Читать книгу Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 354, April 1845 - Various - Страница 1

Originality of conception and fidelity of observation in general mark the efforts of genius in the earlier ages of society; and it is then, accordingly, that those creative minds appear which stamp their own impress upon the character of a whole people, and communicate to their literature, in the most distant periods, a certain train of thought, a certain class of images, a certain family resemblance. Homer, Phidias, and Æschylus in ancient times – Dante, Michael Angelo, Ariosto, and Shakspeare in modern, belong to this exalted class. Each in his own department has struck out a new range of thought, and created a fresh brood of ideas, which, on "winged words," have taken their flight to distant regions, and to the end of the world will never cease to delight and influence mankind. Subsequent ages may refine their images, expand their sentiments, perhaps improve their expression; but they add little to the stock of their conceptions. The very greatness of their predecessors precludes fresh creations: the furrows of the ancient wheels are so deep that the modern chariot cannot avoid falling into them. So completely in all persons of education are the great works of antiquity incorporated with thought, that they arise involuntarily with every exercise of the faculty of taste, and insensibly recur to the cultivated mind, with all that it admires, and loves, and venerates.

But though originality of conception, the creation of imagery, and the invention of events belong to early ages, delicacy of taste, refinement of sentiment, perfection of expression, are the growth of a more advanced period of society. The characters which are delineated by the hand of Genius in early times, are those bold and original ones in which the features are distinctly marked, the lines clearly drawn, the peculiarities strongly brought out. The images which are adopted are those which have first occurred to the creative mind in forming a world of fancy: the similes employed, those which convey to the simple and unlettered mind the clearest or most vivid conception of the idea or event intended to be illustrated. Valour, pride, resolution, tenderness, patriotism, are the mental qualities which are there portrayed in imaginary characters, and called forth by fictitious events: and it is this first and noblest delineation of mental qualities in an historical gallery which has rendered the Iliad immortal. The images and similes of Homer are drawn from a close observation of nature, but they are not very varied in their range: he paints every incident, every occurrence, every feature, but he is not much diversified in conception, and surprisingly identical in expression. His similes of a boar beset by hunters, of a lion prowling round a fold and repelled by the spear of the shepherd, of a panther leaping into a herd of cattle, are represented in the same words wherever he has a close fight of one of his heroes with a multitude of enemies to recount. So forcibly is the creative mind, in the first instance, fascinated by the variety and brilliancy of its conceptions, that it neglects and despises their subordinate details. It is careless of language, because it is intent on ideas: it is niggardly in language, because it is prodigal of thought. Homer's expressions or epithets are in general admirably chosen, and speak at once a graphic eye and an imaginative mind; but it is extraordinary how often they recur without any variation. It is the same with Ariosto: he is somewhat more varied in his expression, but even more identical in his details. Prodigal of invention, varied in imagination, unbounded in conception, in the incidents and great features of his story, he has very little diversity in its subordinate parts. He carries us over the whole earth, through the air, and to the moon: but giants, castles, knights, and errant damsels occur at every step, with hardly any alteration. The perpetual jousts of the knights, charging with the lance and then drawing the sword, are exactly parallel to the endless throwing of the spear and leaping from the chariot in the Iliad.

No man can read the Æneid without seeing that it has been constructed, both in its general conception and chief incidents, on the poems of Homer; and yet so exquisite was the taste, so refined the sentiment, so tender the heart of Virgil, that he has produced upon the world the impression of a great original author. Dante worshipped him as a species of divinity; he made him his guide through the infernal regions, to unfold the crimes of the wicked and the intentions of the Deity in the distribution of future rewards and punishments. Throughout the middle ages he was regarded as a sort of necromancer, a mighty magician, to whom the past and the future are alike known, and whose power even the elements of nature were constrained to obey. The "Sortes Virgilianæ," so well known, and so long practised in every country of Europe, arose from this belief. The imagery, mythology and characters of his epic poem are drawn from the Iliad: but in two particulars he is entirely original, and his genius has opened the two fountains from which the most prolific streams of beauty in modern poetry have flowed. He is the father of descriptive and amatory poetry. The passion of love, as we understand it, was unknown to Homer, as much as was the description of nature as a separate and substantive object. He has made the whole Iliad, indeed, turn upon the wrath of Achilles for the loss of Briseis; and he has painted, with inimitable tenderness and pathos, the conjugal attachment of Hector and Andromache; but he had no conception of love as a passion, mingled with sentiment, and independent of possession. The wrath of Achilles is the fury of an Eastern sultan whose harem has been violated: the parting of Hector and Andromache is the rending asunder of the domestic affections, the farewell from the family hearth, the breaking up of the home circle. But the love of Dido for Æneas is the refined passion which is the soul of the romances and of half the poetry of modern times. It was the creature of the imagination, the offspring of the soul from its own conceptions, kindled only into life by an external object. It arose from mental admiration; it was inhaled more by the ear than the eye; it was warmed at his recital of the sack of Troy, and his subsequent wanderings over the melancholy main. It had no resemblance to the seducing voluptuousness of Ovid, any more than the elegant indecencies of Catullus. It resembled the passion of Desdemona for Othello.

