The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Mantuan
THE MANTUAN
Virgil and His Meaning to the World of To-Day. By J. W. Mackail. 12mo. 159 pages. Marshall Jones Company. $1.50.
Virgil: A Biography. By Tenney Frank. 8vo. 200 pages. Henry Holt and Company. $2.
PROFESSOR MACKAIL'S little book on Virgil, in the Our Debt to Greece and Rome series, is an attempt to "sell" that poet to "the World of To-Day." That such an attempt is in order just now was recently demonstrated in the course of a symposium on "the ten dullest authors" in which no less than two eminent literary characters—one of them a professional critic—voted Virgil one of the world's greatest bores. It is to such an audience as this that Professor Mackail's book is primarily addressed, and I am not sure that he does not err a little in overpraising his author—or rather in praising him uncritically. But on the whole the book is admirable for its purpose; it infects the reader with the peculiar glow of luminous enthusiasm which is characteristic of Mackail and which makes him such a charming writer on the classics. I wish, however, that the editors of this interesting series would not insist so upon emphasizing the "Meaning" of their subjects to the "World of To-Day." In this case, the editor writes a preface explaining that Professor Mackail "has presented us with a study of the significance of Virgil to the twentieth century"—and then Mackail goes ahead—quite rightly—and writes a book which commends Virgil to our attention on the strength of his absolute literary and intellectual merits—in other words, of his chief claims to significance to the world of any day.
Professor Frank's book is quite different; it is a new biography of Virgil from rather a fresh point of view. Professor Frank has examined all the evidence for himself and deferred to no one else's judgement about it, with the result that he accepts as genuine most of the doubtful poems ascribed to Virgil and on the strength of them reconstructs a very complete record of his movements and his intellectual development. He concludes that Virgil was not a peasant and the son of a humble potter, but the son of a landed proprietor who also owned a pottery; that he sat at the feet of Epicurean masters and was always Epicurean rather than Stoic; that the pastoral setting of the Eclogues is not an impossible medley, as Mackail, for instance, contends, but neither Mantuan nor Sicilian and merely the scenery of southern Italy; that Virgil was not driven out of his farm after the battle of Philippi, but was living comfortably at Naples at the time that the evictions occurred and wrote his poems on the subject merely as general protests in favour of Mantua; and decides many other controversial questions in unorthodox fashion. No doubt Professor Frank is very certain about a great many things which no one can know anything about—since the evidence on Roman civilization seems so incomplete as actually to make certainties in matters of this kind very difficult, at the same time that it is considerable enough to arouse scholars with a gift for the fiction of historical criticism into constructing any number of equally plausible and directly contradictory legends; but I cannot help sympathizing with Professor Frank in his hospitality toward the disputed poems, as I have been bored all too long by editors who, never having written a line of poetry themselves or known anybody else who has written one and consequently not understanding that the noblest of poets write also ribaldry and nonsense and that a man begins by imitating other poets and may write half a dozen styles before he has mastered his own, insist that Shakespeare could not have written the brothel scenes in Pericles because they do not sound the way Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale sound to people incapable of listening to what Shakespeare actually wrote, and that Virgil could not have written the Aetna because it sounds like an echo of Lucretius, when Virgil even in his maturest work was always in the habit of dropping into the manner of Lucretius when he wanted a passage of natural philosophy. In any case, Professor Frank, though he may build some of his statements about Virgil on rather an uncertain soil, brings Rome itself much nearer than such books usually do; one feels that he has been there to see and brought back a first-hand account. To him Maecenas and Cicero are contemporaries, not monuments. His forthcoming history of Rome should be of unusual interest. My only objection to his portrait of Virgil would be that he has concerned himself almost entirely with the events of Virgil's public life and the development of his ideas; he makes no psychological portrait; you hear nothing of Virgil's emotional life—about which his poetry suggests some curious speculations. I suppose someone will presently psycho-analyse him and poor pius Aeneas and his dreams will stand naked in the lecture-room.
