Aeneas; and, as regards the first, though in his undoubtedly genuine works there is no passage so faulty, there is also no passage of quite the same species (for his narrative poems do not aim at epic grandeur), and there are many passages where bombast of the same kind, though not of the same degree, occurs.
Let the reader ask himself, for instance, how the following lines would strike him if he came on them for the first time out of their context:
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds! Roast me in sulphur!
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
Are Pyrrhus’s ‘total gules’ any worse than Duncan’s ‘silver skin laced with his golden blood,’ or so bad as the chamberlains’ daggers ‘unmannerly breech’d with gore’?[1] If ‘to bathe in reeking wounds,’ and ‘spongy officers,’ and even ‘alarum’d by his sentinel the wolf, Whose howl’s his watch,’ and other such phrases in Macbeth, had occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly have been told that they were meant for burlesque. I open Troilus and Cressida (because, like the speech of Aeneas, it has to do with the story of Troy), and I read, in a perfectly serious context (IV. v. 6 f.):
Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe:
Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek
Outswell the colic of puff’d Aquilon:
Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood;
Thou blow’st for Hector.
‘Splendid!’ one cries. Yes, but if you are told it is also bombastic, can you deny it? I read again (V. v. 7):
Hath Doreus prisoner,
And stands colossus-wise, waving his beam,
Upon the pashed corses of the kings.
Or, to turn to earlier but still undoubted works, Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet,
With worms that are thy chamber-maids;
- ↑ The extravagance of these phrases is doubtless intentional (for Macbeth in using them is trying to act a part), but the absurdity of the second can hardly be so.
