Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 3 of 3

The false position of Virgil.

The failure in the Æneas of Virgil cannot be compared with the case of any modern romance, such as the Waverley or Old Mortality of Scott, where the hero may be an insipid person. All the greater modern inventors have been compelled to lay their foundations in the palpable breadth of some historic event: it was the prouder distinction of the Homeric epic, that it had a living centre; it hung upon a man; there was enough of vital power in Homer for this end: his Achilles and his Ulysses were each an Atlas, that sustained the world in which they also moved. Virgil made his poem an Æneid, instead of following the example of the Cyclic poets; he thus pledged himself to his readers, that Æneas should be its centre, its pole, its inward light and life. But he did not keep his word: he had drawn the bow of Homer without Homer’s force. He marks perhaps the final transition from the old epic of the first class to the new. After him we have the epics of fact, the Pharsalia, the Thebaid, and so forth. But Æneas stands before us with the pretensions of Achilles and Ulysses; and the failure is great in proportion to the gigantic scale of the attempt. When, in the Italian romance, the character of the ideal man, as shown in Orlando, again became the basis of new epic poems, we again find in the protagonist great weakness indeed, as compared with Achilles and Ulysses; but strength and success as compared with the Æneas of Virgil.

Upon the whole we are thrown back on the supposition that this crying vice of the Æneid, the feebleness and untruth of the character of Æneas, was due to the false position of Virgil, who was obliged to discharge his functions as a poet in subjection to his dominant obligations and liabilities as a courtly parasite of Augustus. As the entire poem, so the character of its hero, was, before all other things, an instrument for glorifying the Emperor of Rome. It at once followed, that in all respects must that character be such as to avoid suggesting a comparison disadvantageous to the person whose dignity, for political ends, had already been elevated even into the unseen world; nay, whose forestalled divinity was to be kept in a relation of absolute and broad superiority to the image of his human ancestor. Æneas is himself addressed in the action of the Æneid, as

Dîs genite, et geniture deos.

In order to arrive at the disastrous effects of this mental servitude, take, first, the measure of the cold and unheroic character of Augustus; then estimate the degree of relative superiority, which it was essential to Virgil’s position that he should preserve for him throughout; and thus we may come to some practical conception of the straitness of the space within which Virgil had to develop his Æneas, or, in other words, to run his match against Homer. All the faults, and all the faultiness, of his poem may be really owing, in a degree none can say how great, to this original falseness of position.

On account of the personal principle on which the ancient epic was constructed, failure in the character of the hero must almost of necessity have entailed failure in the poem. Most of all would this follow in a case where, as in the Æneid, the hero is never out of view, and where the action does not, as in the Iliad, travel away from his person, in order then to enhance the splendour and effectiveness of his reappearance. Thus the falseness of Virgil’s position was not confined to an individual character, but extended to his entire work. Living, too, in an age less natural and more critical than that of Homer, he provided against criticism, so far as regarded its merely technical functions, more, and he studied nature less. He had to construct his epic for a court, and a corrupt court, not for mankind at large; it followed, that he could not take his stand upon those deep and broad foundations in human nature itself, which gave Homer a position of universal command. Hence as a general rule he does not sing from the heart, nor to the heart. His touches of genuine nature are rare. Such of them as occur have been carefully noted and applauded, for he is always studious to set them off by choice and melodious diction. For my own part, I find scarcely any among them so true as the simile of the mother labouring with her maidens at night, which he owes to Homer⁸⁸⁹:

 
Castum ut servare cubile
Conjugis, et possit parvos educere natos⁸⁹⁰.
 

As to religion, liberty, and nationality.

With rare exceptions, the reader of Virgil finds himself utterly at a loss to see at any point the soul of the poet reflected in his work. We cannot tell, amidst the splendid phantasmagoria, where is his heart, where lie his sympathies. In Homer a genial spirit, breathed from the Poet himself, is translucent through the whole; in the Æneid we look in vain almost for a single ray of it. Again, Virgil lived at a time when the prevailing religion had lost whatever elements of real influence that of Homer’s era either possessed in its own right, or inherited from pristine tradition. It was undermined at once by philosophy and by licentiousness; and it subsisted only as a machinery, a machinery, too, already terribly discredited, for civil ends. Thus he lost one great element of truth and nature, as well as of sublimity and pathos. The extinction of liberty utterly deprived him of another. Homer saw before him both a religion and a polity young, fresh, and vigorous; for Virgil both were practically dead: and whatever this world has of true greatness is so closely dependent upon them, that it was not his fault if his poem felt and bears cogent witness to the loss. Even the sphere of personal morality was not open to him; for what principle of truth or righteousness could he worthily have glorified, without passing severe condemnation on some capital act of the man, whom it was his chief obligation to exalt?

