“If your Highness will go into another room, I can show in secret what the Turks are now doing.”
“But how you can make me see what the Turks are doing is more than I can understand,” replied the Emperor. “However, let us go, if it be only to see what fancy thou hast in thy head.”
Then the Emperor rose, and giving his arm to Virgil, went to a room apart, where the magician showed and explained to him (per filo e per segna) all that the Turks were about. And the Emperor was amazed at seeing clearly what Virgil had promised to show. Then he gave to Virgil the thousand crowns with his own hand, and was ever from that day his friend. And so Virgil rose in the world.
In this tale there is as quaint and naïve a mixture of traditions and ideas as one could desire. The fair Helen, in her tower of Troy, becomes Danae visited by Jupiter, and as the narrator had certainly seen Dantzic Golden Water, or some other cordial with gold-leaf in it, the story of the shower is changed into aureated wine. It is evident that the one who recast the legend endeavoured to make this incident intelligible. All the rest is mediæval. “Gold,” says Helen, “will preserve my beauty.” Thus the aurum potabile of the alchemists was supposed to do the same as Paracelsus declared.
We all recognise a great idea when put into elaborate form by a skilled artist, but to perceive it as a diamond in the rough and recognise its value is apparently given to few. It is true that those few may themselves be neither poets nor geniuses—just as the Hottentot who can find or discern diamonds may be no lapidary or jeweller. What I would say is, that such ideas or motives abound in this Italian witch-lore to a strange extent.
Thus, the making Virgil a son of Jupiter by a Helen-Danae is a flight of mythologic invention, far surpassing in boldness anything given in the Neapolitan legends of the poet. Thomas Carlyle and Vernon Lee have expressed with great skill great admiration of the idea that Faust begat with the fair Helen the Renaissance. It was indeed a magnificent conception, but in very truth this fathering of Virgil, the grand type of poetry and magic, and of all earthly wisdom, by Jupiter on Helen-Danae is far superior to it in every way. For Virgil to the legend-maker represented the Gothic or Middle Ages in all their beauty and exuberance, their varied learning and splendid adventure, far more perfectly than did the mere vulgar juggler and thaumaturgist Faust, as the latter appears in every legend until Goethe transfigured him. And, strangely enough, the Virgilian cyclus, as I have given it, is as much of the Renaissance as it is classic or mediæval. The Medicis are in it to the life. In very truth it was Virgil, and not Faust, who was the typical magician par éminence after Apollonius, some of whose legends he, in fact, inherited. And Virgil has come to us with a traditional character as marked and peculiar as any in Shakespeare—which Faust did not. He has passed through the ages not only as a magus and poet, but as a personality, and a very remarkable one.
There is another very curious, and, indeed, great idea lurking in these witch-Virgilian legends, especially set forth in this of the birth and continued in all. It is that there is in them a cryptic, latent heathenism, a sincere, lingering love of the old gods, and especially of the dii minores, of fate or fays, and fauns and fairies, of spirits of the air and of rivers and fountains, an adoration of Diana as the moon-queen of the witches, and a far greater familiarity with incantations than prayers, or more love of sorceries than sacraments. Whenever it can be done, even as a post-scriptum, we have a conjuration or spell, as if the tale had awakened in the mind of the narrator a feeling of piety towards “the old religion.” The romances of Mercury, and Janus, and Vesta, and Apollo, and Diana all inspire the narrator to pray to them in all sincerity, just as a Catholic, after telling a legend of a saint, naturally repeats a prayer to him or a novena. It is the last remains of classic faith.
Or we may say, as things fell out, that the Goethean-Helen-Faust-Renaissance poem represents things as they were, or as they came to pass, as if it were the acme, while the Virgilian tradition which I here impart indicates things as they might have happened, had the stream of evolution been allowed to run on in its natural course, just as Julian the apostate (or rather apostle of the gospel of letting things be) held that progress or culture and science might have advanced just as surely and rapidly on the old heathen lines as any other. According to Heine, this would have saved us all an immense amount of trouble in our school-studies, in learning Latin and mythology, had we kept on as we were.
I mean by this that these traditions of Virgil indicate, as no other book does, the condition of a naïvely heathen mind, “suckled in a creed out-worn,” believing in the classic mythology half turned to fairies, much more sincerely, I fear, than many of my readers do in the Bible, and from this we may gather very curious reflection as to whether men may not have ideas of culture, honesty, and mercy in common, whatever their religion may be.
The marvels of the birth of Virgil of old, as told by Donatus, probably after the lost work of Suetonius, are that his mother Maia dreamed, se enixam laureum ramum, that she gave birth to a branch of laurel; that he did not cry when born, and that the pine-tree planted according to ancient custom on that occasion attained in a very short time to a great height, which thing often happens when plants grow near hot springs, as is the case on the Margariten Island, by Budapesth, where everything attains to full-size in one-third of the usual time. The custom of planting a pine-tree on the birth of a child, in the belief that its condition will always indicate its subject’s health and prosperity, is still common among the Passamaquoddy, and other Red Indians in America, I having had such a tree pointed out to me by an old grandfather.