Tydeus and Hippomedon with some difficulty hold Capaneus, telling him that he has conquered, and that it is graceful to spare a vanquished foe who happens to be an ally; but he thrusts aside the prize, and complains that he is not allowed to beat the minion to a mummy, and send him back thus to his patron. The Spartans welcome their champion, and indulge in a distant laugh at Capaneus' blustering; and so the scene is ended. We feel that this summary has done but little justice to the real points of the narrative, which is at once far more ingenious, and for that reason possibly more tedious, than our plain prose can make it. Almost every line contains some terse, pointed expression; not a few of them are distinguished by graphic and picturesque touches, which we have been compelled to omit. Yet we cannot doubt what the verdict will be, if we now call upon our readers to decide between Statius and Virgil. The narrative in the Eneid reflects the simple majesty of the veteran Entellus, rising modestly, only gradually warming into passion, and finally retiring from the victorious field with a tribute to his patron, such as we can fancy Virgil paying to Homer. In Statius all is noise, glare, and confusion, whether we attempt to sympathize with the baffled giant whom failure is turning into a fiend, or to join in the laugh with which his threats are received by the backers of his young opponent. Yet it is not the absence of art which makes Virgil what he is. Every line in him will bear examination; and every line will be seen upon examination to have been made conducive to the purpose of the entire narrative. Take for instance the figure of Dares; he is drawn with just sufficient definiteness to make him seem as a foil to Entellus; beyond that we are not intended to think of him either with sympathy or with aversion. He is dragged away from the scene as any other beaten combatant might be, his plight being represented in words translated from the description of the Homeric Euryalus. By a single word we are made to feel that his backers are beaten as well as their champion; it is only after having been called, "vocati,” that they come and receive the prize for him; over everything else a veil is drawn, and we are not distracted by traits designed to individualize him or them. "Semper ad eventum festinat" might be said of Virgil as truly as of Homer: but his haste is not hurry; he sees the goal before him, and can wait till he reaches it; he does not require to be always reassuring himself by some small piece of immediate success, like the hunters after applause complained of by Sir Walter Scott, who, not content with running swiftly down the stream, must needs taste the froth from every stroke of the oar. He can be sum mary when he pleases; no writer more effectively so; but he is not for ever calling our attention to the fact by those short sharp jerks which make us feel that the poet after all would have found his best employment in composing epigrammatic arguments for the several books of his own work, and remind us that in another generation or two the art of narrative composition at Rome will culminate in such productions as Ausonius' Perioche of the Iliad. But perhaps we shall give a better view of Statius, both in his weakness and in his strength, if we task the patience of our readers by quoting a passage in extenso. It is when Hypsipyle, after having been accosted by Adrastus, disclaims, like Nausicaa in the Odyssey and Venus in the Eneid, the divine character ascribed to her by her querist, and then guides him to the fountain, leaving the infant on the grass :— "Dixit, et orantis media inter anhelitus ardens 'Diva quidem vobis, et si cælestis origo est, : Pignoris at nostris an quis sinus, uberaque ulla, At puer in gremio vernæ telluris, et alto Hypsipyle and her Nursling. 165 At first we seem to meet with nothing but misplaced ingenuity. The thought of calling attention to the parched tongues and panting breath of Adrastus and his comrades might have occurred to Ovid, but would not have occurred to Virgil, especially as the speech which Adrastus has just delivered by no means reminds us of the gasping utterance of physical distress, being, like all Statius' speeches, epigrammatic and rhetorical. Nor is Hypsipyle's reply expressed in the terms which would be most appropriate to the comprehension of thirsty men. To talk to persons in such a condition about the orphaned nurturer of an intrusted pledge, who knows not whether her own children have any breasts to suck, is to stipulate that before receiving relief they shall guess an enigma. Even when she comes to speak of water she cannot refrain from astronomical and mythological details, Cancer and the mane of the Icarian star. After this the description becomes only pleasing and graceful; we are charmed with the picture of the nurse laying down the child and soothing its crying, and we do not resent the comparison to Cybele and the infant Jupiter, though we feel it to be somewhat ambitious. Virgil might have said this, or something like this, just as before taking Cupid to Dido's palace he gives us a momentary glimpse of Ascanius in Idalia. But with the end of the paragraph Virgil would have stopped. Statius, on the contrary, feels that his chance of displaying his talent has come, and he will not forego it. Thus we have the picture, an exceedingly pretty one, of the babe propelling itself along the