Homer painted with graphic fidelity and incomparable force, often with extraordinary beauty, the appearances of nature; but it was as illustrations, or for the purpose of similitude only, that he did so. It was on human events that his thoughts were fixed: it was the human heart, in all its various forms and changes, that he sought to depict. But Virgil was the high-priest of nature, and he worshipped her with all a poet's fervour. He identifies himself with rural life, he describes with devout enthusiasm its joys, its occupations, its hardships: the rocks, the woods, the streams, awaken his ardent admiration; the animals and insects are the objects of his tender solicitude. When the Mantuan bard wrote,

he was inspired with the same spirit that afterwards animated Burns when he contemplated the daisy, Cowper when he sympathized with the hare. The descriptive poetry of modern times has owed much to his exquisite eye and sensitive heart. Thomson, in his Seasons, has expanded the theme in a kindred spirit, and with prodigal magnificence. Scott and Byron have brought that branch of the poetic art to the highest perfection, by blending it with the moral affections, with the picturesque imagery of the olden time, with the magic of eastern or classical association. But none of our poets – how great soever their genius, how varied their materials – have exceeded, if they have equalled, the exquisite beauty of his descriptions; and the purest taste in observation, as the utmost beauty of expression, is still to be best attained by studying night and day the poems of Virgil.

Modern epic poetry arose in a different age, and was moulded by different circumstances. The mythology of antiquity was at an end, and with it had perished the gay and varied worship which had so long amused or excited an imaginative people. The empire of the Cæsars, with its grandeur and its recollections, had sunk into the dusk; the venerable letters, S. P. Q. R., no longer commanded the veneration of mankind. A new faith, enjoining moral duties, had descended upon the earth: a holier spirit had come to pervade the breasts of the faithful. An unknown race of fierce barbarians had broken into the decaying provinces of the Roman empire, and swept away their government, their laws, their property, and their institutions. But the Christian faith had proved more powerful than the arms of the legions; it alone had survived, amidst the general wreck of the civilized world. Mingling with the ardent feelings and fierce energy of the barbarian victors, it sat

Incorporating itself with the very souls of the conquerors – descending on their heads with the waters of baptism, never leaving them till the moment of extreme unction – it moulded between these two extremes their whole character. A new principle superior to all earthly power was introduced – a paramount authority established, to which even the arm of victorious conquest was compelled to submit – ruthless warriors were seen kneeling at the feet of unarmed pontiffs. The crown of the Cæsars had more than once been lowered before the cross of the head of the faithful.

From the intensity and universality of these religious emotions, and the circumstance of the Holy Land being in the hands of the Saracens, with whom Christendom had maintained so long, and at times so doubtful, a struggle, a new passion had seized upon the people of modern Europe, to which no parallel is to be found in the previous or subsequent history of mankind. The desire to recover the Holy Sepulchre, and re-open it to the pilgrimages of the faithful, had come to inflame the minds of men with such vehemence, that nothing approaching to it had ever before occurred in the world. It had pervaded alike the great and the humble, the learned and the ignorant, the prince and the peasant. It had torn up whole nations from Europe, and precipitated them on Asia. It had caused myriads of armed men to cross the Hellespont. In Asia Minor, on the theatre of the contest of the Greeks and Trojans, it had brought vast armies into collision, far outnumbering the hosts led by Hector or Agamemnon. It had brought them together in a holier cause, and on more elevated motives, than prompted the Greek confederates to range themselves under the king of men. It had impelled Richard Cœur-de-Lion and Godfrey of Bouillon from Europe. It had roused Saladin and Solyman the Magnificent in Asia. Unlike other popular passions, it had continued through successive generations. It had survived for centuries, and declined at length less from want of ardour in the cause, than from failure of the physical and material resources to maintain at so vast a distance so wasting a struggle, and supply the multitudes of the faithful whose bones whitened the valley of the Danube or the sands of Asia.

But religious and devout emotions had not alone become all-powerful from the blending of the ardour of a spiritual faith with the fierce energy of northern conquests. The northern nations had brought with them from their woods two principles unknown to the most civilized nations of antiquity. Tacitus has recorded, that a tribe in Germany maintained its authority solely by the justice of its decisions; and that in all the tribes, women were held in the highest respect, and frequently swayed the public councils on the most momentous occasions. It is in these two principles, the love of justice and respect for women, that the foundation was laid for the manners of chivalry, which form the grand characteristic and most ennobling feature of modern times. New elements were thence infused into the breast of the warriors, into the heart of women, into the songs of poetry. Chivalry had arisen with its dreams, its imaginations, its fantasy; but, at the same time, with its elevation, its disinterestedness, its magnanimity. The songs of the Troubadours had been heard in southern Europe; the courts of love had been held in Provence; the exploits of Charlemagne and Richard had resounded throughout the world. The chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, who dedicated himself to the service of God and of his lady, was a less natural, but he was a far more elevated being, than either Achilles or Æneas. Knights-errant, who went about in quest of adventures, redressing wrongs, succouring damsels, combating giants, defying sorcerers, delivering captives – faithful amidst every temptation to their lady-love, true amidst every danger to the Polar-star of duty – formed the leading characters in a species of romance, which is less likely, in all probability, to be durable in fame than the Iliad or the Æneid; but which is so, in a great degree, from the circumstance that the characters it portrays had, from an extraordinary combination of events, been strung upon a higher key than is likely to be sympathized with by future generations of man.

