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ond six. were to be his Iliad." It was only a step from this to describe the whole thing as "a bastard mixture." We shall hardly even begin to appreciate the Aeneid until we realize that with all its complexity of structure and movement, with all its debt to both Iliad and Odyssey, it is no less than these an organic unity and a masterpiece of original creative art.

IX. THE HUMAN ELEMENT

A

MONG the qualities which give an epic poem permanent fame and enduring life, two are of the first importance: a great ideal which it embodies as an interpretation of history and of the world in which man finds himself; and a pervading human sympathy to which the human mind and heart, from one age to another, instinctively respond. In both these qualities the Aeneid is eminent. But it is probably through the latter that it has to most of its myriad readers made its first and also its last appeal. Virgil is the representative poet of the Imperial idea and of the Latin Civilization on which both the Middle Ages and the modern world are based and built. But he is no less, he is even more, the poet in whom mankind have found the most perfect expression of their longings, their questionings, their aspirations; "giving utterance," in Newman's beautiful words, " as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things which is the experience of her children in every time." 24

In Homer, this deep human sympathy is present as an inner life, but only, so to say, in the germ. In Greek poetry of the central and classical period- the poetry which was concentrated in its utmost brilliance at Athensit was kept under severe control; it was subordinated to an incomparably luminous, but, as those who have since re-sought the springs of Helicon have often been inclined to think, a somewhat hard intelligence. Roman sensibility was largely the creation of the later Greek or Alexandrian age. In the most popular poets of that school, that sensibility tended to get out of control. In their Latin pupils and successors, both before and after Virgil, this tendency was further exaggerated. Reaction from the austere Roman tradition, and the captivating charm of sentimental indulgence for the pleasure-loving Italian temperament, led to a sort of deliquescence. The Latin mollities, the Italian morbidezza, a delicacy passing into pulpy softness, is the word used to describe it. Fibre was weakened; sentiment became sentimentality. It was Virgil's aim, and it is perhaps his greatest achievement, to fuse the new romantic sensibility with the epic largeness and the Roman dignity.

To make a human being of the principal figure on his canvas was by no means an easy matter. Aeneas, by the fundamental scheme of the poem, had to be an idealized and symbolic character. He had to carry, attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum, the destinies of a race and a nation. He had to be a warrior and legislator, whose own life was subordinated throughout to the claims of public duty. He was weighted with the responsibilities of a founder, a restorer, a governor. The Achilles of the Iliad is a prince in the flush and ardour and selfishness of youth, full of the pride of life and only shadowed by foreknowledge of an early death. The Ulysses of the Odyssey is a man of wide experience and incomparable adroitness, who passes triumphantly through a series of exciting adventures on his return from Troy. He is fighting throughout for his own hand, for re-conquest of his home and re-union with his wife and child. Neither of them has any call to be a saint; Achilles has no regard for mercy, nor Ulysses for truth: but in neither figure is there any obstacle to the development of the purely individual human interest. With Aeneas it is different. He has done with the romance and

gladness of youth. He is loaded with responsibilities not his own. He has no home to return to, no personal happiness to look forward to. He has to make a new home in a strange land, not for himself, but for his followers and his son. He has a loyal staff, but no intimate friend, no one with whom he can share his soul. He hates bloodshed and has no joy in battle, yet he has to wage a sanguinary war. His entanglement at Carthage brings him no pleasure while it lasts, and he breaks it off with a sombre acquiescence. His marriage at the close to the heiress of the Latin kingdom is a wholly political or dynastic arrangement, and for him, as for her, only one more sacrifice to duty. Of his last years Virgil is all but silent; he only lets us know that they were decreed to be few, and that he was thereafter to join the ranks of the gods siqua est ea gloria -and in another world find the reward, such as it might be, of his lifelong labour of self-suppression.

A pathetic and a heroic figure, Virgil's Aeneas is nevertheless a little removed from humanity both in his virtues and in his shortcomings. If Aeneas be, as to some extent he is, an idealized Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, two