“A talent is formed in stillness,” said Goethe, “a character in the stream of the world.” That is the romantic view; the Greeks of the great age would have violently disagreed. The stream of the world was to them precisely the place to develop the artist, the classical artist, whose eyes are ever turned upon life. But it is not the place to develop the imagination. The romantic artist withdraws from the busy haunts of men to some fair and tranquil retreat, in Sicilian meadows, or by the deep blue sea of the south, or on the hillslope of an English lake, where he may see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight. Alone of the Augustan poets Virgil had no love for life in Rome. During all the years that he wrote he lived in the country, near the Bay of Naples. Even Augustus, who cared much for him and recognized early his genius, was unable to persuade him to do more than make brief visits to the capital.
Very little is known about him. His home was near Mantua and he lost it as Horace did his after the republican cause was defeated. In Naples they called him “the maiden,” for his purity of life, some said, others, for his gentleness, and it may be both had a share in the nickname. He went once to Greece and Horace wrote a poem to the ship that carried so precious a burden. One account is that he died on the way home, another, that this happened after a second voyage. Our gossip, Aulus Gellius, tells at length how on his death bed he begged his friends to burn the Æneid, “because,” Gellius says, “those parts which he left perfected and polished enjoy the highest praise for poetical beauty, but those which he was unable to revise because he was overtaken by death are not worthy of the taste of the most elegant of poets.” Augustus is said to have prevented this last wish from being fulfilled. The point of the story is, of course, the intense desire it shows on Virgil’s part for perfected finish, and this is borne out by the length of time he spent on each piece of writing—eleven years given to the Æneid alone.
Before he began it he had written two poems or sets of poems: the earlier his Eclogues—in English, Selections—which were an imitation of a Sicilian poet’s pastoral verse, but oddly Romanized, so that the shepherds every now and then stop singing of flocks and herds and flowery meadows and the lovely Galatea, to discuss political doings and burst forth into Caesar’s praises; the later, his Georgics—a Greek word meaning the tillage of the land—a unique and very beautiful poem, the literary equivalent of the lovely fruit and flower panel. “What makes a cornfield smile; under what star the soil should be upturned and when it suits best for wedding the vine to the elm; what care oxen need; what is the method of breeding cattle; and what is the weight of men’s experience in preserving the frugal commonwealth of bees; such is the song I now essay.” So the poem begins. It is practical husbandry done in lovely verse, an achievement which would off-hand appear impossible, and has certainly never been repeated since. There are careful descriptions of the soil each crop needs, the time for planting and watering and weeding; a long description of how to breed the farm animals, together with a detailed account of the diseases they are liable to and their remedies; and lastly, everything conceivable about bee-culture, including the fact, even to Virgil mildly surprising, that they do not bring forth their young as do all other creatures, but “pick them up in their mouths from leaves and grateful herbage.”
The good, common-sense directions are exquisitely decorated: “The best planting season for vines is the bloom of spring, spring that does good to woodland foliage and forestry. It is then that the pathless brakes are musical with singing birds and the cattle pair in their season. The fostering soil brings forth, and the warm western winds unseal the womb of the fields. A gentle moisture rises over all and the young vine branch puts out its buds and unfolds all its leaves. I do not believe the days were fairer or their course more blissful when the young world first came into being; it was spring then—it was spring-tide that the great globe was keeping, when an iron race of men rose from the hard soil and beasts were turned into the woods and stars into the sky.”
But a quotation here and there can show nothing really of what the poem is. The slow course of the narrative, the piling up of detail after detail in the life of the farm, the deep feeling for earth and her produce, the sense of the primal value of the labor that causes earth to produce, end by making a powerful impression of the beauty and the meaning in these fundamentals of human life.
It is the poem in which Virgil and Latin poetry come nearest to the classic.
Now and again, however, the Roman gets the better of the artist. Virgil sees no reason why cattle disease is not a subject for a poet, and he tells at length about “the noisome scab” on sheep, and how to open with a knife “the mouth of the swollen sore,” and about “the panting cough that shakes diseased swine,” when “black blood trickles from their nostrils,” and the dying agonies of a bull stricken with distemper, “convulsed and vomiting bloody foam”—a veterinary’s pamphlet sonorously versified.
The note of exaggeration, too, foreign to classic art and always at home in romantic art, is never far away: “The bull comes upon his foe like a billow that begins to grow white out in midsea, curving up like a bellying sail—like it also when it rolls to shore and roars terrific among the rocks, breaking high as the towering cliff.” And at the very end the poem lapses into wild romanticism; the poet wanders away from his bees to the bottom of the ocean and all manner of fantastic creatures of the sea with “grass-green glare of fiery eyes.” Virgil was at last trying his hand at mythology. From this ending to the subject of the Æneid there was but a short step.
A romantic subject may be treated classically and a classic subject romantically. The beauty of a Greek god is human, realized by the artist from the living men he had seen; it is what a romantic subject will become under classic treatment. The romance has suffered: the statue is a god merely because it is so labelled. The strange beauty of a Hindoo god, like nothing ever seen on earth, is completely romantic. The Hindoo artist’s imagination has conceived something beyond or, at the least, apart from, humanity. The same distinction emerges from a comparison between the romantic Æneid and the classic Iliad. The Iliad has as romantic a subject as the Æneid, as romantic, indeed, as there could be: battles where heroes and gods fight for a marvellously beautiful woman, and conclaves held in silver Olympus where deities watch the contest and give victory to this side or that. But when Homer’s method of treatment is compared with Virgil’s the difference between classic romanticism and the purely romantic is instantly perceived.
In the Iliad, Achilles has lost his armor, and his goddess-mother goes to the fire-god to beg a new set from him. She finds him “in his halls wrought of brass by his own hand, sweating and toiling and with busy hand plying the bellows. He was fashioning a score of tripods, all placed on wheels of gold that they might roll in and back, a marvel to behold. Not yet was added the neat handles, for which the god was forging rivets busily.” This description of a god, like the Greek statue, is a classic treatment of a romantic theme which does damage to the romance. The classic artist’s home is the earth; if he ascends to heaven, heaven takes on the look of earth. But when Æneas loses his armor and his mother goes to Vulcan for the same purpose there is nothing of earth in the scene: “An island towering with fiery mountains; beneath thunders a cavern blasted out by the Cyclops’ forges; the sound of mighty blows echo on anvils; molten metal hisses; fires dart from the great jaws of the furnace. Hither the lord of fire descends from heaven’s height. There in the mighty cave the Cyclops were forging”—not smoothly rolling tripods fitted with neat handles, but “the thunderbolt, one of those many which the great Father showers down on earth. Three spokes of frozen rain, three of watery cloud, had they put together, three of ruddy flame and the winged wind of the south; and now they blend the awful flash and the noise and the terror and the fury of the untiring lightning flame.” That is what your true romantic can do with the fearful fire-god and the forges of the Cyclops. Thunderbolts, every reader must feel, are what ought to be produced by such means.
If it is objected that the pictures of the supernatural in the Iliad are not classic, but only primitive, the truth is that the realism so strikingly marked in Homer is essentially the same as that which stamps the whole of Greek art. It is not a mere matter of childish details. His Olympians are human just as the Hermes and the Venus of Milo are.
When the Old Testament writer says that the Lord God was walking in the garden in the cool of the evening, he too, like Homer, is doing all that a classicist can do with such a subject: he makes it delightful, quaint and charming. But the description in the Book of Revelation, “And I saw a great white throne and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away and there was found no place for them,” is the work of a lofty romantic imagination.
To us romance means chiefly the passion of love. The Greeks, Plato excepted, did not think much of that as a subject for literature. They practically ignored it. Even Greek tragedy has very little to do with it. The romantic lover, we know, is allied to the lunatic, and the Greeks had a complete prepossession in favor of sanity. To be sure, the Iliad centres in Helen, but Homer’s treatment of the loveliest woman of the world is soberly matter-of-fact. When Paris is about to be killed by Menelaus, Aphrodite saves him and carries him away to Troy and his own house. Then she goes to find Helen and bring her to him. Helen is sullen and unwilling. She bids the goddess if she loves him so much, to serve him herself, “and he may take thee for his wife—or his handmaid. I will never go to share his couch.” But under Aphrodite’s threats she does go and speaks to Paris scornfully, with averted eyes: “Thou hast left the battle. Would thou hadst perished by the mighty hand of him who was my husband. Once thou didst boast to be his peer. Then up—defy him. Yet I counsel thee not—for fear he smite thee and thou be slain.” Paris takes all this with the serenity of a man who knows he is going to have what he wants no matter how his wife talks. Menelaus is victor at the moment, he tells her, but he may yet vanquish him in turn. “But now is the time for love. Never before have I felt such sweetness of desire. He spake and went to his fair couch and the lady followed him.” There could be nothing less romantic. Angry, scolding, reluctant Helen, and Paris completely indifferent to all save one thing.
Virgil could do a great love story. Æneas and Dido are not only the hero and heroine of our very first romance, they are great lovers, too, the woman the greater, as through the ages the poets have loved to portray her. She “is pierced by love’s cruel shaft, feeding the wound with her life-blood and wasting under a hidden fire”; if she is with him “she begins to speak and stops midway in the utterance”; he speaks and “she hangs upon his lips.” When the night comes and the banquet hall is empty, she steals there from her bed to find the couch he had lain on and stretch herself upon it. “Him far away she sees and hears, herself far away.”
The episode of the hunting party is ushered in with all the trappings of romance. Before the palace door “Dido’s charger splendid in purple and gold champs his foaming bit.” The queen “comes forth with a great company attending her. Her cloak was purple bordered with embroidery; her quiver of gold, her hair knotted up with gold, her purple dress was fastened with a golden clasp.” A hero’s beauty in romance is quite as important as a heroine’s, and when Æneas joins her he is “like Apollo as he leaves his wintry Lycia and visits Delos, his mother-isle; his flowing hair restrained by a wreath of soft leaves and entwined with gold; his arrows ring upon his shoulders. Even so swift came Æneas, such the beauty that shone forth from his peerless look and mien.” Their union, when the hunt is broken up by the storm, takes place in surroundings perfectly fitted to two such personages, a Gustave Doré cavern lit by lightning flashes and echoing the roll of thunder and the cry of the mountain nymphs.
