HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.

[1]To one who knows what frightful cruelty and oppression may lie in simple legal phrases, the indignant sentence in which Walsingham tells his death is the truest comment on the scene: "Non tam villanorum prædictæ villæ de Bury, suorum adversariorum, sed propriorum servorum et nativorum arbitrio simul et judicio addictus morti."

When the snow has driven everybody home again from the Oberland and the Rigi and all the Swiss hotel-keepers have resumed their original dignity as Landammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing to reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has been due to one's own countrymen. It is not that the Englishman abroad is particularly entertaining, for the Frenchman is infinitely more vivacious; nor that he is peculiarly stolid, for he yields in that to most of the German students who journey on the faith of a nightcap and a pipe; or that he is especially boring, for every American whom one meets whips him easily in boredom. It is that he is so nakedly and undisguisedly English. We never see Englishmen in England. They are too busy, too afraid of Mrs. Grandy, too oppressed with duties and responsibilities and insular respectabilities and home decencies to bereally themselves. They are forced to dress decently, to restrain their temper, to affect a little modesty; there is the pulpit to scold them, and the 'Times' to give them something to talk about, and an infinite number of grooves and lines and sidings along which they can be driven in a slow and decent fashion, or into which as a last resort they can be respectably shunted. But grooves and lines end with the British Channel. The true Englishman has no awe for 'Galignani'; he has a slight contempt for the Continental chaplain. He can wear what hat he likes, show what temper he likes, and be himself. It is he whose boots tramp along the Boulevards, whose snore thunders loudest of all in the night train, who begins his endless growl after "a decent dinner" at Basle, and his endless contempt for "Swiss stupidity" at Lucerne. We track him from hotel to hotel, we meet him at station after station, we revel in the chase as coat after coat of the outer man peels away and the inner Englishman stands more plainly revealed. But it is in the hotels of the higher mountains that we first catch the man himself.

There is a sort of snow-line of nations, and nothing amazes one more in a run through the Alps than to seehow true the various peoples among their visitors are to their own specific level. As a rule the Frenchman clings to the road through the passes, the American pauses at the end of the mule-track, the German stops at the châlet in the pine-forest. It is only at the Alpinetable d'hôte, with a proud consciousness of being seven thousand feet above the sea-level, that one gets the Englishman pure. It is a very odd sensation, in face of the huge mountain-chains, and with the glacier only an hour's walk overhead, to find one's self again in a little England, with the very hotel-keeper greeting one in one's native tongue, and the guides exchanging English oaths over their trinkgelt. Cooped up within four walls one gets a better notion of the varieties, the lights and shadows, of home-life than one gets in Pall Mall. The steady old Indian couple whose climb is so infinitely slow and sure, the Oxford freshman who comes blooming up the hill-side to declare Titiens beautiful and to gush over the essays of Frederick Robertson, the steady man of business who does his Alps every summer, the jaded London curate who lingers with a look of misery round the stove, the British mother, silken, severe, implacable as below, the British maiden sitting alone in the rock-clefts andreviewing the losses and gains of the last season—all these are thrown together in an odd jumble of rank and taste by the rain, fog, and snowdrift which form some two-thirds of the pleasures of the Alps. But, odd as the jumble is, it illustrates in a way that nothing else does some of the characteristics of the British nation, and impresses on one in a way that one never forgets the real native peculiarities of Englishmen.

In the first place, no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the lowest form of literature. It is in fact simply drawing-room talk as drawing-room talk would be if all news, all scandal, all family details were suddenly cut off. In its way it throws a pleasant light on English education and on the amount of information about other countries which it is considered essential to an English gentleman to possess. The guardsman swears that the Swiss are an uneducated nation, with a charming unconsciousness that their school system is without a rival in Europe; the young lady to one's right wonders why such nicepeople should be republicans; the Cambridge man across the table exposes the eccentricity of a friend who wished to know in what canton he was travelling; the squire with the pink and white daughters is amazed at the absence of police. In the very heart of the noblest home of liberty which Europe has seen our astonishing nation lives and moves with as contented and self-satisfied an ignorance of the laws, the history, the character of the country or its people, as if Switzerland were Timbuctoo. Still, even sublime ignorance such as this is better than to listen to the young thing of thirty-five summers, with her drivel about William Tell; and one has always the resource of conceiving a Swiss party tramping about England with no other notion of Englishmen than that they are extortionate hotel-keepers, or of the English Constitution than that it is democratic and absurd, or of English history than that Queen Eleanor sucked the poison from her husband's arm.

