“Still dreams her happy dream, nor thinks
That ought can break those golden links.”
But, as the poet goes on to say, “Who can cheat the eyes of love?” Dido soon learns his change of purpose, and taxes him openly with his “baseness and ingratitude. The whole of this fourth book of the Æneid—“The Passion of Dido,” as it has been called—is of a very high order of tragic pathos. The queen is by turns furious and pathetic; now she hurls menaces and curses against her false lover, now she condescends to pitiable entreaty. The Trojan chief’s defence, such as it is, is that he had never meant to stay. He is bound, the pilgrim of Heaven, for Latium. His father Anchises is warning him continually in the visions of the night not to linger here: and now the messenger of the gods in person has come to chide this fond delay.
The grand storm of wrath in which the injured queen bursts upon him in reply has severely taxed the powers of all Virgil’s English translators. They seem to have felt themselves no more of a match for “the fury of a woman scorned” than Æneas was. Certainly they all fail, more or less, to give the fire and bitterness of the original. The heroics of Dryden suit it better, perhaps, than any other measure:—
“False as thou art, and more than false, forsworn!
Not sprung from noble blood, nor goddess-born,
But hewn from hardened entrails of a rock,
And rough Hyrcanian tigers gave thee suck!
Why should I fawn? what have I worse to fear?
Did he once look, or lend a listening ear,
Sigh when I sobbed, or shed one kindly tear?
All symptoms of a base ungrateful mind—
So foul, that, which is worse, ’tis hard to find.
Of man’s injustice why should I complain?
The gods, and Jove himself, behold in vain
Triumphant treason, yet no thunder flies;
Nor Juno views my wrongs with equal eyes:
Faithless is earth, and faithless are the skies!
Justice is fled, and truth is now no more.
I saved the shipwrecked exile on my shore:
With needful food his hungry Trojans fed:
I took the traitor to my throne and bed:
Fool that I was!—’tis little to repeat
The rest—I stored and rigged his ruined fleet.
I rave, I rave! A god’s command he pleads!
And makes heaven accessory to his deeds.
Now Lycian lots; and now the Delian god;
Now Hermes is employed from Jove’s abode,
To warn him hence; as if the peaceful state
Of heavenly powers were touched with human fate!
But go: thy flight no longer I detain—
Go seek thy promised kingdom through the main!
Yet, if the heavens will hear my pious vow,
The faithless waves, not half so false as thou,
Or secret sands, shall sepulchres afford
To thy proud vessels and their perjured lord.
Then shalt thou call on injured Dido’s name:
Dido shall come, in a black sulph’ry flame,
When death has once dissolved her mortal frame,
Shall smile to see the traitor vainly weep;
Her angry ghost, arising from the deep,
Shall haunt thee waking, and disturb thy sleep.
At least my shade thy punishment shall know;
And fame shall spread the pleasing news below.”
But in this passage, if nowhere else, a French translator has surpassed all his English rivals. Possibly the fervid passion of the scene, worked up as it is almost to exaggeration, is more akin to the genius of the French language.[27]
We cannot, however, do better than return to Mr Conington’s version for the sequel:—
“Her speech half done, she breaks away,
And sickening shuns the light of day,
And tears her from his gaze;
While he, with thousand things to say,
Still falters and delays:
Her servants lift the sinking fair,
And to her marble chamber bear.”
The Trojans prepare to depart; but the enamoured queen makes one more despairing effort to detain her faithless guest. She sends her sister to ask at least for some short space of delay—until she shall have schooled herself to bear his loss. Æneas is obdurate in his “piety.” Then her last resolve is taken. She cheats her sister into the belief that she has found some spells potent enough to restrain the truant lover. Part of the charm is that his armour, and all that had belonged to him while in her company, must be consumed by fire. So a lofty pile is built in the palace-court; but it is to be the funeral pile of Dido. As she looks forth from the turret of her palace at daybreak, she sees the ships of Æneas already far in the offing; for, warned again by Mercury that there will be risk of his departure being prevented by force if he delays, he has already set sail under cover of the night. For a moment the queen thinks of ordering her seamen to give chase; but it is a mere passing phase of her despair. She contents herself with imprecating an eternal enmity between his race and hers—fulfilled, as the poet means us to bear in mind, in the long and bloody wars between Rome and Carthage.
“And, Tyrians, you through time to come
His seed with deathless hatred chase:
Be that your gift to Dido’s tomb:
No love, no league ’twixt race and race.
Rise from my ashes, scourge of crime,
Born to pursue the Dardan horde
To-day, to-morrow, through all time,
Oft as our hands can wield the sword:
Fight shore with shore, fight sea with sea,
Fight all that are, or e’er shall be!”
With a master’s hand the poet enhances the glories of his country by this prophetic introduction of the terrible Hannibal. The peaceful empire of Cæsar, before whom East and West bow, is thrown into the broadest light by reference to those early days when Rome lay almost at the mercy of her implacable enemy.