Sed me jussa deûm ...
Imperiis egere suis; nec credere quivi
Hunc tantum tibi me discessu ferre dolorem[926].
Compare with this the extraordinary truth, beauty, and manfulness of the speech, in which Ulysses takes his farewell of Calypso[927]. This is its tenour: ‘Be not incensed; I know Penelope is less beautiful than thou; yet is my desire, from day by day, towards my home; and if I be wrecked upon my way, this too I will endure, even as I have endured much before.’ In Virgil’s hands, the chief would probably have shuffled off the responsibility from himself upon the shoulders of the gods. Never shall we find one of Homer’s heroes doing this, either beforehand, as by saying, ‘I do not wish to do it, but I am ordered,’ or retrospectively. There is one exception; it is when Agamemnon says that Ἄτη, the goddess of Mischief, with Jupiter, had misled him[928], and that he was not himself to blame. But Agamemnon, alone among the Greek heroes, had in his character a strong element of what we call shabbiness; and what is more, he uses this plea only after making reparation, and not, as Æneas does, in lieu of any. To resume, however, the thread. Sometimes the Homeric heroes are pious, sometimes disobedient; sometimes bold, and sometimes fearful; sometimes they submit to overpowering force, sometimes they struggle even against destiny; but they never appear before us shorn of the first attribute of manhood, its free will.
It seems then that Virgil really did not care to form the habit, and thus commonly failed in the power, of working the higher springs of our nature. He puts the clay into the fire, but the pitcher does not always come out such as he intended it; not even when, instead of trusting, like Homer, to simple action as the vehicle of his meaning, he uses the precautionary measure of describing it.
Thus he prepares us to expect in Mezentius a monster of impiety, cruelty, and brutality, from the account and the epithets by which he is introduced to us[929]. In words scattered here and there, this ‘contemptor divûm’ is made to sustain his impious character. Dextra mihi deus, he says; and again nec divûm parcimus ulli[930]. But these are really mere black patches, set upon a character with which they do not accord; they remain patches still, and not parts of it. Practically, Mezentius proceeds in the poem only as an affectionate father, and as a gallant warrior, should do; and there is no more of real impiety in him, than there is of real piety in Æneas. Nay, here again Virgil shows his contempt of consistency. For, when Mezentius slays Orodes, who prophesied that his conqueror would meet with a similar fate upon the field of battle, Mezentius replies in the most decorous manner (copying the very language of Achilles to the dying Hector[931]),
Nunc morere. Ast de me divûm pater atque hominum rex
Viderit[932].
Woman characters of Homer and Virgil.
Though Virgil is esteemed a woman-hater, he has availed himself of the use of female characters to a degree only exceeded, so far as I recollect, by the highly susceptible Tasso. His celestial machinery is principally worked by Juno and by Venus: we miss altogether in him that jovial might of the Homeric Jupiter, which is recalled in the historic portraits of king Henry the Eighth of England. Of mortals we have, besides the mute Lavinia, and minor or transitory personages, Dido, Juturna, Amata, Camilla. All these play very marked parts in the poem; indeed, they supply the mainsprings of the action; and the characters of all are drawn with great spirit and success, while the Passion of Dido will probably always be quoted as the most magnificent witness, which the whole range of the poem affords, to the original power and genius of its author. Yet even in these, his signal successes, it is curious to notice the dissimilarity between Virgil and Homer. Homer, too, has been eminently successful in his women. His greater studies of Helen, Andromache, and Penelope are fully sustained by the truth and force of all the less conspicuous delineations: Hecuba, Briseis, the incomparable Nausicaa, the faithful Euryclea, the pert and heartless Melantho. But how different are the works of the two poets! In all Virgil’s women (as on the other hand his men are apt to be effeminate) there is a tinge of the masculine. Many a woman would stab herself for love like Dido; but none, not even in France, with her pomp, apparatus, and self-consciousness. Their fates, too, are all of a violent character. Amata, as well as Dido, commits suicide; Camilla is slain; Juturna is immortal indeed, but is dismissed from earth with what for her comes nearest to an image of death; with defeat, mortification, shame. But on the contrary, the feminineness of Homer’s women has never been surpassed. In Hecuba alone, at one single point in the story, there is an apparent exception; yet it is no great violence done to nature, if we find in her after Hector’s death the wild ferocity of the dam deprived of her offspring, and if revenge then drives her for a moment into the temper of a cannibal. Elsewhere beyond doubt, even in Melantho, the feminine character is not wholly obliterated, but is left at the point where in actual life licentiousness and vanity might leave it. In Helen, Andromache, Nausicaa, it reaches a perfection which has never been surpassed, unless by Shakespeare, in human song. There is, however, something to be observed, which is more striking and characteristic. The Virgilian delineations of women tell us absolutely nothing, or next to nothing, of the social position of womankind either at the epoch of Æneas or at any other; a matter which has stood so differently in different ages and states of mankind, yet which has at all times been one of the surest tests for distinguishing a true and healthy from a hollow civilization. But the Homeric poems furnish a picture of this interesting subject not a whit less complete than any other picture they contain. The Woman of the heroic age of Greece stands before us in that immortal verse no less clear, no less truly drawn, no less carefully shaded, than the Warrior, the Statesman, and the King.