Stray Studies from England and Italy

by John Richard Greene

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 assume 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 Æneas it is with a perception of this charm infinitely deeper and tenderer than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse, passion, 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 noble ends, passion—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 fœmina." Passion 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 Æneas as modern sculpture, the sculpture of emotion, is to the sculpture of classic 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 Æneas and not Æneas 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 assures 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 Æneas, 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 Æneas 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 Æneas 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 mœnia surgunt," he cries as he looks on the rising walls of Carthage. His gloom has been lightened indeed by the assurance 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 Æneas stand face to face.

Few situations in poetry are more artistic than this meeting of Æneas 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 passion is soon to supersede this compassionate regard. Love himself in the most exquisite episode of the Æneid 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 gratitude of Æneas 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 passion. Passion 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 Æneid, the stately introduction that fortells the destinies of Rome and the divine end to which the fates were guiding Æneas, 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 Æneas 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 passion, 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 passion feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sychæus 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 gods." For a while the figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate passion. 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 passion to catch the change in Æneas, 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 Æneas 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 Mænad in the nightly orgies of Cithæron; she flies at last to her chamber like a beast at bay, and gazes out distracted at the Trojan shipmen putting off busily from the shores. 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 Æneas 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 Æneas 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 Æneas 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 surpassing 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 passion sweeps away for the moment the consciousness of a divine mission which has borne Æneas to the Tyrian shore, the consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man and revives at the new call of the gods. 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, hæc patria est." Æneas 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]