The real foe of life over an Alpine table is that weather-talk, raised to its highest power, which forms nine-tenths of the conversation. The beautiful weather one had on the Rigi, the execrable weather one had atthe Furca, the unsettled weather one had on the Lake of Thun; the endless questions whether you have been here and whether you have been there; the long catechism as to the insect-life and the tariff of the various hotels; the statements as to the route by which they have come, the equally gratuitous information as to the route by which they shall go; the "oh, so beautiful" of the gusher in ringlets, the lawyer's "decidedly sublime," the monotonous "grand, grand" of the man of business; the constant asseveration of all as to every prospect which they have visited that they never have seen such a beautiful view in their life—form a cataract of boredom which pours down from morn to dewy eve. It is in vain that one makes desperate efforts to procure relief, that the inventive mind entraps the spinster into discussion over ferns, tries the graduate on poetry, beguiles the squire towards politics, lures the Indian officer into a dissertation on coolies, leads the British mother through flowery paths of piety towards the new vacancies in the episcopal bench. The British mother remembers a bishop whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian officer gets back by the Ghauts to the Schreckhorn, the graduate finds his way again through 'Manfred' to the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences,the cataract pours down again, and there is nothing for it but to wander out on the terrace of six feet by four, and wonder what the view would be if there were no fog.

But even a life like this must have its poetry and its hero, and at seven thousand feet above the sea-level it is very natural to find one's poetry in what would be dull enough below. The hero of the Bell Alp or the Œggischorn is naturally enough the Alpine Clubbist. He has hurried silent and solitary through the lower country, he only blooms into real life at the sight of "high work." It is wonderful how lively the little place becomes as he enters it, what a run there is on the landlord for information as to his projects, what endless consultations of the barometer, what pottering over the pages of 'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers.' How many guides will he take, has he a dog, will he use the rope, what places has he done before?—a thousand questions of this sort are buzzing about the room as the hero sits quietly down to his dinner. The elderly spinster remembers the fatal accident of last season, and ventures to ask him what preparations he has made for the ascent. The hero stops his dinner politely, andshows her the new little box of lip-salve with which he intends to defy the terrors of the Alps. To say the truth, the Alpine climber is not an imaginative man. With him the climb which fills every bystander with awe is "a good bit of work, but nothing out of the way you know." He has never done this particular peak, and so he has to do it; but it has been too often done before to fill him with any particular interest in the matter. As to the ascent itself, he sets about planning it as practically as if he were planning a run from London to Lucerne. We see him sitting with his guides, marking down the time-table of his route, ascertaining the amount of meat and wine which will be required, distributing among his followers their fair weights of blankets and ropes. Then he tells us the hour at which he shall be back to-morrow, and the file of porters set off with him quietly and steadily up the hill-side. We turn out and give him a cheer as he follows, but the thought of the provisions takes a little of the edge off our romance. Still, there is a great run that evening on 'Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers,' and a constant little buzz round the fortunate person who has found the one record of an ascent of this particular peak.

What is it which makes men in Alpine travel-books write as men never write elsewhere? What is the origin of a style unique in literature, which misses both the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it that the senior tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad Latin, plunges at the sight of an Alp into English inconceivable, hideous? Why does page after page look as if it had been dredged with French words through a pepper-castor? Why is the sunrise or the scenery always "indescribable," while the appetite of the guides lends itself to such reiterated description? These are questions which suggest themselves to quiet critics, but hardly to the group in the hotel. They have found the hole where the hero is to snatch a few hours of sleep before commencing the ascent. They have followed him in imagination round the edge of the crevasses. All the old awe and terror that disappeared in his presence revive at the eloquent description of thearête. There is a gloom over us as we retire to bed and think of the little company huddled in their blankets, waiting for the dawn. There is a gloom over us at breakfast as the spinster recalls one "dreadful place where you look down five thousandfeet clear." The whole party breaks up into little groups, who set out for high points from which, the first view of the returning hero will be caught. Everybody comes back certain they have seen him, till the landlord pronounces that everybody has mistaken the direction in which he must come. At last there is a distantjodel, and in an hour or so the hero arrives. He is impassive and good-humoured as before. When we crowd around him for the tidings of peril and adventure, he tells us, as he told us before he started, that it is "a good bit of work, but nothing out of the way." Pressed by the spinster, he replies, in the very words of 'Peaks and Passes,' that the sunrise was "indescribable," and then, like the same inspired volume, enlarges freely on the appetite of his guides. Then he dines, and then he tells us that what he has really gained from his climb is entire faith in the efficacy of his little box for preventing all injury from sun or from snow. He is a little proud, too, to have done the peak in twenty minutes less time than Jones, and at ten shillings less cost. Altogether, it must be confessed, the Alpine Clubbist is not an imaginative man. His one grief in life seems to be the failure of his new portable cooking apparatus, and he pronounces"Liebig's Extract" to be the great discovery of the age. But such as he is, solid, practical, slightly stupid, he is the hero of the Alpine hotel.

