Let us now look at the question from another side, and apply this law to poems whose position has been finally settled by the judgment of mankind. Why, for example, is the Iliad so full of life? Mainly because the subject of the poem was very much alive in Homer's own imagination: everything in it seems to be of a piece, and to be said naturally and without conscious effort. It must, however, also be admitted that Homer enjoyed an immense advantage over all his successors by starting in almost complete unity with his theme. When he composed the Iliad the poetical mode of conceiving things was the natural mode of conception; so that we may almost say the image of the poem pressed itself on his mind from the outside ready made, and all that he had to do was to find an adequate mould for the expression. In his verse the commonest objects and actions—a ship being rowed over the sea; a banquet; a sacrifice -are described in a manner at once grand and simple; not, I imagine, merely because Homer was a great poet, but because, in his age, almost everything was conceived as having a divine life of its own. Inability to conceive of Nature in the same spirit of childlike poetry extorted from Wordsworth his passionate cry of regret : Great God! I had rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed out-worn, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. E As regards the individual element in his poem, therefore the union, that is to say, between the poet's imagination and his subject Homer had everything in his favour. What is to be said, however, of the union between his imagination and the imagination of his audience? Think how much there is in the Iliad to militate against the production of the desired effect! A scheme of theology which more than two thousand years ago was repudiated by the philosopher; a view of Nature which is to-day incredible to the schoolboy; a representation of warfare which must seem ridiculous to the soldier; and a recital of methods of killing and wounding which, since the invention of firearms, has lost its interest even for the surgeon. What is it, then, in Homer's poetry that produces such unequalled pleasure? It is the element of the Universal. Nowhere else, except in Shakespeare, will you meet with so many characters which are immediately perceived to be living imitations of mankind; so many sentiments which at once move the affections; so many situations of elemental interest and pathos;-nowhere else will you find the images of things adapting themselves so readily to the movement of verse whose majestic roll seems animated by the very life of Nature, and yet is found on examination to be the product of idealising Art. In the Eneid we perceive the case to be quite different. Here we have evidently a sharp separation between the subject and the mind of the poet, and we understand that Virgil's matter must have been long meditated, assimilated, and transmuted, before the poem was ready to be born into the world. The hero of the Æneid is, comparatively speaking, a poor creature; the sentiments and manners represented in the poem, far from making us breathe a naturally heroic atmosphere, provoke question and criticism; many of the incidents appear improbable, being in fact transferred from Homer, and having lost some of their life in the passage. We feel through the last six books of the epic that the poet is only carrying on the action because the machinery of his work requires him to do so. Nevertheless from the very first the Æneid has been alive; it is alive still. What is the secret of its vitality? Partly, no doubt, the fact that Virgil was able to impregnate his subject with certain qualities of his own nature in which no poet has ever equalled him, piety, gravity, sweetness. But partly also the fact that he has developed out of his subject, with unrivalled art, the elements that it contains of the Universal. We know how the Eneid appeared to Virgil's contemporaries. They hailed it as some thing greater than the Iliad. "Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade," said Propertius; and though this sounds like patriotic exaggeration, there is a sense in which it is true. For the Eneid is par excellence the epic of Civil Life. It is the poem of a Roman, having for its theme the foundation of the Roman Empire, and reflecting at every point the majesty of the Roman character. That was the special quality in it which so deeply influenced the genius of Dante; and wherever the civilising power of the Roman Empire has been felt, that is, over the whole of modern Europe, there will this element of life in the Eneid continue to produce sublime pleasure. But there is a wider, a more human sense, in which the Eneid may be said to be greater than the Iliad, and that is in the conception of the pathetic. Not, of course, that Homer is wanting in pathos; he covers a larger surface of the pathetic than Virgil; but at certain points Virgil goes deeper. His great poetical principle is embodied in the line, "Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt," which a modern poet has beautifully rendered: Tears waken tears, and honour honour brings, And mortal hearts are moved by mortal things.1 Inadequate as the character of Æneas is on the heroic side, it is exceedingly human, and the poet has sounded the deepest feelings of our kind in the description of his hero's adventures and misfortunes. The narrative of the fall of Troy, the death of Dido, the meeting of Eneas and Anchises in the lower world, the deaths of Nisus and Euryalus, these things will move the hearts of men through all time. Virgil in such passages has individualised the Universal; his images live for ever in a stream of verse as deep and full as Homer's is swift and brilliant. Let me now, by way of contrast, refer to a poem which having once enjoyed great popularity has long passed, not indeed into oblivion, but neglect. When the Thebais was first published, we know from Juvenal that it was received with general enthusiasm, 1 F. W. Myers, Classical Essays, p. 120. and even in the Middle Ages the reputation of Statius was so great-mainly no doubt on account of his legendary Christianity-that Dante assigns him a place in his Purgatory. To-day he is known only to professed scholars. Why? If we try to realise the manner in which the Thebais came into existence we shall be able to account for its literary fate. Statius so far complied with Horace's advice in the Ars Poetica as to choose a subject not less. well known to his audience than "the tale of Troy divine." Unfortunately it had no special elements of interest which could touch his heart as a man and a Roman; hence his subject never really passed into his own imagination; he hatched it, so to speak, like an artificial incubator. Let us try to watch him composing the Fourth Book, which is much the best in the poem. Here his business was, in some way or other, to conduct Polynices and the Argive army to Thebes, where Eteocles had usurped the government. Statius sets to work in a style which is eminently logical, and, in a way, scientific. He starts his expedition with stir and bustle, and tells us of all the rumours which the news of the invasion set in circulation at Thebes. Then he appears to have said to himself, "Now what effect would these rumours have had on the mind of Eteocles?" Eteocles is conceived as a gloomy tyrant. Of course, then, his bad conscience would drive him to consult the prophet Tiresias. Here came a splendid opportunity for what Horace calls "a purple patch." Tiresias practised magic in a wood; the wood must therefore be de |