Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/276

Rh 254 V I R G I L national epic, and this explains the large part played in the develop- nient of the action by special revelation, omens, prophecies, cere monial usages, and prayer. But, while the predominant religious idea of the poem is that of a divine purpose carried out regardlessly of human feeling, in other parts of the poem, and especially in that passage of the sixth book in which Virgil tries to formulate his deepest convictions on individual destiny, the agency of fate seems to yield to that of a spiritual dispensation, awarding to men their portions according to their actions. The idealization of Augustus is no expression of servile adulation. It is through the prominence assigned to him that the poem is truly representative of the critical epoch in human affairs at which it was written. The cardinal fact of that epoch was the substitution of personal rule for the rule of the old commonwealth over the Roman world. Virgil shows the imaginative significance of that fact by revealing the emperor as chosen from of old in the counsels of the supreme ruler of the world to fulfil the national destiny, as the descendant of gods and of heroes of old poetic renown, as one, moreover, who, in the actual work done by him, as victor in a great decisive battle between the forces of the Western and the Eastern world, as the organizer of empire and restorer of peace, order, and religion, had rendered better service to mankind than any one of the heroes who in an older time had been raised for their great deeds to the company of the gods. Virgil s true and yet idealizing interpretation of the imperial idea of Rome, in its national, religious, and personal significance, is the basis of the monumental greatness of the &ncid as a represent ative poem. It is on this representative character and on the excellence of its artistic execution that the claim of the ^Eneid to rank as one of the great poems of the world mainly rests. The inferiority of the poem to the Iliad and the Odyssey as a direct representation of human life is so unquestionable that we are in greater danger of underrating than of overrating the real though secondary interest which the poem possesses as an imitative epic of human action, manners, and character. What are the main sources of human interest in the poem can only be briefly indicated. 1 11 the first place, the action is chosen not only as suited to embody the idea of Rome and the dominant sentiment of a great and critical epoch in human affairs, but as having a peculiar nobleness and dignity of its own. It brings before us the spectacle, but restored by the light of a romantic imagination cast upon dim traditions, of the destruction of the city of greatest name in poetry or legend, the supposed seat of a prehistoric empire, of the foundation of the imperial city of the AVestern seas, in which Rome had encountered her most powerful and dangerous antagonist in the whole course of her long struggle for supremacy, and that of the first rude settle ment on the hills of Rome itself. The scenes through which the action is carried are familiar, yet full of great memories and associ ations, Troy and its neighbourhood, the seas and islands of Greece, the coasts of Epirus, familiar to all travellers between Italy and the East, Sicily, the site of Carthage, Campania, Latium, the Tiber, and all the country within sight of Rome. The personages of the action are prominent in poetry and legend, or by their ethnical names stir the sentiment of national enthusiasm, /Eneas and Anchises, Dido, Acestes, Evander, Turnus. The spheres of activity in which they are engaged are war and sea-adventure, the themes of the oldest and greatest of epic poems. The passion of love, which had played a great part in Attic tragedy and in the epic and elegiac poets of Alexandria, is a powerful addition to the older sources of interest which Virgil derives from the Homeric poems. The ^Eneid, like the Alexandrian epic, revives, by a conventional compromise be tween the present and the remote past, some image of the old romance of Greece; it creates the romance of &quot;that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds.&quot; It might be said of the manner of life represented in the jE twiil, that it is no more true to any actual condition of human society than that represented in the Eclogues. But may not the same be said of all idealizing restoration of a remote past in an age of advanced civilization ? The life represented in the (Edipus Tijrannus or in King Lear is not the life of the Periclean nor of the Elizabethan age, nor is it conceivable as the real life of a prehistoric age. The truth of such a representation is to be judged, not by its relation to any actual state of things ever realized in the world, but by its relation to an ideal of the imagination, the ideal conception of how man, endowed with the gifts and graces of a civilized time, but who had not yet lost the youthful buoyancy of a more primitive age, might play his part under circumstances which would afford scope for the passions and activities of a vigorous personality, and for the refined emotions and subtle reflexion of an era of high intellectual and moral cultivation. The verdict of most readers of the ^Eneid will be that Virgil docs not satisfy this condi tion, as it is satisfied by Sophocles and Shakespeare. Yet there is a considerable attraction in the compromise which Virgil has pro duced between the life which he knew by experience and that which he saw in the past of his imagination. There is a courtesy, dignity, and consideration for the feelings of others in the manners of his chief