DISCOVERY 



121 



his words at the point when he sees the doves. And 

 the doves themselves are surely connected with the 

 better side of the activities of Venus. They suggest 

 not the storm and stress of passion, but the calm of 

 steady and settled affection, the light and warmth of 

 home. 



My point need not be, surely, laboured further. If 

 the Golden Branch was not connected in Vergil's mind 

 with the strength of natural affection, with the ties 

 between father and son, between son and mother, 

 between friend and friend, then it was at least a most 

 happy accident that, in his story, linked such motives 

 so closely to so beautiful an image. And in great 

 poets accidents rarelj' happen. 



Without some specific declaration on the part of the 

 poet himself, such as good John Bunyan loved to 

 prefix, and infix, and superfix to every part of his 

 allegories, or such as Spenser and Milton did not always 

 disdain to add to the stately figures of their own 

 creation — without some such confession on the poet's 

 part we are, of course, bound to limit our conjectures 

 with a prudent "perhaps." Yet one thing at least 

 about Vergil is not a " perhaps," but quite certain 

 and demonstrable ; namely, that to him the central 

 interest of the world was in human affection. In this 

 lay what for Vergil was the supreme paradox of life ; 

 the supreme example which proved the need of stating 

 things by antithesis, of alwa^'s seeing two sides to 

 every human event. 



In the paper to which I have referred, evidence is 

 given at some length of Vergil's habit of double sym- 

 pathy ; of the way, for instance, in which he cannot 

 picture the bees being caught and killed by the swallows 

 without indicating in one and the same ' line his 

 sjonpathy both with the hapless bees and with the 

 hungry young swallows, whom the bees are slain to 

 feed. This is a tempting theme which I must not 

 develop further here. Every thoughtful reader of 

 Vergil will be able to recall other examples ; the 

 greatest is in the tragedy of Dido. 



There was only one thing to Vergil that really 

 mattered in this world, and that was the affection of 

 human beings, their affection first for their own human 

 kind, secondly for their fellow-creatures, and, thirdly, 

 for the power which we call Nature, who to Vergil was 

 a being not less throbbing with life and affection, not 

 less bountiful of love to men, than any human mother 

 to her child. Need I attempt to illustrate this side of 

 Vergil's personaUty ? Through all the ages it is this 

 which has endeared him to thousands of unkno\\-n 

 readers who, through the veil of mist raised by the 

 strangeness of his tongue and the distance of his times 

 from their own, have felt the central, inner glow of 

 his human affection, the throbbing pulse of that great 

 1 Georgics, iv. 17. 



heart. Think of his picture in the Georgics of the 

 farmer at home with his children hanging round his 

 kisses ; think of the delight with which he notes the 

 ways of animals small and great, but especially the 

 small ones — birds and insects and little creatures of 

 the soil ; how more than once - he bursts into an 

 enthusiastic avowal of gratitude to tlie beneficent 

 power that strews men's path with blessings. But 

 perhaps, since the Mneid is less often read as a whole, 

 we are less conscious how often the same note sounds 

 in that poem. Think of the line in the Sixth Book 

 where, among those who receive the highest honour in 

 Elysium, the snow-white garland, the last class con- 

 sists of those who, " by their good deeds, have made 

 two or three folk remember them " (quiqiie siii tnemores 

 aliquos fecere merendo). With what gentle sympathy 

 does Vergil sketch the figure of every aged man — 

 Anchises, Evander, Latinus — and of every youth — 

 Pallas and Lausus, Nisus and Euryalus ? Or when 

 Galaesus is slain at the outbreak of the fighting in 

 Book VII, failing in his efforts to pacify his country- 

 men, how many readers have noted how his flocks 

 and herds at home and all the people of his farm are 

 brought into the picture to represent the mourning 

 for their master ? Or think of the feeling shown for 

 Silvia's pet stag, whose accidental wounding by 

 Ascanius is the signal for the outbreak of war. This 

 incident is actually censured by a wise modern critic 

 as merely pretty and Alexandrine, quite beneath the 

 dignity of the Epic ! 



But I need not prolong the enumeration. Let me 

 ask the reader only to realise the tragic paradox which 

 Vergil found beneath this lovingkindness of the world : 

 the fact that our human affection is the source both of 

 the only joj's worth counting joj's, and of the only 

 sorrows worth counting sorrows. Every one of the 

 troubles of the Mneid, every one of its tragedies, 

 springs ultimately from this. The tragedy of Dido, 

 first from the misguided affections ' of Juno and Venus, 

 and then from her own ; the tragedy of Juturna from 

 her love for her brother ; the war in Latium from 

 Silvia's affection for her stag and her followers' affec- 

 tion for Silvia ; the second outbreak from Turnus' love 

 for Lavinia and his follo\\-ers' devotion to Turnus ; 

 the tragedies of Brutus and Torquatus, briefly men- 

 tioned in the vision of Anchises ; the traged}- of Mar- 

 cellus, pictured at the end of the same revelation — 

 the essence of all these lies in the affection of some men 

 or women, ill guided or ill governed, or crossed by 

 physical calamity. With the solitary exception of 

 Drances (who plays but a small part), there is no such 



= Georgics, ii. 323 ff. ; 433, 516. 



^ These were of a political, nationalist type, but affections 

 none the less ; see a fuller discussion of this in my New Studies 

 of a Great Inheritance, p. 161. 



