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Updated: May 16, 2025
Des Esseintes would gladly have accepted the tedious nonsense which those marionettes exchange with each other off-stage; or even the poet's impudent borrowings from Homer, Theocritus, Ennius and Lucretius; the plain theft, revealed to us by Macrobius, of the second song of the Aeneid, copied almost word for word from one of Pisander's poems; in fine, all the unutterable emptiness of this heap of verses.
The action of the Aeneid is of this nature: a grand series of destined events worked out through human agency to fulfil the plan of the ruler of all things in heaven and earth.
Of his estate, which was very considerable by the liberality of his friends, he left the greater part to Valerius Proculus and his brother, a fourth to Augustus, a twelfth to Mecaenas, besides legacies to L. Varius and Plotius Tucca, who, in consequence of his own request, and the command of Augustus, revised and corrected the Aeneid after his death.
Yet the positive excellences of the Aeneid are so numerous and so splendid that the claim of its author to be the Roman Homer is not unreasonable, if it be made clear that the two poems are fundamentally disparate, and that no more is meant than that the one poet is as eminent in his own form and method as the other in his.
Vergil apparently never published the Ciris, for he re-used its lines, indeed whole blocks of its lines with a freedom that cannot be paralleled. The much discussed line of the fourth Eclogue: Cara deum suboles, magnum Jovis incrementum, and Aeneid II. 405: Ad caelum tendens ardentia lumina frustra, and a score of others.
Among his translations was Virgil's Aeneid, which long before, you remember, Surrey had begun in blank verse. But blank verse was not what the age in which Dryden lived desired, and he knew it. So he wrote in rimed couplets. Long before this he had turned Milton's Paradise Lost into rimed couplets, making it into an opera, which he called The State of Innocence.
The poets of the Renaissance were not afraid of big things; every one of them had in his mind as the goal of poetic endeavour the idea of the heroic poem, aimed at doing for his own country what Vergil had intended to do for Rome in the Aeneid, to celebrate it its origin, its prowess, its greatness, and the causes of it, in epic verse.
"Formerly, during the period term'd classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was govern'd by recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect, the Aeneid, the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted.
Diffugimus visu exsangues, illi agmine certo Laocoonta petunt . . . Aeneid, ii. 212-213. Here the force is presented to us as terrible also; and contemplative sublimity passes into the pathetic. We see that force enter really into strife with man's impotence. Whether it concerns Laocoon or ourselves is only a question of degree.
Of Virgil's works the Georgics is unquestionably the most artistic. Grasp of the subject, clearness of arrangement, evenness of style, are all at their highest excellence; the incongruities that criticism detects in the Eclogues, and the unrealities that often mar the Aeneid, are almost wholly absent.
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