His last wish is that the old age of his father, Daunus, should not be deprived of the consolation of his funeral honours. Although the headlong vehemence of his own nature, no less than his opposition to the beneficent purposes of Omnipotence, seems to justify his fate, yet, as in the Ajax of Sophocles, the αὐθαδία in Turnus is rather the flaw in an essentially heroic temper, than his dominant characteristic. The poet’s sympathy with the high spirit of youth, as manifested in love and war, and his pride in the strong metal out of which the Italian race was made, have led him, perhaps involuntarily, to an embodiment of those chivalrous qualities, which affect the modern imagination with more powerful sympathy than the qualities of a temperate will and obedience to duty which he has striven to embody in the representation of Aeneas.
The vigorous sketch of Mezentius, as he appears in Book x., has received from some critics more admiration than the sustained delineation of Turnus through all the vicissitudes of feeling and fortune through which he passes. Chateaubriand says, that this figure is the only one in the Aeneid that is ‘fièrement dessinée.’ Landor describes him as ‘the hero transcendently above all others in the Aeneid.’ And there is certainly a vague grandeur of outline in this conception of the ‘contemptor divom’ and oppressor of his people, who is ‘not only the most passionate in his grief for Lausus, but likewise [pg 405]gives way to manly sorrow for the mute companion of his warfare,’ indicative of a bolder invention than that which is usually ascribed to Virgil. It is remarkable that poets whose spirit is most purely religious,—both in the strength of conviction and the limitation of sympathy produced by the religious spirit—Aeschylus, Virgil, and Milton—seem to be moved to their most energetic creativeness by the idea of antagonism to the supreme will on the part of a human, or superhuman but limited will: and that they cannot help raising in their readers a glow of admiration as well as a sense of awe in their embodiment of this clash between finite and infinite power. The sketch of Mezentius cannot indeed be compared with two of the most daring conceptions and perfected creations of human genius,—the Prometheus of Aeschylus and the Satan of Milton,—yet, if it does not enlist our ethical sympathies like the former of these, like the second it receives the tribute of that involuntary admiration, which is given to courage, even when allied with moral evil, so long as it is not absolutely divorced from the capability of sympathetic and elevated emotion.
In the part which Dido plays in the poem, Virgil finds a source of interest in which he had not been anticipated by Homer. And although the passion of love, unreturned or betrayed, had supplied a motive to the later Greek tragedy and to the Alexandrine epic, it was still not impossible for a new poet to represent this phase of modern life with more power and pathos than any of his predecessors. It was comparatively easy to produce a more noble and vital impersonation than the Medea of Apollonius. But the Dido of Virgil may compare favourably with the creations of greater masters,—with the Deianeira of Sophocles, with the Phaedra and the Medea of Euripides. And Virgil’s conception is at once more impassioned than that of Sophocles, and nobler and more womanly than those of Euripides. Her character, as it is represented before the disturbing influence of this new passion produced by supernatural artifice, is that of a brave [pg 406]and loyal, a great and queenly, a pure, trusting, and compassionate nature. The most tragic element in the development of her love for Aeneas is the struggle which it involves with her high-strung sense of fidelity to the dead—
Ille meos primus qui me sibi iunxit amores
Abstulit: ille habeat secum servetque sepulchro[656].
The first feeling awakened in her mind by Aeneas is compassion for his sufferings, and the desire to make the Trojans sharers in the fortune which had attended her own enterprise. When by the unsuspected agency of the two goddesses she has been possessed by the fatal passion, it is to no ignoble influence that she succumbs. It is the greatness and renown of one whom she recognises as of the race of the gods, which exercise a spell over her imagination—
Multa viri virtus animo, multusque recursat
Gentis honos; haerent infixi pectore voltus
Verbaque, nec placidam membris dat cura quietem[657].
No weakness, no unwomanly ferocity mingles with the reproaches which she utters on first awakening to the betrayal of her trust. A feeling of magnanimous scorn makes her rise in rebellion against the plea that her desertion was the result of divine interposition—