_To Lady Violet Lebas_.
Dear Lady Violet,--Who can admire too much your undefeated resolution to
admire only the right things? I wish I had this respect for authority!
But let me confess that I have always admired the things which nature
made me prefer, and that I have no power of accommodating my taste to the
verdict of the critical. If I do not like an author, I leave him alone,
however great his reputation. Thus I do not care for Mr. Gibbon, except
in his Autobiography, nor for the elegant plays of M. Racine, nor very
much for some of Wordsworth, though his genius is undeniable, nor
excessively for the late Prof. Amiel. Why should we force ourselves into
an affection for them, any more than into a relish for olives or claret,
both of which excellent creatures I have the misfortune to dislike? No
spectacle annoys me more than the sight of people who ask if it is
"right" to take pleasure in this or that work of art. Their loves and
hatreds will never be genuine, natural, spontaneous.
You say that it is "right" to like Virgil, and yet you admit that you
admire the Mantuan, as the Scotch editor joked, "wi' deeficulty." I,
too, must admit that my liking for much of Virgil's poetry is not
enthusiastic, not like the admiration expressed, for example, by Mr.
Frederic Myers, in whose "Classical Essays" you will find all that the
advocates of the Latin singer can say for him. These heights I cannot
reach, any more than I can equal that eloquence. Yet must Virgil always
appear to us one of the most beautiful and moving figures in the whole of
literature.
How sweet must have been that personality which can still win our
affections, across eighteen hundred years of change, and through the
mists of commentaries, and school-books, and traditions! Does it touch
thee at all, oh gentle spirit and serene, that we, who never knew thee,
love thee yet, and revere thee as a saint of heathendom? Have the dead
any delight in the religion they inspire?
_Id cinerem aut Manes credis curare sepultos_?
I half fancy I can trace the origin of this personal affection for
Virgil, which survives in me despite the lack of a very strong love of
parts of his poems. When I was at school we met every morning for
prayer, in a large circular hall, round which, on pedestals, were set
copies of the portrait busts of great ancient writers. Among these was
"the Ionian father of the rest," our father Homer, with a winning and
venerable majesty. But the bust of Virgil was, I think, of white marble,
not a cast (so, at least, I remember it), and was of a singular youthful
purity and beauty, sharing my affections with a copy of the exquisite
Psyche of Naples. It showed us that Virgil who was called "The Maiden"
as Milton was named "The Lady of Christ's." I don't know the archeology
of it, perhaps it was a mere work of modern fancy, but the charm of this
image, beheld daily, overcame even the tedium of short scraps of the
"AEneid" daily parsed, not without stripes and anguish. So I retain a
sentiment for Virgil, though I well perceive the many drawbacks of his
poetry.
It is not always poetry at first hand; it is often imitative, like all
Latin poetry, of the Greek songs that sounded at the awakening of the
world. This is more tolerable when Theocritus is the model, as in the
"Eclogues," and less obvious in the "Georgics," when the poet is carried
away into naturalness by the passion for his native land, by the longing
for peace after cruel wars, by the joy of a country life. Virgil had
that love of rivers which, I think, a poet is rarely without; and it did
not need Greece to teach him to sing of the fields:
_Propter aquam, tardis ingens ubi flexibus_
_Mincius et tenera praetexit arundine ripas_.
"By the water-side, where mighty Mincius wanders, with links and loops,
and fringes all the banks with the tender reed." Not the Muses of
Greece, but his own _Casmenae_, song-maidens of Italy, have inspired him
here, and his music is blown through a reed of the Mincius. In many such
places he shows a temper with which we of England, in our late age, may
closely sympathize.
Do you remember that mediaeval story of the building of Parthenope, how
it was based, by the Magician Virgilius, on an egg, and how the city
shakes when the frail foundation chances to be stirred? This too vast
empire of ours is as frail in its foundation, and trembles at a word. So
it was with the Empire of Rome in Virgil's time: civic revolution
muttering within it, like the subterranean thunder, and the forces of
destruction gathering without. In Virgil, as in Horace, you constantly
note their anxiety, their apprehension for the tottering fabric of the
Roman state. This it was, I think, and not the contemplation of human
fortunes alone, that lent Virgil his melancholy. From these fears he
looks for a shelter in the sylvan shades; he envies the ideal past of the
golden world.
_Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat_!
