Chapter 31

Dardanus, Iliacæ primus pater urbis et auctor[910];

but Dardanus founded Dardania, while Ilium did not exist until the time of his great grandson Ilus. And here Virgil seems wholly to forget that he had himself made Teucer the head of the race[911]. In describing the migration of this hero from Crete to Troas, he says:

Nondum Ilium et arcesPergameæ steterant; habitabant vallibus imis[912].

Nondum Ilium et arces

Pergameæ steterant; habitabant vallibus imis[912].

Here he not only rejects Homer, who places Dardanus and the original settlement among the mountains, but likewise represents what is in itself improbable, since eminences, and not bottoms, were commonly sought by the first colonists with a view to security. Choosing to depart from Homer, he does not even agree with Apollodorus[913]. Lastly, he is not less neglectful of the actual topography; for he implies that Ilium is among the hills, while it was, according to Homer’s express words and according to universal opinion, on the plain as opposed to the hills. Again we have from Virgil the allusion—

quibus obstitit Ilium, et ingensGloria Dardaniæ[914].

quibus obstitit Ilium, et ingens

Gloria Dardaniæ[914].

Here is another case of metre against history, and in all such cases history must go (as is said) to the wall.Iliumwould not satisfactorily admit the genitive case; there could therefore be no glory of Ilium, and on this account Virgil liberally assigns vast renown to Dardania, which was a place of no renown whatever. But he is quite as ready, it must be admitted, to contradict himself as he is to contradict Homer. In Æn. ii. 540, he gives it to be understood that the city of Troy alone was the kingdom of Priam, and that the Greek camp was beyond it, for he makes Priam say of his return from the camp,

meque in mea regna remisit.

But a very little further on he calls Priam (v. 556),

tot quondam populis regnisque superbumRegnatorem Asiæ.

tot quondam populis regnisque superbum

Regnatorem Asiæ.

Each account is alike inaccurate: Priam had more than a city, but his dominions were confined to a mere nook of Asia Minor. And again, before quitting this part of the subject, let us observe how, in the case of Anchises, he departs from Homer, even where it would have served the purpose of his story to follow him closely. The Anchises of Homer is anἄναξ ἀνδρῶν; he does not appear at Troy among theδημογέροντεςof thecity, or of Priam’s court, which would have made him a secondary figure; he resides at Dardania as an independent sovereign, and it seems not unlikely that in lineal dignity, at least, he was even before Priam. But the Anchises of Virgil is resident in Troy[915]; and is therefore, of course, to be taken for a subject of Priam. Here the alteration very much lowers the rank of Æneas, and so far, therefore, of Augustus.

The effect of all this is, without any real gain either moral or poetical, entirely to bewilder the mind of the reader of the Æneid, in regard to a subject of real interest both historical and ethnological, with respect to which Homer has left on record a most careful and clear representation. It must indeed be admitted, that the intervening poets had set many examples of similar license; indeed they had made irregularity a rule; but they had no such powerful reasons as Virgil had for imitating, in some points at least, the precision of Homer, and besides, he has perhaps exceeded them all in the multitude and variety of his departures from it. On the other hand, some allowance, I admit, should be made for the less flexible character of the Latin tongue, which might have made the peculiar accuracy of Homer a real difficulty to Virgil.

I have thus minutely traced out this course of inconsistency and contradiction in particular instances, because they are highly illustrative of the character of Virgil’s work, if not of his mind. After the political and courtly idea of the poem, he seems to have abandoned all solicitude except for its form and sound, and to have been totally indifferent as to presenting any veracious, or if that word imply too much credulity, any self-consistent pattern, of manners, places, events, or characters.

Virgil must, materially at least, have saturated himself with the Iliad before he planned the Æneid, for his borrowing is alike incessant and diversified; and this it is which renders it so singular that he should at once have exposed himself to the double charge of servilely imitating and of gratuitously disfiguring his original.