At such an elevation the religious developement of the British mind becomes strangely jerky and irregular. The arrival of Sunday is suddenly revealed to the group round the breakfast-table by the severity with which the spinster's eye is fixed on an announcement over the stove that the English service in the hotel is at ten o'clock. But the announcement is purely speculative. The landlord "hopes" there will be service, and plunges again into the kitchen. Profane sounds of fiddling and dancing reach the ear from an outbuilding where the guides and the maids are celebrating the day by a dance. The spinster is in earnest, but the insuperable difficulty lies in the non-existence of a parson. The Indian civilian suggests that we should adopt the naval usage, and that the senior layman read prayers. But the attorney is the senior layman, and he objects to such a muddling of the professions. The young Oxford undergraduate tells his little tale of a service on board ship where the major, unversed in such matters, began with the churchingservice, and ended with the office for the burial of the dead. Then he withers beneath the stony stare of the British mother, who is reading her "lessons" in the corner. At last there is a little buzz of excitement, and every eye is fixed upon the quiet-looking traveller in a brown shooting-coat and a purple tie, who is chipping his egg and imbibing his coffee in silence and unconsciousness. The spinster is sure that the stranger is Mr. Smith. The attorney doubts whether such a remarkable preacher would go about in such a costume. The British mother solves the whole difficulty by walking straight up to him, and with an eye on the announcement in question, asking point-blank whether she has the pleasure of addressing that eminent divine. Smith hesitates, and is lost. His egg and coffee disappear. The table is cleared, and the chairs arranged with as little regard to comfort as may be. The divine retires for the sermon which—prescient of his doom—he has slipped into his valise. The landlord produces two hymn-books of perfectly different origins, and some time is spent in finding a hymn which is common to both. When the time comes for singing it, the landlord joins in with a fine but wandering bass, catching an English word here and there as he goes along.The sermon is as usual on the Prodigal Son, and the Indian civilian nods at every mention of "going into a far country," as a topic specially appropriate for the occasion. But the divine is seen no more. His cold becomes rapidly serious, and he takes to his bed at the very hour of afternoon service. The British maiden wanders out to read Tennyson in the rock-clefts, and is wonder-struck to come upon the unhappy sufferer reading Tennyson in the rock-clefts too. After all, bed is not good for a cold, and the British Sunday is insufferable, and poetry is the expression of the deepest and most sacred emotions. This is the developement which religion takes with a British maiden and a British parson in regions above the clouds.

In the revival side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in which modern life loses its direct and intensest joys, a craving for a world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the Iliad. The charm of Vergil on the other hand lies in the strange fidelity with which across so many ages he echoes those complex thoughts which make the life of our own. Vergil is the Tennyson of the older world; his power, like that of the laureate, lies in the sympathy with which he reflects thestrength and weakness of his time, its humanity, its new sense of human brotherhood, its pitifulness, its moral earnestness, its high conception of the purpose of life and the dignity of man, its attitude of curious but condescending interest towards the past, its vast dreams of a future, embodied by the one poet in the vague dreamland of 'Locksley Hall,' by the other in the enduring greatness of Rome.

