Pretending to side with the assassins of Julius Cæsar,
he presently threw himself into Antony's arms; perhaps because he
saw that Antony could more easily be first utilized and then dis-
patched.
he presently threw himself into Antony's arms; perhaps because he
saw that Antony could more easily be first utilized and then dis-
patched.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v26 - Tur to Wat
Lo!
But where is the doughty Charlemaine?
## p. 15405 (#353) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15405
BALLAD OF OLD-TIME LORDS
No. 2
W"
Here are the holy apostles gone,
Alb-clad and amice-tired and stoled
With the sacred tippet and that alone,
Wherewith, when he waxeth overbold,
The foul fiend's throttle they take and hold ?
All must come to the selfsame bay;
Sons and servants, their daya are told:
The wind carries their like away'.
Where is he now that held the throne
Of Constantine with the hands of gold ?
And the King of France, o'er all kings known
For grace and worship that was extolled,
Who convents and churches manifold
Built for God's service ? ' In their day
What of the honor they had ? Behold,
The wind carries their like away.
Where are the champions every one,
The Dauphins, the counselors young and old ?
The barons of Salins, Dôl, Dijon,
Vienne, Grenoble? They all are cold.
Or take the folk under their banners enrolled, -
Pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, (hey!
How they fed of the fat, and the Alagon trolled ! ) —
The wind carries their like away.
ENVOI
Princes to death are all foretold,
Even as the humblest of their array:
Whether they sorrow or whether they scold,
The wind carries their like away.
BALLAD OF THE WOMEN OF PARIS
TO
HOUGH folk deem women young and old
Of Venice and Genoa well eno'
Favored with speech, both glib and bold,
To carry messages to and fro;
Savoyards, Florentines less or mo',
## p. 15406 (#354) ##########################################
15406
FRANÇOIS VILLON
Romans and Lombards though folk renown,-
I, at my peril, I say no:
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
The Naples women (so we are told)
Can school all comers in speech and show;
Prussians and Germans were still extolled
For pleasant prattle of friend and foe;
But hail they from Athens or Grand Cairo,
Castile or Hungary, black or brown,
Greeks or Egyptians, high or low,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
Switzers nor Bretons know how to scold,
Nor Provence nor Gascony women: lo!
Two fishfags in Paris the bridge that hold
Would slang them dumb in a minute or so.
Picardy, England, Lorraine, (heigho!
Enough of places have I set down ? )
Valenciennes, Calais, wherever you go,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
ENVOI
Prince, to the Paris ladies, I trow,
For pleasant parlance I yield the crown.
They may talk of Italians; but this I know,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
BALLAD THAT VILLON MADE AT THE REQUEST OF HIS
MOTHER, WHEREWITHAL TO DO HER HOMAGE
TO OUR LADY
L"
ADY of heaven, Regent of the earth,
Empress of all the infernal marshes fell,
Receive me, thy poor Christian, 'spite my dearth,
In the fair midst of thine elect to dwell;
Albeit my lack of grace I know full well:
For that thy grace, my Lady and my Queen,
Aboundeth more than all my misdemean,
Withouten which no soul of all that sigh
May merit heaven. 'Tis sooth I say, for e'en
In this belief. I will to live and die.
Say to thy Son I am his, — that by his birth
And death my sins be all redeemable;
## p. 15407 (#355) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15407
As Mary of Egypt's dole he changed to mirth,
And eke Theophilus, to whom befell
Quittance of thee, albeit (so men tell)
To the foul fiend he had contracted been.
Assoilzie me, that I may have no teen,
Maid that without breach of virginity
Didst bear our Lord that in the Host is seen.
In this belief I will to live and die.
A poor old wife I am, and little worth;
Nothing I know, nor letter aye could spell:
Where in the church to worship I fare forth,
I see heaven limned with harps and lutes, and hell
Where damned folk seethe in fire unquenchable.
One doth me fear, the other joy serene:
Grant I may have the joy, O Virgin clean,
To whom all sinners lift their hands on high,
Made whole in faith through thee their go-between.
In this belief I will to live and die.
ENVOI
Thou didst conceive, Princess most bright of sheen,
Jesus the Lord, that hath nor end nor mean,
Almighty, that, departing heaven's demesne
To succor us, put on our frailty,
Offering to death his sweet of youth and green:
Such as he is, our Lord he is, I ween!
In this belief I will to live and die.
LAY, OR RATHER ROUNDEL
D
EATH, of thy rigor I complain,
That hast my lady torn from me,
And wilt not yet contented be,
Save from me too all strength be ta’en,
For languishment of heart and brain.
What harm did she in life to thee,
Death ?
One heart we had betwixt us twain;
Which being dead, I too must dree
Death, or, like carven saints we see
In choir, sans life to live be fain,
Death!
[End of the Greater Testament. ]
## p. 15408 (#356) ##########################################
15408
FRANÇOIS VILLON
BALLAD OF VILLON IN PRISON
H
AVE pity, friends, have pity now, I pray,
If it so please you, at the least, on me!
I lie in fosse, not under holm or may,
In this duresse, wherein, alas! I dree
Ill fate, as God did thereanent decree.
Lasses and lovers, younglings manifold,
Dancers and montebanks, alert and bold,
Nimble as quarrel from a crossbow shot;
Singers, that troll as clear as bells of gold, -
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
Clerks, that go caroling the livelong day,
Scant-pursed, but glad and frank and full of glee;
Wandering at will along the broad highway,
Harebrained, perchance, but whit-whole too, perdie:
Lo! now I die, whilst that you absent be,
Song-singers, - when poor Villon's days are told,
You will sing psalms for him and candles hold;
Here light nor air nor levin enters not,
Where ramparts thick are round about him rolled.
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
Consider but his piteous array,
High and fair lords, of suit and service free,
That nor to king nor kaiser homage pay,
But straight from God in heaven hold your fee!
Come fast or feast, all days alike fasts he,
Whence are his teeth like rakes' teeth to behold;
No table hath he but the sheer black mold;
After dry bread (not manchets), pot on pot
They empty down his throat of water cold:
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
ENVOI
Princes and lords aforesaid, young and old,
Get me the King his letters sealed and scrolled,
And draw me from this dungeon; for, God wot,
Even swine, when one squeaks in the butcher's fold,
Flock around their fellow and do squeak and scold.
Till
you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
## p. 15409 (#357) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15409
THE EPITAPH IN BALLAD FORM THAT VILLON MADE FOR
HIMSELF AND HIS COMPANIONS, EXPECTING NO BETTER
THAN TO BE HANGED IN THEIR COMPANY
B
ROTHERS, that after us on life remain,
Harden your hearts against us not as stone;
For, if to pity us poor wights you're fain,
God shall the rather grant you benison.
You see us six, the gibbet hereupon:
As for the flesh that we too well have fed,
'Tis all devoured and rotted, shred by shred.
Let none make merry of our piteous case,
Whose crumbling bones the life long since hath Aled:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
Yea, we conjure you, look not with disdain,
Brothers, on us, though we to death were done
By justice. Well you know, the saving grain
Of sense springs not in every mother's son;
Commend us, therefore, now we're dead and gone,
To Christ, the Son of Mary's maidenhead,
That he leave not his grace on us to shed
And save us from the nether torture-place.
Let no one harry us,- forsooth, we're sped:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
We are whiles scoured and soddened of the rain,
And whiles burnt up and blacke
ed of the sun;
Corbies and pyets have our eyes out-ta’en,
And plucked our beard and hair out one by one.
Whether by night or day, rest have we none:
Now here, now there, as the wind shifts its stead,
We swing and creak and rattle overhead,
No thimble dinted like our bird-pecked face.
Brothers, have heed and shun the life we led :
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
ENVOI
Prince Jesus, over all empowered,
Let us not fall into the Place of Dread,
But all our reckoning with the Fiend efface.
Folk, mock us not that are forspent and dead:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace !
XXVI-964
## p. 15410 (#358) ##########################################
15410
FRANÇOIS VILLON
BALLAD OF THINGS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
F
LIES in the milk I know full well;
I know men by the clothes they wear;
I know the walnut by the shell;
I know the foul sky from the fair;
I know the pear-tree by the pear;
I know the worker from the drone,
And eke the good wheat from the tare:
I know all save myself alone.
I know the pourpoint by the fell,
And by his gown I know the frère;
Master by varlet I can spell;
Nuns by the veils that hide their hair;
I know the sharper and his snare,
And fools that fat on cates have grown;
Wines by the cask I can compare:
I know all save myself alone.
I know how horse from mule to tell;
I know the load that each can bear;
I know both Beatrice and Bell;
I know the hazards, odd and pair;
I know of visions in the air;
I know the power of Peter's throne,
And how misled Bohemians were:
I know all save myself alone.
ENVOI
Prince, I know all things; fat and spare,
Ruddy and pale, to me are known,
And Death that endeth all our care:
I know all save myself alone.
BALLAD AGAINST THOSE WHO MISSAY OF FRANCE
LET
ET him meet beasts that breathe out fiery rain,
Even as did Jason hard by Colchis town;
Or seven years changed into a beast remain,
Nebuchadnezzar-like, to earth bowed down;
Or suffer else such teen and mickle bale
As Helen's rape on Trojans did entail;
Or in Hell's marshes fallen let him fare
Like Tantalus and Proserpine, or bear
## p. 15411 (#359) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15411
A grievouser than Job his sufferance,
Prisoned and pent in Dædalus his snare,-
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
Four months within a marish let him plain,
Bittern-like, with the mud against his crown;
Or sell him to the Ottoman, to chain
And harness like an ox, the scurvy clown!