If we look to the action of the Twelfth Book of the Æneid, it is all made up from Homer cut in pieces and recast. It begins with the idea of the single combat, borrowed from theThird and Seventh Iliads. Then come the pact and the breach of it by Juturna, under Juno’s influence, which are borrowed from the treachery of Pandarus, prompted by Minerva, under the same instigation. Next, the flight of Turnus before Æneas is borrowed from that of Hector before Achilles. After this, Turnus is disabled by a divine agency, like Patroclus before Hector; a downfall brought about in the one case, as in the other, without peril and without honour, so that here we have a copy even of one among the few points where the Iliad was little worthy to be imitated. Lastly, the thought of Pallas in the mind of Æneas (more highly wrought, however, and very effective), plays the part of the recollection of Patroclus[916]in the mind of Achilles.

Unfaithful imitations of detail.

Both here and elsewhere, the imitations in detail are too numerous to be noted. Some of them even descend to a character which, independently of their minuteness, approaches the ludicrous. The very dung, in which the Oilean Ajax loses his footing[917], in the Twenty-third Iliad, is reproduced in the Fifth Æneid, that Nisus may flounder in it. But even here we may note two characteristic differences. Homer trips up a personage, whom he has no particular occasion to set off favourably. Virgil chooses for the object of derision Nisus, on whom, in the beautiful episode which soon after follows, he is about to concentrate all the tenderest sympathies of his hearers. And again, Homer makes Ajax slip where, as he says, the oxen had just been slain over Patroclus: Virgil has no such probable cause to allege for the presence of the obnoxious material[918], but sayscæsis forte juvencis. Now the Trojans had in fact left the tomb of Anchises, and had gone to a chosen spot to celebrate the foot-races[919]; so that even his gore and ordure are quite out of place.

So again, of all theformulæin Homer, it is not very clear why Virgil should have chosen to recall the rather commonplace line

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδήτυος ἐξ ἔρον ἕντο

in his own more ambitious and resounding verse,

Postquam exemta fames, et amor compressus edendi[920];

but it is still more singular that, instead of saying that hunger and thirst were satisfied, he should leave out thirst altogether, and fill up his hexameter by mentioning hunger twice over.

Still it seems not a little strange, notwithstanding the power of the disabling causes which have been enumerated, that, with so vast an amount of material imitation, Virgil should not have acquired, even by accident or by sheer force of use, some traits of nearer resemblance in feeling, and in ethical handling, to his great original.

His maltreatment of the Homeric characters is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the instance of Helen. This case, indeed, deserves a separate consideration of the causes which have reduced a beautiful, touching, and remarkably original portrait to a gross and most common caricature. But Ulysses, as the prince of policy, had perhaps a better claim to be comprehended by a Roman at the court of Augustus. Yet the Ulysses of Virgil simply represents the naked ideas of hardness, cunning, and cruelty. He is never named but to be abused; and, though the mention of him is not very frequent, it is easy to construct from the poem a pretty large catalogue of vituperative epithets, unmitigated by any single one of an opposite character. He isdurus,dirus,sævus,pellax,fandi fictor,artifex,inventor scelerum, andscelerum hortator. Even physical circumstances, however, and those too of the broadest notoriety, Virgil entirely overlooks. Nothing can be more at variance with the effeminate character of the Homeric Paris, his impotence in fight, and his distinction limited to the bow, which was then the coward’s weapon, than to represent him as possessed of vast physical force. Yet even on this Virgil has ventured. In the games of the Fifth Book, when Æneas invites candidates for the pugilistic encounter, the huge Dares immediately presents himself, and he is described as the only person who could box with Paris[921]!

Solus qui Paridem solitus contendere contra.

Heyne urges by way of apology the authority of Hyginus, who was no more than the contemporary of Virgil himself; and presumes that Virgil followed authorities now lost: a sorry defence, because the representation is inconsistent notmerely with the facts, but with the essential idea of the Paris of Homer, and therefore proves that Virgil did not try or care to understand the character, or to be faithful to his master.

