careful construction than of organic growth. The reflexion employed on it is rather that of a critic applying artistic principles to impart unity to many heterogeneous materials, than that of an imaginative thinker, seeing his story unfold itself before him in the light of some great intuition into the secret meanings of life.

His inferiority to Homer in the power of making his story at once vividly real and n.o.bly ideal arises partly from an inferiority in his own temper, and partly from the inferior adaptability of the life of his own age to imaginative treatment. There is no trace in Virgil of that keen enjoyment of personal adventure and bodily activity which is present in every page of the Homeric poems. Virgil's materials are gathered from study and reflexion, not from strong and many-sided contact with life. Though he writes of 'arma virumque' with a Roman sense of the duty of disregarding danger and death, he has none of the 'delight of battle' which animates the Iliad and the poetical and prose romances of Scott. Neither does he make us feel that elevation of spirit in the presence of the danger of the sea, which the author of the Odyssey among ancient, and Byron among modern poets, communicate to their readers.

But the vast difference in manners, feelings, and modes of thought, between an early and a late age-between the spring and the autumn of ancient civilisation-presented still more insuperable obstacles to Virgil in his attempt to accomplish the work of Homer. In the first period imagination is the ruling faculty of life, the great impeller to action and discovery, the chief prompter both of hope and fear: and thus the movement and impulses of such an age readily yield themselves to imaginative treatment. Poets and dramatists of a later time who desire to represent life in its most energetic phase endeavour to reproduce some image of this early time by a constructive act of imagination. A dramatist may take the mere outline of some ancient legend and fill it with modern thought and sentiment. He is not called on for that realistic reproduction of manners and usages which an epic poet is expected to exhibit on his larger canvas. The difficulty which the latter has to meet is that of verifying by anything in his own experience the impression which he forms from the study of ancient art and records. Homer alone, by living the imaginative life of an earlier time, was able to represent that life in its truth, its fulness of being, its vivid sense of pleasure and pain. The age mirrored in the Homeric poems is the true age of romance and personal enterprise, when the individual acquires ascendency through his own qualities of strength, beauty, courage, force of mind, natural eloquence; when the world is regarded as the scene of supernatural agencies manifesting themselves in visible shape; when men live more in the open air than in houses and cities, and have to procure subsistence, comfort, and security by energy of body and the inventive resources of their minds; and when their hearts are alive to every natural emotion, not deadened by routine or enervated by excess of pleasure. Hence it is that all Homer's accounts of war and battles, of sea-adventure, of debates in the council of chiefs or in the a.s.semblies of the people, of games and contests of strength, are so full of living interest. Hence too comes the vivacity with which all the details of procuring food, the enjoyment of eating and drinking and sinking to sleep, the arming or clothing of heroes, the management of a s.h.i.+p at sea, the ordinary occupations of the hunter or the herdsman are described. To the same cause is due the truth and appropriateness of all the descriptions from Nature,-of the dawn and sunrise, of storms, of the gathering of clouds, of the constellations, of the stillness of night, of the habits of wild animals, of the more violent forces of the elements, of the omens which suddenly appear to men engaged in battle or a.s.sembled in council in the open air and awaiting a sign for their guidance.

An image of this Homeric life Virgil has to reproduce from the midst of a state of society utterly unlike it. The Augustan Age was pre-eminently an age of order and material civilisation, in which great results were produced, not by individual force, but by ma.s.ses and combinations of men directed by political sagacity and secret council; in which the life of the richer cla.s.s was pa.s.sed in great cities and luxurious villas; in which the comforts of life were abundantly supplied through the organisation of commerce and the ministrations of a mult.i.tude of slaves(559); in which the outward world was enjoyed as a beautiful spectacle rather than as a field of active exertion and personal adventure; in which the belief in the supernatural was fixed in imposing outward symbols, but was no longer a fresh source of wonder and expectation; an age too, in which the natural emotions of the heart and imagination were becoming deadened by satiety and the 'strenua inertia' of luxurious living.

