Part 10

“Fata obstant, placidasque viri Deus obstruit aures.”

This notwithstanding, as Segrais confesses, he might have shown a little more sensibility when he left her, for that had been according to his character.

But let Virgil answer for himself. He still loved her, and struggled with his inclinations to obey the gods:—

“Curam sub corde premebat, Multa gemens, magnoque animum labefactus amore.”

Upon the whole matter, and humanly speaking, I doubt there was a fault somewhere, and Jupiter is better able to bear the blame than either Virgil or Æneas. The poet, it seems, had found it out, and therefore brings the deserting hero and the forsaken lady to meet together in the lower regions, where he excuses himself when it is too late, and accordingly she will take no satisfaction, nor so much as hear him. Now Segrais is forced to abandon his defence, and excuses his author by saying that the “Æneis” is an imperfect work, and that death prevented the divine poet from reviewing it, and for that reason he had condemned it to the fire, though at the same time his two translators must acknowledge that the sixth book is the most correct of the whole “Æneis.” Oh, how convenient is a machine sometimes in a heroic poem! This of Mercury is plainly one; and Virgil was constrained to use it here, or the honesty of his hero would be ill defended; and the fair sex, however, if they had the deserter in their power, would certainly have shown him no more mercy than the Bacchanals did Orpheus: for if too much constancy may be a fault sometimes, then want of constancy, and ingratitude after the last favour, is a crime that never will be forgiven. But of machines, more in their proper place, where I shall show with how much judgment they have been used by Virgil; and in the meantime pass to another article of his defence on the present subject, where, if I cannot clear the hero, I hope at least to bring off the poet, for here I must divide their causes. Let Æneas trust to his machine, which will only help to break his fall; but the address is incomparable. Plato, who borrowed so much from Homer, and yet concluded for the banishment of all poets, would at least have rewarded Virgil before he sent him into exile; but I go farther, and say that he ought to be acquitted, and deserved, beside, the bounty of Augustus and the gratitude of the Roman people. If after this the ladies will stand out, let them remember that the jury is not all agreed; for Octavia was of his party, and was of the first quality in Rome: she was also present at the reading of the sixth Æneid, and we know not that she condemned Æneas, but we are sure she presented the poet for his admirable elegy on her son Marcellus.

But let us consider the secret reasons which Virgil had for thus framing this noble episode, wherein the whole passion of love is more exactly described than in any other poet. Love was the theme of his fourth book; and though it is the shortest of the whole “Æneis,” yet there he has given its beginning, its progress, its traverses, and its conclusion; and had exhausted so entirely this subject that he could resume it but very slightly in the eight ensuing books.

She was warmed with the graceful appearance of the hero; she smothered those sparkles out of decency, but conversation blew them up into a flame. Then she was forced to make a confidante of her whom she best might trust, her own sister, who approves the passion, and thereby augments it; then succeeds her public owning it; and after that the consummation. Of Venus and Juno, Jupiter and Mercury, I say nothing (for they were all machining work); but possession having cooled his love, as it increased hers, she soon perceived the change, or at least grew suspicious of a change. This suspicion soon turned to jealousy, and jealousy to rage; then she disdains and threatens, and again is humble and entreats: and, nothing availing, despairs, curses, and at last becomes her own executioner. See here the whole process of that passion, to which nothing can be added. I dare go no farther, lest I should lose the connection of my discourse.