Maltreatment of Mythology and Ethics.

But it is time to give some instances, which show an utter disregard of either mythological or moral consistency.

In the Eighth Æneid, Æneas and Anchises are much troubled in mind; and so it appears they must have continued,

Nî signum cœlo Cytherea dedisset aperto;Namque improviso vibratus ab æthere fulgorCum sonitu venit[922].

Nî signum cœlo Cytherea dedisset aperto;

Namque improviso vibratus ab æthere fulgor

Cum sonitu venit[922].

This idea of aCytherea tonansis as incongruous as it is novel. To preserve the characteristic attributes of the several deities of the Pagan mythology contributes to beauty, and was therefore at least an obligation imposed by the poetic art; but Virgil is not content with simply departing from it by taking the management of thunder and lightning out of the hands of Jupiter and the highest deities; he cannot be satisfied without giving it to Venus. With her Homeric character, and with any consistent conception of her attributes, it is utterly irreconcilable.

But again, in the Second Æneid, Virgil makes Venus address to her son the following majestic lines, when he was about to slay Helen amidst the conflagration of Troy:

Non tibi Tyndaridis facies invisa LacænæCulpatusve Paris: Divûm inclementia, DivûmHas evertit opes, sternitque a culmine Trojam[923].

Non tibi Tyndaridis facies invisa Lacænæ

Culpatusve Paris: Divûm inclementia, Divûm

Has evertit opes, sternitque a culmine Trojam[923].

In which he plainly imitates the words of Priam,

οὔτι μοι αἰτίη ἐσσὶ, θεοί νύ μοι αἴτιοί εἰσιν,οἵ μοι ἐφώρμησαν πόλεμον πολύδακρυν Ἀχαιῶν[924].

οὔτι μοι αἰτίη ἐσσὶ, θεοί νύ μοι αἴτιοί εἰσιν,

οἵ μοι ἐφώρμησαν πόλεμον πολύδακρυν Ἀχαιῶν[924].

Now, even with reference to the acquittal of Helen, the cases are quite dissimilar. What Homer puts into the mouth of Priam, Virgil stamps with the authority of a deity: what Priam says of the Homeric Helen, who had been carried off by Paris, and whose general character was very far from depraved, the Venus of Virgil says of a hardened traitress as well as adulteress. Again, what Priam says relative to himself, ‘Ido not blamethee,’ seems in the Æneid to resemble the unlimited enunciation of an abstract proposition. But, above all, let us notice how lamentably Virgil has mauled the sentiment by introducing Paris into the passage, of whose moral guilt, if there be such a thing as moral guilt upon earth, there could be no doubt, and whom Homer, with true poetic justice, has taken care to punish by making him the object of the general reprobation and hatred of his countrymen[925]. In acquitting such an offender, and throwing the charge of his crimes upon the Immortals, by the mouth, too, of one belonging to their number, Virgil has given into the worst form of fatalism, that namely which annihilates all moral sanctions and ideas as applicable to human conduct.

And this he has done with no plea whatever which might have been drawn,valeat quantum, from the exigencies of his poem. Paris was not before the eye of Æneas: Venus was not dissuading her son from taking vengeance upon Paris; he is forced into our sight; the allusion is as irrelevant with reference to the purpose of the passage, as it is blameworthy in an ethical point of view; and in all probability the mention of him is introduced for no other reason than that it supplied Virgil with a hemistich to fill up a gap in an extremely fine passage, and to secure its prosodial equilibrium, to which the balance of moral sanctions is sacrificed without remorse.

As it is with the management of his gods, so with his conception of human nature; Virgil seems to have lost the sight of its higher prerogatives, and especially of the great and noble truth, that it is susceptible of divine influences without the loss of its free agency. The poems of Homer, notwithstanding their copious theurgy, are throughout eminently and entirely human. Their human agency is adorned and elevated (as well as unhappily lowered and darkened), it is even modified and controlled, but never inwardly mutilated, curtailed or superseded, by the interference of the Immortals. But, in regard to his relations with the deities, Æneas is a mere puppet; and the gallant spirit of Turnus on his last battlefield is, as it were, put down within him by main force from heaven.