Virgil’s attitude at this point in the story, the Roman attitude, was to have a far-reaching influence. Dido has made the fatal slip; her good name is lost; she has fallen from her high estate. Not so Æneas; the matter is merely incidental to him. His good name is not affected at all. Jupiter sends down the messenger god to bid him remember his high charge to found the Roman race, and he makes ready to sail with little more distress than at the difficulty of how to break the news to her: “What first beginning can he make?” But for her, of course, everything is over. She pleads with him for a moment in beautiful, tender words: “Flying, and from me? By these tears and by your plighted hand—since I myself have left my wretched self nothing else to plead—by our union, by marriage-rites yet unfulfilled, if in anything I have deserved well of you, if anything of mine was ever sweet to you”—but the gods have spoken and Æneas must go, and all that is left for Dido and her tarnished fair fame is death, the only refuge in such straits for the romantic heroine through all the centuries since.
Here is a great change from Homer and his treatment of Helen. A long way has been travelled on the long road of woman’s destiny. In the Iliad, Helen is not blamed at all. What could a woman do but go with whatever man was at hand to carry her off? All the blame is put upon Paris. In the Odyssey, when Telemachus goes to Menelaus’ palace to ask news of his father, Helen comes down into the great hall, lovely and serene. A handmaid places a well-wrought chair for her; another brings her silver work-basket, and Helen sits and works and talks tranquilly of ruined Troy and the men gaze adoringly. Homer is logical: a woman was helpless in those days; the fault could not be hers. But Roman women were not like that ever; they were responsible human beings, a force to be reckoned with; Dido clearly did not have to yield to Æneas. Then, by a curious shifting of the balance, all the blame was put upon her. Æneas got none of it. This was the Roman point of view, in line with all the early stories of Lucretia and Virginia and the like, and embodied in Virgil’s poem it went over the whole western world, never even challenged until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Trollope held it as firmly as Virgil. When lovely woman stooped to folly, her only refuge was to die, while the man in the case did just as Æneas did, married somebody else.
The completely romantic view of woman, as what Havelock Ellis called “a silly angel,” is only dimly foreshadowed by Virgil. It could never have found a real footing in Rome. Dido is the Roman matron, remembering for her consolation as she dies that she has built a splendid city and avenged a brother’s death. But the foundation for the later development was laid, and the long line of lovely, innocent, trusting women, betrayed to their undoing, who for hundreds of years took possession of romance, goes directly back to the Æneid.
There is nothing more romantic than heroism and great deeds in battle and a glorious death. They are all ideas Greek literature fights shy of. The Iliad is a poem of battles but there is very little talk about glory of any kind, and none at all about the glory of a noble death. Homer’s heroes all know that there is a time for heroism and a time not. When a mightier warrior faces them they retreat, even if unwillingly, “for this sore grief enters my heart, Hector some day shall boast that I fled before his face,” but they never lose the common-sense point of view that “there is no shame in fleeing from ruin, yea, even in the night. Better he fares who flees from trouble than he that is overtaken.” A matter-of-fact atmosphere pervades the ringing plains of windy Troy. When Ajax dares to fight with Hector and withstand him, his reward at close of day is substantial: “And wide-ruling Agamemnon gave to Ajax slices of the full length of the [roasted] ox’s back for his honor.” Homeric heroes do a great deal of eating and drinking and cooking, too; there are receipts given, how to make a pleasant drink from grated cheese and wine and barley, what relishes go best with wine, and so on. The things of daily life play quite as prominent a part as valorous deeds do and “the joy of battle.”
All this is completely unlike the Æneid. The heroes there are not human beings, but bigger, stronger, grander. Hector in the Iliad advancing to battle is “like a stalled horse, full fed at the manger, when he breaks his tether and speeds exultingly over the plain,” or—the extreme of romantic description in the poem—“all in bronze shon
e Hector even as the lightning of Father Zeus.” But Æneas in the same case is “vast as Mount Athos or Mount Eryx, vast as Father Apennine himself when he shakes his mighty oaks and lifts his snow-topped peak to the sky,” or “like Ægaeon who, fable tells, had a hundred arms and a hundred hands and flashed fire through fifty mouths from the depths of fifty bosoms, thundering on fifty strong shields and drawing fifty sharp swords—even so Æneas slakes his victorious fury the whole field over.”
No one in the Æneid, except Dido alone, ever comes down to earth. The heroes never are afraid. They fight for glory only and in its pursuit they are as disdainful of death as the knights of the Round Table or Charlemagne’s paladins. “The combatants rush on glorious death through a storm of wounds” over and over again. They pray for death and they go willingly to meet it. “Death I fear not,” a wounded warrior cries advancing upon Æneas, “I come to die.” “Have compassion upon me,” another hero, defeated, prays. “Dash me on reef, on rock, that none may know my shame.” Æneas bitterly regrets that he did not die when Troy fell:
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