Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with[885].
Nor can we draw an apology for the defects of this primary character in Virgil from the Æneas of Homer. The Dardanian Prince is indeed in the Iliad, as to everything essential, a taciturn and background figure. He is placed very high in station and authority, and, as we have seen[886], he may probably have been, by the dignity of lineal descent, the head of the whole Trojan race. But Homer pays him off with generalities; for, as no Poet is greater in the really creative work of character, so none better understands how, where the purpose of his poem requires it, to take a lay figure, and stuff him out with straw. In what may be called the vital action of the Iliad, Æneas has no considerable share, either martial or political. He is very far indeed behind the noble Sarpedon in the first capacity, and Polydamas in the second, as well as Hector in both. Still, if there is in the Homeric Æneas nothing grand, nothing vigorous, nothing profound, there is on the other hand nothing over-prominent or pretentious, and therefore nothing mean, nothing inconsistent, nothing untrue. All the Homeric characters, down to Thersites, are drawn each in its way with a master’s hand; Æneas forms no exception: on the contrary, we have to admire the skill with which, in a kind of middle distance, his outline is filled up, and he is kept entirely clear of any confusion with either those greater characters on the Trojan side, who have been named, or with the effeminate Paris. This is the more worthy of note, because, as the favourite child of Venus, he bore a qualified and dim resemblance to her chief minion; as we may see by certain traits of his very negative bearing in the field, and by Apollo’s putting him (if the phrase may be allowed) to bed in Pergamus[887], when he had been rescued from Diomed, just as Venus had done with Paris, after she had saved him in the Third Book from Menelaus[888].
Neither did Virgil fail in the delineation of his hero, or ‘protagonist,’ from simple want of power to portray human character. No such want can be ascribed to the poet of the Fourth Book of the Æneid. And if it be true that, amidst all the stormy wildness and intensity of the passion of Dido, there is something not quite natural—something that recalls the very remarkable imitation of it in the ‘Duchesse de la Vallière’ of Madame de Genlis, and leaves us almost at a loss to say which of the two has most the character of a copy, and which of an original—what are we to say of the genuine and manly character of Turnus? The whole of that sketch is as good and true as we can desire; and the noble speech in particular, in which he rebukes the trim cowardice of Drances, is a work of such extraordinary power and merit, that it is fit (and this I take for the summit of all eulogies) even to have been spoken by the Achilles of Homer. In vigorous reasoning, in biting sarcasm, in chivalrous sentiment, and in indignant passion, it presents a combination not easily to be matched; and it is, as a whole, admirably adapted to the oratorical purpose, for which it is presumed to have been delivered. But, indeed, from our first view of Turnus to our last, we do not find in him a single trait feeble in itself, or unworthy of the masculine idea and intention of the portrait, except where, in the very last passage of his life, his free agency seems to be taken, as it were by force, out of his hands.
The false position of Virgil.
The failure in the Æneas of Virgil cannot be compared with the case of any modern romance, such as the Waverley or Old Mortality of Scott, where the hero may be an insipid person. All the greater modern inventors have been compelled to lay their foundations in the palpable breadth of some historic event: it was the prouder distinction of the Homeric epic, that it had a living centre; it hung upon a man; there was enough of vital power in Homer for this end: his Achilles and his Ulysses were each an Atlas, that sustained the world in which they also moved. Virgil made his poem an Æneid, instead of following the example of the Cyclic poets; he thus pledged himself to his readers, that Æneas should be its centre, its pole, its inward light and life. But he did not keep his word: he had drawn the bow of Homer without Homer’s force. He marks perhaps the final transition from the old epic of the first class to the new. After him we have the epics of fact, the Pharsalia, the Thebaid, and so forth. But Æneas stands before us with the pretensions of Achilles and Ulysses; and the failure is great in proportion to the gigantic scale of the attempt. When, in the Italian romance, the character of the ideal man, as shown in Orlando, again became the basis of new epic poems, we again find in the protagonist great weakness indeed, as compared with Achilles and Ulysses; but strength and success as compared with the Æneas of Virgil.
Upon the whole we are thrown back on the supposition that this crying vice of the Æneid, the feebleness and untruth of the character of Æneas, was due to the false position of Virgil, who was obliged to discharge his functions as a poet in subjection to his dominant obligations and liabilities as a courtly parasite of Augustus. As the entire poem, so the character of its hero, was, before all other things, an instrument for glorifying the Emperor of Rome. It at once followed, that in all respects must that character be such as to avoid suggesting a comparison disadvantageous to the person whose dignity, for political ends, had already been elevated even into the unseen world; nay, whose forestalled divinity was to be kept in a relation of absolute and broad superiority to the image of his human ancestor. Æneas is himself addressed in the action of the Æneid, as
Dîs genite, et geniture deos.
In order to arrive at the disastrous effects of this mental servitude, take, first, the measure of the cold and unheroic character of Augustus; then estimate the degree of relative superiority, which it was essential to Virgil’s position that he should preserve for him throughout; and thus we may come to some practical conception of the straitness of the space within which Virgil had to develop his Æneas, or, in other words, to run his match against Homer. All the faults, and all the faultiness, of his poem may be really owing, in a degree none can say how great, to this original falseness of position.