The art of Virgil is thus powerless to produce a true image of the life and manners of the Homeric age. Yet he does surround the actors in his story with an environment of religious belief and observances, of political and social life, of material civilisation, of martial movement and sea-adventure, formed partly out of his poetical and antiquarian studies, partly out of the familiar spectacle of his own age, partly out of his personal sympathies and convictions. And this representation, though it necessarily wants the vital freshness and vigour of Homer's representation, has a peculiar dignity and charm of its own. It must be accepted as an artistic compromise, and not as the idealised picture of any life that has ever been realised in the world. It is one of the earliest and most interesting products of that kind of imagination which has in modern times created the literature of romance(560). The work in English poetry which comes most near to the Aeneid in the union of modern ethical and political feeling with the spectacle of the martial life and the ideas of the supernatural belonging to a much earlier time, is 'The Faery Queen(561):' though the allegorical meaning of that poem is as different as possible from the solid basis of fact-the marvellous career of Rome-on which the Aeneid is founded. Virgil produces much more than Spenser the illusion of a kind of life not absolutely withdrawn from mundane experience. The scenes through which he guides the personages of his story are the familiar places of central Italy, of Sicily, of the Greek islands, of the sh.o.r.es of Africa. These personages are engaged in important transactions, such as make up the actual history of early nations,-wars, alliances, intermarriages, and the like. Even the supernatural element in the poem produces the illusion, if not of conformity with the belief of men in the age in which the poem was written, yet of conformity with that stage in the whole growth and decomposition of ancient beliefs which, through the works of art and poetry, has made the deepest impression on the world. Thus if Virgil's representation of scenes, persons, incidents, modes of life, supernatural belief, etc. wants both the freshness and _navete_ of Homer and the ideality and exuberance of fancy characteristic of Spenser, it is yet a solid creation of the cla.s.sical mind, exercised for the first time on a great scale in bodying forth an imaginary foretime, peopling it with the personages of earlier art or of the poet's fancy, and filling up the outlines of tradition with the sentiment, the interests, and the ideas of the age in which the poem was written.

In addition to his great knowledge of antiquity and his gift of living in the creations of earlier art and poetry, Virgil possessed in his own imaginative const.i.tution elements of power which enabled him to give solidity and beauty to the world of his invention. Among these elements of power his feeling of religious awe, his sense of majesty investing the forms of government, his veneration for antiquity, his susceptibility to the a.s.sociations attaching to particular places, are conspicuous. His sympathy with the primary human affections suggests to him the details of many pathetic situations. He has a Roman admiration for courage, endurance, and magnanimous bearing. His refined perceptions, perfected by a life of studious culture and by familiarity with the social life of men inheriting the traditions of a great governing cla.s.s, enable him to make the various actors on his stage play their parts with grace and dignity.

By some of these sources of imaginative power Ennius also was moved in the composition of his epic. In that which is Virgil's strength, sympathy with the primary human affections, it would have been impossible for any poet who came after them to have surpa.s.sed Homer, Sophocles, or Lucretius. But in Homer this sympathy is combined with a sterner, in Sophocles with a severer mood. In Lucretius the feeling is identified with the general melancholy of his thought. The feeling of humanity in Virgil is as original and pervading as the feeling with which Nature affects him. From all these elements of inspiration, his imagination is able to body forth the world of his creation in the remote border-land of history and mythology, and to impart to it not only solidity and self-consistency, but also grandeur of outline and beauty of detail.

II.

The first general impression produced by reading the Aeneid immediately after reading the Iliad, is that the supernatural 'machinery,' consisting in a great degree of the agency of the Olympian G.o.ds in hindering or furthering the catastrophe, is the most imitative and conventional element in the poem. But a closer examination of its whole texture brings to light beneath the more conspicuous figures of the Homeric mythology, the presence of other modes of religious belief, feeling, and practice. And even the parts a.s.signed to the greater deities have been recast for the purposes of Virgil's epic. If these deities have lost much in vivacity and energy, they have gained in dignity of demeanour. The two most active amongst them are indeed as little scrupulous in the means they employ to attain their ends, as they show themselves in the Iliad. They are as regardless of individual happiness as they appear in some of the dramas of Euripides. And we cannot attribute to Virgil, what has been attributed to Euripides, the intention of bringing the objects of popular belief into disrepute(562). He seems to feel that they are above man's questioning; that it is for him 'parere quietum;' and that it is well with him if through long suffering he at last obtains reconciliation with them. But the Venus and Juno of the Aeneid are at least exempt from some of the lower appet.i.tes and more ferocious pa.s.sions with which they are animated in the Iliad. They have learned the tact and dissimulation of the life of an Imperial society. They are actuated by political rather than by personal pa.s.sions. They move with a certain Roman state and dignity of bearing-

pedes vestis defluxit ad imos Et vera incessu patuit dea.

Ast ego, quae Divom incedo regina(563).

The action of Juno in the Aeneid reminds us of the leading part taken by women in the political intrigues of the later Republic and early Empire; as by the ??p?? of Cicero's Letters, and the younger Agrippina in the pages of Tacitus. The 'mother of the Aeneadae' combines a subtlety of device and persistence of purpose with the charm which befits the ancestress of a family in which personal beauty, as is attested by many extant statues, was as conspicuous as force of intellect and of character.