And once more. Homer sang to his own people of the glorious deeds of their sires, to whom they were united by fond recollection, and by near historic and local ties. This was at once a stimulus and a check; it cheered his labour, and at the same time it absolutely required him to study moral harmony and consistency. Virgil sang to Romans of the deeds of those who were not Romans, and whom only a most hollow fiction connected with his hearers, through the dim vista of a thousand years, and under circumstances which made the pretence to historical continuity little better than ridiculous. Or rather, he sang thus, not to Romans, but to their Emperor; he had to bear in mind, not the great fountains of emotion in the human heart, but his town-house on the Esquiline, and his country-house on the road from Naples to Pozzuoli. In dealing with Greeks, with Trojans, with Carthaginians, he again lost Homer’s double advantage: he had nothing to give a healthy stimulus to his imagination, and nothing to bring him or to keep him to the standard of truth and nature. And here, perhaps, we hit upon some clue to the superior character and attractions of Turnus. The Poet was now for once upon true national ground: he was an Italian minstrel, singing to Italians, whether truly or mythically is of less consequence, about an Italian hero. Thus he had something like the proper materials to work with; and the result is one worthy of his noble powers, though it has the strange consequence of setting all the best sympathies of his readers, and of implying that his own were already set, in direct opposition to the ostensible purpose of his poem.

It appears, however, as if this great and splendid Poet, being thrown out of his true bearings in regard to all the deeper sources of interest on which an epic writer must depend, such as religion, patriotism, and liberty, became consequently reckless, alike in major and in minor matters, as to all the inner harmonies of his work, and contented himself with the most unwearied and fastidious labours in its outward elaboration, where he could give scope to his extraordinary powers of versification and of diction without fear of stumbling upon anything unfit for the artificial atmosphere of the Roman court. The consequence is, that a vein of untruthfulness runs throughout the whole Æneid, as strong and as remarkable as is the genuineness of thought and feeling in the Homeric poems. Homer walks in the open day, Virgil by lamplight. Homer gives us figures that breathe and move, Virgil usually treats us to waxwork. Homer has the full force and play of the drama, Virgil is essentially operatic. From Virgil back to Homer is a greater distance, than from Homer back to life.

Homer is misapprehended through Virgil.

But more. Virgil is at once the copyist of Homer, and, for the generality of educated men, his interpreter⁸⁹¹. In all modern Europe taken together, Virgil has had ten who read him, and ten who remember him, for one that Homer could show. Taking this in conjunction with the great extent of the ground they occupy in common, we may find reason to think that the traditional and public idea of Homer’s works, throughout the entire sphere of the Western civilization, has been formed, to a much greater degree than could at first be supposed, by the Virgilian copies from him. This is only to say, in other words, that it has been sadly impaired, not to say seriously falsified; for there is scarcely a point of vital moment, in which Virgil follows Homer faithfully, or represents him either fairly or completely. Now this traditional idea is not only the stock idea that governs the indifferent public, but it is likewise the idea with which the individual student starts, and which governs him until he has reached such a point in his progress as to discover the necessity, and be conscious moreover of the strength, to throw it off. This, however, is a point that, from the nature of human life and its pursuits, very few students indeed can reach at all. Elsewhere we shall see, with what evil and untrue effect Virgil has handled some of the Homeric characters. It is the same in every minor trait; and it seems strange that so great a Poet should not have had enough of reverence for another Poet, greater still and enshrined in almost the worship of all ages, to have restrained him from such constant and wanton, as well as wilful, mutilations of the Homeric tradition. It would, however, appear that Virgil’s miscarriages are not all due to carelessness, in the common sense of it. In many instances, unless so far as they can be referred to the necessities that press upon a courtier, it would seem as if they must be ascribable to torpor in the faculties, or defect in the habit of mind, by which Homer should have been appreciated. Nay, sometimes he appears to have been moved simply by metrical convenience to alter the traditions of Homer. Let us take first a minor instance to test this assertion.