Ariosto was the great original mind in this extravagant but yet noble style of poetry; he was the Homer of this romance of modern Europe. He possessed the same fruitful invention, the same diversified conception, the same inexhaustible fancy as the Grecian bard; and in melody and occasional beauty of versification, he is often his superior. But he will bear no sort of comparison with Homer in knowledge of character or the delineation of the human heart. His heroes are almost all cast in one of two models, and bear one of two images and superscriptions. The Christian paladins are all gentle, true, devoted, magnanimous, unconquerable; the Saracen soldans haughty, cruel, perfidious, irascible, but desperately powerful in combat. No shades of difference and infinite diversity in character demonstrate, as in the Iliad, a profound knowledge and accurate observation of the human heart. No fierce and irascible Achilles disturbs the sympathy of the reader with the conquerors; no self-forgetting, but country-devoted Hector enlists our sympathies on the side of the vanquished. His imagination, like the winged steed of Astolfo, flies away with his judgment; it bears him to the uttermost parts of the earth, to the palace of the syren Alcina, to the halls in the moon, but it destroys all unity or identity of interest in the poem. The famous siege of Paris by the Saracens in the time of Charlemagne, which was so often expected during the middle ages, that it at last came to be believed to have been real, was the main point of his story; but he diverges from it so often, in search of adventures with particular knights, that we wellnigh forget the principal object of the poem, and feel no absorbing interest in the issue of any particular events, or the exploits of any particular heroes. He had no great moral to unfold, or single interest to sustain, in his composition. His object was to amuse, not instruct – to fascinate, not improve. He is often as beautiful as Virgil in his descriptions, as lofty as Homer in his conceptions; but he as often equals Ovid in the questionable character of his adventures, or Catullus in the seducing warmth of his descriptions. There is no more amusing companion than the Orlando Furioso for the fireside; but there is none less likely to produce the heroes whom it is his object to portray.

That which Ariosto wants, Tasso has. The Jerusalem Delivered is, beyond all question, the epic poem of modern Europe. In it, as in the Iliad, unity of interest and of action is entirely preserved. It is one great struggle between Europe and Asia which is recorded; it is for the attack and defence of one city that the forces of Christendom and of Mahometanism are arrayed. But the object of contention, the moral character of the struggle, is incomparably higher in the modern than the ancient poem. It is not "another Helen who has fired another Troy;" it is no confederacy of valour, thirsting for the spoils of opulence, which is contending for victory. It is the pilgrim, not the host, whose wrongs have now roused Europe into action; it is not to ravish beauty from its seducer, but the holy sepulchre from its profaners, that Christendom has risen in arms. The characters of the chiefs correspond to the superior sanctity of their cause, and indicate the mighty step in advance which the human mind, under the influence of Christianity and civilization, had made since the days of Homer. In Godfrey of Bouillon we perceive enthusiasm guided by wisdom; difficulties overcome by resolution, self-subdued by devotion. Rinaldo, like Achilles, is led astray by beauty and the issue of the war is prolonged from the want of his resistless arm; but the difference between his passion for Armida, and the Grecian hero's wrath for the loss of Briseis, marks the influence of the refined gallantry of modern times. The exquisite episode of the flight of Erminia, the matchless pathos of the death of Clorinda, can be compared to nothing either in the Iliad or Æneid; they belong to the age of chivalry, and are the efflorescence of that strange but lofty aspiration of the human mind. Above all, there is a moral grandeur in the poem, a continued unity of interest, owing to a sustained elevation of purpose – a forgetfulness of self in the great cause of rescuing the holy sepulchre, which throws an air of sanctity around its beauties, and renders it the worthy epic of Europe in its noblest aspect.

Notwithstanding these inimitable beauties, the Jerusalem Delivered never has, and never will make the impression on the world which the Iliad has done. The reason is, that it is not equally drawn from nature; the characters are taken from romantic conception, not real life. The chiefs who assemble in council with Godfrey, the knights who strive before Jerusalem with Tancred, have little resemblance either to the greyhaired senators who direct human councils, or the youthful warriors who head actual armies. They are poetical abstractions, not living men. We read their speeches with interest, we contemplate their actions with admiration; but it never occurs to us that we have seen such men, or that the imagination of the poet has conceived any thing resembling the occurrences of real life. The whole is a fairy dream – charming, interesting, delightful, but still a dream. It bears the same resemblance to reality which the brilliant gossamer of a snow-clad forest, glittering in the morning sun, does to the boughs when clothed with the riches and varied by the hues of summer. It is the perfection of our conceptions of chivalry, mingled with the picturesque machinery of antiquity and romantic imagery of the East, told with the exquisite beauty of European versification. But it is a poetical conception only, not a delineation of real life. In Homer, again, the marvellous power of the poet consists in his deep insight into human character, his perfect knowledge of the human heart, and his inimitable fidelity of drawing every object, animate or inanimate. Aristotle said that he excelled all poets that ever appeared in "διαγνοια." Aristotle was right; no one can study the Iliad without feeling the justice of the observation. It is the penetration, the piercing insight of the Greek bard, which constitute his passport to immortality. Other poets may equal him in variety of imagination; some may excel him in melody of versification or beauty of language: none will probably ever approach him in delineation of character, or clothing abstract conceptions in the flesh and blood of real life.

