VIRGILIANA.*

EUROPE has been loyal to Virgil for two thousand years, and if it does not remain loyal for two thousand more, it will be due to no casual movement of fashion but to a deeper change of heart than any we have suffered yet. For Virgil is the supreme Latinist, and Latin is the language that as mattered most in History. Latin is the only universal language that Europe has ever had ; three great modern languages are merely Latin modernized ; even in English you cannot express abstract ideas without using Latin words. It is our parent language ; we have Latin in our blood, as it were, and our loyalty to the greatest master of Latin speech is in part, therefore, a kind of instinctive filial loyalty. It is this which makes men who could not translate a line of Virgil feel a warm- ing of the heart when they read Tennyson's splendid salutation

to him. But there is much more than that in it. For Virgil appeals to both those moods of the spirit which never dominate us together, but which are both eternal, the two moods which in life beget Bunyans and Lovelaces and in literature Raeines and Lamartines. If you wish for human emotio i in poetry and for that use of words which is magical rather than reasonable, you will find it in Virgil as in Keats. If you wish for intellect and perfection of form, you will find it in Virgil as in Pope. Virgil has been the model of all classical poets since his day. Lucan borrowed from him, Milton borrowed from him, Dryden translated him ; and yet the most perfect expression of the spirit which inspired all the Romantic poets is a line of Virgil, and one that has indeed the true Romantic magic about it, such as only Keats achieved in English :- " Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt."

Virgil has been revered as a prophet of Christianity, consulted as a magician, quarried by the builders of Centos, glorified by Dante, vilified by Samuel Butler, studied and loved by every man who has ever studied Latin and loved humanity. And the study of him cannot but go on, for the better one knows his poetry the more immeasurable seems the wonder of it. Scholars are always going deeper and deeper into it, but the best of them cannot exhaust its riches and the worst cannot. cheapen them.

At one time the study of Virgil in England had too much pedantry about it. Textual criticism, the cradle and the grave of scholarship, was given a false importance, and it was readings and emendations that set scholars by the cars. Now the study of Virgil is more humanistic, and scholars fall out over the interpretation of a love story, some siding with Dido and some

• (1) Roman Essays and Interpretations. By W. Wards Fowler. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press. [12s. Gd. net.]----(2) The Trees. Shrub,, and Plants of Virgil. By John Sargeaunt. Oxford : B. H. Blackwell. 168. net.]— (3) Emrich= Geta's Tragedy " Medea" : a Virgilian Cento. Edited by Joseph Mooney. Birmingham : Cornish Brothers. [4s. Gd. net.]

with Aeneas. Dr. Glover is for Aeneas, Mr. Page for Dido. Dr. Warde Fowler in a new books full of interest of every kind includes twenty little essays on Virgil, and, of course, appears on the side of Aeneas and against Mr. Page. His knowledge of the Roman mind and its workings is profound, and he is probably right in saying that Dido's passion was abhorrent to Roman sentiment, and that she' is a parable of Cleopatra, whose discomfiture by Augustus meant the salvation of the Roman world. Yet, if Dido had to be discomfited, one could have wished that Aeneas had done the business differently, and if Virgil had not partly agreed ho could never have written that tremendous scene in the Sixth Book where the " Pius Aeneas " cannot draw even a contemptuous word from Dido in the Under World. Elsewhere Dr. Warde Fowler is illuminating too, notably on Nisus and Euryalus, though one feels that occasionally he says a thing merely because Mr. Page says the opposite ; and when this is the case he is always unconvincing. Thus in speaking of Mr. Page's note on the drooping poppy of Aeneid IX. 436 Dr. Warde Fowler is merely combative, and on the swans of Aeneid I. 400 he seems to be merely wrong. On another passage with which he deals one could have wished for more light than he gives. In the early part of Aeneid IX. Cybele changes Aeneas' ships into Nymphs to save them from destruction. This Dr. Warde Fowler holds to be an old Mediterranean fairy-tale, and he says it took Virgil's fancy, as it has apparently taken his own. But it surely has the look rather of a literary invention than of a real fairy-tale, for fairy-tales are tales that would be credible if you once granted the possibility of miracle and magic. But this story would never be credible whatever you granted, for it is not only impossible but absurd. You can turn a person into a rock or a tree or a beast, but if you turn a ship where men have been living into a person, you will have to explain what happened to the binnacle and the cooking utensils at the meta- morphosis, and to the second mate's spare trousers which he left hanging over his bunk. Such a passage, like the one where the sheep of the Golden Age go about with their fleeces ready dyed, raises some really interesting questions concerning ancient humour and the sense df the ludicrous as it appears in the Latin and in the Teutonic races. But Dr. Warde Fowler goes off once more in pursuit of Mr. Page. Of the phrase prisca fides Mr. Page says, " Prisca is certainly not, as Henry takes it, ' old- fashioned,' " so naturally Dr. Warde Fowler says " Henry's ' old-fashioned ' will do very well."