Æneas and Dido in the Shades.

Thus for example, Virgil is not ashamed to introduce to us Æneas in the shades below apologizing to Dido for his black desertion of her by saying, ‘he could not help it, the gods compelled him; and really he never thought she would take it so much to heart.’

Invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi;Sed me jussa deûm ...Imperiis egere suis; nec credere quiviHunc tantum tibi me discessu ferre dolorem[926].

Invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi;

Sed me jussa deûm ...

Imperiis egere suis; nec credere quivi

Hunc tantum tibi me discessu ferre dolorem[926].

Compare with this the extraordinary truth, beauty, and manfulness of the speech, in which Ulysses takes his farewell of Calypso[927]. This is its tenour: ‘Be not incensed; I know Penelope is less beautiful than thou; yet is my desire, from day by day, towards my home; and if I be wrecked upon my way, this too I will endure, even as I have endured much before.’ In Virgil’s hands, the chief would probably have shuffled off the responsibility from himself upon the shoulders of the gods. Never shall we find one of Homer’s heroes doing this, either beforehand, as by saying, ‘I do not wish to do it, but I am ordered,’ or retrospectively. There is one exception; it is when Agamemnon says thatἌτη, the goddess of Mischief, with Jupiter, had misled him[928], and that he was not himself to blame. But Agamemnon, alone among the Greek heroes, had in his character a strong element of what we call shabbiness; and what is more, he uses this plea only after making reparation, and not, as Æneas does, in lieu of any. To resume, however, the thread. Sometimes the Homeric heroes are pious, sometimes disobedient; sometimes bold, and sometimes fearful; sometimes they submit to overpowering force, sometimes they struggle even against destiny; but they never appear before us shorn of the first attribute of manhood, its free will.

It seems then that Virgil really did not care to form the habit, and thus commonly failed in the power, of working the highersprings of our nature. He puts the clay into the fire, but the pitcher does not always come out such as he intended it; not even when, instead of trusting, like Homer, to simple action as the vehicle of his meaning, he uses the precautionary measure of describing it.

Thus he prepares us to expect in Mezentius a monster of impiety, cruelty, and brutality, from the account and the epithets by which he is introduced to us[929]. In words scattered here and there, this ‘contemptor divûm’ is made to sustain his impious character.Dextra mihi deus, he says; and againnec divûm parcimus ulli[930]. But these are really mere black patches, set upon a character with which they do not accord; they remain patches still, and not parts of it. Practically, Mezentius proceeds in the poem only as an affectionate father, and as a gallant warrior, should do; and there is no more of real impiety in him, than there is of real piety in Æneas. Nay, here again Virgil shows his contempt of consistency. For, when Mezentius slays Orodes, who prophesied that his conqueror would meet with a similar fate upon the field of battle, Mezentius replies in the most decorous manner (copying the very language of Achilles to the dying Hector[931]),

Nunc morere. Ast de me divûm pater atque hominum rexViderit[932].

Nunc morere. Ast de me divûm pater atque hominum rex

Viderit[932].

Woman characters of Homer and Virgil.