Considered with reference to unity of action and identity of interest, the Jerusalem Delivered, equal to the Iliad, is much superior to the Æneid. Virgil appears, in his admiration of Homer, to have aimed at uniting in his poem the beauties both of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and thence in a great measure his failure to rival either. While the first six books, which contain the wanderings of the Trojan exile and the dismal recital of the sack of Troy, are an evident imitation of the Odyssey, the last six, containing the strife in Italy, the efforts of the Trojans to gain a footing on the Ausonian shores, and the concluding single combat of Turnus and Æneas, are as evidently framed upon the model of the Iliad. But it is impossible in this manner to tack together two separate poems, and form an homogeneous whole from their junction. Patchwork will appear in spite of all the genius and taste of Virgil. Epic poetry, indeed, is not confined within the narrow limits of the Grecian stage; the poem may embrace a longer period than it requires to read it. But in epic poetry, as in all the fine arts, one unity is indispensable – the unity of interest or emotion. Unity of time and place is not to be disregarded to any great degree without manifest danger. The whole period embraced in the Iliad is only forty-eight days, and the interest of the piece – that which elapses from Hector lighting his fires before the Greek intrenchments till his death in front of the Scæan Gate – is only thirty-six hours. Tasso has the same unity of time, place, and interest in his poems: the scene is always around Jerusalem; the time not many weeks; the main object, the centre of the whole action, the capture of the city. The charming episodes of Erminia's flight and Armida's island are felt to be episodes only: they vary the narrative without distracting the interest. But in Virgil the interest is various and complicated, the scene continually shifting, the episodes usurp the place of the main story. At one time we are fascinated by the awful recital of the murder of Priam, the burning of Troy, and the flight of Æneas: at another, we weep with the sorrows of Dido at Carthage, and the exquisite pathos of his heart-rending lamentations: at a third, we are charmed by the descent into the infernal regions on the shores of Avernus, we sympathize with the patriotic effort of Turnus and the people of Ausonia to expel the invaders from the Italian shores. Though Virgil did not intend it, he has twice transferred the reader's sympathy from the hero of his story: once by his inimitable description of the mourning and death of Dido from the departure and perfidy of Æneas, and again, from the burst of patriotic feeling which he has represented as animating the Etruscan tribes at the violent intrusion of the Trojan invaders.

Virgil's heroes will bear no sort of comparison with those either of the Iliad or the Jerusalem Delivered. Æneas himself is a vain conceited man, proud of his piety and his wanderings, and destroying our admiration for either by the ostentation with which he brings them forward on all occasions. The well-known line,

occurs too frequently to render it possible to take any interest in such a self-applauding character. Compare this with the patriotic devotion, the heroic courage, the domestic tenderness, the oblivion of self in Hector, in the Iliad, and it will at once appear how far deeper the insight into the human heart was in the Grecian than the Roman poet. One striking instance will at once illustrate this. When Hector parts from Andromache at the Scæan Gate, and after he has taken his infant son from his arms, he prays to Jupiter that he may become so celebrated that the people in seeing himself pass, may say only – "He far exceeds his father." What sentiment on the part of a hero himself, and at the moment the bulwark and sole stay of Troy! But what does Virgil make Æneas say in similar circumstances? – "Learn, boy, virtue and true labour from ME, fortune from others."

What a difference between the thought in the two poets, and the interest which their words excite in the breast of the reader!

What an historical gallery, or rather what a gallery of imaginary portraits, does the Iliad contain! It is the embodying so many separate and well-distinguished characters, in different persons, which forms the grand characteristic – the unequalled supremacy of the poem. Only think of what they are. Achilles, vehement alike in anger and in grief, wrathful, impetuous, overbearing, "the most terrible character ever conceived by man;" yet not insensible at times to the tender emotions, loving his country, weeping for his father, devoted to his home, but yet determined to purchase deathless renown by a short life, ere he met the death he knew awaited him under the walls of Troy. Hector, calm, resolute, patriotic; sustaining by his single arm the conflict with a host of heroes; retaining by his single suavity the confederacy of many jealous and discordant nations; unconquerable in the field; undaunted in council; ever watching over his country; ever forgetful of himself; overflowing with domestic affection, yet prodigal of self-sacrifice; singly awaiting before the Scæan Gate the approach of Achilles, when his celestial armour shone like the setting sun, and all Troy in terror had sought refuge within the walls; deaf to the wailing even of Andromache and Priam, at the call of patriotic duty; and when betrayed by Minerva in the last conflict, and deprived of his home, yet drawing his sword to do deeds of which men might speak thereafter! Diomede, unsubdued even amidst the wreck of Grecian fortunes during the absence of Achilles, alone sustaining the war, when all around him quailed before the spear of Hector; and resolute to hold his ground with a few followers, even though the whole of his Grecian leaders fled in their ships. Agamemnon, proud, imperious, passionate; doing injustice in anger, yet willing to repair it on reflection; wresting the blue-eyed maid from Achilles in the first burst of fury, yet publicly acknowledging his fault in the council of the chiefs; sending embassies, and offering his own daughter, to obtain a reconciliation with the son of Peleus. Ulysses, wary alike in council and in action; provident in forming designs, intrepid in carrying them into execution; sparing of the blood of his soldiers, but unconquerable in the resolution with which they were led; ever counselling prudent measures, but ever ruled by invincible determination. Ajax, singly resisting the onset of the Trojan multitude; slowly retreating, covered by his broad shield; midway between the two armies, when all around him fled; striving with desperate resolution for the body of Patroclus, and covering the retreat of his followers who dragged along the lifeless hero, when Hector, clad in the shining panoply he had wrested from the Myrmidonian chief, was thundering in close pursuit. What has Virgil to exhibit as a set-off to this band of heroes – "Fortem Gyan, fortemque Cloanthum" – the boyish eagerness of Ascanius, the savage wrath of Turnus when bereaved of his bride! We seem, in passing from the Iliad to the Æneid, to have fallen, so far as character goes, from a race of giants to a brood of pigmies.

