VI. Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic
This visage tells thee that my doom is past;
Nor should the change be mourned, even if the joys
Of sense were able to return as fast
And surely as they vanish. Earth destroys
Those raptures duly—Erebus disdains:
Calm pleasures there abide—majestic pains.
WORDSWORTH.
The epic subject, as later critics came to understand it, is Virgil’s invention; he has altered the very meaning of the word epic. Starting from the desire that the Romans should have a great poem to rival the Iliad, he had to ask himself what kind of poem would really express and satisfy the Roman spirit. The answer to this question he doubtless found in his own heart; we can find it by considering the earlier Roman attempts in this kind. The two previous Latin epics had been quite remarkably unlike Homer. Naevius had told the story of the first Punic War, but apparently on so large a scale that he could begin with the legend of Aeneas. Ennius, starting with the same legend, had worked steadily through the history of his people down to his own time. It is clear that both poets wrote what we should call metrical chronicles, things very much more like the work of Layamon and Robert of Gloucester than that of Homer. They catered for a taste common to the Romans and ourselves, but curiously lacking among the Greeks. Neither Herodotus nor Thucydides attempted to trace the history of even a single Greek state from its origins. The phenomena of growth, the slow process by which some great thing has taken its present shape, does not seem to have interested the Greeks. Their heart’s desire was the timeless, the unchangeable, and they saw time as mere flux. But the Romans were different. Whether directly or (as Dr. Tillyard would say) ‘obliquely’ their great poem, unless it was to be a mere pastiche of Homer, would have to deal with the same sort of material as Naevius and Ennius. Yet, on the other hand, so true an artist as Virgil could not be content with the clumsiness and monotony of a mere chronicle. His solution of the problem—one of the most important revolutions in the history of poetry—was to take one single national legend and treat it in such a way that we feel the vaster theme to be somehow implicit in it. He has to tell a comparatively short story and give us the illusion of having lived through a great space of time. He has to deal with a limited number of personages and make us feel as if national, or almost cosmic, issues are involved. He must locate his action in a legendary past and yet make us feel the present, and the intervening centuries, already foreshadowed. After Virgil and Milton, this procedure seems obvious enough. But it is obvious only because a great poet, faced with an all but insoluble problem, discovered this answer and with it discovered new possibilities for poetry itself.
Partly as the result of romantic primitivism a silly habit has grown up of making Homer a kind of norm by which Virgil is to be measured. But the radical differences between them begin to appear on the very first page of the Aeneid. The third paragraph of the poem (Il. 12–33) furnishes us with examples of nearly all the methods whereby he makes his comparatively simple fable carry the weight of so much destiny. Notice the key words. Carthage is an ancient city, facing the Tiber’s mouth a long way off. He is already spreading out his story both in time and space. Juno hoped to give it empire of the earth, if the fates allow: but she has already heard a rumour that one day (olim) the Trojan seed will bruise it. The whole Punic War has come in. But Juno is not thinking only of the future; an older war is rankling in her mind—she thinks of her Argives at Troy wall, of the Judgement of Paris, ‘and Ganymede exalted to immortal place’. We are not, you see, at the beginning. The story on which we are embarked fades backward into an even remoter past. The heroes whose adventures we are to follow are the remnant (reliquias) of some earlier order, destroyed before the curtain rose; survivors, and, as it were ghosts, hunted (and here wideness in space comes in again) maria omnia circum, while Juno bars them from Latium,
Leading them far, for-wandered, over alien foam;
So mighty was the labour of the birth of Rome.
The labour, the moles, is the point. These men are not fighting for their own hand like Homeric heroes; they are men with a vocation, men on whom a burden is laid.
The more obvious instances of this enlargement of Virgil’s subject have, no doubt, often been noticed—the glimpses of the future in Jove’s prophecy in Book I, or in the vision of Anchises, or in the shield, or again the connexion of the whole fourth Book with the Punic Wars. Perhaps the most moving of all these forward links is the visit of Aeneas to the site of Rome in Book VIII. The backward links are of equal importance in determining the poetical quality of the Aeneid. If I am not mistaken it is almost the first poem which carries a real sense of the ‘abysm of time’. Priscus, vetus, and antiquus are key-words in Virgil. In Books VI to VIII—the true heart of the poem—we are never allowed to forget that Latium—Lurkwood, the hiding place of aged Saturn—has been waiting for the Trojans from the beginning of the world. The palace of King Latinus is very unlike any house in Homer: ‘Awful with woods and piety of elder days,’
Where carved in ancient cedar their old sires appear
In order: father Italus and grey Sabine
Bearing his hook in token how he loved the vine,
And Saturn old and Janus with his double face . . .
(VII, 180.)
There is a poetry that reiterated readings cannot exhaust in all these early Italian scenes; in the first sight of the Tiber, the lonely prayer to that unknown river, and the long river journey on which the ships startle those hitherto unviolated forests. I do not know a better example of imagination, in the highest sense, than when Charon wonders at the Golden Bough ‘so long unseen’; dark centuries of that unhistoried lower world are conjured up in half a line (VI, 409).
But Virgil uses something more subtle than mere length of time. Our life has bends as well as extension: moments at which we realize that we have just turned some great corner, and that everything, for better or worse, will always henceforth be different. In a sense, as we have already seen, the whole Aeneid is the story of just such a transition in the world-order, the shift of civilization from the East to the West, the transformation of the little remnant, the reliquias, of the old, into the germ of the new. Hence the sadness of farewells and the alacrity of new beginnings, so conspicuously brought together at the opening of Book III, dominate the whole poem. Sometimes the sense of paes ofereode is made explicit, as when the Trojans arrive at Actium and find themselves at last, beyond hope, disengaged from the Greek world, and this important moment is underlined by a change of season,
Meanwhile the sun had rolled through the delaying year
And icy winter, roughening the dark waves, was here.
