DIVINI GLORIA RURIS.*

WE are indebted to the Countess Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco for many charming and interesting volumes. She is the rates sacra, in English, of Italy's new birth. Her " books convey better than any others to British readers the

high spirit of the Bisergimento"; so says Mr. George Trevelyan; and even he has not written better in describing that heroic event. In her Cavour she has given a spirited and illuminating biography of the greatest among modern states- men. Her "Italian Characters " arc worthy of a place among Plutarch's antique heroes, whom so many of them resemble in their simple and patriotic lives. The first of them, Sigismondo Castromediano, surpasses eveything in Plutarch for heroism and tragedy. If all politicians would take these Patriotti Italiani for their examples the world might soon be better.

Not less inspiring is her account of " The Liberation of Italy." Sympathy with everything noble and chivalrous is the keynote of all these volumes. Equally sympathetic in other directions are her Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs, The Place of Animals in Human Thought, and her fascinating Lombard Studies. In the present volume she takes a wider range, sur- veying the Greek and Latin poets, exploring what they have said about peasants and country life, and illustrating their words by her knowledge of their scenery. Travelling in Greece and a long residence in Italy enable her to do this with more insight and authority than most commentators. '`I have walked with Virgil in his fields," she writes, "and listened with Theocritus to Sicilian folk-songs. The poets of the old world became for me not dead poets but living men —living observers of things I could observe myself every day.

Antiquity was not past but present." This is a true and really too modest an account of a skilful and most enchanting volume ; for the author has done a great deal more than utilize what is known as "local colour," a commodity which has been vulgarized and cheapened by unskilful handling. The 'Countess Martinengo Cesaresco has applied her rare gifts of sympathy and insight to the words of the old poets and to the places they describe, with their existing inhabitants, all .of which she knows by sight and by experience. The result is a book which cannot fail to stimulate the general reader ; and even scholars may learn a great deal from it if they will read their classical texts in the light of this fresh and vivid experience. And, more than this, there are scattered through the volume some admirable and penetrating criticisms of the several Greek and Roman authors which will certainly be approved highly by those who know them best. The Countess's book is a felicitous and remarkable achievement for which we beg to offer our cordial thanks and congratu- lations; and we hope our own profit and pleasure from it will be shared by a multitude of readers. It is a book to which we may turn back in a tired hour or a despondent mood; for it has what Arnold describes so happily as Wordsworth's " healing power," and it revives for us, as a tonic, " the freshness of the early world," with its bracing and delicious air.

"Pan, the most captivating creation of Greek mythology, is the concrete embodiment of the feelings awakened by the woods with their fragrant undergrowth, by the wet grasses starred with daffodils; unlike the too solid gods, his kindred, Pan is half human and whole elf—a whimsical radiant presence interpreting that something which answers, which lives and is conscious in the silence of wide spaces, the solitude of the forest recesses. The pointed rocks and snowy heights of the mountains are his; it is he wha passes over the sunlit hills and scales the highest summit that commands a view of flocks scattered over the slopes; he passes quickly along the rugged chain, his soft fair hair floating • The Outdoor Life in Greek and Roman Poets. By the Countess Evelyn Martinengo Ceearesoo. London : Macmillan and Co. Os. net.] in the wind; or he lingers near the streams shaded by thickets; or he reclines in meadows full of crocus and hyacinth, and sings so sweetly that no bird pouring forth his soul amongst the first leaves can ever sing sweeter. This is the Pan of the Homeric Hymns, who with little change flits through antiquity till the voice on the Ionian Sea announces that Pan is dead, and dead with him is the first youth of the world."

To him was addressed "the most beautiful prayer that was ever spoken outside Palestine." " 0 sweet Pan and ye other gods, whoever ye be, grant to me to be beautiful within." "So prayed Socrates in his only country walk." Pan was " the embodiment of the indwelling, unconscious joy of nature. In a sense, he was the embodiment of the peasant himself?' And of that peasant, in the ideal world of Homer and the grimmer reality of Hesiod, we have an agreeable account in the opening chapter, " The Peasant of Ancient Greece "; a chapter full of sympathetic and sensible criticism.