Or thirty years, like Maudlin, without veil
Or vesture, let him his misdeeds bewail;
Or with Narcissus death by drowning share;
Or die like Absalom, hanged by the hair;
Or Simon Magus, by his charms' mischance;
Or Judas, mad with horror and despair,-
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
If but Octavian's time might come again,
His molten gold should down his throat be thrown,
Or 'twixt two millstones he should grind for grain,
As did St. Victor; or I'd have him drown
Far out to sea, where help and breath should fail,
Like Jonah in the belly of the whale;
Let him be doomed the sunlight to forswear,
Juno her goods and Venus debonair,
And be of Mars oppressed to utterance,-
As was Antiochus the king, whilere, --
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
ENVOI
Prince, may winds bear him to the wastes of air,
Or to the mid-sea woods and sink him there;
Be all his hopes changed to desesperance:
For he deserves not any fortune fair
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
BALLAD OF THE DEBATE OF THE HEART AND BODY OF
VILLON
W**"That hold but by a thread for frailty
I hearI I,
;
I have nor force nor substance, all drained dry,
Since thee thus lonely and forlorn I see,
Like a poor cur, curled up all shiveringly. -
How comes it thus ? — Of thine unwise liesse. -
## p. 15412 (#360) ##########################################
15412
FRANÇOIS VILLON
What irks it thee? - I suffer the distress. -
Leave me in peace. - Why? – I will cast about. —
When will that be ? . When I'm past childishness. —
I say no more. - And I can do without.
What deemest thou? - To mend before I die. -
At thirty years ? —'Tis a mule's age, perdie. -
Is't childhood ? — Nay. -'Tis madness, then, doth ply
And grip thee? Where? — By the nape. - Seemeth me
Nothing I know? — Yes, fies in milk, maybe:
I
,
Thou canst tell black from white yet at a press. -
Is't all? - What words can all thy faults express ? -
If it's not enough, we'll have another bout. -
Thou'rt lost. — I'll make a fight for't none the less. —
I say no more. — And I can do without.
Dule have I, pain and misery thou thereby:
If thou wert some poor idiot, happily
Thou mightst have some excuse thy heart anigh.
Lo, foul and fair are all alike to thee.
Or harder is thy head than stone by sea,
Or more than honor likes thee this duresse.
Canst thou say aught in answer ? Come, confess. -
I shall be quit on't when I die, no doubt. -
God! what a comfort 'gainst a present stress!
I say no more. — And I can do without.
Whence comes this evil ? Surely, from on high:
When Saturn made me up my fardel, he
Put all these ills in. —'Tis a foolish lie:
Thou art Fate's master, yet its slave wilt be.
Thereof see Solomon his homily:
The wise, he says, no planets can oppress;
They and their influence own his mightiness. —
Nay, as they've made me, so shall it fall out.
What sayst thou ? — 'Tis the faith that I profess. –
I say no more. —And I can do without.
ENVOI
Wilt thou live long ? So God vouchsafe me, yes. —
Then must thou What ? Repent; forswear idlesse
And study — What? — The lore of righteousness.
I'll not forget. — Forsake the motley rout
And to amendment straightway thee address:
Delay not till thou come to hopelessness.
I say no more. —And I can do without,
## p. 15412 (#361) ##########################################
## p. 15412 (#362) ##########################################
## p. 15413 (#363) ##########################################
15413
VIRGIL
(B. C. 70–19)
BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON
CM
UBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, purest, sweetest, gentlest, best be-
loved among all poets since the dawn of civilization, was
Su. born at Andes, a village near Mantua. His birthplace, his
name, perhaps too his wealth of romantic imagination, may indicate
Keltic origin. At any rate, his father was a man of humble station,
some say a potter, who married his master's daughter, Magia. (This
name of Virgil's mother helped on the wild mediæval invention of
Virgil the magician. ) As Transpadanes, the family naturally shared
the general gratitude toward the great Julius, always their especial
champion, who in 49 B. C. conferred full Roman citizenship upon
the provincials. Virgil apparently never had personal relations with
Catullus, Calvus, and their brilliant group of young aristocrats and
anti-Cæsarian poets.
His education was not defective, certainly. He studied both at
Milan and in Rome. A doubtful tradition makes him the fellow-
student of Antony and Augustus. In a youthful poem, perhaps au-
thentic, he takes reluctant farewell of verse, when devoting himself
to philosophy as the pupil of the Epicurean sage Siron :-
« Begone, O Muses: ay, begone,- although
Sweet Muses; for we will the truth confess,
Sweet have ye been! And on my pages look
Ye yet again,– but modestly, nor oft. ”
The undertone of doubt in these words proved doubly prophetic.
Much in the tranquil Epicurean acceptance of life,- and much indeed
of Lucretius's grandest harmonies and large view of nature's eternal
pageant, - the Augustan poet-laureate always retained. Perhaps he
even envies that most fearless and lofty of atheistic philosophers:-
(Happy the man whose steadfast eye surveys
The whole world's truth, its hidden works and ways,-
Happy, who thus beneath his feet has thrown
All fears and fates, and Hell's insatiate moan! »
((Georgics, ii. 490-492, translation of F. W. H. Myers. )
## p. 15414 (#364) ##########################################
15414
VIRGIL
These lines are generally supposed to be a direct tribute to Lucre-
But Virgil's intensely religious and even mystical spirit clung
most anxiously to those two beliefs which Lucretius puts scornfully
behind him: the faith in all-wise, all-powerful Divine beings, and in
the soul's existence after death.
Virgil was certainly no untutored child of the soil, · like Burns.
Even more than his friend Horace, he everywhere reveals the lofti-
est refinement, and lifelong loving familiarity with the best in liter-
ature and art. He turns away, indeed, like Lucretius, and far more
heartily than worldly-minded Horace, from the splendor and the noisy
throng of clients in ministerial palaces, to seek refreshment on
nature's heart.
«Oh, happy beyond all happiness — did they
Their weal but know — those husbandmen obscure,
Whose life, deep hidden from strife of arms away,
The all-righteous earth and kind doth well secure.
What though for them no towering mansion pours
At early morning, forth of its haughty doors
And halls, a surge of courtiers untold,
Gaping on the rich portals, as they pass,
Fair with mosaic of tortoise-shell, the gold
Of broidered vestments and the Corinthian brass ?
“But they are at peace in life, in guile untaught,
And dowered with manifold riches. Theirs the ease
Of acres ample, and many a shady grot,
And slumber of sweetness under sheltering trees,
And living lakes, and the cool of Tempe's valley,
And the lowing of herds are theirs continually;
Theirs are the haunts of game on the wooded hill;
And theirs a hardy youth, unto humble ways
Attempered, and patient in their toil; and still
The old have honor of them, and the gods have praise.
Justice, methinks, when driven from earth away,
Left her last footprint among such as they. ”
('Georgics,' ii. 458-474, version of Harriet Waters Preston. )
There is abundant evidence here (as in the pictures of Carthaginian
splendor in Æneid,' Books i. and iv. ) that Virgil knew the luxury
of courts as thoroughly as he did the better beloved rural peace he
craves. The last phrase just quoted, furthermore, reminds us of the
melancholy tone, the vein of pathos, which all lovers of our poet
remember so well. There was much in the conditions of the time to
justify this; indeed, that sturdy patriot Livy, in his prelude, strikes a
more disconsolate note than any single passage in the epic.
## p. 15415 (#365) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15415
-
In truth, the best stage of the national life had already passed
with the age of the two Africani. The lordship of Italy fully at-
tained, Rome passed on to more fatal successes. She overthrew
Carthage and Corinth in a single year (146 B. C. ); but Cato was more
than half right,- the national character was rapidly undermined by
foreign wealth, and by culture too easily and swiftly won from
without, not bred steadily from within. Doubtless Ennius's historical
poem, or versified chronicle, if ever it shall come again to light, will
seem rugged and inartistic to us, as it certainly did to most of the
later Romans. Yet it was more truly an epic of manly freedom
and patriotic pride than was possible under the early empire.
The empire itself indeed was generally, and rightly, welcomed.
But it was —
“As he who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes. ”
was
on
Augustus's rule came as the only hope of peace and order after a
century full of civic strife, beginning with the death of the generous
far-sighted patrician radical, Tiberius Gracchus, under the clubs of an
aristocratic mob (133 B. C. ).
If ever conditions were such that the stanchest republican, who
a true and wise patriot as well, must welcome “the man
horseback," it was in the year after the great Julius's death (43 B. C. );
when the Roman State,--that is, the civilized world, -already rudely
shaken and drained of its life-blood by previous civil wars, now lay
utterly helpless, and rent asunder between the dissolute rapacity of
Mark Antony, and the impracticable imperious selfishness of wouldbe
reactionists like Cassius and Brutus. Rome and civilization seemed
about to sink together into that rift of civic strife, too wide for any
Curtius to close. It was at this juncture that the cold-hearted, long-
headed boy Octavian- heir to Julius's name and fortune, far more
than heir to his self-control and mastery of other men - came upon
the scene.
Pretending to side with the assassins of Julius Cæsar,
he presently threw himself into Antony's arms; perhaps because he
saw that Antony could more easily be first utilized and then dis-
patched.
The next dozen years were to cost the commonwealth much
bloodshed still, in war and peace; many of her noblest lives were
yet to be cut short by the soldier's or the bravo's sword: for we
can hardly set earlier than the decisive battle of Actium (31 B. C. ),
the end of the century of turmoil opened by the death of Tiberius
Gracchus under Nasica's bludgeon. Yet even so, the mighty emperor
Augustus could point to a reign of fully forty-five years, marked by
## p. 15416 (#366) ##########################################
15416
VIRGIL
are
prosperity and union within, and by foreign wars in the main suc-
cessful, when he passed on the firm-held sceptre to his unloved and
unloving kinsman, and took his own place beside Julius among the
deities of Rome. Did the august Augustus ever forget, as we
prone to do, his own identity with the dissolute stripling Octavianus
Cæsar, the murderer of his tutor Cicero? Through this long period,
- this cardinal half-century of the world's life, — the restoration of
civic order, the rebuilding of the city and especially of the temples,
the revival, so far as might be, of popular faith in the national gods,
the glorification of Rome (and of his own house) in art and literature,
were all purposes dear to Augustus's heart, all fused in the steady
central purpose of his life. In all these efforts, Virgil the poet was
as loyal and helpful as Agrippa and Mæcenas the soldier and diplo-
matist; and he met quite as generous appreciation as they, both from
his imperial master and from the Roman people.
Horace never forgot, nor ceased to be proud, that he had led his
battalion in the last hopeless struggle against the incoming despotism.
Nor did he ever wholly surrender his sturdy independence. Those
who love him best may well regret that his life fell in a time when
his genuine manliness and liberty-loving frankness must be so largely
hidden under the courtier's mask and cloak.
