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Or take another similitude drawn from the sea. When the poet
wishes to describe how the Achæan phalanxes come on to battle,
this is the image he employs:—
One after another he lays low the chiefs, and their names fill three
hexameters.
Let me now give one instance of Homer’s feeling for the aspect of
the nightly heavens. It shall be taken from the place of the Iliad
where the Trojans, after a day of successful battle, having driven
back the Greeks, rest for the night. And here I shall quote, not, as in
the above passage, from Lord Derby’s translation, but from a
rendering of the passage by the Poet-Laureate. It is the only
passage of Homer in which we have the Laureate’s handiwork:—
Then the landing and climbing up into the wood, and hiding
himself under a mound of gathered leaves:—
But I recommend every one to read the last hundred lines of the
fifth book of the Odyssey. It is one of the most natural and beautiful
descriptions of sea-coast scenery, heightened in its interest by the
presence of man in strife with the waters, that is to be found in any
poet.
The whole of this passage is commented on by Mr. Ruskin at
length, but I think his comments are one-sided and overdone. No
doubt the shipwrecked man kisses the corn-growing land when at
last he reaches it, and gladly covers himself with the dead leaves.
But it is not, as Mr. Ruskin says, that the Greek mind shrank from
wild things, and took pleasure only in things subservient to human
use. It is because it was the action natural to a shipwrecked man just
escaped from the hateful sea to hug the land he had so much toil to
reach; and it was natural for a poet, when describing his hero tossed
and drenched for days amid the hungry foam, to bring out in strong
contrast all the warmth and comfort of the dry cheerful earth.[14]
One sample of Homer’s home-painting must be given, where we
see—
To Virgil the Muses of the country gave the gift of delicacy and
artistic skill. When Horace thus wrote of his friend only the Eclogues
had as yet appeared. But the two greater poems which Virgil
afterwards produced, among their other merits, elevate him, as a
lover and describer of natural scenes, to a place which his earlier
poems alone would not have won for him.
With regard to the Eclogues, the purely imitative and conventional
character of their language, personages, and sentiment, is well
known. But for long it was believed that their scenery at least was
real, borrowed from Mantua and the banks of his native Mincio. But
later critics have shown that imitation penetrated even here, and that
as the sentiments and substance of the Eclogues are all borrowed
from Theocritus, not less is the framework of scenery in which these
are set. The vine-clad cave in which the shepherd reclines, the briery
crag from which he sees his goats hanging, the mountains that cast
long shadows toward evening, these, it is said, are nowhere to be
seen in the neighborhood of Mantua, but belong entirely to Sicily.
Some even assert that neither the ilex, the chestnut, nor the beech
grows anywhere near the banks of the Mincio. Yet even amid the
prevailingly Sicilian scenery there are touches here and there, where
he reverts to what his own eyes had seen, as where he describes his
farm as covered with bare stones and slimy bulrushes, and the
Mincio as weaving for his green banks a fringe of tender reeds.
Even though the imagery of the Eclogues may be borrowed from
the Sicilian poet, yet here, as every where, Virgil is no mere
translator, but proves by the tender grace of the language in which
he clothes the borrowed imagery his feeling for original Nature. In
the fifth Eclogue, when two shepherds have been playing each his
finest strain, partly to please, partly to emulate the other, at the close,
Menalcas says to Mopsus:—
And then when Menalcas has sung his strain this is the reply of
Mopsus:—
It has generally been held that one of the most prominent notes of
Virgil’s genius was his sympathy with Nature. To this the late
Professor Conington, whose opinion on whatever concerned Virgil
deserves all respect, used to demur, and to maintain rather that his
chief characteristic lay in an elaborate and refined culture,
manifesting itself in the most consummate delicacy and grace. But
though Virgil was before all things the poet of learned culture and
artistic beauty, this did not hinder, rather prompted him, to turn on
Nature a sympathetic and loving eye. The perception of a sympathy
between the feelings and vicissitudes of man and the world that
surrounds him appears nowhere so strongly as in his latest poem,
the Æneid. It may have been that as his subject led him much into
battles and adventures, alien to his taste, he seized all the more
eagerly every opportunity of reverting to that Nature which had been
his earliest delight.
Whatever be the cause, the pictures of Nature, whether in
description or in simile, are more frequent, more intimate, more
tender, than in either of his earlier productions. It has been noticed,
for instance, that at the beginning of the sixth book, as the Sibyl
draws nigh, the earth rumbles, the mountains quake, as if sharing
the human dread at her approach; and that throughout the fourth
book there is maintained a fine sympathy between the aspects of the
outer world and the passions which agitate the human actors.
It is thus he sets off the tumult in the soul of the lovelorn and
wronged queen in contrast with the calm and silence of night:—
“Now night it was, and everything on earth had won the grace
Of quiet sleep; the woods had rest, the wildered waters’ face:
It was the tide when stars roll on amid their courses due,
And all the tilth is hushed, and beasts, and birds of many a hue,
And all that is in waters wide, and what the waste doth keep
In thicket rough, amid the hush of night tide lay asleep,
And slipping off the load of care forgat their toilsome part.
But ne’er might that Phœnician queen, that most unhappy heart,
Sink into sleep, or take the night into her eyes and breast,
Her sorrows grow, and love again swells up with all unrest.”
Is not the feeling here what would be called quite modern? For its
tone, might it not have been written yesterday? This contrast
between Nature’s repose and the tumult of the human heart, thus
consciously felt and expressed, belong to a late and self-conscious
age. In Homer you may see such contrasts, as when Helen, looking
from the walls of Troy, misses her true brothers from among the
Achaian host, and says that they kept aloof from the war, fearing the
reproach which she had brought on herself and them. And the poet
adds:—
“So spake she, but them already the life-giving earth covered
In Lacedæmon there, in their dear native land.”
Here the contrast is only half consciously felt, hinted at obliquely, not
brought into prominence. To emphasize and dwell on the contrast, as
Virgil does, is modern, one of the many points in which the Latin
poet’s feeling is like that of our own day.
Many more passages might be cited where Virgil turns aside from
his epic narrative to dwell over natural scenes. The elaborate
description of the storm in the first book; the sail through the Ionian
Islands; the night passed on the Sicilian coast with Ætna heard
thundering overhead through the dark, in the third book; the island,
in the fifth book, which is made the goal round which the racing-
boats row; the fleet entering the mouth of the Tiber while the calm
morning lies ruddy on the sea;—these are a few which come to
mind.
But it is in the many similes scattered throughout the Æneid that
the Virgilian grace and tenderness is seen at its best. It has been the
fashion with the commentators to trace back every one of Virgil’s
similes to Homer or some other Greek poet. And the two I shall now
give have not wholly escaped this imputation, though there seems
small foundation for it in their case.
In the boat-race, when Mnestheus, having run his boat into a
narrow and sheltered passage among rocks, has with difficulty
scraped through and shot again into open sea, this is Virgil’s
comparison:—