Stray Studies from England and Italy Part 6

From beginning to end the aeneid is a song of Rome. Throughout it we feel ourselves drawing nearer and nearer to that sense of the Roman greatness which filled the soul of Vergil; with him in verse after verse "tendimus in Latium." Nowhere does the song rise to a higher grandeur than when the singer sings the majesty of that all-embracing empire, the wide peace of the world beneath its sway. But the aeneid is no mere outburst of Roman pride. To Vergil the time in which he lived was at once an end and a beginning, a close of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to be the mistress of the world, an opening of her new and mightier career as a reconciler and leader of the nations. His song is broken by divine prophecies, not merely of Roman greatness, but of the work Rome had to do in warring down the rebels against her universal sway, in showing clemency to the conquered, in binding hostile peoples together, in welding the nations into a new human race. The aeneid is a song of the future rather than of the present or past, a song not of pride but of duty. The work that Rome has done points throughout to the n.o.bler work which Rome has yet to do. And in the very forefront of this dream of the future Vergil sets the ideal of the new Roman by whom this mighty task shall be wrought, the picture of one who by loyalty to a higher purpose had fitted himself to demand loyalty from those whom he ruled, one who by self-mastery had learned to be master of men.

It is this thought of self-mastery which is the key to the aeneid. Filled as he is with a sense of the greatness of Rome, the mood of Vergil seems constantly to be fluctuating between a pathetic consciousness of the toils and self-devotion, the suffering and woe, that run through his national history and the final greatness which they bought. His poem draws both these impressions together in the figure of aeneas. aeneas is the representative of that "piety," that faith in his race and in his destiny, which had drawn the Roman from his little settlement on the hills beside Tiber to a vast empire "beyond the Garamantians and the Indians." All the endurance, the suffering, the patriotism, the self-devotion of generation after generation is incarnate in him. It is by his mouth that in the darkest hours of national trial Roman seems to say to Roman, "O pa.s.si graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem." It is to this "end" that the wanderings of aeneas, like the labours of consul and dictator, inevitably tend, and it is the firm faith in such a close that gives its peculiar character to the pathos of the aeneid.

Rome is before us throughout, "per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in Latium." It is not as a mere tale of romance that we follow the wanderings of "the man who first came from Trojan sh.o.r.es to Italy." They are the sacrifice by which the father of the Roman race wrought out the greatness of his people, the toils he endured "dum conderet urbem."

"Italiam quaero patriam" is the key-note of the aeneid, but the Quest of aeneas is no self-sought quest of his own. "Italiam non sponte sequor,"

he pleads as Dido turns from him in the Elysian Fields with eyes of speechless reproach. He is the chosen instrument of a Divine purpose working out its ends alike across his own buffetings from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e or the love-tortures of the Phoenician Queen. The memorable words that aeneas addresses to Dares, "Cede Deo," "bend before a will higher as well as stronger than thine own," are in fact the faith of his own career.

But it is in this very submission to the Divine order that he himself soars into greatness. The figure of the warrior who is so insignificant in the Homeric story of the fight around Troy becomes that of a hero in the horror of its capture. aeneas comes before us the survivor of an immense fall, sad with the sadness of lost home and slaughtered friends, not even suffered to fall amidst the wreck, but driven forth by voices of the Fates to new toils and a distant glory. He may not die; his "moriamur" is answered by the reiterated "Depart" of the G.o.ds, the "Heu, fuge!" of the shade of Hector. The vision of the great circle of the G.o.ds fighting against Troy drives him forth in despair to a life of exile, and the carelessness of despair is over him as he drifts from land to land. "Sail where you will," he cries to his pilot, "one land is as good as another now Troy is gone." More and more indeed as he wanders he recognizes himself as the agent of a Divine purpose, but all personal joy in life has fled. Like Dante he feels the bitterness of exile, how hard it is to climb another's stairs, how bitter to eat is another's bread. Here and there he meets waifs and strays of the great wreck, fugitives like himself, but who have found a refuge and a new Troy on foreign sh.o.r.es. He greets them, but he may not stay. At last the very G.o.ds themselves seem to give him the pa.s.sionate love of Dido, but again the fatal "Depart" tears him from her arms. The chivalrous love of Pallas casts for a moment its light and glory round his life, but the light and glory sink into gloom again beneath the spear of Turnus. aeneas is left alone with his destiny to the very end, but it is a destiny that has grown into a pa.s.sion that absorbs the very life of the man.

"Italiam magnam Grynaeus Apollo, Italiam Lyciae jussere capessere sortes.

Hic amor, haec patria est!"