Though Virgil is esteemed a woman-hater, he has availed himself of the use of female characters to a degree only exceeded, so far as I recollect, by the highly susceptible Tasso. His celestial machinery is principally worked by Juno and by Venus: we miss altogether in him that jovial might of the Homeric Jupiter, which is recalled in the historic portraits of king Henry the Eighth of England. Of mortals we have, besides the mute Lavinia, and minor or transitory personages, Dido, Juturna, Amata, Camilla. All these play very marked parts in the poem; indeed, they supply the mainsprings of the action; and the characters of all are drawn with great spirit and success, while the Passion of Dido will probablyalways be quoted as the most magnificent witness, which the whole range of the poem affords, to the original power and genius of its author. Yet even in these, his signal successes, it is curious to notice the dissimilarity between Virgil and Homer. Homer, too, has been eminently successful in his women. His greater studies of Helen, Andromache, and Penelope are fully sustained by the truth and force of all the less conspicuous delineations: Hecuba, Briseis, the incomparable Nausicaa, the faithful Euryclea, the pert and heartless Melantho. But how different are the works of the two poets! In all Virgil’s women (as on the other hand his men are apt to be effeminate) there is a tinge of the masculine. Many a woman would stab herself for love like Dido; but none, not even in France, with her pomp, apparatus, and self-consciousness. Their fates, too, are all of a violent character. Amata, as well as Dido, commits suicide; Camilla is slain; Juturna is immortal indeed, but is dismissed from earth with what for her comes nearest to an image of death; with defeat, mortification, shame. But on the contrary, the feminineness of Homer’s women has never been surpassed. In Hecuba alone, at one single point in the story, there is an apparent exception; yet it is no great violence done to nature, if we find in her after Hector’s death the wild ferocity of the dam deprived of her offspring, and if revenge then drives her for a moment into the temper of a cannibal. Elsewhere beyond doubt, even in Melantho, the feminine character is not wholly obliterated, but is left at the point where in actual life licentiousness and vanity might leave it. In Helen, Andromache, Nausicaa, it reaches a perfection which has never been surpassed, unless by Shakespeare, in human song. There is, however, something to be observed, which is more striking and characteristic. The Virgilian delineations of women tell us absolutely nothing, or next to nothing, of the social position of womankind either at the epoch of Æneas or at any other; a matter which has stood so differently in different ages and states of mankind, yet which has at all times been one of the surest tests for distinguishing a true and healthy from a hollow civilization. But the Homeric poems furnish a picture of this interesting subject not a whit less complete than any other picture they contain. The Womanof the heroic age of Greece stands before us in that immortal verse no less clear, no less truly drawn, no less carefully shaded, than the Warrior, the Statesman, and the King.

These are great matters: but Virgil is also as careless, as Homer is careful, of minor proprieties. For instance, he describes the Italian smiths engaged in preparing suits of armour upon the invasion of Æneas. Some, he says, make breastplates of brass; and he continues,

Aut leves ocreas lento ducunt argento[933].

Here, we presume, his purpose was to represent the hammering process by a heavy spondaic line—in evident imitation of Homer, who has done it still more completely in the

θώρηκας ῥήξειν δηΐων ἀμφὶ στήθεσσιν[934].

But Homer always gains his metrical objects without injuring the sense; Virgil, on the contrary, has committed an error, by representing silver (a most rare and valuable metal, especially in the Trojan times) as used in large masses for making armour; and a grosser solecism, by representing the greaves as made of far finer material than the breastplates. Perhaps he was helped into this error by a careless reminiscence, that Homer had in some way connected silver with the greaves. This is not, however, in armour as generally used, but in the case of some of the greatest chiefs, including Paris, whose dandyism, we know, extended particularly to his arms. Nor are even his greaves made of, or even plated with, silver, but only the clasps of them:

κνημῖδας μὲν πρῶτα περὶ κνήμῃσιν ἔθηκενκαλὰς, ἀργυρέοισιν ἐπισφυρίοις ἀραρυίας[935].

κνημῖδας μὲν πρῶτα περὶ κνήμῃσιν ἔθηκεν

καλὰς, ἀργυρέοισιν ἐπισφυρίοις ἀραρυίας[935].

Virgil is careful enough as to geography, when he deals with countries under the eye of his hearers. But he can scarcely be excused for inverting the Homeric order of the mountains piled up by the giants. Homer places Mount Pelion on Ossa, and Ossa on Olympus:

Ὄσσαν ἐπ’ Οὐλύμπῳ μέμασαν θέμεν, αὐτὰρ ἐπ’ ὌσσῃΠήλιον εἰνοσίφυλλον[936].

