The Bard of Mantua
THE BARD OF MANTUA HP WO thousand years ago Virgil was born in what ¦*• was then relatively pastoral Lombardy. The boy who dreamed among the vineyards and the poplars— as one fancies he must...
...It is a striking proof of the preservative power of readjustment," he writes in Modernism and Christianity, "that the Roman Catholic Church in the midst of so many external transformations, still demands the same kind of faith that John the Baptist demanded...
...The Gospel has been encased in theology, in ritual, in ecclesiastical authority, in conventional forms of charity—like some small bone of a saint in a gilded reliquary...
...I sing of arms and the man," says the proud exordium which the poet was to belie almost continuously...
...The larger, more human problem of divining the conduct of the universe itself can be completely forgotten...
...The mise-en-scene has changed immensely...
...but the relic is genuine and the Gospel has been preserved by these thick encrustations...
...Realizing that a certain specialization is needed to build railroads or drain mines of their ore, one easily focuses all energies on this point...
...Contemporary forgetfulness of this fact, even in the name of religious activity, has been aptly described by George Santayana...
...And if the general mediaeval affection for the greatest of the Roman poets was based specifically upon the so-called "Messianic" passages in his verse, the schools passed on to a later age an understanding of his integral conception...
...But it is surely the ultimate test of a thinker's value that he should remain conscious of "the thing"— and should not narrow the range of his vision to conform with the here-and-now behaviorism of the practical...
...At any rate the Christian poet would say of him and Plato: "Teste David cum Sybilla...
...His long years of retirement were assuredly THE COMMONWEAL May 14, 1930 not for the sake of polished hexameters alone...
...Many an isolated fanatic or evangelical missionary in the slums shows a greater r semblance to the Apostles in his outer situation than the Pope does...
...When Italy and the rest of the world gather to celebrate the birthday of the bard of Mantua, they will be paying their respects to a current that has moved through the very heart of Europe...
...Knowing the full import of Greece and Rome to universal civilization, he realized that they would be admired and followed as much for what they had done as for what they had thought...
...Romans were doing and thinking in terms of the world...
...Nor is the lad of today, scanning the Aeneid, able to grasp the significance of this phenomenon of longevity...
...When Christendom ultimately became the transcendant inheritor of antique achievement, love of truth for its own sake continued to go hand in hand with action...
...And for his encouragement there spoke out of the present and the immemorial past voices which might fairly claim to have caught, in a measure, the accent of mystery...
...Nor does it hurt to notice that he can be these things, despite his archaic speech, because of the excellence of his quest for beauty...
...Nevertheless Virgil sees it bound always in fealty to order, in the manner of Lucretius and the Greek sages...
...Practical tasks are every generation's perilous besetting sins...
...Confidence in "ox-eyed Athena" had become a mere convention...
...The boy who dreamed among the vineyards and the poplars— as one fancies he must have dreamed—cannot have expected that the life of his achievement would prove contemporaneous with that of Christianity itself...
...He too easily credits the especial agnosticisms of current fashionable thought...
...For that factitious separation between thought and practice, between the ideal and its realization, which some thinkers have latterly sponsored was alien to Virgil...
...In his day the matchless beauty of Homer's artlessness must have been quite as apparent as it is in our own...
...Of course Virgil was anxious to do and to persuade others into acting...
...It is here and not among the modernists that the Gospel is still believed...
...No better simile for a business-conscious mankind could be found than the billiard table, at which a player stands indifferent to everything excepting a definite combination to be found with sure science and steady aim...
...Mediaeval civilization is inseparable from the Eclogues and the Aeneid...
...I mean faith in another world...
...Perhaps the sacred books of the Hebrews were not unknown to Virgil...
...That is why Dante reverently took him for a guide through Inferno and Purgatorio to the gates of Paradise, and affectionately termed him "the honor of all science and all wit...
...How clear and refreshing is this largeness of the Aeneid...
...If the effort of Christendom to conserve most scrupulously every ounce of the radium of truth had been less intense, if it had contented itself with "getting things done," Virgil and the classic world would have been lost as completely as the message of Christ itself...
...Yet in his palace full of pagan marbles the Pope actually practises all this...
...To a Roman who witnessed the triumph and murder of Caesar and that incessant conflict between mutually hostile cultures which made up the intellectual life of the empire, nothing could originally have seemed more normal than scepticism...
...That art of visioning and listening Christendom has likewise been eager to learn from Virgil...
...The man of our age, like the average mortal of Virgil's own time, is careless of these interlocking harmonies...
...Rome eventually died of that easily taken overdose of normalcy...
...It, too, is a bounty for which we may well say grace...
...The actual carrying out of this "life" upon the limited mundane stage to which our human activities are confined invariably implies a falling off in vitality and scale...
...And for more than a thousand years the vision of lordly Rome conjured up by Virgil stood, in the flood of barbarism, like a very citadel of the spirit...
...If the world were not radiantly lovely, if even its pathos were not matchlessly appealing, the agnostic would have a better case...
...For his was the essential passion of synthesis...
...He aims to catch the very rhythm of this universal intelligence—not to be disheartened by recurrent moods of incredulity but to challenge and keep the faith...
...Having been led round to this point by Virgil, one may pardonably feel that he is still guide, philosopher and friend...
...It is true that priority accrues to contemplative states, for the reason that life must be defined as that which is true...
...The Aeneid is abiding proof that wisdom is perennially a matter of listening to the harmony of the spheres and of enjoying with a pure heart the procession of comely forms...
...Here is a poem having, one may say, the true breadth of nature...
...but what mind-healer or revivalist nowadays preaches the doom of the material world and its vanity, or the reversal of animal values, or the blessedness of poverty and chastity, or the infirmity of natural human bonds, or a contempt for lay philosophy...
...Possibly he had heard strange rumors regarding an expected Messiah...
...A cosmic epoch had grown out of provincial years...
...The merely historical concern with age-old sciences and customs—so largely based on mankind's unceasing quest for a becoming explanation of itself— is not the point here...
...Sea air and the spaciousness of heroic landscapes characterize almost every passage...
...One would not be surprised, of course, if a handful of scholars kept up their interest in antiquities...
...Educator and scholar alike continued to hold in esteem the value of his counsel...
...Virgil's was a grandiose attempt to achieve remedial wholeness— perfect in its union of epic matter and form, its endeavor to wed reason and unquiet mystical longing, its modest dream of saving both primitive man and civilization...
...Perhaps it is inevitable that the average, economically harassed citizen should forget...
...But it was no less true that the cultivated Roman was really playing, intellectually, when he read Homer...
...It is a mystery, attached to the still vaster mysteriousness of Greece and Rome...
...The tale of men embattled around Troy because of a man's illicit love for a queen belonged to an era of small earthly scenes, as would the later chronicle of Roland beleaguered at Roncesvalles...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 2