Virgil, on the contrary, more largely than any other great poet,
we evidently owe to the sunshine or perhaps more truly, to the
hot-house warmth - of imperial favor. The marvelous charm of his
verse, the exquisite commingling of clear-cut meaning and thousand-
fold haunting suggestion, is indeed the unique and inexplicable gift of
his genius. Yet his languid Theocritean mock-pastorals might have
perished with him, - at best he would probably have remained the
idle singer of a rather ignoble provincial life,— had Mæcenas not sum-
moned him before a far greater audience, and urged him on to more
ambitious themes.
Quite unlike Horace or any other Roman poet down to their
day, Virgil in his first undoubted utterance strikes the note of utmost
servility and adulation.
«Yea, for a god shall he be evermore unto me, and his altar
Often a tender lamb of our fold shall stain with his heart's blood ! »
cries the shepherd Tityrus in the first Eclogue. It is the voice of
Virgil himself, - one of the first to deify the half-reluctant Emperor.
The cause for gratitude was most inadequate. Virgil's little farm
by Mantua, wrongfully wrested from its loyal owner and bestowed
one of Octavian's veterans, had been tardily and reluctantly re-
stored. Moreover there is a tradition of a second expulsion, attended
with danger to the poet's life; and the urgent intercession of three
on
## p. 15417 (#367) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15417
powerful friends,- Varus, Gallus, and Pollio, - as well as Virgil's own
appeal at Rome to the dictator, were required to secure this act of
scanty justice (41 B. C. ). Indeed, some scholars doubt if Virgil ever
returned to his old home. Perhaps Augustus never lost sight of the
gifted and pliant youth whose value he promptly realized.
We cannot hope to find in this timid courtly poet the exultant
manliness and free stride of an Æschylus, an Ennius, or even of a
Dante, unbending in homeless exile, fearless of speech even under
imminent peril of death. More perhaps than any other artist, the
heroic poet needs to breathe the air of freedom. Virgil the man,
like his hero, is always conscious that his actual lot is, at best, but a
second choice. Æneas tells Dido:--
«If fate permitted me to shape my life
To my desire, and freely end my woes,
The precious remnant of my folk, and Troy,
I then would cherish. Priam's halls would rise;
With home-returning band I would have built
Again our citadel,- for vanquished men. ”
This note of mild regret for vanished hopes is so recurrent and con-
stant as to impress every listener at last. It is indeed the tone not
merely of the poet but of his whole race and generation. But sub-
mission to fate, the merging of the individual life in the larger and
more lasting current of destiny, is in all ages a peculiarly Roman
ideal. Perhaps his very limitations have helped Virgil to crystallize
into epic, more than any other artist has ever done, the whole
national life of so many centuries.
Honored and beloved though he was by all, Virgil's own earthly
life hardly seems to have been a happy one. His health was deli-
cate, his nature shy and sensitive, he had the bitterest misgivings as
to his ability to master the high themes assigned him; and his life
ends naturally with that unavailing appeal to his friends to destroy
the uncompleted and unsatisfying national epic on which so many
years of toil had been spent. But indeed the living Virgil is less
real to us than the stately shade, so gladly descried by the Floren-
tine pilgrim in the gloom of the Valley, the
(courteous Mantuan spirit,
Of whom the fame yet in the world endures,
And shall endure eternal as the world. ”
The ten brief pastorals known as the 'Bucolics' or 'Eclogues) were
published at Rome in 37 B. C. They are often mere paraphrases
from the more sincere Greek pastorals of the school of Theocritus.
>
## p. 15418 (#368) ##########################################
15418
VIRGIL
The shepherds' names are Greek; Sicily and Arcadia are often men-
tioned, but commingled with the scenery and life of Lombardy, or
again, with thinly veiled allusions to Roman politics! The allegory
is hopelessly confused with realism, and there is for the most part
no adequate or serious purpose in the poems. These affectionate or
abusive dialogues of Græco-Roman shepherd-courtiers, their responsive
songs or contests for some rustic prize, are, none the less, rich in
beautiful phrases and tender thoughts. Already the hexameter takes
a more delicate and varied cadence than Lucretius or Catullus could
give it. Even the imitation of the Greek originals, though recurrent,
is never slavish. It is, at its closest, such free, joyous, artistic trans-
lation as delights us in Shelley's Homeric Hymns. Some of these
poems date apparently from the earlier time of Virgil's obscurity.
Others allude to passing events in the years 41 to 37 B. C. The tenth
and latest is actually dedicated to Virgil's friend, the soldier-poet
Gallus,- who is a gallant but incongruous figure, lying under the
shadow of an Arcadian rock, among the Hamadryads and piping shep-
herds, Silenus, Pan, and all their company.
The most important among the Eclogues is the fourth, addressed
to Pollio, announcing the recent or approaching birth, in Pollio's
consulate, of a child who shall bring back the golden age. Professor
Sellar thinks the actual child alluded to was the daughter of Augus-
tus, the brilliant and infamous Julia. The imagery of the poem is
often astonishingly like that of the Hebrew prophets. That the wide-
spread expectation of a Messiah may have been known to the schol-
arly poet seems possible. Still there is no single touch in the poem
which points unmistakably to Isaiah's influence. Every image can be
paralleled in earlier Greek or Latin literature.
The next seven years of Virgil's life (37–30 B. C. ) were devoted
to the Georgics. The general purpose of these four books is the
revival of agriculture in Italy; or as Merivale and Conington agree to
put it, the “Glorification of Labor. ” Instead of Theocritus, Hesiod's
(Works and Days' was most largely influential here, though Lucretius's
large and majestic treatment of natural scenery has also been closely
studied. The four sections treat of tillage for grain, of tree culture,
of cattle breeding, and the care of bees. Mythological digressions are
gracefully introduced, the poetic and religious tone of the whole work
is most perfect and harmonious, and in general no serious didactic
purpose was ever more perfectly accomplished in delightful verse.
Virgil is now the complete master of the hexameter. Its alien ori-
gin, its inherent difficulty, are forgotten. There are many noble
and historic Latin words, even, which cannot be used in its frame.
So much the worse for them. The sway of this rhythm became for
centuries as tyrannous as the heroic couplet under Dryden and Pope.
(
## p. 15419 (#369) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15419
Well might Tennyson end his loyal greeting to the Mantuan with the
words:-
«Wielder of the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of man. ”
The fourth Georgic closes with the story of the Greek shepherd
Aristæus and his quest for bees. But Servius, the learned ancient
commentator, says of the poet Cornelius Gallus, mentioned several
times above: “He was so much the friend of Virgil, that the fourth
book of the Georgics, from the middle to the close, was taken up
with praise of him. This, at Augustus's bidding, the poet afterward
altered into the tale of Aristæus. ” The first part of this statement
is made quite probable by the Eclogue already outlined: the latter
is, it is to be feared, quite credible -- though not creditable, either
to patron or poet. Gallus's fall from favor and consequent suicide
occurred in 27 B. C. , so the earlier form of the poem must have been
in full circulation for years; yet no other trace of it survives save
this allusion. At present the fourth book opens with a
renewed
appeal to Mæcenas by name; and it closes with a half-dozen lines of
modest autobiographical tone. By the parallel allusions, however, in
this closing passage, to Augustus's victories in these same years, the
poet contrives to intimate a lofty claim for his own task and accom-
plishment; perhaps as bold a claim as Horace's “monument more
lasting than bronze. » Indeed, we are faintly reminded of Pindar's
proud greeting to Hiero at the close of the first Olympian.
As a rule, however, the allusions to Augustus, and also to Mæce-
nas, in the Georgics, voice the humility and adulation of the courtier.
Mæcenas's patronage is the poet's chief claim to honor or happiness.
“Cæsar” is the especial care of the gods, among whom he is to take
his place. This ascription of divinity to Julius and Augustus is par-
ticularly repugnant to our instincts. Full sincerity in these matters
can hardly claim for our poet. We could wish Virgil might
have heard Tiberius's calm words: “I, conscript Fathers, call you to
witness that I am but a mortal, and am performing human duties,
and consider it enough if I fill the foremost place. ” Perhaps in per-
fect freedom of utterance, Virgil would have confessed that only the
imperial task of keeping a world in order seemed to him divine. We
may recall that Cicero's popular orations, and Horace's public odes,
are full of orthodox piety; but the familiar satires and epistles of
the one, the private letters of the other, utterly ignore the divinities
of the folk! In Virgil's case we have only his poems, however; and
they indicate that the poet, if not the man, made a lifelong effort,
at least, to acquire full belief in that overcrowded Græco-Roman pan-
theon wherein every generation sets up new figures, - whether dead
we
## p. 15420 (#370) ##########################################
15420
VIRGIL
rulers, vague abstractions like Faith, Honor, Necessity, or grotesque
special guardians, from Roma herself down to Volutina the goddess
of corn-husks! Much of allegorical meaning or poetic beauty he him-
self elicited from the faded forms of ancestral belief. Moreover, the
patriotic poet is not an analytical critic nor a radical. His task is
not to tear down whatever is traditional, popular, conservative, but
to revive, complete, and beautify it.
These questions cannot be separated from any account of the
great national epic, the Æneid, to which Virgil devoted the remain-
ing years of his life (30–19 B. C. ). The tale of the lonely Trojan
survivor, Venus's son, escaping from the doomed city, and reaching
Italy after world-wide wanderings, had been made familiar by poets
and popular tradition for centuries. The direct descent of the Julii
from this demigod Æneas was not to be questioned. A courtly
national epic could build on no other foundation than this. The
wonder is, that even under these cramping conditions the poet rose
to the full dignity of his true theme. Larger than imperial patron
or mythical ancestral hero, there marches through the epic the
Roman people itself,— that rude martial clan, that strides ever on
and on to the lordship of Latium, of Italy, of the Mediterranean, of
the civilized world!
Even if we be inclined to regret that Virgil employed again the
divine machinery, already familiar from Homer, to set his action in
movement, we must all feel the noble scope of the long prophecy
uttered by Jupiter early in the poem.
Here Æneas becomes a mere
link in the mighty chain. He is not even to be victorious nor long-
lived in Italy. He shall reign in his own city for three years, his
son for thirty, their Alban posterity through three centuries, – the
younger Romans forever.
