Letter from Mrs. Verrall
In order to interpret this message, therefore, I wrote to Mrs. Verrall as instructed, asking her: "Does The Poet and Faunus mean anything to you? Did one 'protect' the other?" She replied at once (8 September 1915) referring me to Horace, Carm. II. xvii. 27-30, and saying:—
"The reference is to Horace's account of his narrow escape from death, from a falling tree, which he ascribes to the intervention of Faunus. Cf. Hor. Odes, II. xiii.; II. xvii. 27; III. iv. 27; III. viii. 8, for references to the subject. The allusion to Faunus is in Ode II. xvii. 27-30:—
'Me truncus illapsus cerebro
Sustulerat, nisi Faunus ictum
Dextra levasset, Mercurialium
Custos virorum.'
"'Faunus, the guardian of poets' ('poets' being the usual interpretation of 'Mercury's men').
"The passage is a very well-known one to all readers of Horace, and is perhaps specially familiar from its containing, in the sentence quoted, an unusual grammatical construction. It is likely to occur in a detailed work on Latin Grammar.
"The passage has no special associations for me other than as I have described, though it has some interest as forming part of a chronological sequence among the Odes, not generally admitted by commentators, but accepted by me.
"The words quoted are, of course, strictly applicable to the Horatian passage, which they instantly recalled to me.
(Signed) M. de G. Verrall"
I perceived therefore, from this manifestly correct interpretation of the 'Myers' message to me, that the meaning was that some blow was going to fall, or was likely to fall, though I didn't know of what kind, and that Myers would intervene, apparently to protect me from it. So far as I can recollect my comparatively trivial thoughts on the subject, I believe that I had some vague idea that the catastrophe intended was perhaps of a financial rather than of a personal kind.
The above message reached me near the beginning of September in Scotland. Raymond was killed near Ypres on 14 September 1915, and we got the news by telegram from the War Office on 17 September. A fallen or falling tree is a frequently used symbol for death; perhaps through misinterpretation of Eccl. xi, 3. To several other classical scholars I have since put the question I addressed to Mrs. Verrall, and they all referred me to Horace, Carm. II. xvii. as the unmistakable reference.
Mr. Bayfield's Criticism
Soon after the event, I informed the Rev. M. A. Bayfield, ex-headmaster of Eastbourne College, fully of the facts, as an interesting S.P.R. incident (saying at the same time that Myers had not been able to 'ward off' the blow); and he was good enough to send me a careful note in reply:—
"Horace does not, in any reference to his escape, say clearly whether the tree struck him, but I have always thought it did. He says Faunus lightened the blow; he does not say 'turned it aside.' As bearing on your terrible loss, the meaning seems to be that the blow would fall but would not crush; it would be 'lightened' by the assurance, conveyed afresh to you by a special message from the still living Myers, that your boy still lives.
"I shall be interested to know what you think of this interpretation. The 'protect' I take to mean protect from being overwhelmed by the blow, from losing faith and hope, as we are all in danger of doing when smitten by some crushing personal calamity. Many a man when so smitten has, like Merlin, lain
'as dead,
And lost to life and use and name and fame.'
That seems to me to give a sufficiently precise application to the word (on which Myers apparently insists) and to the whole reference to Horace."
In a postscript he adds the following:—
"In Carm. iii. 8, Horace describes himself as prope funeratus arboris ictu, 'wellnigh killed by a blow from a tree.' An artist in expression, such as he was, would not have mentioned any 'blow' if there had been none; he would have said 'well nigh killed by a falling tree'—or the like. It is to be noted that in both passages he uses the word ictus. And in ii. 13. 11 (the whole ode is addressed to the tree) he says the man must have been a fellow steeped in every wickedness 'who planted thee an accursed lump of wood, a thing meant to fall (this is the delicate meaning of caducum—not merely "falling") on thine undeserving master's head.' Here again the language implies that he was struck, and struck on the head.
"Indeed, the escape must have been a narrow one, and it is to me impossible to believe that Horace would have been so deeply impressed by the accident if he had not actually been struck. He refers to it four times:—
Carm.ii. 13.—(Ode addressed to the tree—forty lines long.)
ii. 17. 27.
iii. 4. 27.—(Here he puts the risk he ran on a parallel with that of the rout at Philippi, from which he escaped.)
iii. 8. 8.
"I insist on all this as strengthening my interpretation, and also as strengthening the assignment of the script to Myers, who would of course be fully alive to all the points to be found in his reference to Faunus and Horace—and, as I have no doubt, believed that Horace did not escape the actual blow, and that it was a severe one."