Nothing can be more marked than the prominence of the Scamander as compared with the Simois in Homer. The Simois is named by him only six times, and none of the passages show it to have been a considerable stream. In the Twenty-first Book⁸⁹², Scamander invites Simois to join him in pouring forth the flood which was to bear away Achilles, but his ‘brother’ neither replies, nor takes part in the action. It would appear, indeed, from geographical considerations, which belong to the topography of the Troad, that in the summer Simois was probably dry. This entirely accords with the passage in which this river supplies ἀμβροσίη⁸⁹³, a figure, as may be presumed, of grass, for the horses of Juno. At any rate, that passage is at variance with the idea of the river as a tearing torrent. Again, Homer mentions⁸⁹⁴ that many heroes fell, he does not say in, but about, the stream: above all, he does not say they fell into its waters, but in the dust of it, or near it:

 
καὶ Σιμόεις, ὅθι πολλὰ βοάγρια καὶ τρυφάλειαι
κάππεσον ἐν κονίῃσι.
 

Again, Scamander is personified as the god Xanthus, and plays a great part in the action: Simois is not personified at all. Scamander is δῖος, διοτρεφὴς and much besides: Simois has no epithets. Simoeisius is the son of Anthemion, a person of secondary account; but Scamandrius is the name given by Hector to his boy. Simois, for all we know, may have been either a dry bed, or little better than a rivulet; but armed men are thrown into Scamander, and whirled by him to the sea. Lastly, the plain where the Greek army was reviewed is λειμὼν Σκαμάνδριος, πέδιον Σκαμάνδριον. Now a right conception of these rivers is not altogether an insignificant affair, but is material to the clearness of our ideas upon the military action of the poem. What then has Virgil done with them? He has simply reversed the Homeric representation. Xanthus is with him the unmarked river, Simois is the mighty torrent. Witness these passages:

 
Mitto ea, quæ muris bellando exhausta sub altis,
Quos Simois premat ille viros. (Æn. xi. 256.)
 

Again:

Victor apud rapidum Simoenta sub Ilio alto. (Æn. v. 261.)

And most of all, the passage which he has directly carried off from Homer, and corrupted it on his way (Æn. i. 104):

 
Ubi tot Simois correpta sub undis
Scuta virûm galeasque et fortia corpora volvit.
 

And why all this? Plainly, I apprehend, because, while Scamander was a word disqualified from entering into the Latin hexameter, Xanthus also was somewhat less convenient than Simois for the march of his resounding verse. Now this is a sample in small things of what Virgil has done in nearly all things, both small and great.

Νεκυΐα of Homer and Virgil.

There are instances in which Virgil is popularly thought to profit by the comparison with Homer, and where, notwithstanding, a full consideration may lead to a reversal of the sentence. The νεκυΐα of the Eleventh Odyssey, for example, is thought inferior to that of the Sixth Æneid. To bring them fairly together, we should perhaps put out of view the philosophical and prophetical part of the latter⁸⁹⁵; but whether we do it or not is little material in the comparison. In either way, the Inferno of Virgil is, upon the whole, a stage procession of stately and gorgeous figures; but it has no consistent or veracious relation to any idea of the future or unseen state actually operative among mankind. Yet there existed such an idea, at least in the times of which Virgil was treating, if not at the period when he lived. It was surely a subject of the deepest interest, and of the most solemn pathos. What we are as men here depends very much on our conception of what we are hereafter to be. There is nothing more touching in all the history of the race of Adam, than its blind and painful feeling after a future still invisible. There is no witness to the comparative degradation of a race or age, so sure as its having ceased to yearn towards any thing beyond the grave. Homer has shown us in the Eleventh Odyssey⁸⁹⁶, that, together with his keen sense of the present and visible, he felt the full force of this mysterious drawing towards the unseen. He is plainly as much in earnest here, as in any part of the poems. Virgil, on the other hand, succeeds in investing his hell with almost unequalled pomp, approximating at times to splendour. Homer attempts nothing of the kind; but he produces a perfect and profound impression of those regions, according to the idea in his own mind: they are shadowy, gloomy, cold, above all, and in one word, dismal. Virgil contrives to leave the reader convinced that he is a very great artist: Homer lets all such matters take care of themselves. But while Virgil creates no impression at all on the mind as to the World of Shades, no image of the timid, vague, and dim belief that was entertained respecting it, Homer has set it all before us with a truthfulness never equalled or approached. And yet Virgil abounds in details and measurements which Homer avoids. Tartarus is twice as deep as the distance from earth to sky⁸⁹⁷, and the Hydra has fifty mouths. Yet the details of the one give no impression of reality, while the utter local vagueness and dreaminess of the other is far more definite in its effect, because it is made to minister to the appropriate ideas of sadness, sympathy, and awe. As to particular passages, the appearance of Dido is full of grandeur; but her silence, the basis of it, is borrowed from that of Ajax; while in the Odyssey the striding of Achilles in silence over the meadow of asphodel, when he swells with exultation upon hearing that his son excelled in council and in war, is perhaps one of the most sublime pieces of human representation, which Homer himself ever has produced.

