the 'Dido problem.' Grammarians and lexicographers made him their norm and example. The schoolboy thumbed hisÆneid' by lamplight till the page grew black with the smuts; he learned it for repetition, and scribbled scraps of it on the nearest wall. At Pompeii, where all is silent, and has been so for eighteen hundred years, it is touching to read the first word and a half of the famous second book, 'CONTICUERE OM . . .,' while still more notable, scrawled in gigantic letters, as though by the hand of the genius of Rome itself, on the wall of the Baths of Titus, is the most appropriate of lines:-

'Tantæ molis erat Romanam condere gentem.'

Like Tennyson, like all truly popular poets, Virgil was parodied. Like Tennyson, he was taken to task during his lifetime, and for much the same faults as Tennyson. What are these? First and foremost, unoriginality, plagiarism. Virgil,' says his biographer, ' never wanted disparagers (obtrectatores), and no wonder, for Homer has been disparaged too.' Herennius collected only Virgil's faults, Perellius Faustus his thefts as well; Quintus Octavius Avitus had eight books of parallels or translations, saying what verses he borrowed, and from what sources. Other critics defended him from these charges of plagiarism, but Virgil's own answer is the best: Why don't these gentry attempt the same thefts themselves? They will then find that it is easier to rob Hercules of his club than Homer of a single line.' Still he was not insensible to criticism. He intended, we are told, to go into retirement and polish his works till even the most hostile critic could say no more. Here again how like Tennyson! 'No poet,' says Mr Lecky, 'ever altered more in deference to his critics'; while Mr Churton Collins and Mr Stephen Gwynn have shown how many corrections he made in his early volume after the strictures of the Quarterly Review.

Of Virgil's imitation much is obvious enough. It is obvious that he copies Theocritus, obvious that he translates, and it must be confessed, even mistranslates, him. He avowedly follows Hesiod and sings the song of Ascra through the towns of Italy. It is obvious that he copies Homer and borrows from Ennius. Tennyson's case is different. He, too, was a scholar deeply versed in letters,

Greek, Roman, and modern, and he often makes scholarly allusions and appropriations, and occasionally, though not often, obviously imitates or translates. But the amount of his imitation has been, as he himself long ago pointed out, much over-estimated by the class of critics who are inclined to use his own phrase-to' swamp the sacred poets with themselves.'

In addition to the charge of plagiarism thus brought against both of them, they were taken to task for yet other faults, faults of manner, faults of matter. Virgil was accused of a new Euphuism' of a special and subtle kind, by which he gave an unusual and recondite meaning to simple words. The critics could not call him either bombastic or poverty-stricken, they therefore quarrelled with what he and Horace considered his great achievement, and what surely is a secret of his grand style, his new and inspired combination of old and simple materials. The truth would seem to be that Virgil, like Tennyson, held the theory that poetry and poetic diction must often suggest rather than express, that you cannot tie down the poet to one meaning and one only. Poetry is like shot silk,' Tennyson once said, 'with many glancing colours, it combines many meanings':

'Words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the soul within';

and this is exactly the theory applied by Conington to the elucidation of Virgil.*

A more serious charge is that levelled against the characters, and especially the heroes, of their epics. Tennyson's mediævalism is unreal: he has sophisticated the masculine directness of Malory. The hero of the 'Idylls' is a prig, and a blameless prig: he is too good, he is even goody. This has often been said of Tennyson and King Arthur. It is exactly what is said of Virgil and pius Eneas. Virgil's hero is a prig or a 'stick '—'always,' as Charles James Fox remarked, either insipid or odious': his blood does not flow, his battles are battles of the stage. Virgil's epic is a drawing-room epic. These are criticisms often made, and there is a certain truth in them. Æneas

6

For instance in his note on Assurgens fluctu nimbosus Orion,' 'Eneid,' i, 535.

6

is certainly not a simple Homeric hero. He is conceived by Virgil,' says Professor Nettleship, 'as embodying in his character the qualities of a warrior, a ruler, and a civiliser of men, the legendary impersonation of all that was great in the achievements of Rome. His mission is to carry on a contest in Italy, to crush the resistance of its warlike tribes, to give them customs and build them cities.'

'Bellum ingens geret Italia, populosque feroces
Contundet, moresque viris et monia ponet.'

*

Mr. Gladstone curiously misses this character. To him Turnus is more attractive than Æneas: he is the leader of a people rightly struggling to be free. But, in truth, to Virgil Turnus is a barbarian. So Arthur is the champion of the faith, who

'In twelve great battles ruining overthrew

The heathen hordes.'

He is not only the warrior king of legend, but is an ideal— 'New-old and shadowing Sense at war with Soul, Ideal manhood closed in real man.'

