Virgil's Romantic Muse: Rewrites of a Classic in Chateaubriand and Hugo

Of all the Ancients who filled the horizon of French cultural history, Virgil remained from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the poet most often quoted. ¹ Horace was a close competitor, but was not considered to have Virgil’s breadth and depth. In the early 1800s only Homer threatened Virgil’s predominance, but everybody who read knew Latin, and that was not so true of Greek. Only Racine was deemed comparable to Virgil, but as late as 1857 Sainte-Beuve in his Etude sur Virgile called the Swan of Mantua the unsurpassed painter of inner passions.

This living presence of a Classic among the Romantics is a recognized fact. Less obvious is the exact nature of Virgil’s influence on literary production during this period. For Virgil’s case is not an instance of survival in an alien milieu dominated by a new movement. Rather his poetry remains an inspiration for the votaries of Romanticism. How this came to pass is, I think, little understood because critics reduce this phenomenon to just another, if exceptionally powerful instance of influence: it is also combined with the elevating of Virgil himself to the status of a symbolic character, the embodiment of poetry or of wisdom, and the interpreter of some superior or spiritual order clearly, here, in the tradition of Dante’s Virgil. This historical approach would apply to any number of writers but yield statements concerning his influence too general to be helpful, since it can do little more than register a predecessor’s shadow as it projects onto the work of a successor, that is, register merely another repetitive, interchangeable set of indices attesting that a lingering tradition coexists with true originality.

Rather, a semiotic approach promises more, for it leads to truly specific results. The merits of a semiotic analysis are three. Firstly it focuses not on Virgil the man but on representations of the poet in Romantic texts, that is, sign systems referring to a particular conception of Virgil or to a way of seeing and saying things specified as quintessentially Virgilian. Secondly, it defines the relation of Virgilian discourse to Romantic writing as one of intertextuality. And thirdly, it suggests, again within the framework of intertextuality, that certain Romantic symbols can be understood only as departures from Virgilian imagery, so much so that they verge on nonsense unless we read them in the light of that imagery.

My examples will be drawn from Chateaubriand, whose mastery owes not a little to classical rhetoric, and from Hugo, who repudiates it altogether.² Besides this appealing symmetry, it is significant that both writers exploit Virgil in the same way.

The first object of my inquiry, the motif of Virgil’s persona in the Romantic text, need not reflect what we know of the man from external sources, nor even what we may surmise about him from his writings: it simply means the motif of Virgil’s shadow in the Romantic text—an imagistic impersonation, one might say, of his poetry. In short, Romanticism did not renounce convention any more than it ceased to imitate the Ancients. It merely cloaked classical convention beneath a new one, replacing Virgil as a textual model with Virgil as his very self, conjured up from the shades of Hades. This personification has the advantage of creating the conditions for a symbolic dialog, the illusion of a contact between poet and reader.

This change would seem to demand a new technique of illusion-making, something like the magic lantern and its phantasmagorias the popularity of which goes back to the end of the eighteenth century. Of course, nothing quite so literally dramatic occurs. Instead, an uninterrupted sequence of transformations leads from the classical practice of quotation to a method of esthetic confrontation of two types of discourse which conjoins the Virgilian model and its Romantic derivation, both dealing with a common experience. This is the ultimate transference from text to author, whereby the quotation gives way to the summoning up of Virgil himself, to the replay of his original experience of whatever he had...