(III, 285.)
Sometimes it is an infinitesimal change of language which may pass the reader’s conscious mind unnoticed, but which doubtless plays its part in colouring his total experience, as when the old Aegean hatreds have slipped far enough behind for crafty Ulysses to become unfortunate Ulysses. Perhaps one of Virgil’s most daring successes is the appearance of Creusa’s ghost in Book II. The sad, ineffectual creature, shouldered aside by destiny, must come to prophesy the wife who will replace her and the fortunes of her husband in which she will have no share. If she were a living woman it would be inexcusable cruelty. But she is not a woman, she is a ghost, the wraith of all that which, whether regretted or unregretted, is throughout the poem drifting away, settling down, into the irrevocable past, not, as in elegiac poets, that we may luxuriate in melancholy reflections on mutability, but because the fates of Jove so order it, because, thus and not otherwise, some great thing comes about. Aeneas himself is mistaken for a ghost in the next book. In a sense he is a ghost of Troy until he becomes the father of Rome. All through the poem we are turning that corner. It is this which gives the reader of the Aeneid the sense of having lived through so much. No man who has once read it with full perception remains an adolescent.
This theme of the great transition is, of course, closely connected with the Virgilian sense of Vocation. Nothing separates him so sharply from Homer, and that, sometimes, in places where they are superficially most alike. Aeneas’ speech encouraging his men in Book I (198) is closely modelled on Odysseus’ speech in Odyssey XII (208). Both remind their followers that they have been in tighter places before. But Odysseus speaks simply as any captain to any crew; safety is the goal. Aeneas adds something quite un-Homeric:
One day it will be pastime to recall this woe,
Through all these freaks of fortune and hard straits we go
Right onward to the promised home, the Latian earth,
Where we shall rest and Ilium have her second birth.
(I, 206.)
Vicit iter durum pietas; with this conception Virgil has added a new dimension to poetry. I have read that his Aeneas, so guided by dreams and omens, is hardly the shadow of a man beside Homer’s Achilles. But a man, an adult, is precisely what he is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy. You may, of course, prefer the poetry of spontaneous passion to the poetry of passion at war with vocation, and finally reconciled. Every man to his taste. But we must not blame the second for not being the first. With Virgil European poetry grows up. For there are certain moods in which all that had gone before seems, as it were, boys’ poetry, depending both for its charm and for its limitations on a certain naivety, seen alike in its heady ecstasies and in its heady despairs, which we certainly cannot, perhaps should not, recover. Mens immota manet, ‘the mind remains unshaken while the vain tears fall’. That is the Virgilian note. But in Homer there was nothing, in the long run, to be unshaken about. You were unhappy, or you were happy, and that was all. Aeneas lives in a different world; he is compelled to see something more important than happiness.
It is the nature of a vocation to appear to men in the double character of a duty and a desire, and Virgil does justice to both. The element of desire is brought out in all those passages where the Hesperian land is hinted, prophesied, and ‘dim-discovered’. First through the lips of Hector’s ghost, a land still without a name; then by Creusa’s ghost, with the names Hesperia and Tiber added; then comes the all-important third Book, the reluctant yet unfaltering search for the abiding city (mansuram urbem), always supposed to be so near and always in reality so distant, and our slowly increasing knowledge of it. It is our ancient mother—it is a terra antiqua, mighty in arms and rich in soil—it is quite close, but not for us who must go many miles about and make a different landfall—now it is in sight, but not the part of it we seek. This is the very portrait of a vocation: a thing that calls or beckons, that calls inexorably, yet you must strain your ears to catch the voice, that insists on being sought, yet refuses to be found.
In the human response to this we find the element of duty. On the one hand we have Aeneas, who suffers, but obeys. He has one moment of real disobedience in the fourth Book, which we read all amiss because an increased respect for woman and for the sexual relation have made the hero appear inhuman at the very moment when Virgil intends to exhibit (and for a historically minded reader does exhibit) his human weakness. But everywhere else he bears the yoke well, though with a wistful side-glance at those not called to bear it.
Live happy! you whose story is accomplish’d. We
Commanded, move from destiny to destiny.
Your rest is won. You wander the wide seas no more,
Nor seek that ever-vanishing Ausonian shore.
(III, 496.)
On the other hand, we have the women, who have heard the call, and lived long in painful obedience, and yet desert at last. Virgil perceives their tragedy very clearly. To follow the vocation does not mean happiness: but once it has been heard, there is no happiness for those who do not follow. They are, of course, allowed to stay behind. Every arrangement is made for their comfort in Sicily. The result is that agonized parting in which the will remains suspended between two equal intolerables.
’Twixt miserable longing for the present land
And the far realms that call them by the fates’ command.
(V, 656.)
It will be seen that in these two lines Virgil, with no intention of allegory, has described once and for all the very quality of most human life as it is experienced by any one who has not yet risen to holiness or sunk to animality. It is not thanks to the Fourth Eclogue alone that he has become almost a great Christian poet. In making his one legend symbolical of the destiny of Rome, he has, willy-nilly, symbolized the destiny of Man. His poem is ‘great’ in a sense in which no poem of the same type as the Iliad can ever be great. The real question is whether any epic development beyond Virgil is possible. But one thing is certain. If we are to have another epic it must go on from Virgil. Any return to the merely heroic, any lay, however good, that tells merely of brave men fighting to save their lives or to get home or to avenge their kinsmen, will now be an anachronism. You cannot be young twice. The explicitly religious subject for any future epic has been dictated by Virgil; it is the only further development left.