It may well be that there is less of this sort of thing nowadays, when Parliamentary illustrations, among the younger members at least, seem to be drawn more extensively from natural history than from ancient poetry. Yet it is but a few years since Mr. Gladstone, on going out of office, created a sensation in his turn by his application of Virgil’s fine line,
“Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.”[[124]]
We cannot very well imagine a leading Congressman summoning Horace to enforce his argument, say, on the vital necessity to the nation of repealing the Seventh Commandment until such time as his constituents at Podunk can get enough of their neighbors’ currency to make resumption and patriotism convertible terms. Not only would he be doubtful of being understood, but he would be awed by that practical-minded public opinion at home which severely discourages in its chosen representatives such frivolities as unknown tongues. He would see behind the Speaker’s desk the grim phantom of the honest Granger transfixing him with a spectral finger, and asking him in hollow tones if he was sent to Congress to talk gibberish or to get that little appropriation; he would see the still more appalling phantom of the local editor grimly sharpening his quill and squaring himself for another of those savagely sarcastic articles about our erudite Congressman, who spends his time—the time we pay for, etc.—muddling his brains—the few brains, etc.—over obsolete rubbish in the Congressional Library, while he neglects his constituents’ interests and allows that little bill, etc., etc. He sees all this, and, instead of Horace, he quotes Josh Billings, and everybody is satisfied.
Now, this is not meant to the dispraise of either the Congressman or his constituents, but only to show that here political is divided from literary life in a way quite unknown in England. The scholar in politics is a fond illusion of youthful enthusiasm. Our politicians do not write; our literary folks do not go to Congress. A stray editor, to be sure, now and then gets in, tumbling over, as it were, from the Reporters’ Gallery, or a flourish is made of sending Mr. Motley or Prof. Lowell minister to some foreign court; but these are spasmodic exceptions, and usually result in a way to confirm the rule. We have no counterparts to Disraeli, or Gladstone, or Mr. Lowe, or Sir George Cornewall Lewis, or the Duke of Argyle. Perhaps, however, a new era is dawning with the present Secretary of the Navy, who spells his literature with a “P.”
We have said enough—the reader may think more than enough—to show why translations from the classics should flourish better in England than here, and also, by implication at least, why of all classic authors, with the one exception of Homer, Horace and Virgil should most have taken the translators’ attention. From one or other of these are all the Parliamentary quotations we have given; and it is indeed, we believe, considered what our English friends call “bad form” to quote in debate any other Latin or Greek. The cause of this popularity it is easy to see. Horace and Virgil, in the usual college curriculum, are put into the student’s hands just as he has got over his initial struggles with the language, and his mind is a little freed to feel some of the beauties as well as the difficulties of the author—to know that the rose has fragrance as well as thorns. Homer, on the contrary, from his comparative ease, comes much earlier in the Greek course, and becomes so much the more distasteful to the learner as Greek is harder than Latin; its very letters are aliens to his eyes, its alphabet is a place of briers and brambles. It is hard to get over these early dislikes. St. Augustine confesses a hatred for Homer thus implanted in his school-days which he could never overcome, while he declares Virgil to be the greatest and most glorious of poets—a censure echoed by Voltaire, who pronounced the Æneid, le plus beau monument qui nous reste de toute l’antiquité, and asserts that if Homer produced Virgil, it was his finest work.
Both in Virgil and Horace there is much to captivate a youthful mind and everything to keep the affections won. The story of the Æneid is not only full of life and color and motion, with plenty of fighting, which all boys love of course, but, despite its later-discovered want of a reasonable hero or heroine, its episodes—the Trojan horse and the sharp street-fight in fallen Ilium, the mysterious journey through the shades under a spectral moon, the races in the Fifth Book, the midnight scout of Nisus and Euryalus, the plucky young Iulus fleshing his maiden shafts at the siege in Book Ninth, the gallant onset and tragic fate of the young champions Lausus and Pallas—all are apt to take the boyish imagination; and in older years the haunting melody of the verse, the pensive grace that suffuses the telling of the story, renew and rivet the early charm.
Horace, too, is full of matter that even boyhood can taste and manhood never tires of. The lovely bits of rural landscape scattered like so many cabinet pictures through the odes—the sweltering cattle standing knee-deep under the oak-boughs in the pool of Bandusia, the bickering, pine-arched rivulet by whose side Dellius takes his nooning; the sunny slopes of Lucretilis dotted with sheep; the romantic beauty of the Happy Isles—do we not all recall the delight we felt when these enchanting little sketches first smiled on us from the weary drudgery of Tacitus and Thucydides like vistas of fresh meadow and woodland and cascade caught by the wayfarer from the hot and dusty highway? We did not so well relish then, in that out-door time of life, the warm little interiors that contrast and set off these: the glowing fire-side piled high with logs, made merry with old Falernian, and laugh and joke and friendly talk, while the rain beats upon the roof and the snow whirls about Soracte, and, drawing closer to the cheery blaze, we hug ourselves in the “tumultuous privacy of storm”; the jolly dinner-parties, where we help to quiz Quinctius for his gravity or chaff that harebrain Telephus out of his affectation of wisdom; the more sober feasts with Mæcenas or Virgil at the little Sabine Farm—but these, too, we soon get to know, and linger over them with fond familiarity. Then, too, we win to the secret of that genial though pagan philosophy which comes home to the “business and bosoms” of all of us, and whose precepts are so pithily expressed we cannot forget them if we would: that there is a time when folly is the truest wisdom; that he alone is happy who is content with little; that a wise man takes care of the present and lets the future take care of itself, because, as Cowley puts it,
“When to future years thou extend’st thy cares,
Thou dealest in other men’s affairs”;
that we must pluck the blossom of to-day, or we may never have a chance at the morrow’s.