Modern partiality cannot claim for Tasso the merit of having conceived a band of heroes whose characters were as strongly marked, or boldly drawn, as those of the Grecian bard; yet may it justly claim for the Italian poet the second honours. Tasso did not draw his characters from nature, like Homer; he lived at a period when the manners of the heroic age had passed away, and the recollections of it were preserved only in the stanzas of poetry and the romances of the Troubadours; yet did the force of his genius, the elevation of his sentiments, the loftiness of his conceptions, in a great measure supply the defect, and produce a magnificent, and to this day unequalled, picture of the chivalry of modern Europe. Godfrey of Bouillon is the model of a Christian hero whose arm has been devoted to the sacred lance; antiquity did not, and could not, conceive any such character. Hector is the nearest approach to it; but the patriotism of the Trojan chief is mingled with his domestic affections; it is for his father, his wife, his child, his hearth, his country, that he fights. In Godfrey, all these affections, warm and ennobling as they are, appear to be obliterated by the perpetual sense of a sacred duty superior to them all – by the intensity of the pious fervour which had concentrated all earthly affections. He is the personification of the Church militant, combating for its Saviour's cause. The profound feelings, the self-negation, the martyr-like spirit which had been nursed for centuries amidst the solitude of the cloister, appears in him brought forth into action, and producing the most intense enthusiasm, yet regulated by the caution of Ulysses, combined with the foresight of Agamemnon, sustained by the constancy of Ajax.

Rinaldo, youthful, vehement, impassioned, is the ideal of a hero not yet weaned from the passions of the world. Vehement, capricious, and irascible, he disturbs, like Achilles, the council of the chiefs by his wrath, and is seduced by the beauty of Armida to abandon the cause of the cross; yet even in her enchanted gardens, and when surrounded by all that can fascinate the imagination and allure the senses, the sparks of a noble nature are not extinct in his breast; he is recalled to his duty by the sight of her warriors; he flies the arms of the syren; he penetrates with invincible courage the enchanted forest; and when he descends purified from the stains of the world from the lofty mountain, on whose summit at sunrise he had dedicated himself to God, he is the worthy and invincible champion of the cross. Not less bold than his youthful rival, not less enthusiastic in his affections, Tancredi is the victim of a romantic passion. But it is no enchantress for whom he pines; it is no seducing frail one who allures him from the path of duty. Clorinda appears in the Saracen ranks; her arms combat with heroic power for the cause of Mahomet; the glance which has fascinated the Christian knight came from beneath the plumed helmet. Lofty enthusiasm has unstrung his arm – devoted tenderness has subdued his heart – the passion of love in its purest form has fascinated his soul; yet even this high-toned sentiment can yield to the influences of religion; and when Tancredi, after the fatal nocturnal conflict in which his sword pierced the bosom of his beloved, is visited by her in his dreams, and assured that she awaits him in Paradise, the soul of the Crusader is aroused within him, and he sets forth with ardent zeal to seek danger and death in the breach of Jerusalem. It cannot be said that these characters are so natural as those of Homer, at least they are not so similar to what is elsewhere seen in the world; and therefore they will never make the general impression which the heroes of the Iliad have done. But they are more refined – they are more exalted; and if less like what men are, they are perhaps not the less like what they ought to be.

How is it, then, if Virgil is so inferior to Homer and Tasso in the unity of action, the concentration of interest, and the delineation of character, that he has acquired his prodigious reputation among men? How is it that generation after generation has ratified the opinion of Dante, who called him his "Divine Master" – of Petrarch, who spent his life in the study of his works? How is it that his verses are so engraven in our recollection that they have become, as it were, a second nature to every cultivated mind, and insensibly recur whenever the beauty of poetry is felt, or the charms of nature experienced? Rest assured the judgment of so many ages is right: successive generations and different nations never concur in praising any author, unless his works, in some respects at least, have approached perfection. If we cannot discern the beauties, the conclusion to be drawn is that our taste is defective, rather than that so many ages and generations have concurred in lavishing their admiration on an unworthy object. Nor is it difficult to see in what the excellence of Virgil consists; we cannot read a page of him without perceiving what has fascinated the world, without concurring in the fascination. It is the tenderness of his heart, his exquisite pathos, his eye for the beauty of nature, the unrivalled beauty of his language, which have given him immortality, and to the end of time render the study of his works the most perfect means of refining the taste and inspiring a genuine feeling of poetic beauty.

So melodious is the versification, so delicate the taste, so exquisite the feeling, so refined the sentiment of Virgil, that it may truly be said that he will ever remain the model on which the graces of composition in every future age must be formed. Of him more truly than any human being it may be said, "Nihil quod tetegit non ornavit." The Georgics demonstrate that, in the hands of genius, and under the guidance of taste, the most ordinary occupations of rural life may be treated with delicacy, and rendered prolific of beauty. The dressing of vines, the subduing of the clod by the sturdy heifers, the different manures for the soil, the sowing of seed, the reaping of harvest, the joys of the vintage, the vehemence of storms, the snows of winter, the heats of summer, the blossoms of spring, the riches of autumn, become in his hands prolific of description and prodigal of beauty. Even the dumb animals are the objects of his tender solicitude. We hear the heifers lowing for their accustomed meal in winter; we gaze on the sporting of the lambs in spring; we see the mountain goat suspended from the shaggy rock in summer; we sympathize with the provident industry of the bees; we even feel we have a friend in the little underground nest of the field mouse. The opening lines of the Eclogues, which every schoolboy knows by heart, give an earnest of the exquisite taste which pervades his writings: —

Virgil, it has been said, was so strongly impressed with the inferiority of the Æneid to what he conceived epic poetry should be, that he desired that poem to be thrown into the flames after his death; yet though deficient in the principal requisites of an epic poem, so far as the structure of the story and the delineation of the characters are concerned, what exquisite beauties does it contain – what an assemblage of lovely images has it brought together – what an irreparable loss would its destruction have been to all future generations of men! Not all the genius of subsequent ages could have supplied its place. There are beauties in the Æneid, which neither Thomson in descriptive, nor Racine in dramatic poetry, have been able to rival.