"Oh, for the fields! Oh, for Spercheius and Taygetus, where wander the
Lacaenian maids! Oh, that one would carry me to the cool valleys of
Haemus, and cover me with the wide shadow of the boughs! Happy was he
who came to know the causes of things, who set his foot on fear and on
inexorable Fate, and far below him heard the roaring of the streams of
Hell! And happy he who knows the rural deities, Pan, and Sylvanus the
Old, and the sisterhood of the nymphs! Unmoved is he by the people's
favour, by the purple of kings, unmoved by all the perfidies of civil
war, by the Dacian marching down from his hostile Danube; by the peril of
the Roman state, and the Empire hurrying to its doom. He wasteth not his
heart in pity of the poor, he envieth not the rich, he gathereth what
fruits the branches bear and what the kindly wilderness unasked brings
forth; he knows not our laws, nor the madness of the courts, nor the
records of the common weal"--does not read the newspapers, in fact.
The sorrows of the poor, the luxury of the rich, the peril of the Empire,
the shame and dread of each day's news, we too know them; like Virgil we
too deplore them. We, in our reveries, long for some such careless
paradise, but we place it not in Sparta but in the Islands of the
Southern Seas. It is in passages of this temper that Virgil wins us
most, when he speaks for himself and for his age, so distant, and so
weary, and so modern; when his own thought, unborrowed and unforced, is
wedded to the music of his own unsurpassable style.
But he does not always write for himself and out of his own thought, that
style of his being far more frequently misapplied, wasted on telling a
story that is only of feigned and foreign interest. Doubtless it was the
"AEneid," his artificial and unfinished epic, that won Virgil the favour
of the Middle Aces. To the Middle Ages, which knew not Greek, and knew
not Homer, Virgil was the representative of the heroic and eternally
interesting past. But to us who know Homer, Virgil's epic is indeed,
"like moonlight unto sunlight;" is a beautiful empty world, where no real
life stirs, a world that shines with a silver lustre not its own, but
borrowed from "the sun of Greece."
Homer sang of what he knew, of spears and ships, of heroic chiefs and
beggar men, of hunts and sieges, of mountains where the lion roamed, and
of fairy isles where a goddess walked alone. He lived on the marches of
the land of fable, when half the Mediterranean was a sea unsailed, when
even Italy was as dimly descried as the City of the Sun in Elizabeth's
reign. Of all that he knew he sang, but Virgil could only follow and
imitate, with a pale antiquarian interest, the things that were alive for
Homer. What could Virgil care for a tussle between two stout
men-at-arms, for the clash of contending war-chariots, driven each on
each, like wave against wave in the sea? All that tide had passed over,
all the story of the "AEneid" is mere borrowed antiquity, like the Middle
Ages of Sir Walter Scott; but the borrower had none of Scott's joy in the
noise and motion of war, none of the Homeric "delight in battle."
Virgil, in writing the "AEneid," executed an imperial commission, and an
ungrateful commission; it is the sublime of hack-work, and the legend may
be true which declares that, on his death-bed, he wished his poem burned.
He could only be himself here and there, as in that earliest picture of
romantic love, as some have called the story of "Dido," not remembering,
perhaps, that even here Virgil had before his mind a Greek model, that he
was thinking of Apollonius Rhodius, and of Jason and Medea. He could be
himself, too, in passages of reflection and description, as in the
beautiful sixth book, with its picture of the under world, and its hints
of mystical philosophy.
Could we choose our own heavens, there in that Elysian world might Virgil
be well content to dwell, in the shadow of that fragrant laurel grove,
with them who were "priests pure of life, while life was theirs, and holy
singers, whose songs were worthy of Apollo." There he might muse on his
own religion and on the Divinity that dwells in, that breathes in, that
is, all things and more than all. Who could wish Virgil to be one of the
spirits that
_Lethaeum ad flumen Dues evocat agmine magno_,
that are called once more to the Lethean stream, and that once more,
forgetful of their home, "into the world and wave of men depart?"
There will come no other Virgil, unless his soul, in accordance with his
own philosophy, is among us to-day, crowned with years and honours, the
singer of "Ulysses," of the "Lotus Eaters," of "Tithonus," and "OEnone."
So, after all, I have been enthusiastic, "maugre my head," as Malory
says, and perhaps, Lady Violet, I have shown you why it is "right" to
admire Virgil, and perhaps I have persuaded nobody but myself.
P.S.--Mr. Coleridge was no great lover of Virgil, inconsistently. "If
you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?" Yet
Mr. Coleridge had defined poetry as "the _best_ words, in the best
order"--that is, "diction and metre." He, therefore, proposed to take
from Virgil his poetry, and then to ask what was left of the Poet!