On account of the personal principle on which the ancient epic was constructed, failure in the character of the hero must almost of necessity have entailed failure in the poem. Most of all would this follow in a case where, as in the Æneid, the hero is never out of view, and where the action does not, as in the Iliad, travel away from his person, in order then to enhance the splendour and effectiveness of his reappearance. Thus the falseness of Virgil’s position was not confined to an individual character, but extended to his entire work. Living, too, in an age less natural and more critical than that of Homer, he provided against criticism, so far as regarded its merely technical functions, more, and he studied nature less. He had to construct his epic for a court, and a corrupt court, not for mankind at large; it followed, that he could not take his stand upon those deep and broad foundations in human nature itself, which gave Homer a position of universal command. Hence as a general rule he does not sing from the heart, nor to the heart. His touches of genuine nature are rare. Such of them as occur have been carefully noted and applauded, for he is always studious to set them off by choice and melodious diction. For my own part, I find scarcely any among them so true as the simile of the mother labouring with her maidens at night, which he owes to Homer[889]:
Castum ut servare cubile
Conjugis, et possit parvos educere natos[890].
As to religion, liberty, and nationality.
With rare exceptions, the reader of Virgil finds himself utterly at a loss to see at any point the soul of the poet reflected in his work. We cannot tell, amidst the splendid phantasmagoria, where is his heart, where lie his sympathies. In Homer a genial spirit, breathed from the Poet himself, is translucent through the whole; in the Æneid we look in vain almost for a single ray of it. Again, Virgil lived at a time when the prevailing religion had lost whatever elements of real influence that of Homer’s era either possessed in its own right, or inherited from pristine tradition. It was undermined at once by philosophy and by licentiousness; and it subsisted only as a machinery, a machinery, too, already terribly discredited, for civil ends. Thus he lost one great element of truth and nature, as well as of sublimity and pathos. The extinction of liberty utterly deprived him of another. Homer saw before him both a religion and a polity young, fresh, and vigorous; for Virgil both were practically dead: and whatever this world has of true greatness is so closely dependent upon them, that it was not his fault if his poem felt and bears cogent witness to the loss. Even the sphere of personal morality was not open to him; for what principle of truth or righteousness could he worthily have glorified, without passing severe condemnation on some capital act of the man, whom it was his chief obligation to exalt?
And once more. Homer sang to his own people of the glorious deeds of their sires, to whom they were united by fond recollection, and by near historic and local ties. This was at once a stimulus and a check; it cheered his labour, and at the same time it absolutely required him to study moral harmony and consistency. Virgil sang to Romans of the deeds of those who were not Romans, and whom only a most hollow fiction connected with his hearers, through the dim vista of a thousand years, and under circumstances which made the pretence to historical continuity little better than ridiculous. Or rather, he sang thus, not to Romans, but to their Emperor; he had to bear in mind, not the great fountains of emotion in the human heart, but his town-house on the Esquiline, and his country-house on the road from Naples to Pozzuoli. In dealing with Greeks, with Trojans, with Carthaginians, he again lost Homer’s double advantage: he had nothing to give a healthy stimulus to his imagination, and nothing to bring him or to keep him to the standard of truth and nature. And here, perhaps, we hit upon some clue to the superior character and attractions of Turnus. The Poet was now for once upon true national ground: he was an Italian minstrel, singing to Italians, whether truly or mythically is of less consequence, about an Italian hero. Thus he had something like the proper materials to work with; and the result is one worthy of his noble powers, though it has the strange consequence of setting all the best sympathies of his readers, and of implying that his own were already set, in direct opposition to the ostensible purpose of his poem.
It appears, however, as if this great and splendid Poet, being thrown out of his true bearings in regard to all the deeper sources of interest on which an epic writer must depend, such as religion, patriotism, and liberty, became consequently reckless, alike in major and in minor matters, as to all the inner harmonies of his work, and contented himself with the most unwearied and fastidious labours in its outward elaboration, where he could give scope to his extraordinary powers of versification and of diction without fear of stumbling upon anything unfit for the artificial atmosphere of the Roman court. The consequence is, that a vein of untruthfulness runs throughout the whole Æneid, as strong and as remarkable as is the genuineness of thought and feeling in the Homeric poems. Homer walks in the open day, Virgil by lamplight. Homer gives us figures that breathe and move, Virgil usually treats us to waxwork. Homer has the full force and play of the drama, Virgil is essentially operatic. From Virgil back to Homer is a greater distance, than from Homer back to life.
Homer is misapprehended through Virgil.
But more. Virgil is at once the copyist of Homer, and, for the generality of educated men, his interpreter[891]. In all modern Europe taken together, Virgil has had ten who read him, and ten who remember him, for one that Homer could show. Taking this in conjunction with the great extent of the ground they occupy in common, we may find reason to think that the traditional and public idea of Homer’s works, throughout the entire sphere of the Western civilization, has been formed, to a much greater degree than could at first be supposed, by the Virgilian copies from him. This is only to say, in other words, that it has been sadly impaired, not to say seriously falsified; for there is scarcely a point of vital moment, in which Virgil follows Homer faithfully, or represents him either fairly or completely. Now this traditional idea is not only the stock idea that governs the indifferent public, but it is likewise the idea with which the individual student starts, and which governs him until he has reached such a point in his progress as to discover the necessity, and be conscious moreover of the strength, to throw it off. This, however, is a point that, from the nature of human life and its pursuits, very few students indeed can reach at all. Elsewhere we shall see, with what evil and untrue effect Virgil has handled some of the Homeric characters. It is the same in every minor trait; and it seems strange that so great a Poet should not have had enough of reverence for another Poet, greater still and enshrined in almost the worship of all ages, to have restrained him from such constant and wanton, as well as wilful, mutilations of the Homeric tradition. It would, however, appear that Virgil’s miscarriages are not all due to carelessness, in the common sense of it. In many instances, unless so far as they can be referred to the necessities that press upon a courtier, it would seem as if they must be ascribable to torpor in the faculties, or defect in the habit of mind, by which Homer should have been appreciated. Nay, sometimes he appears to have been moved simply by metrical convenience to alter the traditions of Homer. Let us take first a minor instance to test this assertion.
Nothing can be more marked than the prominence of the Scamander as compared with the Simois in Homer. The Simois is named by him only six times, and none of the passages show it to have been a considerable stream. In the Twenty-first Book[892], Scamander invites Simois to join him in pouring forth the flood which was to bear away Achilles, but his ‘brother’ neither replies, nor takes part in the action. It would appear, indeed, from geographical considerations, which belong to the topography of the Troad, that in the summer Simois was probably dry. This entirely accords with the passage in which this river supplies ἀμβροσίη[893], a figure, as may be presumed, of grass, for the horses of Juno. At any rate, that passage is at variance with the idea of the river as a tearing torrent. Again, Homer mentions[894] that many heroes fell, he does not say in, but about, the stream: above all, he does not say they fell into its waters, but in the dust of it, or near it: