Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

BULLER. Hear Virgil

"Mœnia lata videt, triplici circumdata muro, Quæ rapidus flammis ambit torrentibus amnis Tartareus Phlegethon, torquetque sonantia

saxa.

No Phlegethon with torrents of fire surrounding and shaking Byron's Hell. I do not understand it-an unaccountable blunder.

NORTH. In next stanza, what is gained by

"How profound The gulf! and how the giant element From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound?"

Nothing. In the First Stanza, we had the "abyss," "the gulf," and the agony-all and

more than we have here.

SEWARD. Check-mate.

TALBOYS. Confound the board!-no, not the board-but Hurwitz himself could not play in such an infernal clatter.

NORTH. Buller has not got to the word "infernal" yet, Phillidor-but he will by-andby. "Crushing the Cliffs"-crushing is not the right word-it is the wrong one-for not such is the process--visible or invisible. "Downward worn" is silly. "Fierce footsteps," to my imagination, is tame and out of place-though it may not be to yours; and I thunder in the ears of the Chess-players that the first half of the next stanza-the

third—is as bad writing as is to be found in

Byron.

TALBOYS. Or in North.

[blocks in formation]

Did Hope-could Hope ever sit by such. a death-bed! The infernal surge—the hell of waters-the howling-the hissing-the boiling in endless torture-the sweat of the

great agony wrung out-and more of the same sort-these image the death-bed. Hope has death-bed--but not by such as this: and sat beside many a sad-many a miserable yet, here, such a death-bed is hinted at as not uncommon-in a few words-" like Hope upon a death-bed." The smile came not of itself-it was sought for-and had far better

have been away.

[merged small][ocr errors]

There is much bad writing here, too—“ unworn”. -"unshorn""torn"- 66 dyes" hues". "beams" "torture of the scene"--epithet heaped on epithet, without any clear perception, or sincere emotion-the Iris changing from Hope upon a death-bed to Love watching Madness-both of which I pronounce, before that portion of mankind assembled in this Tent, to be on the FALSETTO--and wide from

NORTH. Seward--you may give him like- the thoughts that visit the suffering souls of wise a Bishop

"Look back:

Lo! where it comes like an Eternity!"

the children of men remembering this life's greatest calamities.

SEWARD. Yet throughout, sir, there is Power.

NORTH. Power!

denies it? But great Power-true poetical My dear Seward, who Power is self-collected - not turbulent

though dealing with turbulence-in its own

I do not say that is not sublime. If it is an image of Eternity-sublime it must be but the Poet has chosen his time badly for inspiring us with that thought-for we look back on what he had pictured to us as ing into hell-and then flowing diffused "on-stately passion dominating physical nature in its utmost distraction-and in her blind ly thus to be parents of rivers that flow gush-forces seeing a grandeur-a sublimity that ingly with many windings through the vale" only becomes visible or audible to the senses, -images of Time.

"As if to sweep down all things in its track," is well enough for an ordinary cataract, but not for a cataract that comes" like an Eternity."

66

TALBOYS.

through the action of imagination creating its own consistent ideal world out of that tur

moil-making the fury of falling waters appeal to our Moral Being, from whose depths and heights rise emotions echoing all the tones of the thundering cataract. In these stanzas of Byron, the main Power is in the Cat

Charming the eye with dread-a matchless aract—not in the Poetry-loud to the ear

cataract,

Horribly beautiful."

to the eye flashing and foaming-full of noise and fury, signifying not much to the

soul, as it stuns and confounds the senseswhile its more spiritual significations are uncertain, or unintelligible, accepted with doubt, or rejected without hesitation, because felt to be false and deceitful, and but brilliant mockeries of the Truth.

TALBOYS. Spare Byron, who is a Poet and castigate some popular Versifier.