It is in the hero of the Idylls and not in the hero of the Iliad that we find the key to such a character as this. So far is Vergil from being the mere imitator of Homer that in spite of his close and loving study of the older poem its temper seems to have roused him only to poetic protest. He recoils from the vast personality of Achilleus, from that incarnate "wrath," heedless of divine purposes, measuring itself boldly with the G.o.ds, careless as a G.o.d of the fate and fortunes of men. In the face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a founder of cities and peoples, self-forgetful, patient, loyal to a divine aim, calm with a Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of pa.s.sion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of reverence, of "piety."

It is in realizing the temper of the poem that we realize the temper of its hero. aeneas is the Arthur of the Vergilian epic, with the same absorption of all individuality in the n.o.bleness of his purpose, the same undertone of melancholy, the same unearthly vagueness of outline and remoteness from the meaner interests and pa.s.sions of men. As the poet of our own day has embodied his ideal of manhood in the king, so Vergil has embodied it in the hero-founder of his race. The temper of aeneas is the highest conception of human character to which the old world ever attained. The virtues of the Homeric combatants are there: courage, endurance, wisdom in council, eloquence, chivalrous friends.h.i.+p, family affection, faith to plighted word; but with these mingle virtues unknown to Hector or Achilleus, temperance, self-control, n.o.bleness and unselfishness of aim, loyalty to an inner sense of right, the piety of self-devotion and self-sacrifice, refinement of feeling, a pure and delicate sense of the sweetness of woman's love, pity for the fallen and the weak.

In the Homeric picture Achilleus sits solitary in his tent, bound as it were to the affections of earth by the one tie of his friends.h.i.+p for Patroclos. No figure has ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible in the loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge. But from one end of his song to the other Vergil has surrounded aeneas with the ties and affections of home. In the awful night with which his story opens the loss of Creusa, the mocking embrace in which the dead wife flies from his arms, form his farewell to Troy. "Thrice strove I there to clasp my arms about her neck,"--everyone knows the famous lines:--

"Thrice I essayed her neck to clasp, Thrice the vain semblance mocked my grasp, As wind or slumber light."

Amid all the terror of the flight from the burning city the figure of his child starts out bright against the darkness, touched with a tenderness which Vergil seems to reserve for his child-pictures.[2] But the whole escape is the escape of a family. Not merely child and wife, but father and household accompany aeneas. Life, he tells them when they bid him leave them to their fate, is worthless without them; and the "commune periclum, una salus" runs throughout all his wanderings. The common love of his boy is one of the bonds that link Dido with aeneas, and a yet more exquisite touch of poetic tenderness makes his affection for Ascanius the one final motive for his severance from the Queen. Not merely the will of the G.o.ds drives him from Carthage, but the sense of the wrong done to his boy.[3] His friends.h.i.+p is as warm and constant as his love for father or child. At the two great crises of his life the thought of Hector stirs a new outpouring of pa.s.sionate regret. It is the vision of Hector which rouses him from the slumber of the terrible night when Troy is taken; the vision of the hero not as glorified by death, but as the memory of that last pitiful sight of the corpse dragged at the chariot wheels of Achilleus had stamped it for ever on the mind of his friend. It is as though all recollection of his greatness had been blotted out by the shame and terror of his fall ("quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore!"), but the gory hair and the mangled form only quicken the pa.s.sionate longing of aeneas.[4] The tears, the "mighty groan," burst forth again as in the tapestry of the Sidonian temple he sees pictured anew the story of Hector's fall. In the hour of his last combat the thought of his brother-in-arms returns to him, and the memory of Hector is the spur to n.o.bleness and valour which he bequeaths to his boy.

But throughout it is this refinement of feeling, this tenderness and sensitiveness to affection, that Vergil has loved to paint in the character of aeneas. To him Dido's charm lies in her being the one pitying face that has as yet met his own. Divine as he is, the child, like Achilleus, of a G.o.ddess, he broods with a tender melancholy over the sorrows of his fellow-men. "Sunt lacrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the aeneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of aeneas. Like the poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still."[5] He stands utterly apart from those epical heroes "that delight in war." The joy in sheer downright fighting which rings through Homer is wholly absent from the aeneid.

Stirring and picturesque as is "The gathering of the Latin Clans,"

brilliant as is the painting of the last combat with Turnus, we feel everywhere the touch of a poet of peace. Nothing is more noteworthy than the careful exclusion of the Roman cruelty, the Roman ambition, from the portrait of aeneas. Vergil seems to protest in his very hero against the poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. On the eve of his final triumph, aeneas

"incusat voce Latinum; Testaturque deos iteram se ad proelia cogi."