Again, even the tragedy of Dido's approaching death is forgotten
in the memory of an infinitely grander drama, when from her dying
lips, as an imprecation on her faithless lover, comes the prophecy of
a deadly scourge for his descendants, destined to arise from her line,
and more and more boldly the figure of Hannibal shapes itself in her
vision.
Perhaps the most effective passage to be cited here, however, is
the apostrophe of Anchises in the underworld to his descendants :
«Others may mold more deftly the breathing bronze, I concede it,
Others out of the marble the living features will summon;
They shall surpass us in pleading of causes, delineate better
Motions of heavenly bodies, and tell of the stars and their risings.
Thou, O Roman, remember to curb with thy empire the peoples.
These thine arts shall be, and of peace to impose the conditions,
Sparing them that yield, but quelling in battle the haughty. ”
## p. 15421 (#371) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15421
Though uncompleted in many details, the Æneid is no fragment-
ary work. Its whole plan lies clear before the reader, all the salient
episodes are completely worked out. The after-world may read it by
preference in parts, and even the poet himself set the fashion in his
own lifetime. We could well spare, in truth, some of the rather petty
and wearisome battle scenes in the later books; and in general, the
Italian episodes can no longer interest us as they may have done
the original auditors. Yet it is a pity that such stately rigures as
royal Evander and the maiden Camilla should ever become unfamil-
iar. The latter seems to have appealed especially to Francesca's
grim Tuscan poet, and she is the first of Virgil's characters named
in the Commedia. Upon the whole, however, the sack of Troy, the
loves of Dido and Æneas, and the pageant of future Roman heroes,
defiling like Banquo's posterity before Æneas's eyes, will doubtless
always hold the supreme place in the hearts of Virgil's lovers. Per-
haps this superiority of the part over the whole is inevitable in any
poem of ten thousand verses. Certainly in this case we are justified,
since the poet himself selected these three books (ii. , iv. , vi. ) to read
in Augustus's presence.
Professor Sellar, in his copious study of Virgil, is too rarely epi-
grammatic; but he makes in a single sentence a striking antithesis,
calling Virgil perhaps the most imitative, yet one of the most origi-
nal, among the great classic poets. This suggests a few words upon
the striking position held by Virgil between the two most independ-
ent and creative of all poets, Homer and Dante.
It was apparently a general feeling among the Greeks, and espe-
cially with the Romans, that a thought once ideally well uttered, a
phrase rightly turned, could no longer be improved, but became in
large degree common property, belonging at last to him who could
set it in its fittest association. This high privilege is used above all
by Virgil. He borrows royally from nearly every older master of
style. Yet the result, if a mosaic, at least remains clear, beautiful,
even harmonious, in its general design and effect. His philosophic
and antiquarian lore, again, is much more completely fused into pure
and limpid poetry than Milton's similar treasures in Paradise Lost. '
Virgil's debt to Homer is especially heavy, and includes much
that essential, even, in the main framework of the plot. Of course
there is no reproach of “plagiarism” in this statement. Virgil's
audience was perhaps absolutely more familiar with Greek poetry
than with Latin. Horace actually began his poetical career with
Greek verses, as Dante and Petrarch did with Latin, — but sensibly
reverted to his own speech. A Roman gentleman's son went to
Athens as naturally as we go to college, to finish his education,
which had usually been begun by a Greek tutor, slave or free. The
## p. 15422 (#372) ##########################################
15422
VIRGIL
»
striking confession in the oration for the poet Archias will be re-
membered: «For if any one supposes less fame is acquired throug
Greek poetry than through Latin, he is greatly in error; since Greek
is read among nearly all nations, whereas Latin is confined within
our own rather narrow boundaries. ”
When Virgil, then, in his general plot, his incidents, his scenery,
his similes, constantly follows closely in Homer's footsteps, it can
only be regarded as a loyal acknowledgment of his supremacy.
often reminds us intentionally that his hero is retracing the route of
Odysseus: as, for instance, Æneas picks up on the Sicilian shore a
Greek of the Ithacan crew, left behind in their hasty flight from the
Cyclops's cave a few weeks before; and he even catches a terrified
glimpse of the blinded ogre Polyphemus himself. When the Trojan
wanderer hurries by the Sirens' shore or Circe's isle without pausing,
it may well be interpreted as a confession of Homer's unapproachable
mastery there. In'the Virgilian account of Troy's downfall, such a
verse as
« The final day, the inevitable hour
Of Troy is come! )
is clearly an echo of Hector's foreboding -
« The day shall come when sacred Troy shall perish. ”
In the seventh year of his wanderings Æneas comes unexpectedly
upon Andromache, in her Grecian home of exile. She faints at the
sight, and the whole interview is saddened with bitter memories. In
the scene of farewell, Andromache's tenderest words are addressed
to the boy Ascanius, cousin of her own son by Hector: that son who
was murdered in the sack of Troy.
“O sole surviving image of my boy
Astyanax! Such eyes, such hands, had he,
Such features; and his budding youth would just
Have equaled thine in years. ”
Now, Virgil does not feel that the pathos of these words needs
the slightest hint of explanation: and rightly; for every Roman
reader had present before him in imagination the immortal group of
Hector with his wife and child, from the parting scene in Iliad vi.
Virgil often — but not always — justifies his claim to what he has
borrowed. Thus the description of Achilles's shield in the Iliad is a
beautiful series of idyllic pictures, but they form a mere digression
and interruption, while the stage waits; whereas Virgil's genius has
filled Æneas's shield with some of the most striking and noble scenes
in Roman story. So the idea of taking his hero to the underworld is
## p. 15423 (#373) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15423
frankly borrowed from the Odyssey; but here again the ghostly
array of future Roman heroes is wholly Virgil's own addition. To
be sure, the general superiority of this grand Augustan picture of the
Inferno to the mere pallid replica of earthly life offered us in the
Greek poem, is largely due to the influence of Plato's splendid vis-
ions and noble philosophy. Still we may say in general that Virgil
never merely borrows,- and at the worst he is always the most inter-
esting of translators.
Dante's reasons for taking Virgil as his guide cannot be adequately
discussed here. Above all else, indeed, the belief in the empire, in a
supreme temporal power as a necessity to the orderly government of
the world, glowed far more fiercely, as a lifelong unattained desire,
in Dante's homeless heart, than in the more contented breast of the
poet who could see Augustus daily in the flesh. This very descent
of Æneas to Hades, just mentioned, suggested many details to Dante.
The later poet is indeed too loyal in saying that he learned from his
master “the fair style which has won him honor. ” The style, like
the metre, of Dante, is very remote from the more sweeping cadences
of the Latin epic; and it owes astonishingly little to any master.
But next only to Virgil's own poems (as Mr. Myers has remarked),
the Inferno) and Purgatorio' will help us to an adequate apprecia-
tion of the Roman poet.
This peculiar position of Virgil between two of the world's great-
est poets, — who never knew each other,- is one of his many claims
to our tender regard. The general opinion agrees with Mr. Norton's
statement on an earlier page, that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare
stand alone. Each belongs to the world, not to a nation; for each in
a large sense created an ideal world of art. In his own class, how-
ever, as a poet in whose work a great nation's life, at least, has been
worthily typified and interpreted, the Roman Virgil will doubtless
long maintain the foremost position; perhaps until our own freer and
fuller life shall deserve, and receive, an adequate artistic expression
in epic.
Wirrian Cranston Lawion,
.
NOTE
a
It is impossible to cull, even, out of the countless loving tributes
to Virgil's genius; extending from Propertius's prophecy of a master-
piece to surpass the Iliad, to the eager cry of affection uttered in old
age by the last laureate, in whom so many of our poet's traits were
repeated. Not only as a mage, but as “prophet of the Gentiles,” he
## p. 15424 (#374) ##########################################
15424
VIRGIL
(
>
was honored, all but sainted, in the Middle Ages. He has never
been a lost author. Indeed, it is almost literally true, that had all
his manuscripts vanished, Virgil's poems could have been recovered
entire from the citations in later works of antiquity. There is, how-
ever, an abundance of MSS. , even those illustrated by drawings, be-
ginning in the fourth or fifth century.
Perhaps the one indispensable edition to-day is Conington's, in
three volumes in the Bibliotheca Classica, especially since the edi-
tor's generous taste has been reinforced by the more minute erudition
of Nettleship. The latter is also the authority on Ancient Lives
of Virgil' (Oxford, 1879). The ancient Virgilian commentators alone
make a small library; and Servius, especially, is more readable and
valuable than most modern editions.
Sellar's volume on Virgil in his (Roman Poets is diffuse but ex-
cellent. The most appreciative brief essay is by F. W. H. Myers, in
his book Essays, Classical. From these writers, or from Tyrrell's
'Latin Poetry,' abundant further references will be obtained. The
French have a high appreciation of this first Romantic poet. Men-
tion of Sainte-Beuve's early volume, and Boissier's delightful work,
must suffice here. Comparetti's Virgil in the Middle Ages' opens
a curious chapter of popular superstition.
Much of Virgil's greatest charm evaporates in any transfer to alien
speech.
He is, like all allusive artists, extremely difficult to translate
at all; and no version can be satisfying to the classical critic. Long-
fellow has experimented in hexameter on one or two Eclogues. Miss
Preston's "Georgics) have a very free rhythm, and far more of the
Virgilian charm than any other version. Among translators of the
Æneid, Conington again claims the first place, with two notable
renderings. We must protest against the brisk trot of “The stag
at eve” when forced upon the stately Roman Muse, yet the sense
is wonderfully well packed in. His prose rendering, again, is by no
means prosily literal; and for many a famous phrase it almost
achieves the impossible. Countless other versions there are, before
and since Dryden's; but no accepted favorite. Morris's skillful per-
formance disappointed his (and Virgil's) admirers. It is generally felt
that the method of the translator and the spirit of the original are
somewhat at variance. The version of Sir Charles Bowen, cited
largely below, has much of the Virgilian spirit and grace; and is
also an interesting experiment metrically, lacking only the last syl-
lable of the dactylic line.
Every lover of literature will complete this catalogue for himself.
The essayist desires to acknowledge especially his constant debt, here
and elsewhere, to Schanz, and also to Von Christ (in the Handbuch
der Alterthumswissenschaft').