NORTH. I will not spare Byron-and just because he is a Poet. For popular Versifiers, they may pipe at their pleasure, but aloof from our Tents-chirp anywhere but in this Encampment; and if there be a Gowdspink or Yellow-hammer among them, let us incline our ear kindly to his chattering or his yammering, "low doun in the broom," or high up on his apple-tree, in outfield or orchard, and pray that never naughty schoolboy may harry his nest.

SEWARD. Would Sir Walter's poetry stand such critical examination?

NORTH. All-or nearly so-directly dealing with War-Fighting in all its branches. Indeed, with any kind of Action he seldom fails-in Reflection, often-and, strange to say, almost as often in description of Nature, though there in his happier hours he excels.

SEWARD. I was always expecting, during that discussion about the Clitumnus, that you would have brought in Virgil.

NORTH. Ay, Maro-in description-is superior to them all-in the Æneid as well as in the Georgics. But we have no time to speak of his Pictures now-only just let me ask you Do you remember what Payne Knight says of Æneas?

SEWARD. No, for I never read it.

NORTH. Payne Knight, in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste-a work of high authority in his own day, and containing many truths vigorously expounded, though characterized throughout by arrogance and presumption-speaks of that "selfish coldness with which the Eneas of Virgil treats the unfortunate princess, whose af fections he had seduced," and adds, that "Every modern reader of the Æneid finds that the Episode of Dido, though in itself the most exquisite piece of composition existing, weakens extremely the subsequent interest of the Poem, it being impossible to sympathize either cordially or kindly with the fortunes or exertions of a hero who sneaks away from his high-minded and muchinjured benefactress in a manner so base and unmanly. When, too, we find him soon after imitating all the atrocities, and surpassing the utmost arrogance, of the furious and

vindictive Achilles, without displaying any of his generosity, pride, or energy, he becomes at once mean and odious, and only excites scorn and indignation; especially when, at the conclusion, he presents to Lavinia a hand stained with the blood of her favored lover, whom he had stabbed while begging for quarter, and after being rendered incapable of resistance." Is not this, Seward, much too strong?

SEWARD. I think, sir, it is not only much too strong, but outrageous; and that we are bound, in justice to Virgil, to have clearly before our mind his own idea of his Hero.

TALBOYS. To try that Æneas by the rules of poetry and of morality; and if we find his character such as neither our imagination nor our moral sense will suffer us to regard with favor to admire either in Hero or Manthen to throw the Eneid aside.

BULLER. And take up his Georgics.

TALBOYS. To love Virgil we need not forget Homer-but to sympathize with Eneas, our imaginations must not be filled with Achilles.

SEWARD. Troy is dust-the Son of Thetis dead. Let us go with the Fugitives and their Leader.

TALBOYS. Let us believe from the first that they seek a Destined Seat-under One Man, who knows his mission, and is worthy to fulfill it. Has Virgil so sustained the character of that Man-of that Hero? Or has he, from ineptitude, and unequal to so great a subject-let him sink below our nobler sympathies-nay, unconscious of failure of his purpose, as Payne Knight says, accommodated him to our contempt?

SEWARD. For seven years he has been that Man-that Hero. One Night's Tale has shown him-as he is-for I presume that Virgil-and not Payne Knight-was his Maker. If that Speech was all a lie-and the son of Anchises, not a gallant and pious. Prince, but a hypocrite and a coward-shut the Book or burn it.

TALBOYS. Much gossip--of which any honest old woman, had she uttered the half of it, would have been ashamed before she had finished her tea-has been scribbled by divers male pens--stupid or spritely-on that magnificent Recital. Eneas, it has been said, by his own account, skulked during the Town Sack-and funked during the Sea Storm. And how, it has been asked, came he to lose Creusa? Pious indeed! A truly pious man, say they, does not speak of his piety--he takes care of his household gods without talking about Lares and Penates. Many critics-some not without name-have

been such--unrepentant-old women. Come we to Dido.

NORTH. Be cautious-for I fear I have been in fault myself toward Æneas for his part in that transaction.

