Note 27 — Chapter IV · DIDO.
Reading edition
Delille’s fine translation of this passage is so little known to English readers that it may well find room in a note:—
“Non—tu n’es point le fils de la mère d’Amour; Au sang de Dardanus tu ne dois point le jour; N’impute point aux dieux la naissance d’un traitre— Non, du sang d’héros un monstre n’a pu naître; Non.—Le Caucase affreux, t’engendrant en fureur, De ses plus durs rochers fit ton barbare cœur, Et du tigre inhumain la compagne sauvage, Cruel! avec son lait t’a fait sucer sa rage. Car enfin qui m’arrête? Après ses durs refus, Après tant de mépris, qu’attendrais-je de plus? S’est-il laissé flechir à mes cris douloureux? A-t-il au moins daigné tourner vers moi les yeux Prosternée a ses pieds, plaintive, suppliante, N’a-t-il pas d’un front calme ecouté son amante? . . . . . . . . . . Sans secours, sans asile, errant de mers en mers, Par les flots en courroux jeté dans nos deserts, Je l’ai reçu, l’ingrat! des fureurs de l’orage J’ai sauvé ses sujets, ses vaisseaux de naufrage, Je lui donne mon cœur, mon empire, ma main: O fureur, et voilà que ce monstre inhumain Ose imputer aux dieux son horrible parjure, Me parle et d’Apollon, et d’oracle, et d’augure! Pour presser son depart, l’ambassadeur des dieux Est descendu vers lui de la voûte des cieux: Dignes soins, en effet, de ces maîtres du monde! En effet, sa grandeur trouble leur paix profonde! —C’en est assez; va, pars; je ne te retiens pas; Va chercher loin de moi je ne sais quels états: S’il est encore un dieu redoubtable aux ingrats, J’espère que bientôt, pour prix d’un si grand crime, Brisé contre un écueil, plongé dans un abîme, Tu paîras mes malheurs, perfide! et de Didon Ta voix, ta voix plaintive invoquera le nom.”
[28] One of the Roman sea-deities.
[29] Such explanations of an unfavourable result are not entirely unknown in the annals of modern boat-races. Reasons of a very apocryphal kind, if not so boldly mythological, have been assigned by modern captains of crews for their having been beaten. When an unsuccessful oarsman recounts his deeds to a sympathetic audience, and “tells how fields were” not won, he is apt to complain that, in some form or other, the river-gods were unjust. The state of the tide, or an intruding barge, or an imprudent supper on the part of “No. 7,” takes the place of Panope and Portunus.
[30] “Superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est.”
[31] Virgil himself has no word of reproach for these weaker spirits, who thus preferred the rest of Sicily to the far-off hopes of Hesperia. But his impassioned pupil Dante is less merciful: he classes them in his “Purgatory” with the murmuring Israelites:—
“First they died, to whom the sea Opened, or ever Jordan saw his heirs; And they who with Æneas to the end Endured not suffering, for their portion chose Life without glory.” —Purg. xviii. (Cary.)
[32] Keble.
[33] The rickety state of Charon’s boat was always a fertile source of wit to the freethinkers among the classical satirists. Lucian, in one of his very amusing dialogues, makes Charon complain of his passengers bringing luggage with them: “My boat is something rotten, look you, and lets in a good deal of water at the seams; if you come on board with all that luggage you may repent it—especially those of you who can’t swim.”—(Dial. Mort., x.) So in another dialogue Menippus thinks it hard to be asked to pay for his passage over, when “he helped to bale the boat all the way.” It maybe observed that the boat is said to be made of hide, stretched on a wooden frame, like the “coracles” of the Britons, still in use on some of the Welsh rivers. There may be some connection with an ancient tradition which would identify the “white rock” of which Homer speaks (Od., xxiv. 11) as marking the entrance to the regions of the dead with the cliffs of our own island—“Albion.” A curious old legend of the coast of France gives some colour to the interpretation. There was a tribe of fishermen who were exempted from payment of tribute, on the ground that they ferried over into Britain the souls of the departed. At nightfall, when they were asleep (so the legend ran), they would be awakened by a loud knocking at their doors, and voices calling them, and feel a strange compulsion to go down to the seashore. There they found boats, not their own, ready launched, and to all appearance empty. “When they stepped on board and began to ply their oars they found the boats move as though they were heavily laden, sinking within a finger’s breadth of the water’s edge; but they saw no man. Within an hour, as it seemed, they reached the opposite coast—a voyage which in their own boats they hardly made in a whole day and night. When they touched the shore of Britain still they saw no shape, but they heard voices welcoming their ghostly passengers, and calling each of the dead by name and rank. Then having got rid, as it seemed, of their invisible freight, they put off again for home, feeling their boats so sensibly lightened that hardly more than the keel touched the water.—See Gesner’s Notes on Claudian, iii. 123; Procopius, De Bell. Goth., iv. 20.