But where is the doughty Charlemaine?
## p. 15405 (#353) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15405
BALLAD OF OLD-TIME LORDS
No. 2
W"
Here are the holy apostles gone,
Alb-clad and amice-tired and stoled
With the sacred tippet and that alone,
Wherewith, when he waxeth overbold,
The foul fiend's throttle they take and hold ?
All must come to the selfsame bay;
Sons and servants, their daya are told:
The wind carries their like away'.
Where is he now that held the throne
Of Constantine with the hands of gold ?
And the King of France, o'er all kings known
For grace and worship that was extolled,
Who convents and churches manifold
Built for God's service ? ' In their day
What of the honor they had ? Behold,
The wind carries their like away.
Where are the champions every one,
The Dauphins, the counselors young and old ?
The barons of Salins, Dôl, Dijon,
Vienne, Grenoble? They all are cold.
Or take the folk under their banners enrolled, -
Pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, (hey!
How they fed of the fat, and the Alagon trolled ! ) —
The wind carries their like away.
ENVOI
Princes to death are all foretold,
Even as the humblest of their array:
Whether they sorrow or whether they scold,
The wind carries their like away.
BALLAD OF THE WOMEN OF PARIS
TO
HOUGH folk deem women young and old
Of Venice and Genoa well eno'
Favored with speech, both glib and bold,
To carry messages to and fro;
Savoyards, Florentines less or mo',
## p. 15406 (#354) ##########################################
15406
FRANÇOIS VILLON
Romans and Lombards though folk renown,-
I, at my peril, I say no:
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
The Naples women (so we are told)
Can school all comers in speech and show;
Prussians and Germans were still extolled
For pleasant prattle of friend and foe;
But hail they from Athens or Grand Cairo,
Castile or Hungary, black or brown,
Greeks or Egyptians, high or low,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
Switzers nor Bretons know how to scold,
Nor Provence nor Gascony women: lo!
Two fishfags in Paris the bridge that hold
Would slang them dumb in a minute or so.
Picardy, England, Lorraine, (heigho!
Enough of places have I set down ? )
Valenciennes, Calais, wherever you go,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
ENVOI
Prince, to the Paris ladies, I trow,
For pleasant parlance I yield the crown.
They may talk of Italians; but this I know,
There's no right speech out of Paris town.
BALLAD THAT VILLON MADE AT THE REQUEST OF HIS
MOTHER, WHEREWITHAL TO DO HER HOMAGE
TO OUR LADY
L"
ADY of heaven, Regent of the earth,
Empress of all the infernal marshes fell,
Receive me, thy poor Christian, 'spite my dearth,
In the fair midst of thine elect to dwell;
Albeit my lack of grace I know full well:
For that thy grace, my Lady and my Queen,
Aboundeth more than all my misdemean,
Withouten which no soul of all that sigh
May merit heaven. 'Tis sooth I say, for e'en
In this belief. I will to live and die.
Say to thy Son I am his, — that by his birth
And death my sins be all redeemable;
## p. 15407 (#355) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15407
As Mary of Egypt's dole he changed to mirth,
And eke Theophilus, to whom befell
Quittance of thee, albeit (so men tell)
To the foul fiend he had contracted been.
Assoilzie me, that I may have no teen,
Maid that without breach of virginity
Didst bear our Lord that in the Host is seen.
In this belief I will to live and die.
A poor old wife I am, and little worth;
Nothing I know, nor letter aye could spell:
Where in the church to worship I fare forth,
I see heaven limned with harps and lutes, and hell
Where damned folk seethe in fire unquenchable.
One doth me fear, the other joy serene:
Grant I may have the joy, O Virgin clean,
To whom all sinners lift their hands on high,
Made whole in faith through thee their go-between.
In this belief I will to live and die.
ENVOI
Thou didst conceive, Princess most bright of sheen,
Jesus the Lord, that hath nor end nor mean,
Almighty, that, departing heaven's demesne
To succor us, put on our frailty,
Offering to death his sweet of youth and green:
Such as he is, our Lord he is, I ween!
In this belief I will to live and die.
LAY, OR RATHER ROUNDEL
D
EATH, of thy rigor I complain,
That hast my lady torn from me,
And wilt not yet contented be,
Save from me too all strength be ta’en,
For languishment of heart and brain.
What harm did she in life to thee,
Death ?
One heart we had betwixt us twain;
Which being dead, I too must dree
Death, or, like carven saints we see
In choir, sans life to live be fain,
Death!
[End of the Greater Testament. ]
## p. 15408 (#356) ##########################################
15408
FRANÇOIS VILLON
BALLAD OF VILLON IN PRISON
H
AVE pity, friends, have pity now, I pray,
If it so please you, at the least, on me!
I lie in fosse, not under holm or may,
In this duresse, wherein, alas! I dree
Ill fate, as God did thereanent decree.
Lasses and lovers, younglings manifold,
Dancers and montebanks, alert and bold,
Nimble as quarrel from a crossbow shot;
Singers, that troll as clear as bells of gold, -
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
Clerks, that go caroling the livelong day,
Scant-pursed, but glad and frank and full of glee;
Wandering at will along the broad highway,
Harebrained, perchance, but whit-whole too, perdie:
Lo! now I die, whilst that you absent be,
Song-singers, - when poor Villon's days are told,
You will sing psalms for him and candles hold;
Here light nor air nor levin enters not,
Where ramparts thick are round about him rolled.
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
Consider but his piteous array,
High and fair lords, of suit and service free,
That nor to king nor kaiser homage pay,
But straight from God in heaven hold your fee!
Come fast or feast, all days alike fasts he,
Whence are his teeth like rakes' teeth to behold;
No table hath he but the sheer black mold;
After dry bread (not manchets), pot on pot
They empty down his throat of water cold:
Will you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
ENVOI
Princes and lords aforesaid, young and old,
Get me the King his letters sealed and scrolled,
And draw me from this dungeon; for, God wot,
Even swine, when one squeaks in the butcher's fold,
Flock around their fellow and do squeak and scold.
Till
you all leave poor Villon here to rot?
## p. 15409 (#357) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15409
THE EPITAPH IN BALLAD FORM THAT VILLON MADE FOR
HIMSELF AND HIS COMPANIONS, EXPECTING NO BETTER
THAN TO BE HANGED IN THEIR COMPANY
B
ROTHERS, that after us on life remain,
Harden your hearts against us not as stone;
For, if to pity us poor wights you're fain,
God shall the rather grant you benison.
You see us six, the gibbet hereupon:
As for the flesh that we too well have fed,
'Tis all devoured and rotted, shred by shred.
Let none make merry of our piteous case,
Whose crumbling bones the life long since hath Aled:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
Yea, we conjure you, look not with disdain,
Brothers, on us, though we to death were done
By justice. Well you know, the saving grain
Of sense springs not in every mother's son;
Commend us, therefore, now we're dead and gone,
To Christ, the Son of Mary's maidenhead,
That he leave not his grace on us to shed
And save us from the nether torture-place.
Let no one harry us,- forsooth, we're sped:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
We are whiles scoured and soddened of the rain,
And whiles burnt up and blacke
ed of the sun;
Corbies and pyets have our eyes out-ta’en,
And plucked our beard and hair out one by one.
Whether by night or day, rest have we none:
Now here, now there, as the wind shifts its stead,
We swing and creak and rattle overhead,
No thimble dinted like our bird-pecked face.
Brothers, have heed and shun the life we led :
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace!
ENVOI
Prince Jesus, over all empowered,
Let us not fall into the Place of Dread,
But all our reckoning with the Fiend efface.
Folk, mock us not that are forspent and dead:
The rather pray, God grant us of his grace !
XXVI-964
## p. 15410 (#358) ##########################################
15410
FRANÇOIS VILLON
BALLAD OF THINGS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
F
LIES in the milk I know full well;
I know men by the clothes they wear;
I know the walnut by the shell;
I know the foul sky from the fair;
I know the pear-tree by the pear;
I know the worker from the drone,
And eke the good wheat from the tare:
I know all save myself alone.
I know the pourpoint by the fell,
And by his gown I know the frère;
Master by varlet I can spell;
Nuns by the veils that hide their hair;
I know the sharper and his snare,
And fools that fat on cates have grown;
Wines by the cask I can compare:
I know all save myself alone.
I know how horse from mule to tell;
I know the load that each can bear;
I know both Beatrice and Bell;
I know the hazards, odd and pair;
I know of visions in the air;
I know the power of Peter's throne,
And how misled Bohemians were:
I know all save myself alone.
ENVOI
Prince, I know all things; fat and spare,
Ruddy and pale, to me are known,
And Death that endeth all our care:
I know all save myself alone.
BALLAD AGAINST THOSE WHO MISSAY OF FRANCE
LET
ET him meet beasts that breathe out fiery rain,
Even as did Jason hard by Colchis town;
Or seven years changed into a beast remain,
Nebuchadnezzar-like, to earth bowed down;
Or suffer else such teen and mickle bale
As Helen's rape on Trojans did entail;
Or in Hell's marshes fallen let him fare
Like Tantalus and Proserpine, or bear
## p. 15411 (#359) ##########################################
FRANÇOIS VILLON
15411
A grievouser than Job his sufferance,
Prisoned and pent in Dædalus his snare,-
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
Four months within a marish let him plain,
Bittern-like, with the mud against his crown;
Or sell him to the Ottoman, to chain
And harness like an ox, the scurvy clown!
Or thirty years, like Maudlin, without veil
Or vesture, let him his misdeeds bewail;
Or with Narcissus death by drowning share;
Or die like Absalom, hanged by the hair;
Or Simon Magus, by his charms' mischance;
Or Judas, mad with horror and despair,-
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
If but Octavian's time might come again,
His molten gold should down his throat be thrown,
Or 'twixt two millstones he should grind for grain,
As did St. Victor; or I'd have him drown
Far out to sea, where help and breath should fail,
Like Jonah in the belly of the whale;
Let him be doomed the sunlight to forswear,
Juno her goods and Venus debonair,
And be of Mars oppressed to utterance,-
As was Antiochus the king, whilere, --
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
ENVOI
Prince, may winds bear him to the wastes of air,
Or to the mid-sea woods and sink him there;
Be all his hopes changed to desesperance:
For he deserves not any fortune fair
Who would wish ill unto the realm of France.
