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.