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 AEneas 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 AEneid 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 leader and 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 AEneas 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 had to 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 AEneas 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 him the grandeur of man's higher
constancy to an unselfish purpose, "varium et mutabile semper foemina."
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 AEneas
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 AEneas and not AEneas 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 a queen, 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 AEneas,
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 AEneas 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 AEneas 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 is weary of wandering, longing with all the old-world
intensity of longing for a settled home. "O fortunati quorum jam moenia
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 AEneas stand face to face.
Few situations in poetry are more artistic than this meeting of AEneas
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 AEneid 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
fiery longings into her heart. Slowly, unconsciously, the lovers draw
together. The gratitude of AEneas 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
AEneid, the stately introduction that fortells the destinies of Rome and
the divine end to which the fates were guiding AEneas, 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 AEneas 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, of reverie, 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 Sychaeus
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 final catastrophe. 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 AEneas, 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 AEneas 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 Maenad in the nightly orgies of Cithaeron; 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 against her 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 AEneas 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 AEneas
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 AEneas
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 and sharply 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 AEneas 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, haec
patria est." AEneas 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]
AEneas 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 ships quit
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 AEneid 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 Roman
peace 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 Caesar. To Vergil Augustus was the founder of a new
Rome, the AEneas who after long wanderings across the strife of civil war
had brought her into quiet waters and bound warring 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 AEneid. 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 Rome from 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. AEneas 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 AEneas, 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.
"Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,
Praemia digna ferant!"
The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness, but through them we
feel the doubt whether, after all, uprightness and a good conscience
were really the object of a divine care. Heaven had flown further off
from earth than in the days of the Iliad. The laws of the universe, as
time had revealed them, the current of human affairs, the very might of
the colossal Empire in which the world of civilization found itself
prisoned, all seemed to be dwarfing man. Man remained, the sad stern
manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes through the character of
AEneas, enduring, baffled, yet full of a faith that the very storms that
drove him from sea to sea were working out some mysterious and divine
order. Man was greater than his fate:--
"Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur,
Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est."
There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words with which AEneas
addresses himself to his final combat:--
"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem,
Fortunam ex aliis."
But the "dis aliter visum" meets us at every step. Ripheus is the most
just and upright among the warriors of Troy, but he is the first to
fall. An inscrutable mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men of
harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and like Augustus repeat
their "vanitas vanitatum" with a smile of contempt at the fools who take
life in earnest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vergil
carry about with them "the pity of it." It is this melancholy that
flings its sad grace over the verse of the AEneid. We close it as we
close the Idylls with the King's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman
stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chivalrous spiritualism
of Arthur. The ideal of the old world is of nobler, sterner tone than
the ideal of the new. Even with death and ruin around him, and the
mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and master of
his fate. The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the
greatness and welfare of the race. We pity, the wandering of AEneas, but
his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark
boat dies into a dot upon the mere; the dream of AEneas becomes Rome.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] "Dextrae se parvus Iulus
Implicuit, sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis."
"His steps scarce matching with my stride."
Mr. Conington's translation hardly renders the fond little touch of the
Vergilian phrase, a phrase only possible to a lover of children.
[3] "Me puer Ascanius, capitisque injuria cari,
Quem regno Hesperiae fraudo et fatalibus arvis."
[4] "Quibus Hector ab oris
Expectate venis?"
[5] "Cur dextrae jungere dextram
Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"
[6] "O sola infandos Trojae miserata labores."
[7] "Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco."
[8] "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella."
[9] "Agnosco veteris vestigia ammae."
[10] "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori,
Dum mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere."
[11] "Nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae."
TWO VENETIAN STUDIES.
I.
VENICE AND ROME.
It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast which makes one's
first row from Venice to Torcello so hard to forget. Behind us the great
city sinks slowly into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted
here and there over the gleaming surface, are the orange sails of
trailing market-boats; we skirt the great hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose
boatmen bandy _lazzi_ and badinage with our gondolier; we glide by a
lonely cypress into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste of
brown sedge and brushwood, the tower of Torcello rises sharply against
the sky. There is something weird and unearthly in the suddenness with
which one passes from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred
with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflections of wall and
bell-tower, into this presence of desolation and death. A whole world
seems to part those dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those
patches of sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen water,
from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And yet really to understand
the origin of Venice, those ages of terror and flight and exile in which
the Republic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It was from
the vast Alpine chain which hangs in the haze of midday like a long dim
cloud-line to the north that the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the
Roman world. Their path lay, along the coast trending round to the west,
where lost among little villages that stand out white in the distant
shadow lie the sites of Heraclea and Altinum. Across these grey shallows
cut by the blue serpentine windings of deeper channels the Romans of the
older province of Venetia on the mainland fled before Attila or
Theodoric or Alboin to found the new Venetia of the lagoon. Eastward
over Lido the glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of the
Pirate war, that, struggle for life which shaped into their after-form
the government and destinies of the infant state. Venice itself, the
crown and end of struggle and of flight, lies over shining miles of
water to the south. But it is here that one can best study the story of
its birth; it is easier to realize those centuries of exile and
buffeting for life amid the dreary flats, the solitude, the poverty of
Torcello than beneath the gleaming front of the Ducal Palace or the
mosaics of St. Mark.
Here in fact lies the secret of Venetian history, the one key by which
it is possible to understand the strange riddle of the Republic. For
thirteen centuries Venice lay moored as it were off the coast of Western
Europe, without political analogue or social parallel. Its patriciate,
its people, its government were not what government or people or
patriciate were in other countries of Western Christendom. The
difference lay not in any peculiar institutions which it had developed,
or in any novel form of social or administrative order which it had
invented, but in the very origin of the State itself. We see this the
better if we turn from Venice to our own homeland. The same age saw the
birth of the two great maritime Powers of modern Europe, for the
settlements of the English in Britain cover the same century with those
of the Roman exiles in the Venetian Lagoon. But the English
colonization was the establishment of a purely Teutonic State on the
wreck of Rome, while the Venetian was the establishment of a purely
Roman State in the face of the Teuton. Venice in its origin was simply
the Imperial province of Venetia floated across to the islands of the
shore. Before the successive waves of the northern inroad the citizens
of the coast fled to the sandbanks which had long served them as gardens
or merchant-ports. The "Chair of Attila," the rough stone seat beside
the church of San Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before
whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to Torcello and the
islands around. Their city--even materially--passed with them. The new
houses were built from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum
served for the "New Altinum" which arose on the desolate isle, and
inscriptions, pillars, capitals came in the track of the exiles across
the lagoon to be worked into the fabric of its cathedral.