BALLAD OF THE DEBATE OF THE HEART AND BODY OF
VILLON
W**"That hold but by a thread for frailty
I hearI I,
;
I have nor force nor substance, all drained dry,
Since thee thus lonely and forlorn I see,
Like a poor cur, curled up all shiveringly. -
How comes it thus ? — Of thine unwise liesse. -
## p. 15412 (#360) ##########################################
15412
FRANÇOIS VILLON
What irks it thee? - I suffer the distress. -
Leave me in peace. - Why? – I will cast about. —
When will that be ? . When I'm past childishness. —
I say no more. - And I can do without.
What deemest thou? - To mend before I die. -
At thirty years ? —'Tis a mule's age, perdie. -
Is't childhood ? — Nay. -'Tis madness, then, doth ply
And grip thee? Where? — By the nape. - Seemeth me
Nothing I know? — Yes, fies in milk, maybe:
I
,
Thou canst tell black from white yet at a press. -
Is't all? - What words can all thy faults express ? -
If it's not enough, we'll have another bout. -
Thou'rt lost. — I'll make a fight for't none the less. —
I say no more. — And I can do without.
Dule have I, pain and misery thou thereby:
If thou wert some poor idiot, happily
Thou mightst have some excuse thy heart anigh.
Lo, foul and fair are all alike to thee.
Or harder is thy head than stone by sea,
Or more than honor likes thee this duresse.
Canst thou say aught in answer ? Come, confess. -
I shall be quit on't when I die, no doubt. -
God! what a comfort 'gainst a present stress!
I say no more. — And I can do without.
Whence comes this evil ? Surely, from on high:
When Saturn made me up my fardel, he
Put all these ills in. —'Tis a foolish lie:
Thou art Fate's master, yet its slave wilt be.
Thereof see Solomon his homily:
The wise, he says, no planets can oppress;
They and their influence own his mightiness. —
Nay, as they've made me, so shall it fall out.
What sayst thou ? — 'Tis the faith that I profess. –
I say no more. —And I can do without.
ENVOI
Wilt thou live long ? So God vouchsafe me, yes. —
Then must thou What ? Repent; forswear idlesse
And study — What? — The lore of righteousness.
I'll not forget. — Forsake the motley rout
And to amendment straightway thee address:
Delay not till thou come to hopelessness.
I say no more. —And I can do without,
## p. 15412 (#361) ##########################################
## p. 15412 (#362) ##########################################
## p. 15413 (#363) ##########################################
15413
VIRGIL
(B. C. 70–19)
BY WILLIAM CRANSTON LAWTON
CM
UBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, purest, sweetest, gentlest, best be-
loved among all poets since the dawn of civilization, was
Su. born at Andes, a village near Mantua. His birthplace, his
name, perhaps too his wealth of romantic imagination, may indicate
Keltic origin. At any rate, his father was a man of humble station,
some say a potter, who married his master's daughter, Magia. (This
name of Virgil's mother helped on the wild mediæval invention of
Virgil the magician. ) As Transpadanes, the family naturally shared
the general gratitude toward the great Julius, always their especial
champion, who in 49 B. C. conferred full Roman citizenship upon
the provincials. Virgil apparently never had personal relations with
Catullus, Calvus, and their brilliant group of young aristocrats and
anti-Cæsarian poets.
His education was not defective, certainly. He studied both at
Milan and in Rome. A doubtful tradition makes him the fellow-
student of Antony and Augustus. In a youthful poem, perhaps au-
thentic, he takes reluctant farewell of verse, when devoting himself
to philosophy as the pupil of the Epicurean sage Siron :-
« Begone, O Muses: ay, begone,- although
Sweet Muses; for we will the truth confess,
Sweet have ye been! And on my pages look
Ye yet again,– but modestly, nor oft. ”
The undertone of doubt in these words proved doubly prophetic.
Much in the tranquil Epicurean acceptance of life,- and much indeed
of Lucretius's grandest harmonies and large view of nature's eternal
pageant, - the Augustan poet-laureate always retained. Perhaps he
even envies that most fearless and lofty of atheistic philosophers:-
(Happy the man whose steadfast eye surveys
The whole world's truth, its hidden works and ways,-
Happy, who thus beneath his feet has thrown
All fears and fates, and Hell's insatiate moan! »
((Georgics, ii. 490-492, translation of F. W. H. Myers. )
## p. 15414 (#364) ##########################################
15414
VIRGIL
These lines are generally supposed to be a direct tribute to Lucre-
But Virgil's intensely religious and even mystical spirit clung
most anxiously to those two beliefs which Lucretius puts scornfully
behind him: the faith in all-wise, all-powerful Divine beings, and in
the soul's existence after death.
Virgil was certainly no untutored child of the soil, · like Burns.
Even more than his friend Horace, he everywhere reveals the lofti-
est refinement, and lifelong loving familiarity with the best in liter-
ature and art. He turns away, indeed, like Lucretius, and far more
heartily than worldly-minded Horace, from the splendor and the noisy
throng of clients in ministerial palaces, to seek refreshment on
nature's heart.
«Oh, happy beyond all happiness — did they
Their weal but know — those husbandmen obscure,
Whose life, deep hidden from strife of arms away,
The all-righteous earth and kind doth well secure.
What though for them no towering mansion pours
At early morning, forth of its haughty doors
And halls, a surge of courtiers untold,
Gaping on the rich portals, as they pass,
Fair with mosaic of tortoise-shell, the gold
Of broidered vestments and the Corinthian brass ?
“But they are at peace in life, in guile untaught,
And dowered with manifold riches. Theirs the ease
Of acres ample, and many a shady grot,
And slumber of sweetness under sheltering trees,
And living lakes, and the cool of Tempe's valley,
And the lowing of herds are theirs continually;
Theirs are the haunts of game on the wooded hill;
And theirs a hardy youth, unto humble ways
Attempered, and patient in their toil; and still
The old have honor of them, and the gods have praise.
Justice, methinks, when driven from earth away,
Left her last footprint among such as they. ”
('Georgics,' ii. 458-474, version of Harriet Waters Preston. )
There is abundant evidence here (as in the pictures of Carthaginian
splendor in Æneid,' Books i. and iv. ) that Virgil knew the luxury
of courts as thoroughly as he did the better beloved rural peace he
craves. The last phrase just quoted, furthermore, reminds us of the
melancholy tone, the vein of pathos, which all lovers of our poet
remember so well. There was much in the conditions of the time to
justify this; indeed, that sturdy patriot Livy, in his prelude, strikes a
more disconsolate note than any single passage in the epic.
## p. 15415 (#365) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15415
-
In truth, the best stage of the national life had already passed
with the age of the two Africani. The lordship of Italy fully at-
tained, Rome passed on to more fatal successes. She overthrew
Carthage and Corinth in a single year (146 B. C. ); but Cato was more
than half right,- the national character was rapidly undermined by
foreign wealth, and by culture too easily and swiftly won from
without, not bred steadily from within. Doubtless Ennius's historical
poem, or versified chronicle, if ever it shall come again to light, will
seem rugged and inartistic to us, as it certainly did to most of the
later Romans. Yet it was more truly an epic of manly freedom
and patriotic pride than was possible under the early empire.
The empire itself indeed was generally, and rightly, welcomed.
But it was —
“As he who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes. ”
was
on
Augustus's rule came as the only hope of peace and order after a
century full of civic strife, beginning with the death of the generous
far-sighted patrician radical, Tiberius Gracchus, under the clubs of an
aristocratic mob (133 B. C. ).
If ever conditions were such that the stanchest republican, who
a true and wise patriot as well, must welcome “the man
horseback," it was in the year after the great Julius's death (43 B. C. );
when the Roman State,--that is, the civilized world, -already rudely
shaken and drained of its life-blood by previous civil wars, now lay
utterly helpless, and rent asunder between the dissolute rapacity of
Mark Antony, and the impracticable imperious selfishness of wouldbe
reactionists like Cassius and Brutus. Rome and civilization seemed
about to sink together into that rift of civic strife, too wide for any
Curtius to close. It was at this juncture that the cold-hearted, long-
headed boy Octavian- heir to Julius's name and fortune, far more
than heir to his self-control and mastery of other men - came upon
the scene.
Pretending to side with the assassins of Julius Cæsar,
he presently threw himself into Antony's arms; perhaps because he
saw that Antony could more easily be first utilized and then dis-
patched.
The next dozen years were to cost the commonwealth much
bloodshed still, in war and peace; many of her noblest lives were
yet to be cut short by the soldier's or the bravo's sword: for we
can hardly set earlier than the decisive battle of Actium (31 B. C. ),
the end of the century of turmoil opened by the death of Tiberius
Gracchus under Nasica's bludgeon. Yet even so, the mighty emperor
Augustus could point to a reign of fully forty-five years, marked by
## p. 15416 (#366) ##########################################
15416
VIRGIL
are
prosperity and union within, and by foreign wars in the main suc-
cessful, when he passed on the firm-held sceptre to his unloved and
unloving kinsman, and took his own place beside Julius among the
deities of Rome. Did the august Augustus ever forget, as we
prone to do, his own identity with the dissolute stripling Octavianus
Cæsar, the murderer of his tutor Cicero? Through this long period,
- this cardinal half-century of the world's life, — the restoration of
civic order, the rebuilding of the city and especially of the temples,
the revival, so far as might be, of popular faith in the national gods,
the glorification of Rome (and of his own house) in art and literature,
were all purposes dear to Augustus's heart, all fused in the steady
central purpose of his life. In all these efforts, Virgil the poet was
as loyal and helpful as Agrippa and Mæcenas the soldier and diplo-
matist; and he met quite as generous appreciation as they, both from
his imperial master and from the Roman people.
Horace never forgot, nor ceased to be proud, that he had led his
battalion in the last hopeless struggle against the incoming despotism.
Nor did he ever wholly surrender his sturdy independence. Those
who love him best may well regret that his life fell in a time when
his genuine manliness and liberty-loving frankness must be so largely
hidden under the courtier's mask and cloak.
