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tions. Aeneas, as the son of a mightier goddess1, is distinguished in the Iliad by the honours of a higher lineage than Achilles. He is brave in war, the comrade of Hector, a hero deemed worthy to encounter Achilles himself as well as Diomede in battle. He is especially dear to the gods, and is marked out by prophecy as destined to bear, and transmit to his descendants, the rule over the remnant of the Trojans. To Anchises attaches the sanctity of one enjoying a closer communion with the immortals, of one at once favoured and afflicted above others, and elevated, like Oedipus, out of weakness and suffering here, into honour and influence beyond the grave. Iulus receives a reflected glory from the transcendent greatness of the Julian house. Dido or Elissa was a name famous in Phoenician legend, and associated with the ancient renown of Tyre. Evander is illustrious from his Arcadian origin, from his relation to Hercules, from the fame of his mother as one of the Italian Camenae. Even the mere ethnical names of Latinus and Turnus receive individuality by being introduced in the line of old Italian dynasties, and in direct connexion with Faunus, Picus, and other beings of the native mythology.

It may therefore be said that in the choice of the time and the scenes in which his action is laid, in the character of the action itself, and in the eminence of the personages taking part in it, Virgil fulfils all the conditions of his art which reflexion on the models of the past and on the circumstances in life most capable of interesting the imagination could teach him. The care with which he prepared himself for his task is as remarkable as the judgment with which he conceived its main conditions. The conduct of his story shows the most intimate familiarity with the incidents and adventures contained in the Iliad and Odyssey, in the Cyclic poems and the dramas founded on them, in the Homeric hymns and the Alexandrine epic. It shows how Virgil so combines and varies the details thus suggested, as to recall many features of the

1 Il. xx. 105.

Homeric age, and at the same time to produce the impression of something new in literary art. The revived image of that age must have affected the contemporaries of the poet in a manner different from its effect on us. To us both the Iliad and the Aeneid are ancient and unfamiliar: the one comes before us as an original picture of manners, the other as a copy taken in a long subsequent age. But to a Roman of the time of Augustus the life of the Homerit age must have appeared almost as remote as it does to us. The direct imitations of Homer in the Aeneid might produce on his mind the same mixed impression of novelty and familiarity which is produced on a modern reader by the reproduction and recasting of the doctrines, incidents, and language of the Bible in the two epic poems of Milton. The fascination of this world. of supernatural agency and personal adventure, brought home to him for the first time in the most elevated tones of his own language, may have charmed the Roman reader in the same way as the revival of mediaeval romance in the literary languages of modern Europe charmed the readers of the latter part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth centuries. And if such were the first impressions produced by the poem, a closer examination of it must have shown that the imagination of Virgil had out of ancient materials built up something new in the world. If his representation of the heroic age wants the vivid truth and naïveté of Homer's representation, yet it is impressive with the dignity of antique associations, and rich with the colouring of his own human sensibilities.

But the Aeneid not only revives the romance of the Greek heroic age: it creates the romance of 'that Italy for which Camilla the virgin, Euryalus, and Turnus and Nisus died of wounds.' It bestows the colour and warmth of human life on dim traditions, on vague names, on the memories of early warfare clinging to ancient towns, and on the origins of immemorial customs and ceremonies. The task of giving poetic life to the dry prose of Cato, to the dust of antiquarian learning, and

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to the rigid formalism of the old Roman ceremonial must have taxed the poet's powers more than that of reawakening the interest in the old Homeric life. Virgil accomplishes this result through his power of living at the same time in the past and in the present; of feeling powerfully the associations of a remote antiquity, and the immediate action of all that was most impressive to thought and imagination in the age in which he lived.