Ethnological dislocations.

Let us now give an instance of Virgil’s utter indifference to historic truth and consistency. It is the more remarkable, because as he was pretending to derive the Julian family from the stock of Æneas, there would apparently have been some advantage in adhering strictly to the Homeric distinctions as to races on both sides in the Trojan war. But this appears to be entirely beneath his attention. For instance, he calls the Homeric Greeks Pelasgi⁸⁹⁸. It may be said he was guided by the Italian traditions, which connected the Greek and Pelasgian names as early colonists of that country. But first, some regard should be paid to Homer in matters which concern Troy; and it is rather violent to call the Greeks Pelasgi, when the only Pelasgi named in the war by the Poet are placed on the side of their enemies. Secondly, as it was his purpose throughout to depress the Greeks, why should he thus thrust them into view as one with an Italian race? Above all, why do this in a case, where Homer had himself supplied a link between Italy and Troy? Again, Virgil calls the Greek camp Dorica castra⁸⁹⁹. But the Dorians at the period of the Trojan war were utterly insignificant, and are never once named by Homer in connection with the contest. Again, Virgil calls Diomed, and the city of Arpi founded by him, Ætolian, and makes him complain that he was not allowed to go back to Calydon⁹⁰⁰, simply because his father Tydeus, as a son of Œneus, had been of Ætolian extraction; though he commanded the Argives, and had nothing whatever to do with the Ætolians of Homer. Again, following a late and purposeless tradition, he calls Ulysses Æolides⁹⁰¹, though Homer has given the descent of Ulysses⁹⁰² without in any manner attaching it to the line of the Æolids, a collection of families whose descent, on account probably of their historical importance, he is more than ordinarily careful to mark.

With cases of simple inaccuracy, to which I do not seek to attach undue weight, we may connect the manner in which he confounds, on the other side, the distinctions of the Trojan races, so accurately marked by Homer. In the Twentieth Iliad, the genealogy of the reigning families of Troy and of Dardania is given with great precision. The distinction between Trojans and Dardanians is preserved through the Iliad, though the Trojan name is sometimes, but rarely, used to include the whole indigenous army, and sometimes it even signifies the entire force, including the allies, which opposed the Greek army. We might here, however, suppose that it would have been in the interest of Virgil’s aim to maintain, or even sharpen, the distinction between the Dardanian line, which was at most but indirectly worsted by the Greeks, and the line of Ilus, which fatally both sinned and suffered in the conflict of the Troica. But, on the contrary, he is still less discriminating in the use of names here, than he has been for the Greeks. The companions of Æneas are sometimes Teucri, Trojani, or Trojugenæ – sometimes Æneadæ, sometimes Dardanidæ. In the first of these names he entirely contravenes Homer, who produces a Teucer eminent among the Greeks, but nowhere connects the name with Troy, while Virgil makes a Cretan Teucer⁹⁰³ the founder of the Trojan race. I grant that he here founds himself upon what may be called a separate tradition, though it is vague and slender, of a Teucrian race in Troas. In the two last appellations, without any authority, he wholly alters the effect of the Greek patronymic, and changes the mere family-name into a national appellation. Then again they appear as the Pergamea gens⁹⁰⁴. But Pergamus in Homer was simply the citadel of Troy, and is a correlative to πύργος⁹⁰⁵: the English might almost as well be called the people of the Tower. Not content yet, he will also have the Trojans to be Phryges:

Phrygibusque adsis pede, diva, secundo⁹⁰⁶;

though in Homer the Phrygians are a people both ethnologically and politically separate⁹⁰⁷ from the Trojan races. Again as to Æneas himself. He is called Rhæteius heros⁹⁰⁸; but if Virgil chose thus to designate his hero by reference to a single point of the Trojan territory, it should have been one with which he was locally connected, whereas the dominions of his family were not near the promontory or upon the coast, but among the hills at the other extreme of the country. Then again Æneas is Laomedontius heros⁹⁰⁹; but Laomedon was of the branch of Ilus, while Æneas belonged to that of Assaracus; and was moreover perjured, while the line of Assaracus was marked with no such taint. So we have again —

Dardanus, Iliacæ primus pater urbis et auctor⁹¹⁰;

but Dardanus founded Dardania, while Ilium did not exist until the time of his great grandson Ilus. And here Virgil seems wholly to forget that he had himself made Teucer the head of the race⁹¹¹. In describing the migration of this hero from Crete to Troas, he says:

Nondum Ilium et arces

Pergameæ steterant; habitabant vallibus imis⁹¹².

Here he not only rejects Homer, who places Dardanus and the original settlement among the mountains, but likewise represents what is in itself improbable, since eminences, and not bottoms, were commonly sought by the first colonists with a view to security. Choosing to depart from Homer, he does not even agree with Apollodorus⁹¹³. Lastly, he is not less neglectful of the actual topography; for he implies that Ilium is among the hills, while it was, according to Homer’s express words and according to universal opinion, on the plain as opposed to the hills. Again we have from Virgil the allusion —

quibus obstitit Ilium, et ingens

Gloria Dardaniæ⁹¹⁴.

Here is another case of metre against history, and in all such cases history must go (as is said) to the wall. Ilium would not satisfactorily admit the genitive case; there could therefore be no glory of Ilium, and on this account Virgil liberally assigns vast renown to Dardania, which was a place of no renown whatever. But he is quite as ready, it must be admitted, to contradict himself as he is to contradict Homer. In Æn. ii. 540, he gives it to be understood that the city of Troy alone was the kingdom of Priam, and that the Greek camp was beyond it, for he makes Priam say of his return from the camp,

meque in mea regna remisit.

But a very little further on he calls Priam (v. 556),

tot quondam populis regnisque superbum

Regnatorem Asiæ.

Each account is alike inaccurate: Priam had more than a city, but his dominions were confined to a mere nook of Asia Minor. And again, before quitting this part of the subject, let us observe how, in the case of Anchises, he departs from Homer, even where it would have served the purpose of his story to follow him closely. The Anchises of Homer is an ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν; he does not appear at Troy among the δημογέροντες of the city, or of Priam’s court, which would have made him a secondary figure; he resides at Dardania as an independent sovereign, and it seems not unlikely that in lineal dignity, at least, he was even before Priam. But the Anchises of Virgil is resident in Troy⁹¹⁵; and is therefore, of course, to be taken for a subject of Priam. Here the alteration very much lowers the rank of Æneas, and so far, therefore, of Augustus.

The effect of all this is, without any real gain either moral or poetical, entirely to bewilder the mind of the reader of the Æneid, in regard to a subject of real interest both historical and ethnological, with respect to which Homer has left on record a most careful and clear representation. It must indeed be admitted, that the intervening poets had set many examples of similar license; indeed they had made irregularity a rule; but they had no such powerful reasons as Virgil had for imitating, in some points at least, the precision of Homer, and besides, he has perhaps exceeded them all in the multitude and variety of his departures from it. On the other hand, some allowance, I admit, should be made for the less flexible character of the Latin tongue, which might have made the peculiar accuracy of Homer a real difficulty to Virgil.

I have thus minutely traced out this course of inconsistency and contradiction in particular instances, because they are highly illustrative of the character of Virgil’s work, if not of his mind. After the political and courtly idea of the poem, he seems to have abandoned all solicitude except for its form and sound, and to have been totally indifferent as to presenting any veracious, or if that word imply too much credulity, any self-consistent pattern, of manners, places, events, or characters.