From beginning to end the Æneid is a song of Rome. Throughout it we feel ourselves drawing nearer and nearer to that sense of the Roman greatness which filled the soul of Vergil; with him in verse after verse "tendimus in Latium." Nowhere does the song rise to a higher grandeur than when the singer sings the majesty of that all-embracing empire, the wide peace of the world beneath its sway. But the Æneid is no mere outburst of Roman pride. To Vergil the time in which he lived was at once an end and a beginning, a close of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to be the mistress of the world, an opening of her new and mightier career as a reconciler and leader of the nations. His song is broken by divine prophecies, not merely of Roman greatness, but ofthe work Rome had to do in warring down the rebels against her universal sway, in showing clemency to the conquered, in binding hostile peoples together, in welding the nations into a new human race. The Æneid is a song of the future rather than of the present or past, a song not of pride but of duty. The work that Rome has done points throughout to the nobler work which Rome has yet to do. And in the very forefront of this dream of the future Vergil sets the ideal of the new Roman by whom this mighty task shall be wrought, the picture of one who by loyalty to a higher purpose had fitted himself to demand loyalty from those whom he ruled, one who by self-mastery had learned to be master of men.

It is this thought of self-mastery which is the key to the Æneid. Filled as he is with a sense of the greatness of Rome, the mood of Vergil seems constantly to be fluctuating between a pathetic consciousness of the toils and self-devotion, the suffering and woe, that run through his national history and the final greatness which they bought. His poem draws both these impressions together in the figure of Æneas. Æneas is the representative of that "piety," that faith in hisrace and in his destiny, which had drawn the Roman from his little settlement on the hills beside Tiber to a vast empire "beyond the Garamantians and the Indians." All the endurance, the suffering, the patriotism, the self-devotion of generation after generation is incarnate in him. It is by his mouth that in the darkest hours of national trial Roman seems to say to Roman, "O passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem." It is to this "end" that the wanderings of Æneas, like the labours of consul and dictator, inevitably tend, and it is the firm faith in such a close that gives its peculiar character to the pathos of the Æneid.

Rome is before us throughout, "per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in Latium." It is not as a mere tale of romance that we follow the wanderings of "the man who first came from Trojan shores to Italy." They are the sacrifice by which the father of the Roman race wrought out the greatness of his people, the toils he endured "dum conderet urbem." "Italiam quæro patriam" is the key-note of the Æneid, but the Quest of Æneas is no self-sought quest of his own. "Italiam non sponte sequor," he pleads as Dido turns from himin the Elysian Fields with eyes of speechless reproach. He is the chosen instrument of a Divine purpose working out its ends alike across his own buffetings from shore to shore or the love-tortures of the Phœnician Queen. The memorable words that Æneas addresses to Dares, "Cede Deo," "bend before a will higher as well as stronger than thine own," are in fact the faith of his own career.

But it is in this very submission to the Divine order that he himself soars into greatness. The figure of the warrior who is so insignificant in the Homeric story of the fight around Troy becomes that of a hero in the horror of its capture. Æneas comes before us the survivor of an immense fall, sad with the sadness of lost home and slaughtered friends, not even suffered to fall amidst the wreck, but driven forth by voices of the Fates to new toils and a distant glory. He may not die; his "moriamur" is answered by the reiterated "Depart" of the gods, the "Heu, fuge!" of the shade of Hector. The vision of the great circle of the gods fighting against Troy drives him forth in despair to a life of exile, and the carelessness of despair is over him as he drifts from land to land. "Sail where youwill," he cries to his pilot, "one land is as good as another now Troy is gone." More and more indeed as he wanders he recognizes himself as the agent of a Divine purpose, but all personal joy in life has fled. Like Dante he feels the bitterness of exile, how hard it is to climb another's stairs, how bitter to eat is another's bread. Here and there he meets waifs and strays of the great wreck, fugitives like himself, but who have found a refuge and a new Troy on foreign shores. He greets them, but he may not stay. At last the very gods themselves seem to give him the passionate love of Dido, but again the fatal "Depart" tears him from her arms. The chivalrous love of Pallas casts for a moment its light and glory round his life, but the light and glory sink into gloom again beneath the spear of Turnus. Æneas is left alone with his destiny to the very end, but it is a destiny that has grown into a passion that absorbs the very life of the man.

"Italiam magnam Grynæus Apollo,Italiam Lyciæ jussere capessere sortes.Hic amor, hæc patria est!"

It is in the hero of the Idylls and not in the hero of the Iliad that we find the key to such a character as this. So far is Vergil from being the mere imitatorof Homer that in spite of his close and loving study of the older poem its temper seems to have roused him only to poetic protest. He recoils from the vast personality of Achilleus, from that incarnate "wrath," heedless of divine purposes, measuring itself boldly with the gods, careless as a god of the fate and fortunes of men. In the face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a founder of cities and peoples, self-forgetful, patient, loyal to a divine aim, calm with a Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of passion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of reverence, of "piety."

