When he wished to make
his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of
bombast. And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech
seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears
'conceited' or grotesque. To me at any rate the metaphors in 'now is he
total gules' and 'mincing with his sword her husband's limbs' are more
disturbing than any of the bombast. But, as regards this second defect,
there are many places in Shakespeare worse than the speech of 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:
Whip me, ye devils,
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'?[262] 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.
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