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faltered as he read.1 At this Augustus and Octavia melted into passionate weeping. Here is the verse which Augustine quotes as typical in its majestic rhythm of all the pathos and the glory of pagan art, from which the Christian was bound to flee. This is the couplet1 which Fénelon could never read without admiring tears. This line Filippo Strozzi scrawled on his prison-wall, when he slew himself to avoid worse ill.5 These are the words which, like a trumpet-call, roused Savonarola to seek the things that are above. And this line? Dante heard on the lips of the Church Triumphant, at the opening of the Paradise of God. Here, too, are the long roll of prophecies sought tremblingly in the monk's secret cell, or echoing in the ears of emperors from Apollo's shrine, which have answered the appeal made by so many an eager heart to the Virgilian Lots-that strange invocation which has been addressed, I believe, to Homer, Virgil, and the Bible alone; the offspring of men's passionate desire to bring to bear on their own lives the wisdom and the beauty which they revered in the past, to make their prophets in such wise as they might—

'Speak from those lips of immemorial speech,

If but one word for each.'

THE LIFE OF VIRGIL.

Virgil, the son of a yeoman farmer, was born near Mantua in 70 B.C. He was educated at Cremona and Milan, and studied subsequently at Naples and at Rome. At Naples (as was natural) he learnt Greek and at Rome studied under Siro, an Epicurean philosopher, who was also a neighbour at his home in the North. His education had a very direct bearing on his prospects in life, for when the civil wars involved (about 40 B.C.) the threatened loss of his father's farm it was to Siro that they fled for refuge, and it was through the influence of the friends of his school-days that the danger was averted. Pollio, governor of Cisalpine Gaul, introduced him to the young Augustus (then known as Octavius), and the farm was

1 Hoc solum nomen quoniam de coniuge restat.
2 Tu Marcellus eris, &c. A. vi. 883.

A. iv. 324.

3 Infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae. A. ii. 772.
4 Aude, hospes, contemnere opes, et te quoque dignum
Finge deo, rebusque veni non asper egenis. A. viii. 364.

5 Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor. A. iv. 625.
Heu! fuge crudelis terras, fuge litus avarum.

7 Manibus date lilia plenis. 4. vi. 883.

A. iii. 44.

› Claudius, Hadrian, Severus, &c., 'in templo Apollinis Cumani.'

saved. His gratitude to Pollio was shown in the Eclogues, his first important work.

From this time onward his life was uneventful. Maecenas, Augustus's minister and the typical literary patron of all time, suggested to him the subject of the Georgics (which were composed between 37-30 B. C.), and accepted the dedication of the work. We catch occasional glimpses of him in the poems of Horace, and the two friends, differing in temperament and tastes, were united in a common admiration of the high plans of the emperor and his minister. Nothing could be more natural than that Virgil should believe fervently in an empire which in his eyes was holy no less than Roman, should see in it more than was apparent to the prosaic world, and should desire to consecrate his genius to the task of revealing what he saw. He wished, it may be said, to do for his generation what Shakespeare did for the Elizabethans, and what Mr. Kipling, in very different circumstances and by very different methods, has attempted to do for the British Empire. Whether the attempt succeeds or fails, it is only through poetry that the soul of a nation can be expressed.

Hence comes the design of the Aeneid, and if the dictum is true, 'On n'exécute que mal ce qu'on n'a pas conçu soi-même', it is impossible to doubt that the idea, though no doubt welcome to Augustus and Maecenas, was fundamentally Virgil's own. He was still engaged on it at the time of his death in 19 B. C., and was so dissatisfied with its incompleteness that he left orders that it should be burnt. Had he lived, we are told that it was his intention to devote himself to philosophy, and the Sixth Book perhaps hints at the kind of speculation which he would have found most attractive. The Christian Church, mainly on the strength of the fourth Eclogue, has long hailed Virgil as anima naturaliter Christiana, and the well-known story of St. Paul's homage at his tomb, on the road between Naples and Puteoli, has truth in it as well as pathos.

Ad Maronis mausoleum
Ductus, fudit super eum

Piae rorem lacrimae :
Quem te, inquit, reddidissem
Si te vivum invenissem,
Poetarum maxime!

THE METHOD OF COMPOSITION OF THE AENEID.