It is in realizing the temper of the poem that we realize the temper of its hero. Æneas is the Arthur of the Vergilian epic, with the same absorption of all individuality in the nobleness of his purpose, the same undertone of melancholy, the same unearthlyvagueness of outline and remoteness from the meaner interests and passions of men. As the poet of our own day has embodied his ideal of manhood in the king, so Vergil has embodied it in the hero-founder of his race. The temper of Æneas is the highest conception of human character to which the old world ever attained. The virtues of the Homeric combatants are there: courage, endurance, wisdom in council, eloquence, chivalrous friendship, family affection, faith to plighted word; but with these mingle virtues unknown to Hector or Achilleus, temperance, self-control, nobleness and unselfishness of aim, loyalty to an inner sense of right, the piety of self-devotion and self-sacrifice, refinement of feeling, a pure and delicate sense of the sweetness of woman's love, pity for the fallen and the weak.

In the Homeric picture Achilleus sits solitary in his tent, bound as it were to the affections of earth by the one tie of his friendship for Patroclos. No figure has ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible in the loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge. But from one end of his song to the other Vergil has surrounded Æneas with the ties and affections of home. In the awful night with which his story opens the lossof Creusa, the mocking embrace in which the dead wife flies from his arms, form his farewell to Troy. "Thrice strove I there to clasp my arms about her neck,"—everyone knows the famous lines:—

"Thrice I essayed her neck to clasp,Thrice the vain semblance mocked my grasp,As wind or slumber light."

Amid all the terror of the flight from the burning city the figure of his child starts out bright against the darkness, touched with a tenderness which Vergil seems to reserve for his child-pictures.[2]But the whole escape is the escape of a family. Not merely child and wife, but father and household accompany Æneas. Life, he tells them when they bid him leave them to their fate, is worthless without them; and the "commune periclum, una salus" runs throughout all his wanderings. The common love of his boy is one of the bonds that link Dido with Æneas, and a yet more exquisite touch of poetic tenderness makes his affection for Ascanius the one final motive for his severance from the Queen.Not merely the will of the gods drives him from Carthage, but the sense of the wrong done to his boy.[3]His friendship is as warm and constant as his love for father or child. At the two great crises of his life the thought of Hector stirs a new outpouring of passionate regret. It is the vision of Hector which rouses him from the slumber of the terrible night when Troy is taken; the vision of the hero not as glorified by death, but as the memory of that last pitiful sight of the corpse dragged at the chariot wheels of Achilleus had stamped it for ever on the mind of his friend. It is as though all recollection of his greatness had been blotted out by the shame and terror of his fall ("quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore!"), but the gory hair and the mangled form only quicken the passionate longing of Æneas.[4]The tears, the "mighty groan," burst forth again as in the tapestry of the Sidonian temple he sees pictured anew the story of Hector's fall. In the hour of his last combat the thought of his brother-in-arms returns to him, and the memory of Hector is the spur to nobleness and valour which he bequeaths to his boy.

But throughout it is this refinement of feeling, this tenderness and sensitiveness to affection, that Vergil has loved to paint in the character of Æneas. To him Dido's charm lies in her being the one pitying face that has as yet met his own. Divine as he is, the child, like Achilleus, of a goddess, he broods with a tender melancholy over the sorrows of his fellow-men. "Sunt lacrymæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the Æneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of Æneas. Like the poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still."[5]He stands utterly apart from those epical heroes "that delight in war." The joy in sheer downright fighting which rings through Homer is wholly absent from the Æneid. Stirring and picturesque as is "The gathering of the Latin Clans," brilliant as is the painting of the last combat with Turnus, we feel everywhere the touch of a poet of peace. Nothing is more noteworthy than the careful exclusion of the Roman cruelty, the Roman ambition, from the portrait of Æneas. Vergil seems to protest inhis very hero against the poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. On the eve of his final triumph, Æneas

"incusat voce Latinum;Testaturque deos iteram se ad prœlia cogi."

Even when host is marshalled against host the thought of reconciliation is always kept steadily to the front, and the bitter cry of the hero asks in the very hour of the combat why bloodshed should divide peoples who are destined to be one.