TALBOYS. I take the account of it from Virgil. Indeed I do not know of any scandalous chronicle of Carthage or Tyre. A Trojan Prince and a Tyrian Queen-say at once a Man and a Woman-on sudden temptation and unforeseen opportunitySIN-and they continue to sin. As pious men as Æneas—and as kingly and heroic too, have so sinned far worse than that-yet have not been excommunicated from the fellowship of saints, kings, or heroes.

SEWARD. To say that Eneas "seduces Dido," in the sense that Payne Knight uses the word, is a calumnious vulgarism.

TALBOYS. And shows a sulky resolution to shut his eyes and keep them shut.

SEWARD. Had he said that in the Schools at Oxford, he would have been plucked at his Little-go. But I forget-there was no plucking in those days-and indeed I rather think he was not an University Man.

NORTH. Nevertheless he was a Scholar. SEWARD. Not nevertheless, sir-notwithstanding, sir.

NORTH. I sit corrected.

SEWARD. Neither did Infelix Elissa seduce him-desperately in love as she was 'twas not the storm of her own will that drove her into that fatal cave.

TALBOYS. Against Venus and Juno combined, alas! for poor Dido at last!

SEWARD. Eneas was in her eyes what Othello was in Desdemona's. No Desdemona she-no "gentle lady"-nor was Virgil a Shakspeare. Yet those remonstrances— and that raving—and that suicide!

TALBOYS. Ay, Dan Virgil feared not to put the condemnation of his Hero into those lips of fire-to let her winged curses pursue the Pious Perfidious as he puts to sea. But what is truth-passion-nature from the reproachful and raving-the tender and the truculent-the repentant and the revengeful -the true and the false Dido-for she had forgot and she remembers Sychæus-when cut up into bits of bad law, and framed into an Indictment through which the Junior Jehu at the Scottish Bar might drive a

Coach and Six!

SEWARD. But he forsook her! He didand in obedience to the will of heaven. Throughout the whole of his Tale of Troy, at that fatal banquet, he tells her whither, and to what fated region, the fleet is bound

he is not sailing under sealed orders— Dido hears the Hero's destiny from the lips of Moestissimus Hector, from the lips of Creusa's Shade. But Dido is deaf to all those solemn enunciations-none so deaf as those who will not hear; the Likeness of Ascanius lying by her on her Royal Couch fired her vital blood-and she already is so insane as to dream of lying ere long on that God-like breast. He had forgot-and he remembers his duty-yes-his duty; according to the Creed of his country-of the whole heathen world-in deserting Dido, he obeyed the Gods.

TALBOYS. He sneaked away! says Knight. Go he must-would it have been more heroic to set fire to the Town, and embark in the General Illumination?

SEWARD. Would Payne Knight have seriously advised Virgil to marry Æneas, in good earnest, to Dido, and make him King of Carthage?

BULLER. Would they have been a happy couple?

SEWARD. Does not our sympathy go with Eneas to the Shades? Is he unworthy to look on the Campos Lugentes? On the Elysian fields? To be shown by Anchises the Shades of the predestined Heroes of unexisting Rome?

TALBOYS. Do we because of Didodespise him when first he kens, on a calm bright morning, that great Grove on the Latian shore near the mouth of the Tiber?

"Eneas, primique duces, et pulcher Iulus, Corpora sub ramis deponunt arboris altæ, Instituuntque dapes."

SEWARD. But he was a robber-a pirate -an invader—an usurper-so say the Payne Knights. Virgil sanctifies the Landing with the spirit of peace-and a hundred olivecrowned Envoys are sent to Laurentum with such peace-offerings as had never been laid at the feet of an Ausonian King.

TALBOYS. Nothing can exceed in simple. grandeur the advent of Eneas-the reception of the Envoys by old Latinus. The right of the Prince to the region he has reached is established by grant human and divine. Surely a father, who is a king, may dispose of his daughter in marriage-and here he must; he knew, from omen and oracle, the Hour and the Man. Lavinia belonged to Eneas-not to Turnus-though we must not severely blame the fiery Rutulian because he would not give her Amata, in and out of her wits, was on his

up.

side; but their betrothment-if betrothed they were-was unhallowed-and might not blind in face of Fate.

