“Rolling his eyes, Æneas stood,
And checked his sword, athirst for blood.
Now faltering more and more he felt
The human heart within him melt,
When round the shoulder wreathed in pride
The belt of Pallas he espied,
And sudden flashed upon his view
Those golden studs so well he knew,
Which Turnus in his hour of joy
Stripped from the newly-slaughtered boy,
And on his bosom bore, to show
The triumph of a satiate foe.
Soon as his eyes at one fell draught
Remembrance and revenge had quaffed,
Live fury kindling every vein,
He cries with terrible disdain:
‘What! in my friend’s dear spoils arrayed,
To me for mercy sue?
’Tis Pallas, Pallas guides the blade;
From your cursed blood his injured shade
Thus takes the atonement due.’
Thus as he spoke, his sword he drave
With fierce and fiery blow
Through the broad breast before him spread;
The stalwart limbs grow cold and dead;
One groan the indignant spirit gave,
Then sought the shades below.”
So closes the Æneid. Does any reader complain that the poet has not carried the story further? With the death of Turnus the catastrophe is complete. The princess of Latium is the prize of the victor; and the loves of Æneas and Lavinia are certainly not of that romantic character that we need care to follow them. The Trojans are settled in Italy—two races under one name. For so has Jupiter promised, as some indulgence to the feelings of his queen, that the old Latin name shall at least not be merged in the detested name of Trojan, and on such terms has the goddess reluctantly acquiesced in the settlement of the wanderers on Italian ground. Latins, not Trojans, are to rule the world. Thus has the poet combined the indigenous glories of his country with the grand descent of its rulers from the old mythical heroes of Troy.
Yet there is a singular vein of melancholy to be traced in the words of Æneas, when he parts with his son before he goes to his last victory. They are perhaps the noblest words which the poet has put into his mouth, and they have something of the sadness which more or less affects all true nobility:—
“In his mailed arms his child he pressed,
Kissed through his helm, and thus addressed:
‘Learn of your father to be great,
Of others to be fortunate.’”
The old tradition—well known, no doubt, to Virgil’s audience and first readers—was that the son, not the father, lived to enjoy the sovereignty of Latium. The hero of many vicissitudes was not held to have settled down into the peaceful rest which he looks forward to, throughout the poet’s story, as the end of all his campaigns and wanderings. The Rutulians, so said the legends, would not yet bow to the foreign usurper; and Æneas fought his last battle with them on the banks of the river Numicius, and then, like so many of the favourite heroes of a people—disappeared; either carried, living or dead, by some divine agency, to heaven, or caught away in the arms of the river-god.
CHAPTER XIV.
CONCLUDING REMARKS.
The Æneid has two drawbacks to its popularity as an epic poem amongst modern readers. One defect is common to all classical fiction—that there is no love-romance, properly so called, on the part either of the hero or of any other male character in the poem. Love, as now understood, has no place either in Virgil or Homer. We find in their verse none of those finer shades of feeling, that loyal personal allegiance, that high unselfish devotion, the mysterious sympathy, as untranslatable by anything but itself as the most perfect wording of the poet, which, nursed, it has been said, in the lap of Northern chivalry, but surely of much older birth, has given now for centuries to poet and to novelist their highest charm and inspiration. Poets had to sing as they could without it in Virgil’s days. Augustus and Octavia, as they listened to the courtly raconteur, would have opened their eyes wide with astonishment if he had sung to them of the devotion of Lancelot, as surely as they would have laughed at the purity of Galahad. They understood what love was, in their fashion; many ladies of the court sympathised with Dido, no doubt. They understood well enough “the fury of a woman scorned.” They had seen a whole love-poem in real life, with the appropriate tragical dénouement, in Antony and Cleopatra. That was their notion of the grand passion. Probably the more shrewd among them looked upon Antony as a fool to prefer “love” to empire, and applauded Æneas’s “piety” in obeying the oracles of the gods, when they pointed to a new wife whose dowry was a kingdom. There was quite love enough in the action of the poem to suit their tastes, and at anything better or purer they would have only shrugged their fair patrician shoulders.