The Jove of the Aeneid, though he appears without the outward signs of majesty which inspired the conception of the Pheidian Zeus, and though the part he plays in controlling the action appears somewhat tame, yet sometimes gives utterance to thoughts which recall the grave and steadfast attributes which the Romans reverenced under the t.i.tle of 'Iuppiter Stator,'-

Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempus Omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis Hoc virtutis opus(564).

Neptune comes forth to calm the storm raised by Aeolus not with the earth-shaking might with which he pa.s.sed from the heights of Samothrace to Aegae, nor in the radiant splendour in which he sped over the waves towards the s.h.i.+ps of the Achaeans, but with the calm and calming aspect made familiar in the plastic art of a later time-

alto Prospiciens summa placidum caput extulit unda(565).

Apollo is introduced taking part in the battle of Actium with something of the proud bearing which the greatest of his statues perpetuates-

Actius, haec cernens, arc.u.m intendebat Apollo Desuper(566).

And as an augury of this late help afforded to his descendant, he appears in the action of the poem as guiding the hand, and encouraging the spirit of the mythical ancestor of the Julii in his first initiation into battle-

Macte nova virtute, puer: sic itur ad astra, Dis genite, et geniture deos: iure omnia bella Gente sub a.s.saraci fato ventura resident: Nec te Troia capit(567).

Sympathy with the pure and heroic nature and the untimely death of Camilla introduces Diana to tell her early story and to express pity for her fate.

Mars appears only once aiding his own people against the foreign enemy(568). Mercury and Iris perform the customary part of messengers between heaven and earth. The Italian mythology contributes some of the few beings endowed with human personality which it produced. The creation of Egeria, of the Nymph Marica, and of the G.o.ddess Juturna was due to the same sentiment, a.s.sociated with lakes, rivers, and brooks, which gave birth to the Naiads and River-G.o.ds of Greek mythology. Of these Juturna alone, as the sister of the Italian hero of the poem, bears any part in the action; and as appearing in that personal human shape in which Greek imagination embodied its conception of deity, but from which Latin reverence for the most part shrank, she is represented as enjoying that doubtful t.i.tle to distinction which made the innumerable heroines of the Greek mythology a 'theme of song to men'-

Extemplo Turni sic est adfata sororem, Diva deam, stagnis quae fluminibusque sonoris Praesidet: hunc illi rex aetheris altus honorem Iuppiter erepta pro virginitate sacravit(569).

Of the other powers of the Italian mythology Faunus is introduced(570) in accordance with the national conception of an undefined invisible agency guiding the conduct of men by means of omens and oracles. And in accordance with the euhemerism which suited the prosaic bent of the Latin mind, the native deities Saturnus, Ja.n.u.s, and Picus appear as a line of kings, who lived and reigned in Latium before a.s.suming their place in the ranks of the G.o.ds.

The ordinary modes in which the divine personages of Virgil's story take part in the action are suggested by incidents in the Homeric poems or Hymns, and, apparently in some instances, by the parts a.s.signed to them in the dramas of Euripides. Thus the office performed by Venus in telling the story of Dido previous to the landing of Aeneas on the sh.o.r.es of Africa, and by Diana in telling the romantic incidents of Camilla's childhood, may have been suggested by the prologues to the Hippolytus, the Bacchae, and the Alcestis. But other manifestations of supernatural agency, and those not the least impressive, are due to Virgil's own invention, and are inspired by that sense of awe with which the thought of the invisible world affects his imagination. Juvenal, when contrasting the comfort which enabled Virgil to do justice to his genius with the poverty of the poets of his own time, selects as an instance of his imaginative power the pa.s.sage in the Seventh Book of the Aeneid which describes the terror inspired by Allecto. And certainly the whole description of the appearance of the Fury on earth, from the time when she enters the palace of Latinus till she disappears among the woods which add to the gloom of the black torrent of Amsanctus, is full of energy. So too is the brief description of Juno completing the work of her agent-one of many pa.s.sages of which the solemn effect is enhanced by the use of the language of Ennius-

Tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis Impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine verso Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postes(571).

Another pa.s.sage in which the appearance of the Olympian deities produces the impression of awe and sublimity is that in which Venus reveals herself to her son in her divine proportions-

confessa deam, qualisque videri Caelicolis et quanta solet(572)-

and, by removing the mist intervening between his mortal sight and the reality of things, displays the forms of Neptune, Juno, Jove himself, and Pallas engaged in the overthrow of Troy,-

Apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae Numina magna deum(573).