personages, such as might be exhibited by the noblest and most commanding natures in an age of chivalry and in an age of culture. The charm of primitive simplicity is present in some passages of the dSncid, the spell of luxurious pomp in others. The actual delight of voyaging past beautiful islands, familiar to travellers in the Augustan age, is enhanced by the suggestion of the adventurous spirit which sent the first explorers abroad in search of unknown settlements. Where Virgil is least real, and least successfully ideal, and where consequently he is most purely imitative, is in the battle-scenes of the later books. They afford scope, however, to his patriotic desire to do justice to the martial energy of the Italian races ; and some of them have a peculiar beauty from the pathos with which the death of some of the more interesting personages of his story is described. But the adverse criticisms of the ^fincid are chiefly based on Virgil s supposed failure in the crucial test of a great poem of action, the creation of character. And his chief failure is pro nounced to be in the protagonist of the poem, the &quot;pious JEneas.&quot; Is this charge true? Is /Eneas a worthy and interesting hero of a great poem of action ? Not, certainly, according to the ideals realized in Achilles and Odysseus, nor according to the modern ideal of gallant and adventurous heroism. A blameless character, patiently enduring much suffering, cannot arouse the same personal interest as a more energetic and impulsive character, relying on his own resources, and stirred by ordinary human passions. It is well said of j^neas by a French critic &quot;Sa vertti doit etre une haute et froide impersonalite, qni fasse de lui non un liommc mais un instrument des dieux.&quot; Virgil wishes to hold up in ^Eneas an ideal of pious obedience, steadfast endurance, persistent purpose, a religious ideal belonging to the ages of faith combined with the humane and self-sacrificing qualities belonging to an era of moral enlightenment. The virtues of the natural man chivalry and daring courage he represents in Turnus. His own sympathy is with his religious ideal rather than with that which better satisfies modern sentiment, nursed on the traditions of chivalrous romance. Yet that there was in his own imagination, more than in that ( i any other Roman writer, a chord responsive to the chivalrous emotion of a later time is seen in the love and pathos which he lias thrown into his delineations of Pallas, Lansus, and Camilla. But, with all his sympathies with the &quot; Itala virtus &quot; the martial virtues of the old Italian race and the martial prowess of Rome, he felt that the deepest need of his time was not military glory, but peace, reconciliation, the restoration of law, order, and piety. Among the personages of the jEncid the only one which entitles Virgil to rank among great creators is Dido, an ideal of a true queen and a true woman. She is the sole creation which Roman poetry has added to the great gallery of men and women filled by the imaginative art of different times and peoples. There are the out lines of a great creation in Mezentius; but Dido alone is a life-like and completed picture. On the episode of which she is the heroine the most passionate human interest is concentrated. It has been objected that Virgil does not really sympathize with his own creation, that he gives his approval to the cold desertion of her by her &quot;false friend.&quot; Whether he sympathizes with his own creation or not, he is entirely possessed by it. If he docs not con demn his hero, he sees in the desertion and death of Dido a great tragic issue in which a noble and generous nature is sacrificed to the larger purpose of the gods. But that Virgil really sympathized with the creation of his imagination appears, not only in the sym pathy which she still inspires, but in the part which he assigns to her in that shadowy realm in which he conceives that the &quot;world s great wrongs &quot; are at last righted &quot;Conjunx iibi pristimis illi Respomlet cm-is, aequatque Sychosus amorem.&quot; Even those who have been insensible to the representative and to the human interest of the sEneid have generally recognized the artistic excellence of the poem. This is conspicuous both in the conception of the action and the arrangement of its successive stages and in the workmanship of details. In variety of interest and finish of execution the first eight books are superior to the last four. Each of the former has a large and distinct sphere of interest, and they each contribute to the impression of the work as a whole. In the first book we have the interest of the storm, of the prophecy of Jove, and of the building of Carthage ; in the second the spectacle of the destruction of Troy ; in the third the voyage among the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean ; in the fourth the tragedy of Dido ; in the fifth the rest in the Sicilian bay, at the foot of Mount Eryx ; in the sixth the revelation of the spiritual world of Virgil s imagination, and of the souls of those who built up the greatness of Rome in their pre-existent state, in their shadowy dwelling-place ; in the seventh the arrival of the Trojans at the mouth of the Tiber and the gathering of the Italian clans ; in the eighth the first sight of the hills of Rome, and the prophetic representation of the great crises in Roman history, leading up to the greatest of them all, the crowning victory of Actium. Among these books we may infer that Virgil assigned the palm to the second, the fourth, and the sixth, as he selected them to read to Augustus and tlu members of the imperial family. The interest flags iu the last