Again, the Auturgus of Euripides "is a peasant through and through. He has the austere gravity impressed by a life spent close to nature, watchful of the fated return of her signs, face to face with the solemn sequence of her seasons." Excellent and convincing, as we think, is the use made of the Greek dramatists. Even more suggestive, more charming,

and more applicable to existing problems is the picture of Xenophon and of The Attie Homestead, based on his Oecono-

micus. "No writer was ever more sincere; he adorns nothing and speaks from his own experience, which is that of a man of the world who has made no excursions into the clouds." He thinks it "absurd to own an estate and know nothing about its management "; but he believes in the pleasures as well as the duties of a country life, describing the chage as " a nursery for strategists" and riding across country as "a school for cavalry." "Besides his love of open-air athletics he had other Anglo-Saxon characteristics, such as the colonizing instinct joined to affection for home and the taste for adven- ture without the tastes of the adventurer." All this is equally sound as criticism, and salutary as advice to political quacks who know little about the mysteries and realities of lands or woods. By such persons Xenophon and his like were banished or taxed out of existence ; but after their departure the prosperity of Attica vanished and the liberty of Athens was destroyed. And Xenophon is typical not only of what was best and soundest in Greek life, but in English.

We should not forget that the most solemn and abiding element in Greek religion was the worship of Eleusis, the mystery and tragedy of the Corn Goddess, the symbol of Nature's resurrection and of man's indomitable hope ; but with the Romans we come to a larger and fuller sense of the dignity and worth of agriculture : the most important of all things, the very foundation of a State, the nursery of men and soldiers. All this, and more, has been said by the Latin authors in glorious and memorable words. Virgil's " Divini gloria. ruris " was no mere poetical phrase. It was the sober belief, the consistent and reasoned practice, of the greatest military and utilitarian power which has yet existed.

" With the exception of Dante no poet has the restrained descriptive power of Lucretius, or, perhaps, in the same degree, the art of choosing suggestive words. A few lines bring a natural scene or a person before our eyes so forcibly that no detail seems to be wanting. His similes produce the

illusion of making a direct appeal to our eyes." "Lucretius almost alone (among the ancients) contemplated Nature as

detached from man, of whose powerlessness he had a sense which was more Eastern than European." And so we find in him the austere and magical "Luna dies et nor, et noctis sign severs," and the terrible "flammantia moenia mundi," or the majestic "Suave mari magno," in which the individual man is so petty and helpless. All this is admirable criticism, and so is the following on Catullus : "The poetry of the Ego, lyrical poetry in its modern sense, sprang into life full- grown with Catullus. Even his allusions to Nature are personal." "He looked on poetry as a vent, not as a profes- sion, or as a road to fame. It is impossible not to suppose that most of his poems are improvisations. Could he have made his individual intensity general, he might have been the great tragic dramatist whom Rome never produced—as one may guess from the terrible Atys." "The poem to Sirmio is the most ideally perfect of all ' poems of places,' and the truest. Two thousand years are annihilated by Catnllus's beautiful

lines ; they have the eternal novelty of Nature herself." The whole chapter on Virgil is too good to be mutilated ; and

his conception of agriculture as a sacred art, of the cultivator as a priest, is worth pondering in this our country of decayed farming, with a declining rural population.