It is this element of allegory that here and there, as Mr Stopford Brooke has eloquently shown, makes Arthur seem'superhuman,' 'out of the world,'' too good for human nature's daily food.'†

It has been a question with critics to what extent Æneas is the type of Augustus. There can be little doubt that Virgil sincerely saw in the Augustan régime the realisation of much of his wish for the Roman people. Tennyson also, doubtless with sincerity, found in Prince Albert the antitype of Arthur.

'These to his memory-since he held them dear,
Perchance as finding there unconsciously

Some image of himself.'

'Æneas,' says Professor Sellar, in almost the same language as Professor Nettleship, 'is intended to be an embodiment of the courage of an ancient hero, the justice of a paternal ruler, the mild humanity of a cultivated man living in an age of advanced civilisation, the saintliness of the founder of a new religion of

* Eneid,' i, 263.

† Vol. ii, chapter x. 'Idylls of the King.'

peace and pure observance, the affection for parent and child which was one of the strongest instincts in the Italian race.' 'Mr. Tennyson,' wrote Mr. Gladstone, 'has encouraged us to conceive of Arthur as a warrior no less irresistible than Lancelot, but as also perfect in purity, and as in all other respects more comprehensive, solid, and profound.'

Yet, after all this apology, both heroes leave us a little cold- Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni.' Tennyson has perhaps come nearer to success with his hero than Virgil. Arthur finds more voices to praise him than Æneas. The greatness, the superior greatness, of Virgil, does not depend upon Æneas, but upon the 'Eneid' as a whole. Of its characters the greatest is Dido: indeed it may be doubted if any other is really great. Yet many are excellently delineated; and figures like Anchises, Evander, Mezentius, Camilla, and Drances have a picturesqueness and dramatic value, as the creations of one who is a master in grouping and figure-painting, if not exactly in character-drawing. Certainly as much or more might be said of the minor characters of the Idylls,' Gawain, Sir Bors, Enid, Elaine, and others; but Tennyson's powers as a delineator of character are not to be judged only, perhaps not mainly, by the Idylls.' characters of his dramas are, it is true, in the first place, not so much ideals as historical studies; but the study of the personality of Queen Mary is very fine,* and so, though less striking, are the conceptions of Harold and of Becket, as became increasingly clear when the last was seen on the stage; while, leaving these out of the question, the 'Northern Farmer,' and in a different way 'Ulysses,' and, yet again, ‘Maud,' show a power of indicating individuality by a few strokes, which is of a very high order.

The

But if the epics of both fail in directness, fail in point of heroic strength and life, and in those qualities in which Homer is so forcible, both have on the other hand qualities which go far to compensate for these defects. Both make appeal to sentiments and interests strong at once in their own day and for all time. Both are national poets addressing themselves to the patriotism of their country

* Vienne un grand acteur qui comprenne et incarne Harold, une grande actrice qui se passionne pour le caractère de Marie, et sans effort Tennyson prendra sa place parmi les dramaturges.' (Filon, 'Théâtre Anglais,' p. 168.)

men; both are at once religious and scientific; both are scholars and artists. What in this regard was Virgil's attitude is best seen by placing him once more side by side with Lucretius. Lucretius, as was said above, is a natural philosopher. Science for him retained its old double meaning: it was at once natural science, that is to say, physical investigation and induction, and philosophy, that is, metaphysical speculation. Lucretius is not indeed aggressively negative: rather he is an agnostic. He em| braces a philosophy which retains the gods provisionally. He does not accept the ordinary views about them, but he does go so far, in his magnificent proem, as to give a kind of scientific justification to a national belief and a family cult. He does not however believe, he disbelieves, in the immortality of the soul. He certainly cannot, by any stretch, be called orthodox. Virgil on the other hand is constructive, is in a sense orthodox. The orthodoxy of his time consisted in maintaining the accepted historic religion of Rome, and in giving a new sanction to its traditions and legends. This line Virgil pre-eminently follows. Further, he has a strong yearning for a personal immortality. He starts, it is true, with the same Epicurean creed as Lucretius: his desire is to know the causes of things. Horace began in precisely the same way. But Horace rested in, or lapsed into, an agnostic conformity: for him all after this life is dust and shadow. Virgil is not content with such a view. If still somewhat of a doubter, ' majestic in his sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind,' more and more he trusts to a larger hope. He believes in a Providence, a Providence to whom the Roman people is specially near and dear; he believes in the persistence of the individual soul, though it may clothe itself in different forms, and therefore in a heaven and a hell, even in a purgatory. The Sixth 'Eneid' is a magnificent effort to reconcile traditional belief and philosophic science. The famous doctrine of metempsychosis is used, no doubt, partly as a splendid artistic device, parallel to the 'Making of the Shield,' but it is also an attempt to justify the belief in immortality, to give to humanity 'the wages of going on, and still to be.'

Here again Tennyson's effect is less intense, or perhaps rather only less concentrated. Like Virgil, he too had from youth to age a passion for philosophy. Jowett said