Saturno quondam[555].
He is there proclaimed to be greater in the extent of his conquests and civilising labours than Hercules and Bacchus. And, though less prominently than in the Invocation to the Georgics, divine honours and the function of answering prayer are promised to him by the mouth of Jupiter—
Hunc tu olim caelo, spoliis Orientis onustum,
Accipies secura: vocabitur hic quoque votis[556].
The personal figure of the Emperor is thus encompassed with the halo of military glory, of beneficent action on the world, of a divine sanction, and of an ultimate heritage of divine honours.
The Aeneid considered as a representative work of genius is thus seen to be the expression or embodiment of an idea of powerful meaning for the age in which the poem was written, for the centuries immediately succeeding that age, and, through the action of historical associations, for all times. As the great poem of Dante gained both immediate and permanent attention by the human interest which it imparted to the spiritual idea on which mediaeval Europe based its life; as the inspiration of Milton’s great Epic was drawn from his passionate sympathy with the intensest form of religious and political life in his age; so the quality of Virgil’s genius which secured for him the most immediate and the most lasting consideration was his sympathetic comprehension of the imperial idea of Rome in its secular, religious, and personal significance. This idea he has ennobled with the associations of a divine origin and of a divine sanction; of a remote antiquity and an unbroken con[pg 353]tinuity of great deeds and great men; of the pomp and pride of war, and of the majesty of government: and he has softened and humanised the impression thus produced by the thought of peace, law, and order given to the world. In his stately diction we are reminded only of the power, glory, majesty, and civilising influence with which the idea of Rome is encompassed. There is nothing to obtrude the thought of the spirit, in which life, freedom, and individuality were crushed out of the world. And this idea, of which Virgil’s poem is the glorified representation, was one actually realised, one which influenced the lives of generations of men, and which was an important element in moulding the whole subsequent history of the world. Yet the idea is one more adapted to be the inspiring influence of a great historical work, like the national history of Livy, or ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ than of a great poem, which must satisfy the human and moral sympathies of men as well as their sense of power. Material greatness and civilisation, and the qualities of mind and character through which these effects are produced, exercise a great spell over the imagination and the masculine sympathies of the world. But the highest art does more than this—it enlarges man’s sense of a spiritual life, it purifies his notions of happiness, it deepens his conviction of a righteous government of the world. Through the imagination it speaks to the soul. The idea of imperial Rome is rather that of the enemy than of the promoter of the spiritual life or of individual happiness: it impresses on the mind the thought of a vast and orderly, but not of a moral and humane government. The idea of the Roman Republic, as it shines through the rude fragments of the Annals of Ennius in such utterances as these—
Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque[557],—
is suggestive of a nobler energy of character, of more abundant public and private virtue, than the idea pervading and animating [pg 354]the polished verse of the Aeneid. The thought of the Rome of Ennius is associated in our minds with the free political life of the Forum and the Campus Martius, and with the grave deliberations of the Senate, as well as with the exercise of military force and administrative sovereignty. The idea of Italy pervading the Georgics has everything to attract and nothing to repel our sympathies: and thus notwithstanding the inferior opportunities for awakening human interest which necessarily attach to a didactic when compared with an epic poem, the charm exercised by that poem is more unmixed and unchanging than that of the poem which evokes the proud memories of the Capitol. In the Aeneid, Virgil is really the panegyrist of despotism under the delusive disguise of paternal government. In so far as there is any conflict between right and wrong in the Aeneid, the wrong appears to be the ‘victrix causa’ ‘which pleases the gods.’ The religious idea of the Fates is invested with none of the ethical mystery with which the analogous idea in Greek poetry is invested. They act in a hard, plain, arbitrary way, irrespective of right and wrong, regardless of personal happiness or suffering. The actors in the poem who move our sympathies are those who perish in blind resistance to, or blind compliance with, their decrees—Dido, Pallas, Turnus, and Lausus. The opposition between natural human feeling and the ‘divom inclementia’ is reverently accepted and acquiesced in by Virgil in the person of his hero.
The conclusion at which we arrive as to the value of the Aeneid as an epic poem representative of the Roman Empire, is that Virgil has given a true, adequate, and noble expression to an idea which actually has exercised a greater spell over the imagination and a greater influence over the daily lives of men, than any other which owed its origin to their secular interests: but that this idea, regarded from its political, religious, and personal side, is one which does not touch the heart, or enlighten the conscience: and this is an important drawback to the claim which the Aeneid may have to the highest rank as a work of art.