BULLER. Turnus was in the wrong from beginning to end. Virgil, however, has made him a hero-and idiots have said that he eclipses Æneas-the same idiots, who, at the same time, have told us that Virgil could not paint a hero at all.

TALBOYS. That his genius has no martial fervor. Had the blockheads read the Rising -the Gathering-in the Seventh Æneid?

NORTH. Sir Walter himself had much of it by heart and I have seen the "repeated air" kindle the aspect, and uplift the LionPort of the greatest War-Poet that ever blew the trumpet.

SEWARD. Eneas at the Court of Evander -that fine old Grecian! There he is a Hero to be loved-and Pallas loved himand he loved Pallas and all men with hearts love Virgil for their sakes.

TALBOYS. And is he not a Hero, when relanding from sea at the mouth of his own Tiber, with his Etrurian Allies-some thousands strong? And does he not then act the Hero? Virgil was no War-Poet! Second only to Homer, I hold

SEWARD. An imitator of Homer! With fights of the Homeric age-how could he help it? But he is, in much, original on the battle-field-and is there in all the Iliad a Lausus, or a Pallas ?

BULLER. Or a Camilla?

SEWARD. Fighting is at the best a sad business-but Payne Knight is offensive on the cruelty-the ferocity of Æneas. I wish Virgil had not made him seize and sacrifice the Eight Young Men to appease the Manes of Pallas. Such sacrifice Virgil believed to be agreeable to the manners of the timeand, if usual to the most worthy, here assuredly due. In the final great battle,

"Away to heaven, respective Lenity,
And fire-eyed Fury be my conduct now."

BULLER. Knight is a ninny on the Single Combat. In all the previous circumstances regarding it, Turnus behaved ill-now that he must fight, he fights well: 'tis as fair a fight as ever was fought in the field of old Epic Poetry; tutelary interposition alternates in favor of either Prince; the bare notion of either outliving defeat never entered any mind but Payne Knight's, nor did any other fingers ever fumble such a charge against the hero of an Epic as "Stabbing while begging for quarter"-but a moment

[blocks in formation]

NORTH. Not more than an hour? BULLER. Then, if you please, my Lord, to-morrow.

NORTH. You must all three be somewhat fatigued by the exercise of so much critical acumen. So do you, Talboys and Seward, unbend the bow at another game of Chess; and you, Buller, reanimate the jaded Moral Sentiments by a sharp letter to Marmaduke, insinuating that if he don't return to the Tents within a week, or at least write to say that he and Hal, Volusene and Woodburn, are not going to return at all, but to join the Rajah of Sarawak, the Grand Lama, or Prester John which I fear is but too probable from the general tone and tenor of their life and conversation for some days before their Secession from the Established Camp-there will be a general breaking of Mothers' hearts, and in his own particular case, a cutting off with a shilling, or disinheriting of the heir apparent of one of the finest Estates in Cornwall. But I forgetthese Entails will be the ruin of England. What! Billy, is that you?

BILLY. Measter, here's a Fish and a Ferocious.

TALBOYS. Ha! what Whappers! BULLER. More like Fish before the Flood than after it.

SEWARD. After it indeed! During it. What is Billy saying, Mr. North? That Coomerlan' dialect's Hottentot to my Devonshire ears.

NORTH. They have been spoiled by the Doric delicacies of the "Exmoor Courtship." He tells me that Archy M'Callum, the Cornwall Clipper, and himself, each in a cow-hide, having ventured down to the River Mouth to look after and bale Gutta Percha, foregathered with an involuntary invasion of divers gigantic Fishes, who had made bad their landing on our shores, and that after a desperate resistance they

succeeded in securing the Two Leaders-a SEWARD. Don't look so savage, sir. Salmo Salar and a Salmo Ferox-see on NORTH. I am not savage-I am serene. snout and shoulder tokens of the Oar. Set the Literature of the day aside altoThirty-and Twenty Pounders-Billy says; gether-and tell me if you think our conI should have thought they were respective-versation since dinner would not have been ly a third more. No mean Windfall. They thought dull by many not altogether unwill tell on the Spread. I retire to my educated persons, who pride themselves not Sanctum for my Siesta. a little on their intellectuality and on their full participation in the Spirit of the Age?

