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 nice people
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 at
the 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 OEggischorn 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, and shows 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 the _arete_. 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 thousand feet 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 distant _jodel_, 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 churching service, 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.
AENEAS:
A VERGILIAN STUDY.
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 the strength 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 AEneid 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 AEneid 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 of the 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 AEneid 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 AEneid. 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 AEneas. AEneas is
the representative of that "piety," that faith in his race 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 AEneas, 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 AEneid.
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 quaero patriam" is the key-note of the AEneid, but the Quest of
AEneas is no self-sought quest of his own. "Italiam non sponte sequor,"
he pleads as Dido turns from him in 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 Phoenician Queen. The memorable words that
AEneas 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. AEneas 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 you will," 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. AEneas
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 Grynaeus Apollo,
Italiam Lyciae jussere capessere sortes.
Hic amor, haec 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 imitator of 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. AEneas 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 unearthly vagueness 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
AEneas 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 AEneas with the ties
and affections of home. In the awful night with which his story opens
the loss of 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 AEneas. 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 AEneas,
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 AEneas.[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 AEneas. 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 lacrymae rerum et mentem mortalia
tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the
AEneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of AEneas. 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 AEneid.
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 AEneas. Vergil seems to protest in his very hero against the
poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. On the eve of his
final triumph, AEneas
"incusat voce Latinum;
Testaturque deos iteram se ad proelia 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.