Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/583

Rh tionally capable of dramatizing the Aeneas-Dido situation. To me, Dido is far more real and charming when Aeneas meets her afterwards in Hades and she listens silent to his excuses with her eyes upon the ground and when he has finished simply runs unfriendly away to the wood where her first husband will comfort her.

And this illustrates the peculiar vein in which Virgil was particularly successful—the vein of the lacrimae rerum, of the deep sadness in all mortal life which "moves the mind." In this elegiac mood, which seems to have represented his most natural and his habitual poetical reaction to life, he writes not narrative, but music; he takes an incident or a figure and diffuses it into exquisite cadences of tenderness; the theme is dissolved like the shapes of a dream into the emotion of the poet. Dido in life is unconvincing; among the shades she is lovely. And Palinurus, even before he reaches Hades and in relating the simple story of his death seems to breathe the pathos of the frustration of all human endeavour, moves already in the vagueness of a dream—all alone on the sleeping sea, tempted softly between sleeping and waking by the bodiless voices of the night. What is most moving, most felt, in the Eclogues?—the eviction of the Mantuan farmers—Nunc victi, tristes, quoniam Fors omnia versat What is most memorable in the Georgics?—a poem which is supposed to have been written as a glorification of the country, a piece of officially inspired propaganda for a back-to-the-land movement. Not, to my taste at any rate, the conscientious exaltation of Bacchus nor the elegant and rather conventional "O fortunatos nimium" passage; in this latter he speaks of the "secura quies et nescia fallere vita," but the net effect of his poem is to make you feel with extreme poignancy that the country life like any other both deceives and fails mankind. It is a sad struggle to wring a living from Nature: the sun dries up your crops; your orchards catch fire and burn down; your cattle get stung by snakes or are wiped out by the plague. All the greatest things in the Georgics are tragic: the description of northern Italy laid waste with the cattle-plague—desertaque regna Pastorum, et longe saltus lateque vacantes; the magnificent passage about the civil wars with its prayer to the gods for peace and the pathos and longing of its vision of the quiet farmer some day turning up with his plough the naked bones and the