We are told by Servius that Virgil first sketched out the whole work in twelve books in prose and wrote the poem as he liked (prout liberet quidque et nihil in ordinem arripiens). If he did not feel inspiration in a particular passage he left it lightly sketched in (levissimis verbis), saying laughingly that he would wait until the solid columns came to support the edifice. This explains the comparative weakness of some passages, and the frequent broken lines.1

It appears that the second, fourth, and sixth books were the first to reach so comparatively finished a state as to be recited to Augustus, and in any case the books were not composed in their present order. Some inconsistencies as to the length of Aeneas's wanderings and some discrepancies between prophecies and their fulfilment are natural results of this method in a work which the author did not live to revise.

A heroic suggestion, which removes many of the difficulties, is that the original draft of Book III was written in the third person and intended to come first. The possibility is worth mentioning here as a reminder that we cannot feel any certainty (with the partial exception of the three books above mentioned) that we have the Aeneid either as it was originally planned by Virgil, or as he would ultimately have left it. Even in its present form it does not justify the verdict of Landor that it is 'the most misshapen of epics', though he may be right in saying that 'it is an epic of episodes', and that 'these constitute the greater and better part'.

1 It should perhaps be added that some great critics have always refused to believe that the fine effect often produced by the unfinished line can be the result of accident. The point is discussed in more detail in the note on IV. 361.

THE METRE OF VIRGIL.

The hexameter, like the elegiac, and the lyric metres used by Horace, was of course borrowed from Greece: it is needless to say that they all suffered in the process, for 'there never has been, there never will be, a language like the dead Greek.' It would be foolish to lay much emphasis on the fact that the metre was not an original creation of the Latin poets: such a line of criticism would involve us in the absurdity of disparaging the great mass of English poetry which is written in metres borrowed from Italy or France: it cannot, however, be denied that the quantitative hexameter excluded a very large number of Latin words and severely limited the possible constructions.

But the very difficulties of the process give value to the successful résult, and in the hands of Lucretius and Virgil it possesses a might and majesty which are all its own. When Tennyson called the Virgilian hexameter

the stateliest measure Ever moulded by the lips of man,

he was choosing his epithet with his accustomed care. There will always be some, and they not the least judicious of critics, who hold that the finished product of Rome is a nobler work of art than its original model, though they will differ among themselves as to the respective shares of honour for this result which are to be allotted to Virgil and to Lucretius.

Its chief danger is monotony, and there are in the later books of the Aeneid signs that Virgil felt the danger and was experimenting with new methods to avoid it. It was perhaps unfortunate for him, as for other poets, that the Homeric poems had ordained a standard of epic length which suited neither the matter nor the manner of Virgil. Had the literary conventions of Euripides' day allowed him to write 'Dramatic Romances', his genius would have found its true scope; and in the same way it is permissible to believe that the genius of Virgil and his 'mighty line' might have been

best displayed in some less tremendous effort than an epic poem of some ten thousand lines.1

THE DICTION OF VIRGIL.

If Virgil showed his original powers in the new form which he gave to the hexameter, he showed it still more clearly in his use of language, which is often highly artificial. It is obvious that all poetry must be artificial in a sense, for even Wordsworth in his famous preface allows that the poet's language must be 'a selection of language really used by men', but the art, or the artifice, of Virgil goes far beyond Wordsworthian limits and is comparable to the studied effects of a pre-eminently 'literary' poet like Gray. It is not so much that he chooses rare words or indulges in deliberate archaisms: these are to be found, no doubt, but are not specially characteristic. It is rather that he continually forces his language to do more than it will naturally bear, and that he delights to strain and vary the use of words and their constructions, and to elaborate the simplest phrases.2 readers are offended by the assumption of this licence, which certainly often makes adequate translation impossible: Landor declaims against one such inversion with characteristic vehemence.

Some

The faults of Ovid are those of a playful and unruly boy; the faults of Virgil are those of his master. I do not find in Ovid (as you may remember I then observed) the hypallage; such, for instance, as Virgil's The odor brought the wind', instead of 'The wind brought the odor'. No child could refrain from laughter at such absurdity; no pedagogue, from whipping him for laughing at such authority. This figure (so the grammarians are pleased to call it) far exceeds all other

1 My severest critic is disposed to deny that this is a permissible belief, and is not propitiated either by my saying that when he is as old as I am he will think more beliefs are permissible, or by the retort that I do not necessarily believe it myself.

2 If it were not irreverent in so august a connexion, reference might be made to the famous utterance of Humpty Dumpty. When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.'

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