Virgil, on the contrary, more largely than any other great poet,
we evidently owe to the sunshine or perhaps more truly, to the
hot-house warmth - of imperial favor. The marvelous charm of his
verse, the exquisite commingling of clear-cut meaning and thousand-
fold haunting suggestion, is indeed the unique and inexplicable gift of
his genius. Yet his languid Theocritean mock-pastorals might have
perished with him, - at best he would probably have remained the
idle singer of a rather ignoble provincial life,— had Mæcenas not sum-
moned him before a far greater audience, and urged him on to more
ambitious themes.
Quite unlike Horace or any other Roman poet down to their
day, Virgil in his first undoubted utterance strikes the note of utmost
servility and adulation.
«Yea, for a god shall he be evermore unto me, and his altar
Often a tender lamb of our fold shall stain with his heart's blood ! »
cries the shepherd Tityrus in the first Eclogue. It is the voice of
Virgil himself, - one of the first to deify the half-reluctant Emperor.
The cause for gratitude was most inadequate. Virgil's little farm
by Mantua, wrongfully wrested from its loyal owner and bestowed
one of Octavian's veterans, had been tardily and reluctantly re-
stored. Moreover there is a tradition of a second expulsion, attended
with danger to the poet's life; and the urgent intercession of three
on
## p. 15417 (#367) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15417
powerful friends,- Varus, Gallus, and Pollio, - as well as Virgil's own
appeal at Rome to the dictator, were required to secure this act of
scanty justice (41 B. C. ). Indeed, some scholars doubt if Virgil ever
returned to his old home. Perhaps Augustus never lost sight of the
gifted and pliant youth whose value he promptly realized.
We cannot hope to find in this timid courtly poet the exultant
manliness and free stride of an Æschylus, an Ennius, or even of a
Dante, unbending in homeless exile, fearless of speech even under
imminent peril of death. More perhaps than any other artist, the
heroic poet needs to breathe the air of freedom. Virgil the man,
like his hero, is always conscious that his actual lot is, at best, but a
second choice. Æneas tells Dido:--
«If fate permitted me to shape my life
To my desire, and freely end my woes,
The precious remnant of my folk, and Troy,
I then would cherish. Priam's halls would rise;
With home-returning band I would have built
Again our citadel,- for vanquished men. ”
This note of mild regret for vanished hopes is so recurrent and con-
stant as to impress every listener at last. It is indeed the tone not
merely of the poet but of his whole race and generation. But sub-
mission to fate, the merging of the individual life in the larger and
more lasting current of destiny, is in all ages a peculiarly Roman
ideal. Perhaps his very limitations have helped Virgil to crystallize
into epic, more than any other artist has ever done, the whole
national life of so many centuries.
Honored and beloved though he was by all, Virgil's own earthly
life hardly seems to have been a happy one. His health was deli-
cate, his nature shy and sensitive, he had the bitterest misgivings as
to his ability to master the high themes assigned him; and his life
ends naturally with that unavailing appeal to his friends to destroy
the uncompleted and unsatisfying national epic on which so many
years of toil had been spent. But indeed the living Virgil is less
real to us than the stately shade, so gladly descried by the Floren-
tine pilgrim in the gloom of the Valley, the
(courteous Mantuan spirit,
Of whom the fame yet in the world endures,
And shall endure eternal as the world. ”
The ten brief pastorals known as the 'Bucolics' or 'Eclogues) were
published at Rome in 37 B. C. They are often mere paraphrases
from the more sincere Greek pastorals of the school of Theocritus.
>
## p. 15418 (#368) ##########################################
15418
VIRGIL
The shepherds' names are Greek; Sicily and Arcadia are often men-
tioned, but commingled with the scenery and life of Lombardy, or
again, with thinly veiled allusions to Roman politics! The allegory
is hopelessly confused with realism, and there is for the most part
no adequate or serious purpose in the poems. These affectionate or
abusive dialogues of Græco-Roman shepherd-courtiers, their responsive
songs or contests for some rustic prize, are, none the less, rich in
beautiful phrases and tender thoughts. Already the hexameter takes
a more delicate and varied cadence than Lucretius or Catullus could
give it. Even the imitation of the Greek originals, though recurrent,
is never slavish. It is, at its closest, such free, joyous, artistic trans-
lation as delights us in Shelley's Homeric Hymns. Some of these
poems date apparently from the earlier time of Virgil's obscurity.
Others allude to passing events in the years 41 to 37 B. C. The tenth
and latest is actually dedicated to Virgil's friend, the soldier-poet
Gallus,- who is a gallant but incongruous figure, lying under the
shadow of an Arcadian rock, among the Hamadryads and piping shep-
herds, Silenus, Pan, and all their company.
The most important among the Eclogues is the fourth, addressed
to Pollio, announcing the recent or approaching birth, in Pollio's
consulate, of a child who shall bring back the golden age. Professor
Sellar thinks the actual child alluded to was the daughter of Augus-
tus, the brilliant and infamous Julia. The imagery of the poem is
often astonishingly like that of the Hebrew prophets. That the wide-
spread expectation of a Messiah may have been known to the schol-
arly poet seems possible. Still there is no single touch in the poem
which points unmistakably to Isaiah's influence. Every image can be
paralleled in earlier Greek or Latin literature.
The next seven years of Virgil's life (37–30 B. C. ) were devoted
to the Georgics. The general purpose of these four books is the
revival of agriculture in Italy; or as Merivale and Conington agree to
put it, the “Glorification of Labor. ” Instead of Theocritus, Hesiod's
(Works and Days' was most largely influential here, though Lucretius's
large and majestic treatment of natural scenery has also been closely
studied. The four sections treat of tillage for grain, of tree culture,
of cattle breeding, and the care of bees. Mythological digressions are
gracefully introduced, the poetic and religious tone of the whole work
is most perfect and harmonious, and in general no serious didactic
purpose was ever more perfectly accomplished in delightful verse.
Virgil is now the complete master of the hexameter. Its alien ori-
gin, its inherent difficulty, are forgotten. There are many noble
and historic Latin words, even, which cannot be used in its frame.
So much the worse for them. The sway of this rhythm became for
centuries as tyrannous as the heroic couplet under Dryden and Pope.
(
## p. 15419 (#369) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15419
Well might Tennyson end his loyal greeting to the Mantuan with the
words:-
«Wielder of the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of man. ”
The fourth Georgic closes with the story of the Greek shepherd
Aristæus and his quest for bees. But Servius, the learned ancient
commentator, says of the poet Cornelius Gallus, mentioned several
times above: “He was so much the friend of Virgil, that the fourth
book of the Georgics, from the middle to the close, was taken up
with praise of him. This, at Augustus's bidding, the poet afterward
altered into the tale of Aristæus. ” The first part of this statement
is made quite probable by the Eclogue already outlined: the latter
is, it is to be feared, quite credible -- though not creditable, either
to patron or poet. Gallus's fall from favor and consequent suicide
occurred in 27 B. C. , so the earlier form of the poem must have been
in full circulation for years; yet no other trace of it survives save
this allusion. At present the fourth book opens with a
renewed
appeal to Mæcenas by name; and it closes with a half-dozen lines of
modest autobiographical tone. By the parallel allusions, however, in
this closing passage, to Augustus's victories in these same years, the
poet contrives to intimate a lofty claim for his own task and accom-
plishment; perhaps as bold a claim as Horace's “monument more
lasting than bronze. » Indeed, we are faintly reminded of Pindar's
proud greeting to Hiero at the close of the first Olympian.
As a rule, however, the allusions to Augustus, and also to Mæce-
nas, in the Georgics, voice the humility and adulation of the courtier.
Mæcenas's patronage is the poet's chief claim to honor or happiness.
“Cæsar” is the especial care of the gods, among whom he is to take
his place. This ascription of divinity to Julius and Augustus is par-
ticularly repugnant to our instincts. Full sincerity in these matters
can hardly claim for our poet. We could wish Virgil might
have heard Tiberius's calm words: “I, conscript Fathers, call you to
witness that I am but a mortal, and am performing human duties,
and consider it enough if I fill the foremost place. ” Perhaps in per-
fect freedom of utterance, Virgil would have confessed that only the
imperial task of keeping a world in order seemed to him divine. We
may recall that Cicero's popular orations, and Horace's public odes,
are full of orthodox piety; but the familiar satires and epistles of
the one, the private letters of the other, utterly ignore the divinities
of the folk! In Virgil's case we have only his poems, however; and
they indicate that the poet, if not the man, made a lifelong effort,
at least, to acquire full belief in that overcrowded Græco-Roman pan-
theon wherein every generation sets up new figures, - whether dead
we
## p. 15420 (#370) ##########################################
15420
VIRGIL
rulers, vague abstractions like Faith, Honor, Necessity, or grotesque
special guardians, from Roma herself down to Volutina the goddess
of corn-husks! Much of allegorical meaning or poetic beauty he him-
self elicited from the faded forms of ancestral belief. Moreover, the
patriotic poet is not an analytical critic nor a radical. His task is
not to tear down whatever is traditional, popular, conservative, but
to revive, complete, and beautify it.
These questions cannot be separated from any account of the
great national epic, the Æneid, to which Virgil devoted the remain-
ing years of his life (30–19 B. C. ). The tale of the lonely Trojan
survivor, Venus's son, escaping from the doomed city, and reaching
Italy after world-wide wanderings, had been made familiar by poets
and popular tradition for centuries. The direct descent of the Julii
from this demigod Æneas was not to be questioned. A courtly
national epic could build on no other foundation than this. The
wonder is, that even under these cramping conditions the poet rose
to the full dignity of his true theme. Larger than imperial patron
or mythical ancestral hero, there marches through the epic the
Roman people itself,— that rude martial clan, that strides ever on
and on to the lordship of Latium, of Italy, of the Mediterranean, of
the civilized world!
Even if we be inclined to regret that Virgil employed again the
divine machinery, already familiar from Homer, to set his action in
movement, we must all feel the noble scope of the long prophecy
uttered by Jupiter early in the poem.
Here Æneas becomes a mere
link in the mighty chain. He is not even to be victorious nor long-
lived in Italy. He shall reign in his own city for three years, his
son for thirty, their Alban posterity through three centuries, – the
younger Romans forever.