Virgil must, materially at least, have saturated himself with the Iliad before he planned the Æneid, for his borrowing is alike incessant and diversified; and this it is which renders it so singular that he should at once have exposed himself to the double charge of servilely imitating and of gratuitously disfiguring his original.

If we look to the action of the Twelfth Book of the Æneid, it is all made up from Homer cut in pieces and recast. It begins with the idea of the single combat, borrowed from the Third and Seventh Iliads. Then come the pact and the breach of it by Juturna, under Juno’s influence, which are borrowed from the treachery of Pandarus, prompted by Minerva, under the same instigation. Next, the flight of Turnus before Æneas is borrowed from that of Hector before Achilles. After this, Turnus is disabled by a divine agency, like Patroclus before Hector; a downfall brought about in the one case, as in the other, without peril and without honour, so that here we have a copy even of one among the few points where the Iliad was little worthy to be imitated. Lastly, the thought of Pallas in the mind of Æneas (more highly wrought, however, and very effective), plays the part of the recollection of Patroclus⁹¹⁶ in the mind of Achilles.

Unfaithful imitations of detail.

Both here and elsewhere, the imitations in detail are too numerous to be noted. Some of them even descend to a character which, independently of their minuteness, approaches the ludicrous. The very dung, in which the Oilean Ajax loses his footing⁹¹⁷, in the Twenty-third Iliad, is reproduced in the Fifth Æneid, that Nisus may flounder in it. But even here we may note two characteristic differences. Homer trips up a personage, whom he has no particular occasion to set off favourably. Virgil chooses for the object of derision Nisus, on whom, in the beautiful episode which soon after follows, he is about to concentrate all the tenderest sympathies of his hearers. And again, Homer makes Ajax slip where, as he says, the oxen had just been slain over Patroclus: Virgil has no such probable cause to allege for the presence of the obnoxious material⁹¹⁸, but says cæsis forte juvencis. Now the Trojans had in fact left the tomb of Anchises, and had gone to a chosen spot to celebrate the foot-races⁹¹⁹; so that even his gore and ordure are quite out of place.

So again, of all the formulæ in Homer, it is not very clear why Virgil should have chosen to recall the rather commonplace

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδήτυος ἐξ ἔρον ἕντο

line in his own more ambitious and resounding verse,

Postquam exemta fames, et amor compressus edendi⁹²⁰;

but it is still more singular that, instead of saying that hunger and thirst were satisfied, he should leave out thirst altogether, and fill up his hexameter by mentioning hunger twice over.

Still it seems not a little strange, notwithstanding the power of the disabling causes which have been enumerated, that, with so vast an amount of material imitation, Virgil should not have acquired, even by accident or by sheer force of use, some traits of nearer resemblance in feeling, and in ethical handling, to his great original.

His maltreatment of the Homeric characters is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the instance of Helen. This case, indeed, deserves a separate consideration of the causes which have reduced a beautiful, touching, and remarkably original portrait to a gross and most common caricature. But Ulysses, as the prince of policy, had perhaps a better claim to be comprehended by a Roman at the court of Augustus. Yet the Ulysses of Virgil simply represents the naked ideas of hardness, cunning, and cruelty. He is never named but to be abused; and, though the mention of him is not very frequent, it is easy to construct from the poem a pretty large catalogue of vituperative epithets, unmitigated by any single one of an opposite character. He is durus, dirus, sævus, pellax, fandi fictor, artifex, inventor scelerum, and scelerum hortator. Even physical circumstances, however, and those too of the broadest notoriety, Virgil entirely overlooks. Nothing can be more at variance with the effeminate character of the Homeric Paris, his impotence in fight, and his distinction limited to the bow, which was then the coward’s weapon, than to represent him as possessed of vast physical force. Yet even on this Virgil has ventured. In the games of the Fifth Book, when Æneas invites candidates for the pugilistic encounter, the huge Dares immediately presents himself, and he is described as the only person who could box with Paris⁹²¹!

Solus qui Paridem solitus contendere contra.

Heyne urges by way of apology the authority of Hyginus, who was no more than the contemporary of Virgil himself; and presumes that Virgil followed authorities now lost: a sorry defence, because the representation is inconsistent not merely with the facts, but with the essential idea of the Paris of Homer, and therefore proves that Virgil did not try or care to understand the character, or to be faithful to his master.