But in the meantime, what is of prime importance is to maintain Virgil's reputation as a poet. Venturing to mention him about a year ago in a company of literary persons I was greeted by hoots and jeers; the grand manner was denounced; and it was generally conceded that no celebrated writer—except Milton—had been so thoroughly discredited. The explanation of the attitude of these people, most of whom were certainly capable of appreciating poetry, and of the two men I mentioned at the beginning of this article is partly, I think, a phobia acquired in boyhood from having had to read the Aeneid in school. We shy instinctively at Virgil in later life, just as we do at the Bible, because we remember it as something intolerably dreary and largely unintelligible which we had to slave over during pleasant afternoons when we would much rather have been doing something else. And I do not much blame schoolboys for being bored with the first few books of the Aeneid which they are usually compelled to read: the fine things are at that age beyond their comprehension and the pseudo-Homeric machinery—the repetitions and conventional formulas which in Homer have all the romantic naiveté of a ballad refrain, in Virgil sound stiff and artificial and are boring to anybody. Besides, Virgil is such a poor story-teller and his characters are so pale. It may be an infantile prejudice on my own part, but I have never been able to feel that even the grand pièce de résistance of the Fourth Book, the episode of Dido and Aeneas, is much of a dramatic success. Dido is ordinarily described as passionate, but she is fluent rather than passionate and, as H. W. Garrod says, even in her most tempestuous outbursts she remembers all the rules of rhetoric. No real conflict takes place between her and Aeneas because Aeneas is completely indifferent; he seems to have no reactions at all one way or the other; and one cannot escape the notion that the poet himself shared not a little of the indifference of his hero. I see no reason for believing that Virgil, whom the Neapolitans called Parthenias, was especially interested in women or that he was emotionally capable of dramatizing the Aeneas-Dido situation. To me, Dido is far more real and charming when Aeneas meets her afterwards in Hades and she listens silent to his excuses with her eyes upon the ground and when he has finished simply runs unfriendly away to the wood where her first husband will comfort her.
And this illustrates the peculiar vein in which Virgil was particularly successful—the vein of the lacrimae rerum, of the deep sadness in all mortal life which "moves the mind." In this elegiac mood, which seems to have represented his most natural and his habitual poetical reaction to life, he writes not narrative, but music; he takes an incident or a figure and diffuses it into exquisite cadences of tenderness; the theme is dissolved like the shapes of a dream into the emotion of the poet. Dido in life is unconvincing; among the shades she is lovely. And Palinurus, even before he reaches Hades and in relating the simple story of his death seems to breathe the pathos of the frustration of all human endeavour, moves already in the vagueness of a dream—all alone on the sleeping sea, tempted softly between sleeping and waking by the bodiless voices of the night. What is most moving, most felt, in the Eclogues?—the eviction of the Mantuan farmers—Nunc victi, tristes, quoniam Fors omnia versat. . . . What is most memorable in the Georgics?—a poem which is supposed to have been written as a glorification of the country, a piece of officially inspired propaganda for a back-to-the-land movement. Not, to my taste at any rate, the conscientious exaltation of Bacchus nor the elegant and rather conventional "O fortunatos nimium" passage; in this latter he speaks of the "secura quies et nescia fallere vita," but the net effect of his poem is to make you feel with extreme poignancy that the country life like any other both deceives and fails mankind. It is a sad struggle to wring a living from Nature: the sun dries up your crops; your orchards catch fire and burn down; your cattle get stung by snakes or are wiped out by the plague. All the greatest things in the Georgics are tragic: the description of northern Italy laid waste with the cattle-plague—desertaque regna Pastorum, et longe saltus lateque vacantes; the magnificent passage about the civil wars with its prayer to the gods for peace and the pathos and longing of its vision of the quiet farmer some day turning up with his plough the naked bones and the empty helmets of Philippi; and finally the lovely, the incomparable legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The circumstances of the inclusion of this last would seem especially to throw light on the character of Virgil's poetic feeling in its pure state. According to Mackail, the Georgics originally ended with an encomium of Gallus, Virgil’s brilliant friend and fellow poet, then vice-regent of Egypt; but when Gallus disgraced himself, was recalled and exiled, and finally committed suicide, Virgil cancelled his conclusion and had to make shift for another. The episode of Orpheus and Eurydice seems so remote from the structure and style of the rest of the poem that one may guess that it was something which Virgil had written independently and merely happened to have about—in fact, that when he was not labouring over the ambitious semi-official themes of the Georgics and the Aeneid he dropped naturally into the writing of sweet sorrowful charming idyls—the dim shades drifting like birds driven by the winter storms, the rescued nymph vanishing like smoke between her lover's helpless hands, the unpetitionable gate-keeper of Hades barring the muddy stream, and the lover still vainly calling "Eurydice!" when his head has been riven from his body, till the last echo of his love has died with her name among the lonely river banks.