Again, even the tragedy of Dido's approaching death is forgotten
in the memory of an infinitely grander drama, when from her dying
lips, as an imprecation on her faithless lover, comes the prophecy of
a deadly scourge for his descendants, destined to arise from her line,
and more and more boldly the figure of Hannibal shapes itself in her
vision.
Perhaps the most effective passage to be cited here, however, is
the apostrophe of Anchises in the underworld to his descendants :
«Others may mold more deftly the breathing bronze, I concede it,
Others out of the marble the living features will summon;
They shall surpass us in pleading of causes, delineate better
Motions of heavenly bodies, and tell of the stars and their risings.
Thou, O Roman, remember to curb with thy empire the peoples.
These thine arts shall be, and of peace to impose the conditions,
Sparing them that yield, but quelling in battle the haughty. ”
## p. 15421 (#371) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15421
Though uncompleted in many details, the Æneid is no fragment-
ary work. Its whole plan lies clear before the reader, all the salient
episodes are completely worked out. The after-world may read it by
preference in parts, and even the poet himself set the fashion in his
own lifetime. We could well spare, in truth, some of the rather petty
and wearisome battle scenes in the later books; and in general, the
Italian episodes can no longer interest us as they may have done
the original auditors. Yet it is a pity that such stately rigures as
royal Evander and the maiden Camilla should ever become unfamil-
iar. The latter seems to have appealed especially to Francesca's
grim Tuscan poet, and she is the first of Virgil's characters named
in the Commedia. Upon the whole, however, the sack of Troy, the
loves of Dido and Æneas, and the pageant of future Roman heroes,
defiling like Banquo's posterity before Æneas's eyes, will doubtless
always hold the supreme place in the hearts of Virgil's lovers. Per-
haps this superiority of the part over the whole is inevitable in any
poem of ten thousand verses. Certainly in this case we are justified,
since the poet himself selected these three books (ii. , iv. , vi. ) to read
in Augustus's presence.
Professor Sellar, in his copious study of Virgil, is too rarely epi-
grammatic; but he makes in a single sentence a striking antithesis,
calling Virgil perhaps the most imitative, yet one of the most origi-
nal, among the great classic poets. This suggests a few words upon
the striking position held by Virgil between the two most independ-
ent and creative of all poets, Homer and Dante.
It was apparently a general feeling among the Greeks, and espe-
cially with the Romans, that a thought once ideally well uttered, a
phrase rightly turned, could no longer be improved, but became in
large degree common property, belonging at last to him who could
set it in its fittest association. This high privilege is used above all
by Virgil. He borrows royally from nearly every older master of
style. Yet the result, if a mosaic, at least remains clear, beautiful,
even harmonious, in its general design and effect. His philosophic
and antiquarian lore, again, is much more completely fused into pure
and limpid poetry than Milton's similar treasures in Paradise Lost. '
Virgil's debt to Homer is especially heavy, and includes much
that essential, even, in the main framework of the plot. Of course
there is no reproach of “plagiarism” in this statement. Virgil's
audience was perhaps absolutely more familiar with Greek poetry
than with Latin. Horace actually began his poetical career with
Greek verses, as Dante and Petrarch did with Latin, — but sensibly
reverted to his own speech. A Roman gentleman's son went to
Athens as naturally as we go to college, to finish his education,
which had usually been begun by a Greek tutor, slave or free. The
## p. 15422 (#372) ##########################################
15422
VIRGIL
»
striking confession in the oration for the poet Archias will be re-
membered: «For if any one supposes less fame is acquired throug
Greek poetry than through Latin, he is greatly in error; since Greek
is read among nearly all nations, whereas Latin is confined within
our own rather narrow boundaries. ”
When Virgil, then, in his general plot, his incidents, his scenery,
his similes, constantly follows closely in Homer's footsteps, it can
only be regarded as a loyal acknowledgment of his supremacy.
often reminds us intentionally that his hero is retracing the route of
Odysseus: as, for instance, Æneas picks up on the Sicilian shore a
Greek of the Ithacan crew, left behind in their hasty flight from the
Cyclops's cave a few weeks before; and he even catches a terrified
glimpse of the blinded ogre Polyphemus himself. When the Trojan
wanderer hurries by the Sirens' shore or Circe's isle without pausing,
it may well be interpreted as a confession of Homer's unapproachable
mastery there. In'the Virgilian account of Troy's downfall, such a
verse as
« The final day, the inevitable hour
Of Troy is come! )
is clearly an echo of Hector's foreboding -
« The day shall come when sacred Troy shall perish. ”
In the seventh year of his wanderings Æneas comes unexpectedly
upon Andromache, in her Grecian home of exile. She faints at the
sight, and the whole interview is saddened with bitter memories. In
the scene of farewell, Andromache's tenderest words are addressed
to the boy Ascanius, cousin of her own son by Hector: that son who
was murdered in the sack of Troy.
“O sole surviving image of my boy
Astyanax! Such eyes, such hands, had he,
Such features; and his budding youth would just
Have equaled thine in years. ”
Now, Virgil does not feel that the pathos of these words needs
the slightest hint of explanation: and rightly; for every Roman
reader had present before him in imagination the immortal group of
Hector with his wife and child, from the parting scene in Iliad vi.
Virgil often — but not always — justifies his claim to what he has
borrowed. Thus the description of Achilles's shield in the Iliad is a
beautiful series of idyllic pictures, but they form a mere digression
and interruption, while the stage waits; whereas Virgil's genius has
filled Æneas's shield with some of the most striking and noble scenes
in Roman story. So the idea of taking his hero to the underworld is
## p. 15423 (#373) ##########################################
VIRGIL
15423
frankly borrowed from the Odyssey; but here again the ghostly
array of future Roman heroes is wholly Virgil's own addition. To
be sure, the general superiority of this grand Augustan picture of the
Inferno to the mere pallid replica of earthly life offered us in the
Greek poem, is largely due to the influence of Plato's splendid vis-
ions and noble philosophy. Still we may say in general that Virgil
never merely borrows,- and at the worst he is always the most inter-
esting of translators.
Dante's reasons for taking Virgil as his guide cannot be adequately
discussed here. Above all else, indeed, the belief in the empire, in a
supreme temporal power as a necessity to the orderly government of
the world, glowed far more fiercely, as a lifelong unattained desire,
in Dante's homeless heart, than in the more contented breast of the
poet who could see Augustus daily in the flesh. This very descent
of Æneas to Hades, just mentioned, suggested many details to Dante.
The later poet is indeed too loyal in saying that he learned from his
master “the fair style which has won him honor. ” The style, like
the metre, of Dante, is very remote from the more sweeping cadences
of the Latin epic; and it owes astonishingly little to any master.
But next only to Virgil's own poems (as Mr. Myers has remarked),
the Inferno) and Purgatorio' will help us to an adequate apprecia-
tion of the Roman poet.
This peculiar position of Virgil between two of the world's great-
est poets, — who never knew each other,- is one of his many claims
to our tender regard. The general opinion agrees with Mr. Norton's
statement on an earlier page, that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare
stand alone. Each belongs to the world, not to a nation; for each in
a large sense created an ideal world of art. In his own class, how-
ever, as a poet in whose work a great nation's life, at least, has been
worthily typified and interpreted, the Roman Virgil will doubtless
long maintain the foremost position; perhaps until our own freer and
fuller life shall deserve, and receive, an adequate artistic expression
in epic.
Wirrian Cranston Lawion,
.
NOTE
a
It is impossible to cull, even, out of the countless loving tributes
to Virgil's genius; extending from Propertius's prophecy of a master-
piece to surpass the Iliad, to the eager cry of affection uttered in old
age by the last laureate, in whom so many of our poet's traits were
repeated. Not only as a mage, but as “prophet of the Gentiles,” he
## p. 15424 (#374) ##########################################
15424
VIRGIL
(
>
was honored, all but sainted, in the Middle Ages. He has never
been a lost author. Indeed, it is almost literally true, that had all
his manuscripts vanished, Virgil's poems could have been recovered
entire from the citations in later works of antiquity. There is, how-
ever, an abundance of MSS. , even those illustrated by drawings, be-
ginning in the fourth or fifth century.
Perhaps the one indispensable edition to-day is Conington's, in
three volumes in the Bibliotheca Classica, especially since the edi-
tor's generous taste has been reinforced by the more minute erudition
of Nettleship. The latter is also the authority on Ancient Lives
of Virgil' (Oxford, 1879). The ancient Virgilian commentators alone
make a small library; and Servius, especially, is more readable and
valuable than most modern editions.
Sellar's volume on Virgil in his (Roman Poets is diffuse but ex-
cellent. The most appreciative brief essay is by F. W. H. Myers, in
his book Essays, Classical. From these writers, or from Tyrrell's
'Latin Poetry,' abundant further references will be obtained. The
French have a high appreciation of this first Romantic poet. Men-
tion of Sainte-Beuve's early volume, and Boissier's delightful work,
must suffice here. Comparetti's Virgil in the Middle Ages' opens
a curious chapter of popular superstition.
Much of Virgil's greatest charm evaporates in any transfer to alien
speech.
He is, like all allusive artists, extremely difficult to translate
at all; and no version can be satisfying to the classical critic. Long-
fellow has experimented in hexameter on one or two Eclogues. Miss
Preston's "Georgics) have a very free rhythm, and far more of the
Virgilian charm than any other version. Among translators of the
Æneid, Conington again claims the first place, with two notable
renderings. We must protest against the brisk trot of “The stag
at eve” when forced upon the stately Roman Muse, yet the sense
is wonderfully well packed in. His prose rendering, again, is by no
means prosily literal; and for many a famous phrase it almost
achieves the impossible. Countless other versions there are, before
and since Dryden's; but no accepted favorite. Morris's skillful per-
formance disappointed his (and Virgil's) admirers. It is generally felt
that the method of the translator and the spirit of the original are
somewhat at variance. The version of Sir Charles Bowen, cited
largely below, has much of the Virgilian spirit and grace; and is
also an interesting experiment metrically, lacking only the last syl-
lable of the dactylic line.
Every lover of literature will complete this catalogue for himself.
The essayist desires to acknowledge especially his constant debt, here
and elsewhere, to Schanz, and also to Von Christ (in the Handbuch
der Alterthumswissenschaft').
