Master Vergil

FOR traveling company most books, like most people, are too exacting. They will not yield to a mood; they will be asserting themselves against us, or tugging us aside. And why travel, especially afoot, if one cannot be lord of his day? Therefore, because it is serenely complaisant. trust the paler allurement of pure art. Take with you some fair book not human enough to challenge you on your road. Manon Lescaut has the simplicity of perfect breeding, a lovely purity of style for no considerable matter. Or take The Sentimental Journey, if you have forgotten who wrote it. But I will always take the epic of travel, the Æneid.

It may be the foredoom of artificial epic that it should live, if at all, by style alone. That all literature lives by style is a platitude; but in the Æneid the import of the matter was so thin at first that it has long been threadbare. If the Paradise, Lost was ever a moulding moral force, it is probably that no longer. The epic of rebellion against a doctrinaire God touches our time only in so far as its cold heresy is lost in its high beauty. Vergil’s gods were from the beginning purely ex machina; his hero is alien to us; but no verse, unless it be Milton’s, wins the ear more masterfully. No wonder it seemed to the Middle Age an incantation.

The purely artistic pleasure in art is given by the Æneid undisturbed. Homer is human, giving a pleasure as of realism, and now and again searching the heart; Vergil, where he is human at all, is so romantically, as in the poignant fourth book. Habitually he moves but splendid shadows in armor through a colored landscape,

This soothing of our souls is not shadowed bv the unreal cares of the unreal Æneas. When the ships are scattered in that magnificently theatrical storm, and the warriors, cast dripping on the beach, instead of cooking plain food over a fire of sticks,

we have already forgotten them for the scenery: —

Was ever finer harmony of sound and form ?

And see how alien the hero is from us when for rare moments we are troubled by a transpiring of personality, and how little he means to us as a personality in the sum of the whole. For this the crux is the episode of Dido, surely the greatest book of all, the most cogently artistic in narrative, the most glowing in figure, the most remarkable in verse. Dido is a woman. Has Vergil another? Beside this passionate creation set in high romance the pious Æneas for a space becomes real enough to be despised; then, as he slinks off behind the divine will, lapses again into armor speaking platitude. Doubtless this impression is due in part to race. The Latin hero leaves us wondering and cold, is not to us heroic. The southern nations seem to keep a different standard of heroic love, to value ardor more than the northern constancy, and withal to be more demonstrative of feeling in speech than is found by us of the north consistent with heroic strength. Chaucer, whose Cressid is one of the most human figures in fiction, can make little of Troilus. Only Shakespeare has leaped this barrier; and has not even he a little Germanized his Latins, as Wagner has Germanized Tristram ? But allowing that to Vergil’s Romans and their descendants Æneas has been more nearly than to us a man and a hero, can we suppose that he has ever seemed to any one a moving personality ? At least the distinctive power of the Æneid is not here.

Except for Dido, what humanly reaches our sympathies now and again is something incidental, — almost, it would appear, accidental. The mother of Euryalus in the midst of her wild grief lamenting that she cannot shroud his body with the coat that had been taxing her aged hands; the affection of Mazentius for his horse; Nisus and Euryalus talking low on the camp wall; the old Evander’s thought of his dead wife — Felix morte tua, neque in hunc servata dolorern — beside the bier of his son; the mere illustrative figure of file house-wife weaving before dawn,—

the stuff of the Æneid is not these, but Laocoön in agony; the descent of Mercury, the figures as sun on brass, more splendid than any others ever strung on so thin a thread of fable. Vergil sings arms, the sea and shore, dawn and moonlight, but not the man.

This typical absence of human appeal leaves free the enjoyment of the Æneid as a supreme work of artifice. It is a pleasure faint, doubtless, to most men. but untroubled, art for the sake of art. The just word charged with suggestion and not surcharged —

the elaborate cunning of the sentences, each a pattern of rhetoric and prosody, suit well the glittering pomp, the unrelaxed etiquette. The methods of the most elaborate, the most highly colored, of the great poets, are so manifest as to appoint him perpetual teacher. Just because his habit is so far from the inimitable simplicity of Homer, Vergil is the master of poets. And as the master of poets, so the gentle companion of those whose journeys must be far lower and more literal than Dante’s. For solace as for study it is always safe to embark upon his sounding line.

For comment on the contributors to this number, see advertising pages 81 and 82.