But there is a more serious defect in the interest of the Æneid, when presented to English readers. It is, that Æneas is no hero. All the defences and apologies which have been made for him are perfectly just, and perfectly unnecessary. He was a hero quite good enough for the court of Augustus, and so far quite suitable for Virgil’s purpose. Le Bossu was perfectly right when he contended that a hero, to be an object of legitimate interest, need not be a pattern of moral virtues. He might have gone further, and said that such paragons, who are plainly superior to the ordinary weaknesses of human nature, generally make very dull heroes indeed. Undoubtedly Æneas is a dutiful son, a respectable father, and, it may even be admitted, in spite of the unfortunate way in which he lost his wife, an exemplary husband. He spread his palms out to heaven in the most orthodox fashion on all occasions, and listened obediently to the message which the gods were always sending him, to set up his home in Latium at all costs. All these estimable qualities are enough to furnish forth a dozen heroes. He is also ready to fight on all proper occasions; and as to the charge that he is equally ready to weep upon all occasions, which has been brought against him by one set of critics, and excused by others, both might have spared their pens; for it is a weakness which may be charged with equal truth upon most of the heroes, not only of classical fiction, but of classical history. It is not only that the chiefs of the Iliad weep without fearing any imputation against their manliness, but if we are to trust the unsensational chronicles of Cæsar, the whole rank and file of his army, even the veterans of the tenth legion—the “fighting division”—when first they heard that they were to be led against the tall and truculent-looking Germans, “could not restrain their tears,” and set to work to make their wills forthwith. The thing is unaccountable, except from some strange difference of temperament; for who can imagine a company of our veriest raw ploughboy recruits so behaving themselves? They might shake in their very shoes; they might even very probably run away: but crying and howling is not our way of expressing emotion, after childhood is past. But we are accustomed to read of such exhibitions of feeling in the natives of warmer climates, as, for instance, in the characters of Scripture; and an occasional burst of tears on Æneas’s part would not have unheroed him in our estimation one whit. It is his desertion of Dido which makes an irredeemable poltroon of him in all honest English eyes. A woman and a queen receives the shipwrecked wanderer with a more than Oriental hospitality; loves him, “not wisely but too well”—and he deserts her. And then Mercury is made to remark, as a reason for Æneas getting away as quickly as possible, that “varium et mutabile semper fœmina!”—that the poor lady’s mood was changeable, forsooth! The desertion is in obedience to the will of the gods, no doubt. That explanation satisfied the critics of Augustus’s day, and he was to them, as Virgil calls him, the “pious” Æneas. To the modern reader, such an authorisation only makes the treachery more disgusting. The morality of English romance, ancient or modern, is by no means immaculate. Tristram and Iseult, still more Lancelot and Guinevere, are of very frail clay. The Sir Galahads ride alone; then, now, and always, in fiction as in fact. But a hero who could be false to a woman, and who was to find in that falsehood the turning-point to fame and success,—he might befit the loose tale with which the rybauder raised a laugh round the camp-fire, but he was the subject of no lay to which noble knight or dame would listen. The passion might be only pars amours, but it must be loyal. To keep such faith, once pledged, the hero might break all other laws, divine or human; but keep it he must. “Loyaulté passe tout, et faulsseté honnet tout.” The principle is by no means the highest, but it is incomparably higher than Virgil’s. And this makes Lancelot, in spite of his great crime, a hero in one sense, even to the purest mind, while the calculating piety of Æneas is revolting.
The apologetic criticisms of some translators, who have felt themselves bound not only to give a faithful version of their author, but to defend his conception of a hero, are highly entertaining. Dryden, who was said by one of his malicious critics to have written “for the court ladies,” admits candidly that he knows they “will make a numerous party against him,” and that he “cannot much blame them, for, to say the truth, it is an ill precedent for their gallants to follow;” winding up with a satirical suggestion that they would do well at least “to learn experience at her cost.” But in spite of this special pleading, even Dryden cannot conceal from himself that his hero makes but a very poor figure in this part of the story; nor can he resist the humorous remark that he was more afraid of Dido, after all, than of Jupiter. “For you may observe,” says he, “that as much intent as he was upon his voyage, yet he still delayed it until the messenger was obliged to tell him plainly, that if he weighed not anchor in the night, the queen would be with him in the morning.” Delille says that Æneas “triumphed over his passions in order to obey the will of heaven;” and forgets to add, that the triumph would have been more complete and more creditable if it had been achieved somewhat earlier in the story. He notices the unfortunate fate of poor Creusa,—left to follow as she might, and never missed till the more fortunate survivors met at the rendezvous,—only to say how necessary it was for the purposes of the story to dispose of her somehow, if there was a new wife awaiting Æneas in Italy; and how the account (his own account) of his affectionate search for her (with the usual tears) must have recommended him to Dido, and excused that poor lady for falling in love with him instantly! Rousseau has more truth in his epigram,—what could Dido expect better from a man who left his lawful wife to be burnt in Troy, and vowed he never missed her? Segrais, very like a Frenchman of the days of Louis XIV., thinks all would have been right if Æneas had but thrown a little more sentiment into the parting, and had bestowed upon Dido a few of those tears which were so ready upon less pathetic occasions.[42] As to the scene in the Shades, where the false lover begins at last to make his tardy excuses and apologies, the French critic fairly throws up his brief for the defence, and contents himself with the suggestion that this was one of those passages in the poem with which Virgil himself was dissatisfied, and which he must certainly have intended to correct. But Æneas has, in fact, little personal character of any kind. He is only what Keble calls him, “a shadow with a mighty name;” and that writer even goes so far as to suggest, that in the curse imprecated upon him by Dido, and her treatment of him in the Shades, we may see an intimation that the poet intended the abasement of his hero.[43]