It is the conflict of these two sides of the character of Æneas, the struggle between this sensitiveness to affection and his entire absorption in the mysterious destiny to which he is called, between his clinging to human ties and his readiness to forsake all and follow the divine voice which summons him, the strife in a word between love and duty, which gives its meaning and pathos to the story of Æneas and Dido. Attractive as it undoubtedly is, the story of Dido is in the minds of nine modern readers out of ten fatal to the effect of the Æneid as a whole. The very beauty of the tale is partly the cause of this. To the schoolboy and to thousands who are schoolboys no longer the poem is nothing more than the love story of the Trojan leaderand the Tyrian queen. Its human interest ends with the funeral fires of Dido, and the books which follow are read merely as ingenious displays of the philosophic learning, the antiquarian research, and the patriotism of Vergil. But the story is yet more directly fatal in the way in which it cuts off the hero himself from modern sympathies. His desertion of Dido makes, it has been said, "an irredeemable poltroon of him in all honest English eyes." Dryden can only save his character by a jest, and Rousseau damns it with an epigram. Mr. Keble supposes that in the interview among the Shades the poet himself intended the abasement of his hero, and Mr. Gladstone has capped this by a theory that Vergil meant to draw his readers' admiration, not to Æneas but to Turnus.

It is wiser perhaps to turn from the impressions of Vergil's critics to the impression which the story must have left in the mind of Vergil himself. It is surely needless to assume that the first of poetic artists has forgotten the very rudiments of his art in placing at the opening of his song a figure which strips all interest from his hero. Nor is it needful to believe that such a blunder has been unconscious, and that Vergil has hadto learn the true effect of his episode on the general texture of his poem from the reader of to-day. The poet who paints for us the character of Dido must have felt, ere he could have painted it, that charm which has ever since bewitched the world. Every nerve in Vergil must have thrilled at the consummate beauty of this woman of his own creation, her self-abandonment, her love, her suffering, her despair. If he deliberately uses her simply as a foil to the character of Æneas it is with a perception of this charm infinitely deeper and tenderer than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse, passion, the mighty energies of unbridled will are wrought up into a figure of unequalled beauty, and then set against the true manhood of the founder and type of Rome, the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of self-control.

To the stoicism of Vergil, steadied by a high sense of man's worth and work in the world, braced to patience and endurance for noble ends, passion—the revolt of the individual self against the world's order—seemed a light and trivial thing. He could feel and paint with exquisite delicacy and fire the charm of woman's utter love; but woman with all her loveliness wanted to himthe grandeur of man's higher constancy to an unselfish purpose, "varium et mutabile semper fœmina." Passion on the other hand is the mainspring of modern poetry, and it is difficult for us to realize the superior beauty of the calmer and vaster ideal of the poets of old. The figure of Dido, whirled hither and thither by the storms of warring emotions, reft even of her queenly dignity by the despair of her love, degraded by jealousy and disappointment to a very scold, is to the calm, serene figure of Æneas as modern sculpture, the sculpture of emotion, is to the sculpture of classic art. Each, no doubt, has its own peculiar beauty, and the work of a true criticism is to view either from its own standpoint and not from the standpoint of its rival. But if we would enter into the mind of Vergil we must view Dido with the eyes of Æneas and not Æneas with the eyes of Dido.

When Vergil first sets the two figures before us, it is not on the contrast but on the unity of their temper and history that he dwells. Touch after touch brings out this oneness of mood and aim as they drift towards one another. The same weariness, the same unconscious longing for rest and love, fills either heart. It is as aqueen, as a Dian over-topping her nymphs by the head, that Dido appears on the scene, distributing their task to her labourers as a Roman Cornelia distributed wool to her house-slaves, questioning the Trojan strangers who sought her hospitality and protection. It is with the brief, haughty tone of a ruler of men that she bids them lay by their fears and assures them of shelter. Around her is the hum and stir of the city-building, a scene in which the sharp, precise touches of Vergil betray the hand of the town-poet. But within is the lonely heart of a woman. Dido, like Æneas, is a fugitive, an exile of bitter, vain regrets. Her husband, "loved with a mighty love," has fallen by a brother's hand; and his ghost, like that of Creusa, has driven her in flight from her Tyrian fatherland. Like Æneas too she is no solitary wanderer; she guides a new colony to the site of the future Carthage as he to the site of the future Rome. When Æneas stands before her, it is as a wanderer like herself. His heart is bleeding at the loss of Creusa, of Helen, of Troy. He is solitary in his despair. He is longing for the touch of a human hand, the sound of a voice of love. He is weary of being baffled by the ghostly embraces of his wife, by the cloud that wraps his mother from his view. He isweary of wandering, longing with all the old-world intensity of longing for a settled home. "O fortunati quorum jam mœnia surgunt," he cries as he looks on the rising walls of Carthage. His gloom has been lightened indeed by the assurance of his fame which he gathers from the pictures of the great Defence graven on the walls of the Tyrian temple. But the loneliness and longing still press heavily on him when the cloud which has wrapt him from sight parts suddenly asunder, and Dido and Æneas stand face to face.