If Homer excels all subsequent writers in conception of character, vigour of imagination, and graphic delineation, Virgil is not less unrivalled in delicacy of sentiment, tenderness of feeling, and beauty of expression. There are many more striking scenes in the Iliad, more animating events, more awful apparitions; but in the Æneid, passages of extraordinary beauty are much more numerous. What is present to the imagination when we rise from the former, is the extraordinary series of brilliant or majestic images which it has presented; what is engraven on the memory when we conclude the latter, is the charming series of beautiful passages which it contains. There are many more events to recollect in the Grecian, but more lines to remember in the Roman poet. To the Iliad, subsequent ages have turned with one accord for images of heroism, traits of nature, grandeur of character. To the Æneid, subsequent times will ever have recourse for touches of pathos, expressions of tenderness, felicity of language. Flaxman drew his conception of heroic sculpture from the heroes of the Iliad: Racine borrowed his heart-rending pathetic from the sorrows of Dido. Homer struck out his conceptions with the bold hand, and in the gigantic proportions, of Michael Angelo's frescoes; Virgil finished his pictures with the exquisite grace of Raphael's Madonnas.

Virgil has been generally considered as unrivalled in the pathetic; but this observation requires to be taken with a certain limitation. No man ever exceeded Homer in the pathetic, so far as he wished to portray it; but it was one branch only of that emotion that he cared to paint. It was the domestic pathetic that he delineated with such power: it was in the distresses of home life, the rending asunder of home affections, that he was so great a master. The grief of Andromache on the death of Hector, and the future fate of his son begging his bread from the cold charity of strangers – the wailings of Priam and Hecuba, when that noble chief awaited before the Scæan Gate the approach of Achilles – the passionate lamentations of the Grecian chief over the dead body of Patroclus – never were surpassed in any language; they abound with traits of nature, which, to the end of the world, will fascinate and melt the human heart. The tender melancholy of Evander for the fate of Pallas, who had perished by the spear of Turnus, is of the same description, and will bear a comparison with its touching predecessor. But these are all the sorrows of domestic life. Virgil and Tasso, in the description of the despair consequent on the severing of the ties of the passion of love, have opened a new field, unknown in the previous poetry of antiquity. It is to be found touched on in the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and but touched on. The passion they represent under the name of love was not what we understand by the word, or what constitutes so important an element in the poetry and romance of modern Europe. It was not the imaginative flame feeding on hope, nursed by smiles, transcendent in enjoyment, but a furious mania, resembling rather, and classed with, the ravings of insanity. Destiny was the grand ruling power in Greek tragedy: the distress brought out was the striving of man against the iron chain of fate. Love as a passion, independent of destiny, detached from sense, feeding on the imagination, living in the presence of the beloved object, is glanced at in Catullus; but it is in Virgil that we must look for the perfect delineation of its suffering, a thorough knowledge of its nature – in Tasso, that it has been wrought up to the highest conceivable perfection.

But, for all that, we will not have old Homer defrauded of his dues. The Iliad cannot, for the reasons already mentioned, produce passages to be placed beside the pathetic tenderness of Dido's love for Æneas, the romantic chivalry of Tancredi, or Erminia's passion. But in the earlier and more natural affections, in the delineation of domestic grief, in the rending asunder the parental or filial ties, who has ever surpassed the pathetic simplicity of the Grecian bard? Where can we find such heart-rending words as Priam addresses to Hector, leaning over the towers of Troy, when his heroic son was calmly awaiting the approach of the god-like Achilles, resplendent in the panoply of Vulcan, and shielded by the Ægis of Minerva?

But we know not whether three lines in the Odyssey do not convey a still more touching picture of grief – so powerful is the wail of untaught nature. When Proteus informed Menelaus of the murder of Agamemnon, his grief is thus described —

"Thus he spoke; my soul was crushed within me; I sat weeping on the sand; nor had I the heart to wish to live, and behold the light of the sun." Here is the pathos of nature: "Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not."

One peculiar beauty belongs to the epic poems of antiquity, and especially Homer, from the combination of heroic sentiments and actions with a simplicity which will be looked for in vain, and in truth would be unseemly, in the later ages of society. We hear of princes, kings, and the daughters of kings, and our imagination immediately clothes them with the pomp and circumstance of modern royalty. But erelong some little circumstance, let out as it were accidentally, brings us back at once to the simplicity and habits of early life. Bellerophon met the daughter of a king amidst the grassy meads, and a race of heroes sprung from this occasion; but he met her as he was tending his herds, and she her lambs. The beauteous daughters of the Trojan chiefs repaired to the hot and cold springs of the Scamander, near the Scæan Gate, but they went there to wash their clothes in its limpid fountains. The youngest daughter of Nestor, with the innocence of a child, though the beauty of womanhood, did, by her father's desire, to Telemachus the duties of the bath. Many a chief is described as rich; but generally the riches consist in flocks and herds, in wrought brass or golden ornaments – not unfrequently in meadows and garden-stuffs. This beauty could not, from the superior age of the world, belong to Tasso. His soldans are arrayed in all the pomp of Asiatic magnificence – his princes appear in the pride of feudal power – his princesses surrounded with the homage of chivalrous devotion. Virgil has often the same exquisite traits of nature, the same refreshing return to the young world, in the Æneid: He dwells on those peeps into pastoral simplicity as Tacitus did on the virtue of the Germans in the corrupted days of Roman society, when "corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur." We may conceive the enchantment with which the Romans, when the Capitol was in all its splendour in the time of Augustus, read his charming description of its shaggy precipices in the days of Evander.