TALBOYS. Let me invest you, my dear Sir, with my Feathers.

BULLER. Do-do take my Tarpaulin.
SEWARD. Billy, your Cow-hide.

NORTH. I need none of your gimcracksfor I seek the Sanctum by a subterraneanbeg your pardon-a Subter-Awning Passage.

SCENE II. SCENE-Deeside. TIME-Seven P. C. NORTH-BULLER-SEWARD-TAL

BOYS.

NORTH. How little time or disposition for anything like serious Thinking, or Reading, out of people's own profession or trade, in this Railway world! The busy-bodies of these rattling times, even in their leisure hours, do not affect an interest in studies their fathers and their grandfathers, in the same rank of life, pursued, even systematically, on many an Evening sacred from the distraction that ceased with the day. TALBOYS. Not all busy-bodies, my good sir-think of

NORTH. I have thought of them—and I know their worth-their liberality and their enlightenment. In all our cities and towns -and villages-and in all orders of the people there is Mind,-Intelligence, and Knowledge; and the more's the shame in that too general appetence for mere amusement in literature, perpetually craving for a change of diet-for something new in the light way-while anything of any substance is "with sputtering noise rejected" as tough to the teeth, and hard of digestion--however sweet and nutritious; would they but taste and try.

SEWARD. I hope you don't mean to allude to Charles Dickens?

NORTH. Assuredly not. Charles Dickens is a man of original and genial genius-his popularity is a proof of the goodness of the heart of the people; and the love of him. and his writings-though not so thoughtful as it might be does honor to that strength in the English character which is indestructible by any influences, and survives in the midst of frivolity and folly, and of mental deprivations, worse than both.

TALBOYS. Our conversation since dinner DULL!! No-no-no. Many poor creatures, indeed, there are among them-even among those of them who work the Press-pigmies with pap feeding a Giant who sneezes them away when sick of them into small offices in the Customs or Excise ;—but not one of our privileged brethren of the Guild-with a true ticket to show-but would have been

delighted with such dialogue-but would be delighted with its continuation—and thankful to know that he, "a wiser and a better man, will rise to-morrow morn."

SEWARD. Do, my dear sir-resume your discoursing about those Greeks.

NORTH. I was about to say, Seward, that those shrewd and just observers, and at the same time delicate thinkers, the ancient Greeks did, as you well know, snatch from amongst the ordinary processes which nature pursues, in respect of inferior animal life, a singularly beautiful Type or Emblem, expressively imaging to Fancy that bursting disclosure of Life from the bosom of Death, which is implied in the extrication of the soul from its corporeal prison, when this astonishing change is highly, ardently, and joyfully contemplated. Those old festal religionists-who carried into the solemnities of their worship the buoyant gladsomeness of their own sprightly and fervid secular life, and contrived to invest even the artful splendor and passionate human interest of their dramatic representations with the name and character of a sacred ceremony-found for that soaring and refulgent escape of a spirit from the dungeon and chains of the flesh, into its native celestial day, a fine and touching similitude in the liberation of a beautiful Insect, the gorgeously-winged aërial Butterfly, from the living tomb in which nature has, during a season, cased and urned its torpid and death-like repose.

SEWARD. Nor, my dear sir, was this lifeconscious penetration or intuition of a keen and kindling intelligence into the dreadful, the desolate, the cloud-covered Future, the casual thought of adventuring Genius, transmitted in some happier verse only, or in some gracious and visible poesy of a fine

« AnteriorContinuar »