grass face foremost, crying for its nurse, and then laughing and talking broken words, wondering at the forest noises, pulling to pieces what falls in its way, and taking in the breath of heaven through its parted lips. It is beauty out of place, but it is beauty still. The simile, or congeries of similes, that follows, is more ques-tionable. After having heard of the infant Jupiter among the Curetes, we do not care to hear of the infant Mars in the snow, or the infant Mercury on the mountain-top; still less can we be said to require to have our apprehension assisted by the grotesque, if ingenious, portrait of the infant Apollo crawling along Delos, and nearly turning it over on its side. When we examine the Thebaid as a whole, we can only speak of it as a monument of misused power. It is only when we contemplate it in its parts that we see evidences of power directed towards an object, attaining to it, and resting in it. Every ingenious expression might be regarded in this way as a result gained it is bad if viewed as a means; good if viewed as an end. But to criticise a work of art in this spirit is not to criticise at all; it is, in fact, to turn the ordered hierarchy of poetical creation into anarchy and chaos. There are, however, parts which are more capable than others of being regarded apart from the whole, even though we may feel that a censure on the poet is involved in the very act of so regarding them. The description of the infant which we have just quoted is one of these. But there are some which stand so completely in a class by themselves as to deserve a few words of separate commemoration. We allude to the similes of the poem. Two or three of them we have incidentally cited or referred to already; others will be familiar to the reader of Copleston's Prælectiones Academica, where it is well remarked that their details, even when irrelevant, are often pleasing from their exceedingly natural character. As parts of the narrative they are sometimes felt to be excrescences: as pieces of independent description they are well worth studying. The poet evidently liked them himself: he is never tired of introducing them; indeed, there is scarcely a page without them. We will quote a very few of them, rendering them more or less closely into English. Here is one from a tiger:1 “Qualis ubi audito venantum murmure tigris Horruit in maculas somnosque excussit inertes, Ductor in absentem consumit prælia fratrem." "As when a tigress, on hearing the horn of the hunters, has bristled her spotted skin, and shaken off the sloth of slumber, she yearns for battle, and eases her stiff jaws, and trims her talons; soon she rushes among the companies, and carries off in her mouth a living man to feed her savage whelps: so, stirred up with wrath, the prince squanders deeds of arms on his absent brother." The Theban general is compared to a shepherd: 3 "Perspicuas sic luce fores et virgea pastor Claustra levat, dum terra recens: jubet ordine primos Ipse levat gravidas et humum tactura parentum 1 Book II. 128 foll. 2 Horruit in maculas" seems to mean no more than what we have made it mean. Addison, however (Spectator, No. 81), applying it to the patches worn in his day, says it is reported of the tigress that several spots rise in her skin when she is angry, and quotes an imitation by Cowley— "She swells with angry pride, And calls forth all her spots on every side." 3 Book VII. 393 foll. Statius successful in Similes. 167 "Thus the shepherd opens at daybreak the transparent doorwork and the wattled enclosures, while there is freshness abroad on the earth; he bids the rams lead the way; the mediate throng crowds on the ewes; with his own hand he supports those heavy with young, and lifts the udders which would else sweep the ground, and brings to the mothers their dropping lambs." Human as well as animal life is made to furnish comparisons. The newly-chosen successor of Amphiaraus reminds the poet of a young Persian monarch:1 "Sicut Achæmenius solium gentesque paternas Even as when the heir of Achæmenes succeeds to the throne and the peoples that were his father's, himself a mere boy, for whom it had been safer were his father still alive, he wavers between the flutterings of joy and fear-Can the nobles be trusted? Will the common herd rebel against the yoke? To whom must he commit the frontier of Euphrates? To whom the gates of the Caspian? He is too modest to bend his father's bow or make his father's steed feel his weight; he cannot think his hand yet strong enough for the sceptre, or his brow large enough for the tiara." Following Virgil, he draws, as we have seen, similes from mythology, but with a much less sparing hand. The joy of Edipus on emerging from his solitude is paralleled with that of Phineus when freed from his Harpy tormentors :2 Qualis post longæ Phineus jejunia pœnæ, Nil stridere domi volucres ut sensit abactas, "Even as Phineus, when his long penal fast was over, soon as he perceived the birds driven off, and no screeching at his doors, ere he wholly credited his bliss, handled gaily board and couch and winecups, unturmoiled by those fierce-flapping wings." And there is surely some grandeur, if there is some exaggeration, in the comparison of the flight of Adrastus from Thebes to the first entrance of Pluto into his infernal realm,3 a sort of anticipation of the Satan of Milton: 1 Book VIII. 286 foll. 2 Book VIII. 255 foll. 3 Book XI. 443 foll. |