Page:Virgil (Collins).djvu/193

all honest English eyes. A woman and a queen receives the shipwrecked wanderer with a more than Oriental hospitality; loves him, "not wisely but too well"—and he deserts her. And then Mercury is made to remark, as a reason for Æneas getting away as quickly as possible, that "varium et mutabile semper fœmina!"—that the poor lady's mood was changeable, forsooth! The desertion is in obedience to the will of the gods, no doubt. That explanation satisfied the critics of Augustus's day, and he was to them, as Virgil calls him, the "pious" Æneas. To the modern reader, such an authorisation only makes the treachery more disgusting. The morality of English romance, ancient or modern, is by no means immaculate. Tristram and Iseult, still more Lancelot and Guinevere, are of very frail clay. The Sir Galahads ride alone; then, now, and always, in fiction as in fact. But a hero who could be false to a woman, and who was to find in that falsehood the turning-point to fame and success,—he might befit the loose tale with which the rybauder raised a laugh round the camp-fire, but he was the subject of no lay to which noble knight or dame would listen. The passion might be only pars amours but it must be loyal. To keep such faith, once pledged, the hero might break all other laws, divine or human; but keep it he must. "Loyaulté passe tout, et faulsseté honnet tout." The principle is by no means the highest, but it is incomparably higher than Virgil's. And this makes Lancelot, in spite of his great crime, a hero in one sense, even to the purest mind, while the calculating piety of Æneas is revolting.