Few situations in poetry are more artistic than this meeting of Æneas and the Queen in its suddenness and picturesqueness. A love born of pity speaks in the first words of the hero,[6]and the reply of Dido strikes the same sympathetic note.[7]But the fervour of passion is soon to supersede this compassionate regard. Love himself in the most exquisite episode of the Æneid takes the place of Ascanius; while the Trojan boy lies sleeping on Ida, lapped on Earth's bosom beneath the cool mountain shade, his divine "double" lies clasped to Dido's breast, and pours his fierylongings into her heart. Slowly, unconsciously, the lovers draw together. The gratitude of Æneas is still at first subordinate to his quest. "Thy name and praise shall live," he says to Dido, "whatever lands call me." In the same way, though the Queen's generosity has shown itself in her first offer to the sailors ("urbem quam statuo vestra est"), it is still generosity and not passion. Passion is born in the long night through which, with Eros still folded in her arms, Dido listens to the "Tale of Troy."

The very verse quickens with the new pulse of love. The preface of the Æneid, the stately introduction that fortells the destinies of Rome and the divine end to which the fates were guiding Æneas, closes in fact with the appearance of Dido. The poem takes a gayer and lighter tone. The disguise and recognition of Venus as she appears to her son, the busy scene of city-building, the sudden revelation of Æneas to the Queen, have the note of exquisite romance. The honey-sweet of the lover's tale, to use the poet's own simile,[8]steals subtly on the graver epic. Step by step Vergil leads us on through every stage of pity, of fancy, ofreverie, of restlessness, of passion, to the fatal close. None before him had painted the thousand delicate shades of love's advance; none has painted them more tenderly, more exquisitely since. As the Queen listens to the tale of her lover's escape she showers her questions as one that could never know enough.

"Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa."

Her passion feeds through sleepless nights on the recollection of his look, on the memory of his lightest words. Even the old love of Sychæus seems to revive in and blend with this new affection.[9]Her very queenliness delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero before whom she falls "one of the race of the gods." For a while the figure of Dido is that of happy, insatiate passion. The rumours of war from the jealous chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers round her hero with sweet observances of love, she hangs at his side the jewelled sword and the robe of Tyrian purple woven by her queenly hands.

But even in the happiest moments of his story the consummate art of the poet has prepared for the finalcatastrophe. Little words, like "misera," "infelix," "fati nescia," sound the first undertones of a woe to come, even amidst the joy of the first meeting or the glad tumult of the hunting-scene. The restlessness, the quick alternations of feeling in the hour of Dido's triumph, prepare us for the wild swaying of the soul from bitterest hate to pitiful affection in the hour of her agony. She is the first in the sensitiveness of her passion to catch the change in Æneas, and the storm of her indignation sweeps away the excuses of her lover, as the storm of her love had swept away his earlier resolve. All dignity, all queenliness breaks before the "fury of a woman scorned." She dashes herself against the rooted purpose of Æneas as the storm-winds, to use Vergil's image, dash themselves from this quarter and that against the rooted oak. The madness of her failure drives her through the streets like a Mænad in the nightly orgies of Cithæron; she flies at last to her chamber like a beast at bay, and gazes out distracted at the Trojan shipmen putting off busily from the shores. Yet ever and again the wild frenzy-bursts are broken by notes of the old pathetic tenderness. In the midst of her taunts and menaces she turns with a woman's delicacy to protest againsther own violence, "heu, furiis incensa feror!" She humbles herself even to pray for a little respite, if but for a few hours.[10]She pleads her very loneliness; she catches as it were from Æneas the thought of the boy whose future he had pleaded as one cause of his departure and finds in it a plea for pity.

Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech; she can only answer with those "speechless eyes" with which her shade was once more to meet Æneas in the Elysian fields. But her wonderful energy forbids her to lie, like weaker women, crushed in her despair. She hurries her sister to the feet of her lover that nothing may be left untried. From the first she stakes her life on the issue; it is as one "about to die" that she prays Æneas not to leave her. When all has failed and hope itself deserts her the weariness of life gathers round and she "tires of the sight of day."

Never have the mighty energies of unbridled human will been wrought up into a form of more surpassing beauty; never have they been set more boldly andsharply against the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of self-control. If the tide of Dido's passion sweeps away for the moment the consciousness of a divine mission which has borne Æneas to the Tyrian shore, the consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man and revives at the new call of the gods. The call bids him depart at once; and without a struggle he "burns to depart." He stamps down and hides within the deep recesses of his heart the "care" that the wild entreaties of the woman he loved arouse within him; the life that had swung for an hour out of its course returns to its old bearings; once more Italy and his destiny become aim and fatherland, "hic amor, hæc patria est." Æneas bows to the higher will, and from that moment all that has turned him from his course is of the past. Dido becomes a part of his memory as of the things that were.[11]

Æneas is as "resolute to depart" as Dido is "resolute to die." And in both the resolve lifts the soul out of its lower passion-life into a nobler air. The queen rises into her old queenliness as she passes "majestic to the grave;" and her last curse as the Tyrian shipsquit her shore is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied woman; it is the mighty curse of the founder of a people calling down on the Roman race ages of inextinguishable hate. "Fight shore with shore: fight sea with sea!" is the prophecy of that struggle with Carthage which all but wrecked for a moment the destinies of Rome. But Vergil saw in the character of Dido herself a danger to Rome's future far greater than the sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of Rome's destinies frees him from the vulgar self-confidence of meaner men. Throughout his poem he is haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of instability which clings to men who have grown up in the midst of revolutions. The grandest picture in the Æneid reflects the terror of that hour of suspense when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the galleys of Antony. From that moment, as Vergil's prescience foresaw, the dangers of Rome were to spring from a single source. Passion, greed, lawless self-seeking, personal ambition, the decay of the older Roman sense of unselfish duty, of that "pietas" which subordinated the interest of the individual man to the common interest of the state, this was henceforth to be the real enemy of Rome. More and more, as the Romanpeace drew the world together, the temper of the East, the temper which Vergil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would tell and tell fatally on the temper of the West. Orontes—to borrow Juvenal's phrase—was already flowing into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, the geniality, the passionate flush and impulse of the conquered.

It was their common sense of this danger which drew together Vergil and the Emperor. It is easy to see throughout his poem what critics are accustomed to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving admiration and reverence of Vergil had no need to stoop to the flattery of compliment. To him Augustus was in a deep and true sense the realization of that ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the forefront of Rome. When Antony in the madness of his enchantment forgot the high mission to which Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by the colder "piety" of Cæsar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new Rome, the Æneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war had brought her into quiet waters and boundwarring factions into a peaceful people. Vergil felt, as even we can feel so many ages later, the sense of a high mission, the calm silent recognition of a vast work to be done, which lifted the cold, passionless Imperator into greatness. It was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from his "rustic measure" to this song of Borne, and the thought of Augustus blended, whether he would or not, with that Rome of the future which seemed growing up under his hands. Unlike too as Vergil was to the Emperor, there was a common undertone of melancholy that drew the two men together. The wreck of the older faiths, the lingering doubt whether good was after all the strongest thing in the world, whether "the gods" were always on the side of justice and right, throws its gloom over the noblest passages of the Æneid. It is the same doubt, hardened by the temper of the man into a colder and more mocking scepticism, that sounds in the "plaudite et valete" of the deathbed of Augustus. The Emperor had played his part well, but it was a part that he could hardly persuade himself was real. All that wisdom and power could do had been done, but Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he had reared. Vergil drew faith in the fortunes of Romefrom his own enthusiasm, but to him too the moral order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt of Hamlet. Everywhere we feel "the pity on't." The religious theory of the universe, the order of the world around him, jars at every step with his moral faith. Æneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Everywhere among good men there was the same moral earnestness, the same stern resolve after nobleness and grandeur of life, and everywhere there was the same inability to harmonize this moral life with the experience of the world.

A noble stoicism breathes in the character of Æneas, the virtue of the virtuous man, refined and softened by a poet's pitifulness, heightened above all by the lingering doubt whether there were any necessary connection between virtue and the divine order of things around it.

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