CHAPTER VI. VIRGIL AS A RELIGIOUS POET. THOSE Who have read will no doubt remember an essay on Virgil by Mr. Frederick Myers, which appeared in the Fortnightly Review of February, 1879. I speak, I believe, the experience of many, when I say that it is long since I have read any piece of criticism with so much interest, I might say delight. To some the spirit in which it is written may appear too enthusiastic the style perhaps may be a shade too florid. But it possesses, I think, that one highest merit of criticism - indeed the only thing which makes any criticism worth reading - it is evidently the work of one who has seen more clearly, and felt more vividly, than others have done, the peculiar excellence of Virgil; and who longs to make others see and feel it. Speaking of a certain essay on Shakespeare by a Mrs. Montague, Dr. Johnson once said, "No, sir, there is no real criticism in it; none showing the beauty of thought, as founded on the workings of the human heart." That word of the stern old critic well expresses what is the true function of his own craft, the only thing that makes poetic criticism worth having — when some competent person uses it to explain to the world in general, who really do not see far in such matters, those permanent truths of human feeling on which some great poem is built. For, after all, the reputation which attaches to even the greatest-Homer, Shakespeare, and the like depends on the verdict of a few. They see into the core of the matter, tell the world what it ought to see and feel; the world receives their saying and repeats it. Mr. Myers has seen anew the truth about Virgil, and expressed it. And, strange to say, this needed to be done, even at this late date, for our age. This century, as we all know, has seen a great decline in the world's estimate of Virgil. Niebuhr and the Germans began it, and, as usual, England followed suit. Perhaps the thing was inevitable. One reason was, that Virgil could not but suffer from the comparison with Homer, which advancing scholarship brought on. Another reason was, that a civilization which, like our own, has reached a late stage turns with an instinctive relish towards the poets of the early time, still fresh with the dew of youth. To the heat and languor of the afternoon, nothing is so grateful as the coolness and freshness of the dawn. The poetry of an age in many ways so akin to our own as Virgil's was is apt to pall on our taste, and to meet with scanty justice. If from causes like these Virgil's reputation has for a time suffered eclipse, we may hope that the glad deliverance has begun, and that he is now passing back to that serener heaven which rightfully belongs to him. One symptom of a return to a truer judgment of Virgil is to be found in the admirable essay by Mr. Myers of which I have spoken. Another is Professor Sellar's work on Virgil, which has given, probably for the first time in English scholarship, a just and well-balanced estimate of the true nature and excellence of Virgilian poetry. The truth is, to compare Virgil and Homer, except to contrast them, is a mistake. Who does not at once feel that of that in which Homer's chief strength lay Virgil has but a meagre share? Heroic portraiture was not in his way. He has depicted no characters which live in the world's imagination, as those of Achilles and Hector, of Ulysses and Ajax, of Priam and Andromache live. To throw himself into the joy of the onset was so alien to Virgil's whole turn of thought that one could almost wish that it had been possible for him to have constructed an Æneid, in which battles could have been dispensed with. The tenth book of the Eneid, though it has many vigorous touches, is pale and ineffectual beside the Homeric battle-pieces. the words of a modern poet, Virgil might have said: "The moving accident is not my trade, To freeze the blood I have no ready arts; In In fact, all that forms the charm of Homer's poetry was simply impossible, and would have been unnatural, to one living in Virgil's day. The keen morning air, the strong-beating pulses of youth, unreflecting delight in all sights of nature, and in all actions of men, could not belong to a poet living in a civilization that was old and smitten with decay. But if these things were denied, other things were given, such as a late time could give the mellow, if somewhat sad, wisdom that comes from a world's experience, the human-hearted sympathy that, looking back over wide tracts of time on the toils and sufferings of man, feels the full pathos of the human story, and yet is not without some consoling hope. It is well known in what special honor the early Christian Fathers held Virgil. St. Augustine styled him the finest and noblest of poets. St. Jerome, who looked severely on all heathen writers, allows that to read Virgil was a necessity for boys, but complains that even priests in his day turned to him for pleasure. In the middle age he was regarded by some as a magician; by others as a prophet or a saint. His form was found sculptured on the stalls of a cathedral among the Old Testament worthies; in a picture of the Nativity, where David and the prophets are singing round The Child, Virgil is seen leading the concert. His verses are found in the burial-places of the catacombs, associated with the cross and the monogram of our Lord. The power with which he has laid hold of the Christian imagination is proved by nothing more than by the place Dante assigns him in his Divina Commedia, as his teacher and his guide to the nether world. You remember the words with which Dante addresses him on his first appearance: : that fountain which pours "Art thou, then, that Virgil forth abroad so rich a stream of speech? O glory and light of other poets! May the long zeal avail me, and the great love that made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author; thou alone art he from whom I took the good style that hath done me honor.1" This general consent of the primitive and the middle ages to adopt Virgil among the possible if not actual saints of Christendom arose, no doubt, from the belief that in his fourth Eclogue he had prophesied the advent of Christ. Constantine, in his discourse Ad Sanctos, quoted it as a prophecy. Lactantius agreed that it had a Christian meaning. St. Augustine accepted it as a genuine prophecy, and read in the thirteenth and four 1 J. Carlyle's Translation of Dante's Inferno. teenth verses of that Eclogue a distinct prediction of the remission of sins. This interpretation of the Eclogue, which would seem to have lingered on till Pope's time, when he imitated it in his Messiah, has for long been discredited. The Child that was to be born, of which the Eclogue speaks, whether the son of Pollio, or the daughter of Augustus, was far enough from being a regenerator of the world. While, however, we reject the grounds which the early Fathers and the men of the middle age would have given for their belief in Virgil's religious, even Christian spirit, we need not reject the belief itself. Though the reason they gave for it was false, the conception may have been true. There is in Virgil a vein of thought and sentiment more devout, more humane, more akin to the Christian, than is to be found in any other ancient poet, whether Greek or Roman. The religious feeling which Virgil preserved in his own heart is made the more conspicuous, when we remember amidst what almost overpowering difficulties it was that he preserved it. It was not only that, in the words of Dante, "he lived at Rome under the good Augustus in the time of the false and lying gods," but he lived at a time when the traditional faith in these gods was dead among almost all educated men. As has been lately said, "The old religions were dead from the Pillars of Hercules to the Euphrates and the Nile, and the principles on which human society had been constructed were dead also. There remained of spiritual conviction only the common and human sense of justice and morality; and out of this sense some ordered system of government had to be constructed, under which men could live and labor, and |