[34] We have here the foundation of the fanciful doctrine of a Limbo Infantum, held by some doctors of the Romish Church—a kind of vestibule to the greater Purgatory, in which were placed the souls of such children as died before they were old enough to be admitted to the sacraments.
[35]
“Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes reappears; Round the dear shade she would have clung—’tis vain, The hours are past—too brief, had they been years; And him no mortal effort can detain: Swift, toward the realms that know not earthly day, He through the portal takes his silent way, And on the palace-floor a lifeless corse she lay. “By no weak pity might the gods be moved; She who thus perished, not without the crime Of lovers that in Reason’s spite have loved, Was doomed to wear out her appointed time, Apart from happy ghosts that gather flowers Of blissful quiet ’mid unfading bowers.” —Wordsworth’s ‘Laodamia.’
[36] But none of the recognised translations seem to come so near the spirit of the original as Lord Macaulay’s paraphrase—for of course it is only a paraphrase—in his lay of “The Prophecy of Capys:”—
“Leave to the sons of Carthage The rudder and the oar; Leave to the Greek his marble nymphs And scrolls of wordy lore: Thine, Roman, is the pilum; Roman, the sword is thine; The even trench, the bristling mound, The legion’s ordered line.”
[37] Virgil is said to have received from her what would amount, in our money, to above £2000—“a round sum,” remarks Dryden, with something like professional envy, “for twenty-seven verses.”
[38] See p. 66.
[39] Andrew Marvell most likely borrowed his thought from the Roman poet in his graceful lines, “The Nymph’s Complaint:”—
“The wanton troopers, riding by, Have shot my fawn, and it will die. Ungentle men! they cannot thrive Who killed thee. Thou ne’er didst alive Them any harm, alas! nor could Thy death yet do them any good.”
[40] No doubt the Camilla of the Roman poet is a reminiscence of the Amazon Penthesilea in Homer, just as the fairy footstep, that left no trace on sea or land, is borrowed from those wondrous mares of Ericthonius to whom Homer assigns the same performance. But the copy far surpasses the original in grace and beauty. Our English poets have made free use of this fancy of the footsteps of beauty: none more sweetly than Jonson in his ‘Sad Shepherd,’ where Æglamour laments his lost Earinè:—
“Here she was wont to go, and here, and here— Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow; The world may find the spring by following her, For other print her airy steps ne’er left. Her treading would not bend a blade of grass, Or shake the downy blow-bell from his stalk: But like the south-west wind she shot along, And where she went the flowers took thickest root, As she had sowed them with her odorous foot.” —The ‘Sad Shepherd,’ Act I. sc. 1.
[41] The thunderbolt is usually represented on ancient coins and medallions with twelve rays.
[42] Dido has always been a favourite heroine with Frenchmen, and has been worked up into three or four tragedies. One writer, partly adopting M. Segrais’s notion of how things ought to have been—that is to say, how a Frenchman would have behaved himself when such a parting was inevitable—has made Æneas take at least a civil farewell of the injured queen:—
“Helas! si de mon sort j’avais ici mon choix, Bornant à vous aimer le bonheur de ma vie, Je tiendrais de vos mains un sceptre, une patrie: Les dieux m’ont envie le seul de leurs bienfaits, Qui pourait réparer tous les maux qu’ils m’ont faits.”
And Dido, mollified by this declaration, far from cursing the fugitive lover in her last moments, assures him of her unchangeable affection, rather apologising for having so inconveniently fallen in his way, and delayed him so improperly from Lavinia and his kingdom:—
“Et toi, d’ont j’ai troublée la haute destinée, Toi, qui ne m’entends plus—adieux, mon cher Ænée! Ne crains point ma colere—elle expire avec moi, Et mes derniers soupirs sont encore pour toi!”{*}
{*} Le Franc de Pompignan, “Didon.”
[43] Prælect., ii. 724.
[44] P. 124.