But what shall be said of the grand manner, which has been so savagely outlawed among us since the realists and the imagists have declared war upon rhetoric—which seems to prevent many intelligent people from supposing that there can be anything in Virgil at all? Well, there is probably a certain margin of rhetoric in everything that Virgil wrote; but it is not like the pseudo-classic rhetoric for which people probably mistake it; it is not like the rhetoric of of the Renaissance. It is silly to say, as I have heard people do, that Catullus is a genuine lyric poet and Virgil merely a goldsmith of noble sentiments (I even know one man who contends that Ovid was a more genuine poet than Virgil). The problem is to disengage Virgil's own lyric strain, which, though less varied than Catullus', is equally genuine. Besides, in the first place, Virgil should be forgiven even his emotionally uninteresting passages for his superb artistic integrity. One must remember that, though in both ancient and modern times he has exfloreated into all sorts of overpowering blossoms, he has also inspired in Dante the sharpest, the most sincere, and the least florid style which has perhaps ever been seen. The Georgics is surely the Madame Bovary of the ancient world. This composition, so different from the imperfect and unfinished, the sometimes shadowy or wooden Aeneid, that epic which he himself on his death-bed had left orders that his friends should destroy, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary virtuosity and one of the greatest examples of the mastery over language ever produced. Every line is a technical triumph; every word is the right word. Even when the subject is quite dull or prosaic, as it not infrequently is, the poet has bent all his energy to presenting it in the most intense and concentrated form and in a manner exactly suited to the matter. In seven years, the colours, the movements, the sounds of the country life of ancient Italy were fixed for eternity. The ravens still flap in the trees; the snake still glides out in his new skin; the bees still buzz by their mossy ponds to their oleaster-shaded nests. You will say perhaps that this is a mere tour de force which no serious poet should ever have attempted, that Virgil might better have gone on writing brief pastorals, like the Eclogues, all his life. But there is a genuine poetic emotion which carries off both the Georgics and the Aeneid, though it is not of precisely the same lyric character as the lacrimae rerum. It is the devotion to the idea of Rome. It is a little hard for us in twentieth century America to understand this intense enthusiasm for an official political and social ideal; we are inclined to think that Virgil's outbursts about Rome are like our Fourth of July orations. But there is an actual poetic conviction about the rhetoric of such passages as "O passi graviora!"; and from the time when the peasant in the First Eclogue tells of having seen the imperial city, and the hexameter, distending, resounds with a thunderous rumour, to the climax of the Sixth Book of the Aeneid when Anchises announces to Aeneas the supremacy and the moral grandeur of the city which he is about to found (Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento) Rome stands behind all that Virgil wrote as a passion profoundly felt. He conceived that the ideals of his civilization were a proper subject for poetry and that a life-time devoted to setting them to verse, though it involved the most interminable patience and the most exacting labour, was a life-time well spent.—Ah, Virgil, I am afraid that all Professor Mackail's eloquence will never sell you to "the world of to-day": for one thing you took life too slowly and for another you took poetry too seriously.