Even when host is marshalled against host the thought of reconciliation is always kept steadily to the front, and the bitter cry of the hero asks in the very hour of the combat why bloodshed should divide peoples who are destined to be one.

It is the conflict of these two sides of the character of aeneas, the struggle between this sensitiveness to affection and his entire absorption in the mysterious destiny to which he is called, between his clinging to human ties and his readiness to forsake all and follow the divine voice which summons him, the strife in a word between love and duty, which gives its meaning and pathos to the story of aeneas and Dido.

Attractive as it undoubtedly is, the story of Dido is in the minds of nine modern readers out of ten fatal to the effect of the aeneid as a whole. The very beauty of the tale is partly the cause of this. To the schoolboy and to thousands who are schoolboys no longer the poem is nothing more than the love story of the Trojan leader and the Tyrian queen. Its human interest ends with the funeral fires of Dido, and the books which follow are read merely as ingenious displays of the philosophic learning, the antiquarian research, and the patriotism of Vergil. But the story is yet more directly fatal in the way in which it cuts off the hero himself from modern sympathies. His desertion of Dido makes, it has been said, "an irredeemable poltroon of him in all honest English eyes." Dryden can only save his character by a jest, and Rousseau d.a.m.ns it with an epigram. Mr. Keble supposes that in the interview among the Shades the poet himself intended the abas.e.m.e.nt of his hero, and Mr. Gladstone has capped this by a theory that Vergil meant to draw his readers' admiration, not to aeneas but to Turnus.

It is wiser perhaps to turn from the impressions of Vergil's critics to the impression which the story must have left in the mind of Vergil himself. It is surely needless to a.s.sume that the first of poetic artists has forgotten the very rudiments of his art in placing at the opening of his song a figure which strips all interest from his hero.

Nor is it needful to believe that such a blunder has been unconscious, and that Vergil has had to learn the true effect of his episode on the general texture of his poem from the reader of to-day. The poet who paints for us the character of Dido must have felt, ere he could have painted it, that charm which has ever since bewitched the world. Every nerve in Vergil must have thrilled at the consummate beauty of this woman of his own creation, her self-abandonment, her love, her suffering, her despair. If he deliberately uses her simply as a foil to the character of aeneas it is with a perception of this charm infinitely deeper and tenderer than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse, pa.s.sion, the mighty energies of unbridled will are wrought up into a figure of unequalled beauty, and then set against the true manhood of the founder and type of Rome, the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of self-control.

To the stoicism of Vergil, steadied by a high sense of man's worth and work in the world, braced to patience and endurance for n.o.ble ends, pa.s.sion--the revolt of the individual self against the world's order--seemed a light and trivial thing. He could feel and paint with exquisite delicacy and fire the charm of woman's utter love; but woman with all her loveliness wanted to him the grandeur of man's higher constancy to an unselfish purpose, "varium et mutabile semper foemina."

Pa.s.sion on the other hand is the mainspring of modern poetry, and it is difficult for us to realize the superior beauty of the calmer and vaster ideal of the poets of old. The figure of Dido, whirled hither and thither by the storms of warring emotions, reft even of her queenly dignity by the despair of her love, degraded by jealousy and disappointment to a very scold, is to the calm, serene figure of aeneas as modern sculpture, the sculpture of emotion, is to the sculpture of cla.s.sic art. Each, no doubt, has its own peculiar beauty, and the work of a true criticism is to view either from its own standpoint and not from the standpoint of its rival. But if we would enter into the mind of Vergil we must view Dido with the eyes of aeneas and not aeneas with the eyes of Dido.

When Vergil first sets the two figures before us, it is not on the contrast but on the unity of their temper and history that he dwells.

Touch after touch brings out this oneness of mood and aim as they drift towards one another. The same weariness, the same unconscious longing for rest and love, fills either heart. It is as a queen, as a Dian over-topping her nymphs by the head, that Dido appears on the scene, distributing their task to her labourers as a Roman Cornelia distributed wool to her house-slaves, questioning the Trojan strangers who sought her hospitality and protection. It is with the brief, haughty tone of a ruler of men that she bids them lay by their fears and a.s.sures them of shelter. Around her is the hum and stir of the city-building, a scene in which the sharp, precise touches of Vergil betray the hand of the town-poet. But within is the lonely heart of a woman. Dido, like aeneas, is a fugitive, an exile of bitter, vain regrets. Her husband, "loved with a mighty love," has fallen by a brother's hand; and his ghost, like that of Creusa, has driven her in flight from her Tyrian fatherland.

Like aeneas too she is no solitary wanderer; she guides a new colony to the site of the future Carthage as he to the site of the future Rome.