To love our native country, and to study its benefit and its glory; to be interested in its concerns, is natural to all men, and is indeed our common duty. A poet makes a farther step for endeavouring to do honour to it. It is allowable in him even to be partial in its cause; for he is not tied to truth, or fettered by the laws of history. Homer and Tasso are justly praised for choosing their heroes out of Greece and Italy; Virgil, indeed, made his a Trojan, but it was to derive the Romans and his own Augustus from him; but all the three poets are manifestly partial to their heroes in favour of their country. For Dares Phrygius reports of Hector that he was slain cowardly; Æneas, according to the best account, slew not Mezentius, but was slain by him; and the chronicles of Italy tell us little of that Rinaldo d’Este who conquers Jerusalem in Tasso. He might be a champion of the Church, but we know not that he was so much as present at the siege. To apply this to Virgil, he thought himself engaged in honour to espouse the cause and quarrel of his country against Carthage. He knew he could not please the Romans better, or oblige them more to patronise his poem, than by disgracing the foundress of that city. He shows her ungrateful to the memory of her first husband, doting on a stranger, enjoyed and afterwards forsaken by him. This was the original, says he, of the immortal hatred betwixt the two rival nations. It is true, he colours the falsehood of Æneas by an express command from Jupiter to forsake the queen who had obliged him; but he knew the Romans were to be his readers, and them he bribed—perhaps at the expense of his hero’s honesty; but he gained his cause, however, as pleading before corrupt judges. They were content to see their founder false to love, for still he had the advantage of the amour. It was their enemy whom he forsook, and she might have forsaken him if he had not got the start of her. She had already forgotten her vows to her Sichæus, and varium et nutabile semper femina is the sharpest satire in the fewest words that ever was made on womankind; for both the adjectives are neuter, and animal must be understood to make them grammar. Virgil does well to put those words into the mouth of Mercury. If a god had not spoken them, neither durst he have written them, nor I translated them. Yet the deity was forced to come twice on the same errand; and the second time, as much a hero as Æneas was, he frighted him. It seems he feared not Jupiter so much as Dido; for your lordship may observe that, as much intent as he was upon his voyage, yet he still delayed it, till the messenger was obliged to tell him plainly that if he weighed not anchor in the night the queen would be with him in the morning, notumque furens quid femina possit: she was injured, she was revengeful, she was powerful. The poet had likewise before hinted that the people were naturally perfidious, for he gives their character in the queen, and makes a proverb of Punica fides many ages before it was invented.

Thus I hope, my lord, that I have made good my promise, and justified the poet, whatever becomes of the false knight. And, sure, a poet is as much privileged to lie as an ambassador for the honour and interest of his country—at least, as Sir Henry Wotton has defined.

This naturally leads me to the defence of the famous anachronism in making Æneas and Dido contemporaries, for it is certain that the hero lived almost two hundred years before the building of Carthage. One who imitates Boccalini says that Virgil was accused before Apollo for this error. The god soon found that he was not able to defend his favourite by reason, for the case was clear; he therefore gave this middle sentence: that anything might be allowed to his son Virgil on the account of his other merits; that, being a monarch, he had a dispensing power, and pardoned him. But that this special act of grace might never be drawn into example, or pleaded by his puny successors in justification of their ignorance, he decreed for the future—no poet should presume to make a lady die for love two hundred years before her birth. To moralise this story, Virgil is the Apollo who has this dispensing power. His great judgment made the laws of poetry, but he never made himself a slave to them; chronology at best is but a cobweb law, and he broke through it with his weight. They who will imitate him wisely must choose, as he did, an obscure and a remote era, where they may invent at pleasure, and not be easily contradicted. Neither he nor the Romans had ever read the Bible, by which only his false computation of times can be made out against him. This Segrais says in his defence, and proves it from his learned friend Bochartus, whose letter on this subject he has printed at the end of the fourth Æneid, to which I refer your lordship and the reader. Yet the credit of Virgil was so great that he made this fable of his own invention pass for an authentic history, or at least as credible as anything in Homer. Ovid takes it up after him even in the same age, and makes an ancient heroine of Virgil’s new-created Dido; dictates a letter for her, just before her death, to the ingrateful fugitive; and, very unluckily for himself, is for measuring a sword with a man so much superior in force to him on the same subject. I think I may be judge of this, because I have translated both. The famous author of “The Art of Love” has nothing of his own; he borrows all from a greater master in his own profession, and, which is worse, improves nothing which he finds. Nature fails him; and, being forced to his old shift, he has recourse to witticism. This passes, indeed, with his soft admirers, and gives him the preference to Virgil in their esteem; but let them like for themselves, and not prescribe to others, for our author needs not their admiration.

The motive that induced Virgil to coin this fable I have showed already, and have also begun to show that he might make this anachronism, by superseding the mechanic rules of poetry, for the same reason that a monarch may dispense with or suspend his own laws when he finds it necessary so to do, especially if those laws are not altogether fundamental. Nothing is to be called a fault in poetry, says Aristotle, but what is against the art; therefore a man may be an admirable poet without being an exact chronologer. Shall we dare, continues Segrais, to condemn Virgil for having made a fiction against the order of time, when we commend Ovid and other poets who have made many of their fictions against the order of nature? For what else are the splendid miracles of the “Metamorphoses?” Yet these are beautiful as they are related, and have also deep learning and instructive mythologies couched under them. But to give, as Virgil does in this episode, the original cause of the long wars betwixt Rome and Carthage; to draw truth out of fiction after so probable a manner, with so much beauty, and so much for the honour of his country, was proper only to the divine wit of Maro; and Tasso, in one of his discourses, admires him for this particularly. It is not lawful indeed to contradict a point of history which is known to all the world—as, for example, to make Hannibal and Scipio contemporaries with Alexander—but in the dark recesses of antiquity a great poet may and ought to feign such things as he finds not there, if they can be brought to embellish that subject which he treats. On the other side, the pains and diligence of ill poets is but thrown away when they want the genius to invent and feign agreeably. But if the fictions be delightful (which they always are if they be natural) if they be of a piece; if the beginning, the middle, and the end be in their due places, and artfully united to each other, such works can never fail of their deserved success. And such is Virgil’s episode of Dido and Æneas, where the sourest critic must acknowledge that if he had deprived his “Æneis” of so great an ornament, because he found no traces of it in antiquity, he had avoided their unjust censure, but had wanted one of the greatest beauties of his poem.

I shall say more of this in the next article of their charge against him, which is—want of invention. In the meantime I may affirm, in honour of this episode, that it is not only now esteemed the most pleasing entertainment of the “Æneis,” but was so accounted in his own age, and before it was mellowed into that reputation which time has given it; for which I need produce no other testimony than that of Ovid, his contemporary:—

“Nec pars ulla magis legitur de corpore toto, Quam non legitimo fædere junctus amor.”

Where, by the way, you may observe, my lord, that Ovid in those words, non legitimo fædere junctus amor, will by no means allow it to be a lawful marriage betwixt Dido and Æneas. He was in banishment when he wrote those verses, which I cite from his letter to Augustus. “You, sir,” saith he, “have sent me into exile for writing my ‘Art of Love’ and my wanton elegies; yet your own poet was happy in your good graces, though he brought Dido and Æneas into a cave, and left them there not over-honestly together: may I be so bold to ask your majesty is it a greater fault to teach the art of unlawful love than to show it in the action?” But was Ovid the court-poet so bad a courtier as to find no other plea to excuse himself than by a plain accusation of his master? Virgil confessed it was a lawful marriage betwixt the lovers; that Juno, the goddess of matrimony, had ratified it by her presence (for it was her business to bring matters to that issue): that the ceremonies were short we may believe, for Dido was not only amorous, but a widow. Mercury himself, though employed on a quite contrary errand, yet owns it a marriage by an innuendo—pulchramque uxorius urbem extruis. He calls Æneas not only a husband, but upbraids him for being a fond husband, as the word uxorius implies. Now mark a little, if your lordship pleases, why Virgil is so much concerned to make this marriage (for he seems to be the father of the bride himself, and to give her to the bridegroom); it was to make way for the divorce which he intended afterwards, for he was a finer flatterer than Ovid, and I more than conjecture that he had in his eye the divorce which not long before had passed betwixt the emperor and Scribonia. He drew this dimple in the cheek of Æneas to prove Augustus of the same family by so remarkable a feature in the same place. Thus, as we say in our home-spun English proverb, he killed two birds with one stone—pleased the emperor by giving him the resemblance of his ancestor, and gave him such a resemblance as was not scandalous in that age (for to leave one wife and take another was but a matter of gallantry at that time of day among the Romans). Neque hæc in fædera veni is the very excuse which Æneas makes when he leaves his lady. “I made no such bargain with you at our marriage to live always drudging on at Carthage; my business was Italy, and I never made a secret of it. If I took my pleasure, had not you your share of it? I leave you free at my departure to comfort yourself with the next stranger who happens to be shipwrecked on your coast; be as kind an hostess as you have been to me, and you can never fail of another husband. In the meantime I call the gods to witness that I leave your shore unwillingly; for though Juno made the marriage, yet Jupiter commands me to forsake you.” This is the effect of what he saith when it is dishonoured out of Latin verse into English prose. If the poet argued not aright, we must pardon him for a poor blind heathen, who knew no better morals.

I have detained your lordship longer than I intended on this objection, which would indeed weigh something in a Spiritual Court;—but I am not to defend our poet there. The next, I think, is but a cavil, though the cry is great against him, and hath continued from the time of Macrobius to this present age; I hinted it before. They lay no less than want of invention to his charge—a capital charge, I must acknowledge; for a poet is a maker, as the word signifies; and who cannot make—that is, invent—hath his name for nothing. That which makes this accusation look so strong at the first sight is that he has borrowed so many things from Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, and others who preceded him. But in the first place, if invention is to be taken in so strict a sense that the matter of a poem must be wholly new, and that in all its parts, then Scaliger hath made out, saith Segrais, that the history of Troy was no more the invention of Homer than of Virgil. There was not an old woman or almost a child, but had it in their mouths before the Greek poet or his friends digested it into this admirable order in which we read it. At this rate, as Solomon hath told us, there is nothing new beneath the sun. Who, then, can pass for an inventor if Homer as well as Virgil must be deprived of that glory! Is Versailles the less a new building because the architect of that palace hath imitated others which were built before it? Walls, doors and windows, apartments, offices, rooms of convenience and magnificence, are in all great houses. So descriptions, figures, fables, and the rest, must be in all heroic poems; they are the common materials of poetry, furnished from the magazine of nature: every poet hath as much right to them as every man hath to air or water:

“Quid prohibetis aquas? Usus communis aquarum est.”

But the argument of the work (that is to say, its principal action), the economy and disposition of it—these are the things which distinguish copies from originals. The Poet who borrows nothing from others is yet to be born; he and the Jews’ Messias will come together. There are parts of the “Æneis” which resemble some parts both of the “Ilias” and of the “Odysses;” as, for example, Æneas descended into hell, and Ulysses had been there before him; Æneas loved Dido, and Ulysses loved Calypso: in few words, Virgil hath imitated Homer’s “Odysses” in his first six books, and in his six last the “Ilias.” But from hence can we infer that the two poets write the same history? Is there no invention in some other parts of Virgil’s “Æneis?” The disposition of so many various matters, is not that his own? From what book of Homer had Virgil his episode of Nysus and Euryalus, of Mezentius and Lausus? From whence did he borrow his design of bringing Æneas into Italy? of establishing the Roman Empire on the foundations of a Trojan colony? to say nothing of the honour he did his patron, not only in his descent from Venus, but in making him so like her in his best features that the goddess might have mistaken Augustus for her son. He had indeed the story from common fame, as Homer had his from the Egyptian priestess. Æneadum genetriæ was no more unknown to Lucretius than to him; but Lucretius taught him not to form his hero, to give him piety or valour for his manners—and both in so eminent a degree that, having done what was possible for man to save his king and country, his mother was forced to appear to him and restrain his fury, which hurried him to death in their revenge. But the poet made his piety more successful; he brought off his father and his son; and his gods witnessed to his devotion by putting themselves under his protection, to be replaced by him in their promised Italy. Neither the invention nor the conduct of this great action were owing to Homer or any other poet; it is one thing to copy, and another thing to imitate from nature. The copier is that servile imitator to whom Horace gives no better a name than that of animal; he will not so much as allow him to be a man. Raffaelle imitated nature; they who copy one of Raffaelle’s pieces, imitate but him, for his work is their original. They translate him, as I do Virgil; and fall as short of him as I of Virgil. There is a kind of invention in the imitation of Raffaelle; for though the thing was in nature, yet the idea of it was his own. Ulysses travelled, so did Æneas; but neither of them were the first travellers: for Cain went into the land of Nod before they were born, and neither of the poets ever heard of such a man. If Ulysses had been killed at Troy, yet Æneas must have gone to sea, or he could never have arrived in Italy; but the designs of the two poets were as different as the courses of their heroes—one went home, and the other sought a home.

To return to my first similitude. Suppose Apelles and Raffaelle had each of them painted a burning Troy, might not the modern painter have succeeded as well as the ancient, though neither of them had seen the town on fire? For the drafts of both were taken from the ideas which they had of nature. Cities have been burnt before either of them were in being. But to close the simile as I began it: they would not have designed it after the same manner; Apelles would have distinguished Pyrrhus from the rest of all the Grecians, and showed him forcing his entrance into Priam’s palace; there he had set him in the fairest light, and given him the chief place of all his figures, because he was a Grecian and he would do honour to his country. Raffaelle, who was an Italian, and descended from the Trojans, would have made Æneas the hero of his piece, and perhaps not with his father on his back, his son in one hand, his bundle of gods in the other, and his wife following (for an act of piety is not half so graceful in a picture as an act of courage); he would rather have drawn him killing Androgeus or some other hand to hand, and the blaze of the fires should have darted full upon his face, to make him conspicuous amongst his Trojans. This, I think, is a just comparison betwixt the two poets in the conduct of their several designs. Virgil cannot be said to copy Homer; the Grecian had only the advantage of writing first. If it be urged that I have granted a resemblance in some parts, yet therein Virgil has excelled him; for what are the tears of Calypso for being left, to the fury and death of Dido? Where is there the whole process of her passion and all its violent effects to be found in the languishing episode of the “Odysses”? If this be to copy, let the critics show us the same disposition, features, or colouring in their original. The like may be said of the descent to hell, which was not of Homer’s invention either; he had it from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. But to what end did Ulysses make that journey? Æneas undertook it by the express commandment of his father’s ghost. There he was to show him all the succeeding heroes of his race, and next to Romulus (mark, if you please the address of Virgil) his own patron, Augustus Cæsar. Anchises was likewise to instruct him how to manage the Italian war, and how to conclude it with his honour—that is, in other words, to lay the foundations of that empire which Augustus was to govern. This is the noble invention of our author, but it hath been copied by so many sign-post daubers that now it is grown fulsome, rather by their want of skill than by the commonness.

In the last place. I may safely grant that by reading Homer, Virgil was taught to imitate his invention—that is to imitate like him (which is no more than if a painter studied Raffaelle that he might learn to design after his manner). And thus I might imitate Virgil if I were capable of writing an heroic poem, and yet the invention be my own; but I should endeavour to avoid a servile copying. I would not give the same story under other names, with the same characters, in the same order, and with the same sequel, for every common reader to find me out at the first sight for a plagiary, and cry, “This I read before in Virgil in a better language and in better verse.” This is like Merry-Andrew on the low rope copying lubberly the same tricks which his master is so dexterously performing on the high.

I will trouble your lordship but with one objection more, which I know not whether I found in Le Febvre or Valois, but I am sure I have read it in another French critic, whom I will not name because I think it is not much for his reputation. Virgil in the heat of action—suppose, for example, in describing the fury of his hero in a battle (when he is endeavouring to raise our concernments to the highest pitch)—turns short on the sudden into some similitude which diverts, say they, your attention from the main subject, and misspends it on some trivial image. He pours cold water into the caldron when his business is to make it boil.

This accusation is general against all who would be thought heroic poets, but I think it touches Virgil less than any; he is too great a master of his art to make a blot which may so easily be hit. Similitudes (as I have said) are not for tragedy, which is all violent, and where the passions are in a perpetual ferment; for there they deaden, where they should animate; they are not of the nature of dialogue unless in comedy. A metaphor is almost all the stage can suffer, which is a kind of similitude comprehended in a word. But this figure has a contrary effect in heroic poetry; there it is employed to raise the admiration, which is its proper business; and admiration is not of so violent a nature as fear or hope, compassion or horror, or any concernment we can have for such or such a person on the stage. Not but I confess that similitudes and descriptions when drawn into an unreasonable length must needs nauseate the reader. Once I remember (and but once) Virgil makes a similitude of fourteen lines, and his description of Fame is about the same number. He is blamed for both, and I doubt not but he would have contracted them had be lived to have reviewed his work; but faults are no precedents. This I have observed of his similitudes in general—that they are not placed (as our unobserving critics tell us) in the heat of any action, but commonly in its declining; when he has warmed us in his description as much as possibly he can, then (lest that warmth should languish) he renews it by some apt similitude which illustrates his subject and yet palls not his audience. I need give your lordship but one example of this kind, and leave the rest to your observation when next you review the whole “Æneis” in the original, unblemished by my rude translation; it is in the first hook, where the poet describes Neptune composing the ocean, on which Æolus had raised a tempest without his permission. He had already chidden the rebellious winds for obeying the commands of their usurping master; he had warned them from the seas; he had beaten down the billows with his mace; dispelled the clouds, restored the sunshine, while Triton and Cymothoe were heaving the ships from off the quicksands, before the poet would offer at a similitude for illustration:—

“Ac, veluti magno in populo cum sæpe coorta est Seditio, sævitque animis ignobile vulgus; Jamque faces, et saxa volant; furor arma ministrat; Tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem Conspexere, silent, arrectisque auribus adstant: Ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet: Sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, æquora postquam Prospiciens genitor, coeloque invectus aperto Flectit equos, curruque volans dat lora secundo.”

This is the first similitude which Virgil makes in this poem, and one of the longest in the whole, for which reason I the rather cite it. While the storm was in its fury, any allusion had been improper; for the poet could have compared it to nothing more impetuous than itself; consequently he could have made no illustration. If he could have illustrated, it had been an ambitious ornament out of season, and would have diverted our concernment (nunc non erat his locus), and therefore he deferred it to its proper place.

These are the criticisms of most moment which have been made against the “Æneis” by the ancients or moderns. As for the particular exceptions against this or that passage, Macrobius and Pontanus have answered them already. If I desired to appear more learned than I am, it had been as easy for me to have taken their objections and solutions as it is for a country parson to take the expositions of the Fathers out of Junius and Tremellius, or not to have named the authors from whence I had them; for so Ruæus (otherwise a most judicious commentator on Virgil’s works) has used Pontanus, his greatest benefactor, of whom he is very silent, and I do not remember that he once cites him.

What follows next is no objection; for that implies a fault, and it had been none in Virgil if he had extended the time of his action beyond a year—at least, Aristotle has set no precise limits to it. Homer’s, we know, was within two months; Tasso; I am sure, exceeds not a summer, and if I examined him perhaps he might be reduced into a much less compass. Bossu leaves it doubtful whether Virgil’s action were within the year, or took up some months beyond it. Indeed, the whole dispute is of no more concernment to the common reader than it is to a ploughman whether February this year had twenty-eight or twenty-nine days in it; but for the satisfaction of the more curious (of which number I am sure your lordship is one) I will translate what I think convenient out of Segrais, whom perhaps you have not read, for he has made it highly probable that the action of the “Æneis” began in the spring, and was not extended beyond the autumn; and we have known campaigns that have begun sooner and have ended later.

Ronsard and the rest whom Segrais names, who are of opinion that the action of this poem takes up almost a year and half, ground their calculation thus:—Anchises died in Sicily at the end of winter or beginning of the spring. Æneas, immediately after the interment of his father, puts to sea for Italy; he is surprised by the tempest described in the beginning of the first book; and there it is that the scene of the poem opens, and where the action must commence. He is driven by this storm on the coasts of Africa; he stays at Carthage all that summer, and almost all the winter following; sets sail again for Italy just before the beginning of the spring; meets with contrary winds, and makes Sicily the second time. This part of the action completes the year. Then he celebrates the anniversary of his father’s funerals, and shortly after arrives at Cumes. And from thence his time is taken up in his first treaty with Latinus; the overture of the war; the siege of his camp by Turnus; his going for succours to relieve it; his return; the raising of the siege by the first battle; the twelve days’ truce; the second battle; the assault of Laurentum, and the single fight with Turnus—all which, they say, cannot take up less than four or five months more, by which account we cannot suppose the entire action to be contained in a much less compass than a year and half.

Segrais reckons another way, and his computation is not condemned by the learned Ruæus, who compiled and published the commentaries on our poet which we call the “Dauphin’s Virgil.” He allows the time of year when Anchises died to be in the latter end of winter or the beginning of the spring; he acknowledges that when Æneas is first seen at sea afterwards, and is driven by the tempest on the coast of Africa, is the time when the action is naturally to begin; he confesses farther, that Æneas left Carthage in the latter end of winter, for Dido tells him in express terms, as an argument for his longer stay—

“Quin etiam hiberno moliris sidere classem.”