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What Homer was to Virgil, and Ariosto to Tasso, that Michael Angelo was to Raphael. Though both these illustrious men lived in the same age, yet the former was born nine years before the latter,1 and he had attained to eminence while his younger rival was yet toiling in the obscurity of humble life. It was the sight of the magnificent frescoes of Michael Angelo that first emancipated Raphael from the stiff and formal, though beautiful style of his master, Pietro Perugino, and showed him of what his noble art was susceptible. So great was the genius, so ardent the effort, of the young aspirant, so rapid the progress of art in those days, when the genius of modern Europe, locked up during the long frost of the middle ages, burst forth with the vigour and beauty of a Canadian spring, that he had brought painting, which he had taken up in a state of infancy in the studio of Pietro Perugino, to absolute perfection when he died, at the age of thirty-seven. Seventeen years, in Raphael's hands, sufficed to bring an art as great and difficult as poetry to absolute perfection! Subsequent ages, vainly as yet attempting to imitate, can never hope to surpass him. How vast must have been the genius, how capacious the thought, how intense the labour, of the man who could thus master and bring to perfection this difficult art, in a period so short as, to men even of superior parts and unwearied application, barely to gain the command of the pencil!

Modern painting, as it appears in the works of Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, is an art as elevated in kind as the highest flights of the epic or tragic muse, and it has been brought to a perfection to be paralleled only by the greatest conceptions of Grecian statuary. If called upon to assign the arts which human genius had, since the beginning of the world, brought to absolute perfection, no one would hesitate to fix on Grecian sculpture and Italian painting. Imagination can conceive a more faultless poem than the Iliad, a more dignified series of characters than those of the Æneid, a more interesting epic than Paradise Lost; but it can figure nothing more perfect than the friezes of Phidias, or more heavenly than the Holy Families of Raphael. It is one of the most extraordinary and inexplicable facts recorded in the history of the human mind, that these two sister arts should both have been brought to perfection near each other, on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the lifetime of a single generation; for the transition from the marbles of Ægina to those of the Parthenon, made in the lifetime of Pericles, is as great as from the paintings of Pietro Perugino to those of Raphael, made in the lifetime of Leo X.

The sculpture of antiquity aimed chiefly, if not entirely, at the representation of a single figure. Even the procession on the frieze of the Parthenon is not sculpture – it is a series of isolated horsemen or figures passing. The group of Niobe and her children is the only attempt extant at telling a story, or representing emotion by a variety of figures. Within this limited range, the great sculptors carried the art to the highest imaginable perfection. The Apollo is the most perfect representation of manly beauty, the Venus of feminine grace and delicacy. The Laocoon exhibits the most fearful contortions and agonized expressions of pain and anguish in suffering humanity; the Fighting Gladiator – the most inimitable representation of war-like energy at its extreme tension – the Dying Warrior of the Capitol, of valour sinking beneath the ebbing stream of blood. The Hercules Farnese is the perfection of physical strength, the Jupiter Tonans of awful majesty, the Venus Calipyge of alluring beauty. Thus the expression of character was their great object; emotion was not overlooked, but it was studied only as it brought out or illustrated the permanent temper of mind. A collection of ancient statues is a vast imaginary gallery, in which, as in the heroes of the Iliad, every conceivable gradation of the human mind is exhibited, from the stern vengeance of Achilles, whom not even the massacre of half the Grecian host could melt, to the tender heart of Andromache, who wept her husband's valour, and her sad presentiments for her infant son.

In modern painting, as it appeared in the hands of Raphael and Michael Angelo, a wider range was attempted: more spiritual and touching objects had come to engross the human mind. The mere contemplation of abstract character – its delineation by the graphic representation of the human form, had ceased to be the principal object of genius. The temple of the unknown God was no longer to be filled with idols made under image of man. The gospel had been preached to the poor; the words of mercy and peace had been heard on the earth. Painting had come to be the auxiliary of religion; it was in the churches of a spiritual and suffering faith that its impression was to be produced. Calvary was to be presented to the eye; the feeling of the centurion. "Truly this man was the Son of God," engraven on the heart. It was to the faithful who were penetrated with the glad words of salvation, that the altar-pieces were addressed; it was the feeling of the song of Simeon that had gone forth on the earth. It was those divine feelings which painting, as it arose in modern Europe, was called to embody in the human form; it was to this heavenly mission that the genius of Italy was called. And if ever there was a mind fitted to answer such a call – if ever the spirit of the gospel was breathed into the human breast, that mind and that breast were those of Raphael.

Michael Angelo was the personification of the genius of Dante. The bold conceptions, the awful agonies, the enduring suffering which are brought forth in that immortal poet, had penetrated his kindred spirit, and realized the Inferno in the representation of the Last Judgment. But it was the Spirit of Christ which had been breathed into the heart of Raphael. The divine words, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven," had inspired his immortal conceptions. It is neither physical beauty nor mental character, as in the Greek sculpture, which is represented in his paintings. It is the Divine spirit breathed into the human heart; it is the incarnation of deity in the human form that formed the object of his pencil. He has succeeded in the attempt beyond any other human being that ever existed. If any works of man ever deserved the name of divine, they are the Holy Families of Raphael.