Ὄσσαν ἐπ’ Οὐλύμπῳ μέμασαν θέμεν, αὐτὰρ ἐπ’ Ὄσσῃ

Πήλιον εἰνοσίφυλλον[936].

This description is in conformity with the proportionate heights of the mountains, among which Olympus is the highest, Ossa the next, Pelion the least. But Virgil makes Pelion the base, and Olympus theapex:

Ter sunt conati imponere Pelio OssamScilicet, atque Ossæ frondosum involvere Olympum[937].

Ter sunt conati imponere Pelio Ossam

Scilicet, atque Ossæ frondosum involvere Olympum[937].

It is not simply that Homer is here geographically accurate, and Virgil the reverse. Homer has adopted the pyramidal structure, which satisfies the eye, and lays a firm and obvious road, so to speak, to the skies. Virgil does not. He subjoins to his description the verse,

Ter pater extructos disjecit fulmine montes.

But Jupiter might have spared himself the trouble: the mountains would have tumbled of themselves.

Confusion of natural Phenomena.

Before parting from the subject, it may be well to give another example of the indifference of Virgil to the association between poetry, and the order of external nature as such. In the Fourth Æneid, he speaks of Mercury as passing over Mount Atlas on his way to Carthage; from what point I do not now inquire. The lines are these[938];

Atlantis, cinctum assidue cui nubibus atrisPiniferum caput et vento pulsatur et imbri;Nix humeros infusa tegit: tum flumina mentoPræcipitant senis, et glacie riget horrida barba.

Atlantis, cinctum assidue cui nubibus atris

Piniferum caput et vento pulsatur et imbri;

Nix humeros infusa tegit: tum flumina mento

Præcipitant senis, et glacie riget horrida barba.

His pine-bearing head, girt with clouds, is beaten by wind and rain. So far so good. But while such is the temperature of the air at the summit, it grows colder, not warmer, as we descend: for snow covers his shoulders. This is the second image. Next, we mount again to his mouth, which discharges rivers over his chin: and not even here have we done with incongruity, for his beard, although thus watered from above, is rough and stiff with ice. Now such a confusion, as is here exhibited, of images which nature always exhibits in a fixed and very imposing order, is, we may be assured, no mere casual error, but indicates a rooted indifference about matterswhich the poets of nature study, not only with accuracy, but with an accuracy which is the fruit of their reverence and love.

The Dolopes of Homer are a part of the Myrmidons, for they are the subjects of Phœnix[939], and Phœnix commands the fifth division of the Myrmidons: they are named by Virgil as a separate race[940]. The Rhadamanthus of Homer appears to have been conceived by the Poet as a mild and benevolent character, for he is placed in the Plains of the Blest, while Minos administers severer justice in the under-world. But the Rhadamanthus of Virgil is the judge of the infernal regions, and is the image of rigour; while his Minos[941]has the very mild and also secondary function of dealing, in the vestibule of the Shades, with the cases of such persons as had been unjustly condemned on earth[942]. Again, where Homer uses exaggeration to enhance effect, Virgil carries it far into caricature. In the Iliad, Diomed[943]heaves a stone, of a weight that ‘two men such as are nowadays (οἷοι νῦν βροτοί εἰσι) could scarcely lift.’ He allows for a short interval since the Trojan war, and says that two ordinary men of his day could scarcely lift what warriors of extraordinary strength, by an extraordinary effort, then raised and hurled. In another place, Ajax flings a stone, such as even a man in the fullest vigour could now scarcely hold[944]. Again, Hector discharges against the Greek rampart one which two strong men could hardly raise with a lever; but then he is specially aided by Jupiter[945]. Now in the Fifth Æneid, Æneas gives to Mnestheus, as a prize, a breastplate which he himself had won, the spoil of Demoleos. This Demoleos[946]was no hero, for he is never named by Homer; again, the Demoleos of Virgil wore the breastplate when he chased the Trojans flying in all directions (‘palantes,’ Æn. v. 265), so that it must have been light to him: there was no time at all for human degeneracy, since they are still his contemporaries that are on the stage; and yet such was the weight of this breastplate, that two men together could scarcely carry it on their shoulders.