Tibullus, too, is presented charmingly; but most sympa- thetic of all is the treatment of Ovid, "a dreamer of dreams among the woods and brooks. We fancy him roving as a pensive boy to whom trees and flowers and all kinds of creatures told their secrets. He was always putting himself into the place of plants and animals, and thinking how one would think in their position." Ovid, at any rate, was a genuine poet, with a golden tongue, boundless imagination, and deep wells of sympathy ; and all these gifts have been too much forgotten. He takes his readers into an enchanted world, and by means of its romance he explains many secrets of the emotional human heart. And his beliefs, his mythology, may be compared to the attitude of an edu- cated Russian towards his ikon, or of intellectual Roman Catholics towards the Franciscan legends. It is impossible to draw any hard-and-fast line between reason and traditional emotions. "There are many accomplished scholars," says our author, "from whom the soul of the Greek legends utterly escapes." " Not all the learning of the Schools can help so much to reveal the inner meaning of the ancient stories as a few summer days spent in a Greek island." " The plain man who has not that gift (the light of imagination) cannot do better than take his classics to the Mediterranean ; for instance, to Benizza, in the island of Corfu, which to the present writer more than any spot till now visited in Hellas, or Sicily, or Magna Graecia, realized the youth of the world." There, in solitude, the Metamorphoses of Ovid will come to life again : so they lived for Ovid himself, and for other poets of a sceptical age; and so the Latin poets must be read, if we would understand or appreciate their attitude towards the old religion.

We are sorry to differ from the Countess Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco, but we cannot accept without protest her judgment of Horace, which seems to us wholly indefensible. He is described as a man about town, whose feeling for the country had no depths nor heights. He had no pleasant childish memories of Apulia. Now Horace is the frankest of all writers when describing himself. He is not exceeded in this amuse- ment by Montaigne or Pepys. We can understand him best from his own words, in spite of all his commentators ; and, as it seems to us, we may always trust implicitly to what he says. With regard to his boyhood in Apulia he tells us how he wandered into the forest, among the hills, and was saved from hurtful beasts, while he slept tended by the doves, to the wonder of the countryside, which foretold his poetic inspira- tion. Again, on the journey to Brundusium, he greets the monies notos of his beloved Apulia, which is mentioned so frequently and affectionately in his verse. If the original Pons Bandusiae was near his old home, then either Horace revisited it with the pious intentions expressed in his Ode, or he christened the spring on his Sabine farm after it according to a familiar Greek and Roman precedent, creating an ambiguam Bandusiam in his new possession. On either supposition we have a proof of his abiding love for Venusia and its neighbourhood ; and if the Ode to Bandusia's fountain be not genuine poetry, full of the tenderest feeling and senti- ment, except for the slaughtered kid, then all poetry is artificial and all our poets are merely actors. Horace has a poet's rapture for the solitude of woods and hills, for the " wizard stream " of his first Ode, for murmuring waters and whispering pines, uniting their shadows to the poplars. To all these tastes the Odes bear witness in a hundred passages, as well as to the tenderness and the wistful regret with which Horace loved the natural world. As many passages, or more, prove his reverence for the old heroes of the Republic, and for the sturdy peasants of Italy, with his delight in their occu- pations. Beyond these, again, we have his devotion to the Sabine estate, with its happy mingling of agriculture and wild, open country, both equally loved by the poet.

But for this lapse, as we think it, from her usual insight and sympathy, the Countess Martinengo Cesaresco guides us safely through the Latin authors to the end of civilization in Rutilius, with his protest against Jews and monks. She shows, with great skill, how the old religion was merged into the new, and how much that is best and most humanizing in popu- lar Roman Catholicism, as distinguished from its professional

theology, is due to the survival and transformation of pagan thought. The peasant, all the world over, is very little changed from prehistoric man ; and to that fact chiefly is due the recuperative power of humanity, in spite of all the disastrous experiments of politicians and theologians.

We are very glad to see the fine appreciation of Daphnis and Chloe, with which we must end. The author

"puts forth unconsciously a defence of Paganism where it was strongest—as the interpretation of Nature to simple folk whose toil it consecrated and whose minds it satisfied. He shows that degeneration had not invaded the country ; Daphnis and Chloe are as innocent as Paul and Virginia, and far more innocent than the splendid id dames and knights of the great cycle of Christian romance in which not the dawn of love but its sultry meridian formed the text."