Superficial writers will ask, what has Raphael to do with Virgil? mere artists will enquire, how they are to be benefited by the study of Tasso? Those, again, who have reflected on the means by which the higher stages in any art are attained, will acknowledge that, at a certain elevation, their principles are the same.

To move the heart, whether by painting, poetry, or eloquence, requires the same mind. The means by which the effect is to be produced are not different. The one works, indeed, with the pencil, the other with the pen; the one composes in verse, the other in prose – but what then? These are the means to the end, they are not the end itself. There are many avenues to the human heart, but the inner doors in them all are to be opened only by one key, and that key is never denied to the suit of genius.

It is in his lesser pieces that the exquisite taste and divine conceptions of Raphael are chiefly to be seen. His greater paintings, the Transfiguration, the frescoes in the Vatican, the cartoons, are invaluable to the artist as studies, and specimens of the utmost power of drawing and energy of conception; but it is not there that the divine Raphael appears. In the larger ones his object was to cover space and display talent; and in the prosecution of these objects he never has been exceeded; but it is in his groups of two or three figures that his exquisite conceptions appear. It is there that he has given free scope to his exquisite conception, intended to represent in the maternal, and therefore universally felt affection, the divine spirit and parental tenderness of the gospel. "My son, give me thy heart," was what he always aimed at. "God is love," the idea which he ever strove to represent, as embodying the essence of the Christian faith. The Madonna della Seggiola at Florence, the Assumption of the Virgin at Dresden, the Madonna di Foligno in the Vatican, the Holy Family at Naples, St John in the Desert in the Tribune at Florence, the small Holy Family in the Louvre, the large Holy Family, with the flowers, brought from Fontainbleau, also in the Louvre, St Mark at Munich, and several of the lesser pieces of Raphael in the same rich collection in that city, are so many gems of art, embodying this conception, which to the end of the world, even when preserved only in the shadowy imitation of engraving, will improve the heart and refine the mind, as well as fascinate the imagination. It may be doubted if they ever will be equalled: excelled they can never be.

Whoever will study those inimitable productions, even when standing to gaze at the engravings from them in a print-shop window, will have no difficulty in feeling the justice of Cicero's remark, that all the arts which relate to humanity have a certain common bond, a species of consanguinity between them. The emotion produced by the highest excellence in them all is the same. So intense is this emotion, so burning the delight which it occasions, that it cannot be borne for any length of time: the mind's eye is averted from it as the eyeball is from the line of "insufferable brightness," as Gray calls it, which often precedes the setting of the sun. It is difficult to say in which this burning charm consists. Like genius or beauty, its presence is felt by all, but can be described by none. It would seem to be an emanation of Heaven – a chink, as it were, opened, which lets us feel for a few seconds the ethereal joys of a superior state of existence. But it is needless to seek to define what, all who have felt it must acknowledge, passes all understanding.

It is a common saying, even among persons of cultivated taste, that it is hopeless to attempt to advance any thing new on the beauties of ancient authors; that every thing that can be said on the subject has already been exhausted, and that it is in the more recent fields of modern literature that it is alone possible to avoid repetition. We are decidedly of opinion that this idea is erroneous, and that its diffusion has done more than any thing else to degrade criticism to the low station which, with some honourable exceptions, it has so long held in the world of letters. But when ancient excellence is contemplated with a generous eye, even when the mind that sees is but slenderly gifted, who will say that nothing new will occur? When it meets kindred genius, when it is elevated by a congenial spirit, what a noble art does criticism become? What has it proved in the hands of Dryden and Pope, of Wilson and Macaulay? It is in the contemplation of ancient greatness, and its comparison with the parallel efforts of modern genius, that the highest flights of these gifted spirits have been attained, and the native generosity of real intellectual power most strikingly evinced. Criticism of words will soon come to an end; the notes of scholiasts and annotators are easily made, as apothecaries make drugs by pouring from one phial into another. But criticism of things, of ideas, of characters, of conceptions, can never come to an end; for every successive age is bringing forth fresh comparisons to make, and fresh combinations to exhibit. It is the outpouring of a heart overburdened with admiration which must be delivered, and will ever discover a new mode of deliverance.

How many subjects of critical comparison in this view, hitherto nearly untouched upon, has the literature of Europe, and even of this age, afforded! Æschylus, Shakspeare, and Schiller – Euripides, Alfieri, and Corneille – Sophocles, Metastasio, and Racine – Pindar, Horace, and Gray – Ovid, Ariosto, and Wieland – Lucretius, Darwin, and Campbell – Demosthenes, Cicero, and Burke – Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon – Thomson, Cowper, and Claude Lorraine: such are a few which suggest themselves at first sight to every one who reflects on the rich retrospect of departed genius. It is like looking back to the Alps through the long and rich vista of Italian landscape; the scene continually varies, the features are ever new, the impression is constantly fresh, from the variety of intervening objects, though the glittering pinnacles of the inaccessible mountains ever shine from afar on the azure vault of heaven. Human genius is ever furnishing new proofs of departed excellence. Human magnanimity is ever exhibiting fresh examples of the fidelity of former descriptions, or the grandeur of former conception. What said Hector, drawing his sword, when, betrayed by Minerva in his last conflict with Achilles, he found himself without his lance in presence of his fully-armed and heaven-shielded antagonist? "Not at least inglorious shall I perish, but after doing some great thing that men may be spoken of in ages to come."2