‘Vix illam famuli Phegeus Sagarisque ferebantMultiplicem, connixi humeris[947].’

‘Vix illam famuli Phegeus Sagarisque ferebant

Multiplicem, connixi humeris[947].’

Let it not be thought that the varied examples, which have here been quoted, are either irrelevant or without serious significance. There cannot, surely, be a more decided error than to treat accuracy in matters of this kind as a matter of sheer indifference. It is not only inseparable from the function of the primitive Poet as the historian of his subject, but it appertains also to the perfection of his poetic nature, that he should have a nice sense of proportion even in figurative language. I have dwelt, however, upon minor points, not for their own sake, but because the manner in which Virgil handles them appears to throw no unimportant light upon the frame and temper of his work at large, and of the later as compared with the earliest poetry.

Contrast of principal aims.

In diction, Virgil is ornate and Homer simple; in metre, Virgil is uniform and sustained, Homer free and varied; in the faculty of invention, for which the historical office of early poetry still leaves ample room, Homer is inexhaustible, while, from the needless accumulation of imitations in every sort and size, Virgil gives ground to suspect that he was poor, at least by comparison. The first thought of Homer was his subject, and the second his nation; the first thought of Virgil was his Emperor and the court around the throne, the second the elaboration of his verse. Characters, feelings, facts, were used by Virgil for producing on the mind the effect of scenic representation; the end of Homer, on the contrary, was to giveadequate vent, in and through these things poetically conceived and handled, to his own yearnings, and to the sympathies of his hearers[948]. The intercommunion of spirit between the poet and those to whom he sang, was not in him a sordid quest of popularity; it was only an expression of the truth that he founded both his composition and his hopes upon the basis of a great effort to be the organ of the general heart of mankind. All this we may discern in his notices, informal as they are, of the profession of the minstrel:

ἢ καὶ θέσπιν ἀοιδὸν, ὅ κεν τέρπῃσιν ἀείδων[949]·

in the names he assigns to them, where they were not historical characters,Δημόδοκος, andΦήμιος Τερπιάδης; in the moral uprightness with which he invests them; for, though it was the office of Phemius to delight, his heart was never with the licentious and guilty band that held the palace of Ulysses:

ὅς ῥ’ ἤειδε μετὰ μνηστῆρσιν ἀνάγκῃ[950].

And again, in the offices of guardianship which they exercised; for Agamemnon, when he left his home for Troy, carefully enjoined upon the bard of his palace the care of Clytemnestra; and his advice, with her own right sense, for a time stood her in good stead[951]. Such was the bard in the living description of Homer; such he was represented in the Poet himself, never thrust into view, but ever understood, ever perceived, through his works. On the other hand, the character of the bard, as exhibited in Virgil, is what may be termed professional: the fire and power of genius may be in him, but they must work only under conventional forms, and for ends prescribed according to the spirit of that lower and narrower utility which is, not logically perhaps, but yet very effectively, denominated utilitarianism. A remarkably high form of exterior art, with a radical inattention to substance, both of facts and laws, has been the result in the case of Virgil. And it is rather significant, that this great Poet has nowhere placed upon his canvass the figure of the bard amidst the abodes of man; as if the verytype had perished from the earth in those degenerate days, and the memory of him could not be recalled. An effete and corrupted age could no longer conceive a mind like the mind of Homer; an Æolian harp so finely strung, that it answers to the faintest movement of the air by a proportionate vibration: with every stronger current its music rises, along an almost immeasurable scale, which begins with the lowest and softest whisper, and ends in the full swell of the organ.

Change in the idea of the Poet’s office.