The earlier works of Virgil had proved his strength in descriptive and didactic poetry, and in the expression of personal feeling, of national sentiment, and of ethical contemplation; but they had given no indication of epic, and little of dramatic genius. Although the episode of the 'Pastor Aristaeus' is a specimen of succinct, animated, and pathetic narrative, it must be remembered that this was a late addition to the Georgics, and was probably written after considerable way had been made in the composition of the Aeneid. An epic poet, over and above his purely poetic susceptibility, must possess the art and faculty of a prose historian. Homer has in an unequalled degree the clearness, vividness, and movement in telling his story, which characterise such writers as Herodotus. The account given of Virgil's mode of composition proves that he took great pains both with the plan and the execution of his narrative. He is said to have arranged the first draught of his story in prose, and then to have worked on the various parts of it as they interested him at the time of composition. There are clear indications that the books were not written in the order in which they stand; and a few inconsistencies of statement between the earlier and later books were left uncorrected at the time of the author's death. The poem, in the careful arrangement of its materials, bears the stamp of the manner in which it was composed. Like that of every other great Roman, the genius of Virgil was thoroughly orderly and systematic. But along with the power of order Virgil had what many Roman writers want, the power of variety. The narrative of the Aeneid is full of movement, succinct

or ample according to the prominence intended to be given to its different parts. The various streams of action are kept separate, yet not too far apart to cause any confusion or forgetfulness when the time comes to unite them. There is at once weight and energy in the movement of the main current: it neither hurries nor flags, but advances for the most part steadily, 'quadam intentione gravitatis.' If it wants the buoyancy and vivacity of the narrative of Herodotus, it shows the concentrated energy which distinguishes the works of the great Roman historians. It brings before us rather a series of grave events, bearing on a great issue and following an inevitable course, than the vicissitudes of individual fortunes and the play of human passions and impulses: and in this it is in accordance both with the actual history of Rome, and with the record of it contained in literature.

Virgil cannot be said to have failed either in the conception of his subject, in the collection and preparation of his materials, or in the art and faculty demanded for impressive narrative. Yet all feel that the Aeneid is much inferior to the Homeric poems in natural human interest, as it is much inferior in reflective interest to the greatest extant dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The poem, as a whole, produces the impression rather of careful construction than of organic growth. The reflexion employed on it is rather that of a critic applying artistic principles to impart unity to many heterogeneous materials, than that of an imaginative thinker, seeing his story unfold itself before him in the light of some great intuition into the secret meanings of life.

His inferiority to Homer in the power of making his story at once vividly real and nobly ideal arises partly from an inferiority in his own temper, and partly from the inferior adaptability of the life of his own age to imaginative treatment. There is no trace in Virgil of that keen enjoyment of personal adventure and bodily activity which is present in every page of the Homeric poems. Virgil's materials are gathered from study and

reflexion, not from strong and many-sided contact with life. Though he writes of 'arma virumque' with a Roman sense of the duty of disregarding danger and death, he has none of the 'delight of battle' which animates the Iliad and the poetical and prose romances of Scott. Neither does he make us feel that elevation of spirit in the presence of the danger of the sea, which the author of the Odyssey among ancient, and Byron among modern poets, communicate to their readers.

But the vast difference in manners, feelings, and modes of thought, between an early and a late age-between the spring and the autumn of ancient civilisation—presented still more insuperable obstacles to Virgil in his attempt to accomplish the work of Homer. In the first period imagination is the ruling faculty of life, the great impeller to action and discovery, the chief prompter both of hope and fear; and thus the movement and impulses of such an age readily yield themselves to imaginative treatment. Poets and dramatists of a later time who desire to represent life in its most energetic phase endeavour to reproduce some image of this early time by a constructive act of imagination. A dramatist may take the mere outline of some ancient legend and fill it with modern thought and sentiment. He is not called on for that realistic reproduction of manners and usages which an epic poet is expected to exhibit on his larger canvas. The difficulty which the latter has to meet is that of verifying by anything in his own experience the impression which he forms from the study of ancient art and records. Homer alone, by living the imaginative life of an earlier time, was able to represent that life in its truth, its fulness of being, its vivid sense of pleasure and pain. The age mirrored in the Homeric poems is the true age of romance and personal enterprise, when the individual acquires ascendency through his own qualities of strength, beauty, courage, force of mind, natural eloquence; when the world is re rded as the scene of supernatural agencies manifesting themselves in visible shape; when men live more in the open air than in houses

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