When aeneas stands before her, it is as a wanderer like herself. His heart is bleeding at the loss of Creusa, of Helen, of Troy. He is solitary in his despair. He is longing for the touch of a human hand, the sound of a voice of love. He is weary of being baffled by the ghostly embraces of his wife, by the cloud that wraps his mother from his view. He is weary of wandering, longing with all the old-world intensity of longing for a settled home. "O fortunati quorum jam moenia surgunt," he cries as he looks on the rising walls of Carthage. His gloom has been lightened indeed by the a.s.surance of his fame which he gathers from the pictures of the great Defence graven on the walls of the Tyrian temple. But the loneliness and longing still press heavily on him when the cloud which has wrapt him from sight parts suddenly asunder, and Dido and aeneas stand face to face.

Few situations in poetry are more artistic than this meeting of aeneas and the Queen in its suddenness and picturesqueness. A love born of pity speaks in the first words of the hero,[6] and the reply of Dido strikes the same sympathetic note.[7] But the fervour of pa.s.sion is soon to supersede this compa.s.sionate regard. Love himself in the most exquisite episode of the aeneid takes the place of Ascanius; while the Trojan boy lies sleeping on Ida, lapped on Earth's bosom beneath the cool mountain shade, his divine "double" lies clasped to Dido's breast, and pours his fiery longings into her heart. Slowly, unconsciously, the lovers draw together. The grat.i.tude of aeneas is still at first subordinate to his quest. "Thy name and praise shall live," he says to Dido, "whatever lands call me." In the same way, though the Queen's generosity has shown itself in her first offer to the sailors ("urbem quam statuo vestra est"), it is still generosity and not pa.s.sion. Pa.s.sion is born in the long night through which, with Eros still folded in her arms, Dido listens to the "Tale of Troy."

The very verse quickens with the new pulse of love. The preface of the aeneid, the stately introduction that fortells the destinies of Rome and the divine end to which the fates were guiding aeneas, closes in fact with the appearance of Dido. The poem takes a gayer and lighter tone.

The disguise and recognition of Venus as she appears to her son, the busy scene of city-building, the sudden revelation of aeneas to the Queen, have the note of exquisite romance. The honey-sweet of the lover's tale, to use the poet's own simile,[8] steals subtly on the graver epic. Step by step Vergil leads us on through every stage of pity, of fancy, of reverie, of restlessness, of pa.s.sion, to the fatal close. None before him had painted the thousand delicate shades of love's advance; none has painted them more tenderly, more exquisitely since. As the Queen listens to the tale of her lover's escape she showers her questions as one that could never know enough.

"Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa."

Her pa.s.sion feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sychaeus seems to revive in and blend with this new affection.[9] Her very queenliness delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero before whom she falls "one of the race of the G.o.ds." For a while the figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate pa.s.sion. The rumours of war from the jealous chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers round her hero with sweet observances of love, she hangs at his side the jewelled sword and the robe of Tyrian purple woven by her queenly hands.

But even in the happiest moments of his story the consummate art of the poet has prepared for the final catastrophe. Little words, like "misera," "infelix," "fati nescia," sound the first undertones of a woe to come, even amidst the joy of the first meeting or the glad tumult of the hunting-scene. The restlessness, the quick alternations of feeling in the hour of Dido's triumph, prepare us for the wild swaying of the soul from bitterest hate to pitiful affection in the hour of her agony.

She is the first in the sensitiveness of her pa.s.sion to catch the change in aeneas, and the storm of her indignation sweeps away the excuses of her lover, as the storm of her love had swept away his earlier resolve.

All dignity, all queenliness breaks before the "fury of a woman scorned." She dashes herself against the rooted purpose of aeneas as the storm-winds, to use Vergil's image, dash themselves from this quarter and that against the rooted oak. The madness of her failure drives her through the streets like a Maenad in the nightly orgies of Cithaeron; she flies at last to her chamber like a beast at bay, and gazes out distracted at the Trojan s.h.i.+pmen putting off busily from the sh.o.r.es. Yet ever and again the wild frenzy-bursts are broken by notes of the old pathetic tenderness. In the midst of her taunts and menaces she turns with a woman's delicacy to protest against her own violence, "heu, furiis incensa feror!" She humbles herself even to pray for a little respite, if but for a few hours.[10] She pleads her very loneliness; she catches as it were from aeneas the thought of the boy whose future he had pleaded as one cause of his departure and finds in it a plea for pity.

Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech; she can only answer with those "speechless eyes" with which her shade was once more to meet aeneas in the Elysian fields. But her wonderful energy forbids her to lie, like weaker women, crushed in her despair. She hurries her sister to the feet of her lover that nothing may be left untried. From the first she stakes her life on the issue; it is as one "about to die" that she prays aeneas not to leave her. When all has failed and hope itself deserts her the weariness of life gathers round and she "tires of the sight of day."

Never have the mighty energies of unbridled human will been wrought up into a form of more surpa.s.sing beauty; never have they been set more boldly and sharply against the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of self-control. If the tide of Dido's pa.s.sion sweeps away for the moment the consciousness of a divine mission which has borne aeneas to the Tyrian sh.o.r.e, the consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man and revives at the new call of the G.o.ds. The call bids him depart at once; and without a struggle he "burns to depart." He stamps down and hides within the deep recesses of his heart the "care" that the wild entreaties of the woman he loved arouse within him; the life that had swung for an hour out of its course returns to its old bearings; once more Italy and his destiny become aim and fatherland, "hic amor, haec patria est." aeneas bows to the higher will, and from that moment all that has turned him from his course is of the past. Dido becomes a part of his memory as of the things that were.[11]

aeneas is as "resolute to depart" as Dido is "resolute to die." And in both the resolve lifts the soul out of its lower pa.s.sion-life into a n.o.bler air. The queen rises into her old queenliness as she pa.s.ses "majestic to the grave;" and her last curse as the Tyrian s.h.i.+ps quit her sh.o.r.e is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied woman; it is the mighty curse of the founder of a people calling down on the Roman race ages of inextinguishable hate. "Fight sh.o.r.e with sh.o.r.e: fight sea with sea!" is the prophecy of that struggle with Carthage which all but wrecked for a moment the destinies of Rome. But Vergil saw in the character of Dido herself a danger to Rome's future far greater than the sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of Rome's destinies frees him from the vulgar self-confidence of meaner men. Throughout his poem he is haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of instability which clings to men who have grown up in the midst of revolutions. The grandest picture in the aeneid reflects the terror of that hour of suspense when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the galleys of Antony. From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Pa.s.sion, greed, lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome. More and more, as the Roman peace drew the world together, the temper of the East, the temper which Vergil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would tell and tell fatally on the temper of the West. Orontes--to borrow Juvenal's phrase--was already flowing into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, the geniality, the pa.s.sionate flush and impulse of the conquered.

It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the colder "piety" of Caesar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new Rome, the aeneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war had brought her into quiet waters and bound warring factions into a peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later, the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work to be done, which lifted the cold, pa.s.sionless Imperator into greatness.

It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended, whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor, there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the G.o.ds"

were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the n.o.blest pa.s.sages of the aeneid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew faith in the fortunes of Rome from his own enthusiasm, but to him too the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his moral faith. aeneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern resolve after n.o.bleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of the world.

A n.o.ble stoicism breathes in the character of aeneas, the virtue of the virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it.

"Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid Usquam Just.i.tia est et mens sibi conscia recti, Praemia digna ferant!"

The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness, but through them we feel the doubt whether, after all, uprightness and a good conscience were really the object of a divine care. Heaven had flown further off from earth than in the days of the Iliad. The laws of the universe, as time had revealed them, the current of human affairs, the very might of the colossal Empire in which the world of civilization found itself prisoned, all seemed to be dwarfing man. Man remained, the sad stern manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes through the character of aeneas, enduring, baffled, yet full of a faith that the very storms that drove him from sea to sea were working out some mysterious and divine order. Man was greater than his fate:--

"Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur, Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est."

There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words with which aeneas addresses himself to his final combat:--

"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, Fortunam ex aliis."

But the "dis aliter visum" meets us at every step. Ripheus is the most just and upright among the warriors of Troy, but he is the first to fall. An inscrutable mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men of harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and like Augustus repeat their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take life in earnest. n.o.bler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that flings its sad grace over the verse of the aeneid. We close it as we close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of n.o.bler, sterner tone than the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the greatness and welfare of the race. We pity, the wandering of aeneas, but his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark boat dies into a dot upon the mere; the dream of aeneas becomes Rome.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] "Dextrae se parvus Iulus Implicuit, sequiturque patrem non pa.s.sibus aequis."

"His steps scarce matching with my stride."

Mr. Conington's translation hardly renders the fond little touch of the Vergilian phrase, a phrase only possible to a lover of children.

[3] "Me puer Ascanius, capitisque injuria cari, Quem regno Hesperiae fraudo et fatalibus arvis."

[4] "Quibus Hector ab oris Expectate venis?"

[5] "Cur dextrae jungere dextram Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"

[6] "O sola infandos Trojae miserata labores."

[7] "Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco."