VIRGIL AND HIS MEANING

hundred years later, is a re-embodied Aeneas. Non sponte sequor, the words wrung out of Aeneas on one of the few occasions when he nearly gives way to simple human emotion, might serve as the motto both for him and for Marcus. In both, they pass more and more from an accent of complaint into what is at once a confession of faith and a religious aspiration, nearly corresponding to Thy will be done.

Pietas, conscientiousness, the steady fulfilment of duty to God and man, is the central quality of Virgil's hero. The spring of his conduct from the first, it grows in power as the action proceeds. In the vision or initiation of his passage through the Underworld, he goes through, it has been suggestively said, a process something like that of conversion.25 Thenceforth he has no thought of self, and is immune to temptations of the senses; he lives for his people and his mission. He is a pattern of patience and self-sacrifice, of courtesy and sympathy. A formidable warrior, he does all he can to avoid the issue of bloodshed, and to stop it when begun. In many great sayings, like the noble

Pacem me exanimis et Martis sorte peremptis Oratis? equidem et vivis concedere vellem, 26

he pleads for peace and reconciliation. Only at the death of Pallas, the boy who had been committed to his own special charge, do mingled grief and rage overcome his self-control and kindle into battle-fury. Of his shocking order for bound prisoners of war to be sent for immolation over Pallas' funeral pyre, one can only say that it is Virgil's single lapse into barbarism, and think or hope that the two lines might have been cancelled in his final revision. It shews the dark side of the Roman character. The horrible story of the Arae Perusinae after the capitulation of Perusia in the civil war of 41 B.C., if it be true, which is perhaps doubtful; but it was believed and the execution in cold blood after years of imprisonment of the heroic and chivalrous Vercingetorix, were events of contemporary history. We ourselves have in recent years seen atrocities as great perpetrated in the daylight by men who called themselves civilized and Christian. So thin is the crust which, now as then, separates mankind from the abyss.

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It is not, however, in stray relics of savagery that the humanity of Virgil's hero is felt to fail. It is in his conduct to Dido. Many critics have conjectured that in the original scheme Dido was a Cleopatra or Alcina, a temptress from whose clutches Aeneas was to be rescued. If so, art proved greater than the artist; and his human sympathy, his insight into a woman's heart and a queen's passion, swept him away irresistibly. Apology may be invented; palliations may be urged: defence of Aeneas is impossible. "Upon the whole matter, and humanly speaking, I doubt there was a fault somewhere." Such is the beautifully felt and beautifully worded summing-up of Dryden. It is as wise as kind in its reticence; and we may leave it at that, for we cannot really go beyond it, and shall hardly improve upon it.

Dido is perhaps Virgil's greatest creation, and certainly one of the greatest in all poetry. She is suggested by and partly modelled on the Medea of Apollonius; but under Virgil's subtle and masterly hand she expands into something much greater. While she is there, she fills the whole canvas, and beside her, Aeneas fades and chills. Into her Virgil pours all his insight

into the human heart and his sense of purely human tragedy. He gives her immortal life.

In the rest of the Aeneid, feminine interest is subordinate, unless the superhuman figures of Juno and Venus, so ably modelled and so skilfully contrasted, may be thought of as not merely goddesses but women. Creusa, the adored and adoring wife whom Aeneas lost in the sack of Troy, is but a graceful and lovely phantom. Lavinia, the young princess who carries the Italian kingdom as her dowry, is slightly drawn and kept deliberately in the background; she and her lover Turnus are not allowed to meet. Only in the episode of Camilla does Virgil bring another female figure into the front plane of the action. She is unique and alone:

Illam omnis tectis agrisque effusa inventus

Turbaque miratur matrum et prospectat euntem,

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and Virgil lavishes his art on the portrait of the terrible maiden, bellatrix (“ soldieress" is the fine Shakespearian word), who from infancy has lived" among the lonely hills"

pastorum solis exegit montibus aevum, with rivers and forests for her companions, in a fierce and flawless virginity. His treatment here allows him

to give full scope to romance, and to bring the essence of pastoral beauty into the august field of the epic. More even than the witchery of the Eclogues, this scene makes Virgil the fountain head of romanticism.

Not that his other women are negligible. Andromache in Epirus, Anna at Carthage, Silvia in the Latin woodland, are all touched by him into life. In the larger portrait of Queen Amata, in the tenderly modelled figure of the mother of Euryalus, and, at the very end, in the sisterly devotion of Juturna, his breadth of sympathy and fineness of touch are remarkable. But he lavishes that sympathy most on the portraiture of boys: on Ascanius, whom he follows lovingly through his growth, from the child who escaped from Troy clinging to his father's hand, to the princely figure in the flush of youth, integer aevi, who begins to take his place in council and battle; on Euryalus, Lausus, Pallas, flower-like forms over whom hangs the shadow of early death.

But it is not merely in this figure or that, it is throughout, that the Aeneid is saturated with human tenderness. A half-accidental isolation of two words from one of his great lines has given to the world, as the very essence of