ON THE "BUCOLICS" OF VIRGIL, A CAFÉ IN PARIS, THE LENGTH OF ESSAYS, PHŒBUS, BACCHUS, A WANTON MAID, AND OTHER MATTERS
A fruitful subject for discussion in these days of war, foreign and civil, ruin, approaching pestilence, eclipse and veiling of the gods, is the proper place in which to read the Bucolics of the poet Virgil.
Some would suggest a pastoral scene—a rising mound near some clear river, or even the shade of a beech. Others a library brown with age, dusty, and (please God) all the windows shut; oaken also, the roof not high, the whole cut up into little compartments each with a wicket-gate as libraries should be. Others would suggest bed—though that connotes a complete acquaintance with the text. Others a railway journey, for on such an occasion the mind is well cut off from interference by modern things: that is, supposing the railway journey to be a fast one between two very distant points—for there is no more distracting passage of time than a journey in a slow train which stops at every station.
Others have suggested ship-board, which seems to me simply silly. For, apart from the difficulty of reading anything at sea, there is the gross unsuitability of time and place for the lovely lines of the Eclogues.
And so on. It is a weighty matter for discussion, and one that can never end, because it all turns upon an individual whim.
But for my part the place where I like to read the Bucolics of Virgil is at a table outside the door of a certain café facing the Bourse in Paris; a table in the open air. The time of day in which this exercise most pleases me is about two o'clock of an early summer afternoon.
As to why this should be so, I cannot tell. Locke would explain it perhaps by his "Association of Ideas"; but Locke is dead and gone. Perhaps once in boyhood, just in that place or in such a place, I first was struck by the beauty of such and such a line. At any rate, that is the place where now it pleases me to read the immortal stuff: a certain café opposite the Bourse in Paris, sitting at a table in the open air, in summer, with the book before me on a marble slab. There do I best receive within my mind (aided by a crib) the noble outlines of the Appennine, the Lombard Plain, the long shadows at evening, the bleating of the flock.
Some little way before me, as I read, the howling mob, which clamours all afternoon, buying and selling round the colonnade of the Bourse, continues its surge. Individual voices at that distance are lost; all you hear is the sea of human avarice and folly in its violence confused.
Why on earth this singular piece of baseness, the roar of men buying and selling and picking each other's pockets, should form a suitable background in my mind for the delicate notes of the pipe in the wood and the long regrets of the shepherds, heaven only knows. But so it is.
I wondered only this year as I re-read the heavenly poet in that place (opposite the Bourse in Paris, the Vile Stock Exchange) whether the advance of barbarism might not produce—and that in a very few years—a generation to whom all these lines will be as tedious as is Corneille to the educated Englishman of to-day.
I can imagine men still reasonably cultivated, still in part acquainted with the Latin tongue, and yet fallen into such a degraded mood that only here and there some specially vivid picture or some piece of stronger rhetoric in the Eclogues shall touch them, while the rest will appear mechanical, dry stuff. For there is a degree of descent in the mind after which the magic of verse disappears; and that sacred quality whereby—none can tell how—a particular disposition of words stirs the mind in a fashion that is to common experience what music is to speech, and what colour is to form, no longer effects its purpose.
I was reading the other day in the work of a Colonial, whose amusing conceits we all properly admire and whose honest morals help to make his work pleasant, a most amazing judgment passed by him upon the poet Homer.
It seemed to him that the poet Homer did not write poetry at all. He said it sounded to him, compared with real poetry, modern poetry, live poetry (the Cad's Laureate, let us say), like the rude scratching of a savage knife upon a wall compared with some glorious work of art, such as a Coronation picture at the Royal Academy.... Well, well, well!...
Shall I attempt to criticise the Colonial? No, I will not.
The truth is, that when you come to criticise certain modern enormities your instrument fails. The thing is too big for you altogether.
You can pick up a cricket ball with your hand; you can handle a ten-foot spherical buoy with a crane. But how are you to deal with a rounded mass several miles across? How are we to deal with mountains of ineptitude? How is criticism to approach those last new literary moods which are deaf to the ancients? I fear it cannot deal with such moods at all. If a man feels like that, he feels like that, and one can say no more. And if there is to come a time when men shall read:
Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem,
and make no more of it than "Passengers must cross the line by the bridge. Penalty £5," why, there it is! Things have their rising and their setting. But before that day comes may the earth cover me.
* * * * *
If the modern world resembled that ancient one of which the echoes, as I lay down my Virgil, still move my mind, I should here complete, I should here end. For I have said all that I have to say. And a very good thing it would be if the modern world resembled the ancient world in this as in many other things. Their books were ten thousand words long, or twenty thousand words long, or fifty thousand words long, or a hundred thousand words long. They had not to conform to a special length. And so it was with that which they wrote down, as I am writing this, at random, a vagary of the mind.
But the modern world differs from the ancient world, and there is a law that an essay such as this (essay, forsooth!) should reach a certain length.
There are various ways in which I could pad it out. One of the best would be to quote you a few lines and ask you how you feel. For instance:
Et me Phœbus amat: Phœbo sua semper apud me
Munera sunt, lauri et suave rubens hyacinthus.
This is not only a beautiful phrase, it is also true—and I am grateful to the Delian. I will do my best never to put him out. I will keep by me a few flowers for such a patron.
By the way, talking of that lovely couplet, do you know (it is true, it is not a lie, I have the very words before me as I write)—do you know that a gentleman still living translated that couplet thus: "Phœbus loves me and I in my turn have gifts for Phœbus—laurels, and the sweet blush of the hyacinth."
But this is not so wrong a rendering after all as that for which a contemporary of mine was once responsible in the noblest and most learned of the Oxford Colleges. For this man said (viva voce, it is true) that certain Greek lines which really meant "at evening soft dew descends upon the earth," signified in English, "Towards nightfall the huge female sea monster crawls up upon the sand." Each a picture; the one sweet, the other strong—but how different one from the other!
And as I have begun quoting, why not go on?
Malo me Galatea petit, lasciva puella,
Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri.
You may, if you like, apply this to yourself just as I applied the first lines to myself. At any rate I will have nothing to do with them.
And really I can think of nothing more to say, and I must bring this to an end.... But as I write, but as I write, a stream comes down from the mountains, a girl escapes beyond the willow trees.