By a false association of ideas, we have come to place accuracy and genius in antagonism to one another. It is Homer who may best undeceive us: except indeed that most complete solution which the mind gladly perceives when, ascending to the Author of all being, it finds in Him alone the source and the perfection, alike of Order and of Light; alike of the most minute, and of the most gigantic operations. But among men Homer best exemplifies this union. It is not indeed the precision of dry facts, terminating upon itself: it is the precision of sympathies, of sympathies with nature and with man, to which the minute and scrupulous adjustments of Homer are to be referred; and this precision is probably due by no means to conscious effort, but to the spontaneous operations of the soul. In this view his far-famed, but not even yet fully fathomed, accuracy is no deduction from his greatness, but is in truth a proof of the near approach to perfection in the organization of his faculties. The later poets have too often torn asunder, what in him was harmoniously combined. They have conferred upon their art a deadly gift, in claiming first an exemptionad libitumfrom the laws, not only of dry fact, but of Truth in its higher sense, of harmony and self-consistency, and of all, except a merely external beauty, which was meant to be the vehicle and not the substitute for all those great and discarded qualities. In this work of laceration, Virgil has borne no secondary share.

Upon the whole, though it is doubtless natural that Virgil should be compared with Homer, the mind is astonished at finding that he should so often even have gained a preference. We may account for his being chosen as Dante’s guide, by their being countrymen, and by the almost universal ignoranceof Greek when Dante wrote. It is far more staggering to find Saint Augustine emphatically call him[952]Poeta magnus omniumque præclarissimus atque optimus; for he was no stranger to Greek influences, inasmuch as the philosophy of Plato had a very high place in his estimation[953]. Nor can this be readily accounted for, except by the advantage which Virgil had through writing in the Latin tongue, and by the very great decay of poetical tastes and perceptions.

Still let us not do wrong to the memory of him, who thrilled with an immeasurable love, as he bore the sacred vessels of the Muses; and who has received so unequivocally the seal of that approbation of mankind, prolonged through ages, which comes near to an infallible award. It is but fair to admit, that we must not measure the relative rank of Homer and Virgil simply by the comparative merits of their epic works. Homer lived in the genial and joyous youth of a poetic nation and a poetic religion, and amid the influences of the soul of freedom: Virgil among a people always matter-of-fact rather than poetical, in an age and a court where the heart and its emotions were chilled, where liberty was dead, where religion was a mockery, and the whole higher material of his art had passed from freshness into the sear and yellow leaf. Whether Virgil, if he had lived the life of Homer in Homer’s country and Homer’s time, could have composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, may be more than doubtful; but it is indisputably clear that Homer could not have produced them, if it had been his misfortune to live at the date and in the sphere of Virgil.

I pass on now to make some attempt at comparison between the work of Tasso and the Iliad of Homer. But although the relation between the subjects appears to recommend the choice of Tasso for this purpose rather than any other Italian poet, I have to confess, that as far as the qualities of the men are concerned, both Bojardo and Ariosto are in my estimation more Homeric than Tasso; as being nearer to nature in its truest sense, as not conveying the same impression of perpetual effort and elaboration, as exempt from the temptation to the conceitsso unhappily frequent in theGerusalemme, and generally as working with a freer and broader touch, and exhibiting a more vigorous and elastic movement.

The War of Troy and the Crusades.

There is, however, a striking resemblance between the relation in which the Trojan war stood to Greece, and that of the Crusades to Western Europe. The political unity and collective existence of Greece was greatly due to the first, that of Christendom to the second. The combination of races and of chiefs, the arduous character and extraordinary prolongation of the effort, the chivalry displayed, the disorganizing effects upon the countries which supplied the invading army, the representation in each of Europe against Asia, of Western mankind meeting Eastern mankind in arms, and the proof of superior prowess in the former, establish many broad and deep analogies between the subjects of these poems. In both struggles, too, the object purported to be the recovery of that which the East had unrighteously acquired: and into both what is called sentiment far more largely entered, than is common in the history of the wars which have laid desolate our earth.

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