But it would be ungrateful to quarrel with the author of this extremely interesting book because of single passages in his Virgilian criticisms. There are essays on all sorts of subjects, from sea serpents to the character of Julius Caesar, but most -of them are concerned, directly or indirectly, with Roman religion, and when Dr. Warde Fowler speaks of Roman religion the rest of us have nothing to do but to listen and learn.

However, Virgil has long been one of his chief interests, and he appears to be the presiding genius of a new venture by Messrs. Blackwell, of Oxford—the publication of a series of Virgilian studies, which includes three by Dr. Warde Fowler himself. These three—Virgil's Gathering of the Clans, Aeneas at the Site of Rome, and The Death of Turnus—have been avail- able for some time, and they have all been widely read. In addition to them, Mr. T. F. Royds has Contributed Virgil and Isaiah and a delightful account of The Beasts, Birds, and Bees of Virgil, for which Dr. Warde Fowler wrote a Preface. A new volume'- has now been added to the series, and forms a com- panion to the last—The Trees, Shrubs, and Plants of Virgil, by Mr. John Sargeaunt, of Westminster. The special value of this book is that it gives the modern Italian counterpart, so far as possible, of the plants concerned—English counterparts do not always exist—and it will help a traveller in Italy to under- stand his Virgil as he never did before. It deals with over a hundred and thirty species, not to mention fifteen varieties of Vine, and it is written by a man who is as good a botanist as he is a scholar.

Such books are our modern tribute to Virgil, but he has had very different tributes in the past. The tales of the Sortes Virgilianae are strange enough, but the composing of a Cento is surely the queerest and sincerest compliment that ingenuity can pay to genius. A Virgilian Cento is a poem, occasional, narrative, or dramatic, composed entirely of lines, half-lines, or phrases taken from the works of Virgil. Many such survive, composed for the most part in the first six centuries after Virgil's death ; and one of the earliest, longest and best has just been

reprinted in a convenient form by the publisher to Birmingham University. It is a tragedy called Medea, nearly five hun- dred lines long, written by one Hoaidius Geta in the second century A.D. As a tragedy it is, of course, quite worthless, for the characters say not what the situation requires of them but what it is possible to find for them in Virgil. But as a literary curiosity its interest is very great. The dialogue is of this kind :- " Medea : Cara milli nutria, claudit nos obice pontus, Deest jam terra fugae ; rorum pars altera adempta est.

Nutria : Tu ne cede malls, sad contra audentior ito."

The " Lyrics " are just long lists of half-lines, and their effect is almost ludicrous :- " Recubans sub tegmine fagi Divino carmine pastor Vocat in certamina divos . , Quae to dementia cepit, Saxi de vertice pastor, Divine Palladio arte Phoebum superare canendo ? "

The editor, Mr. Mooney, takes it all rather seriously, and has actually added a metrical translation and an essay on Roman magic. It would have been better if he had added, instead, some notes on Geta's use of hiatus and on such mangled lines as this :— " Me, me adsum qui feci, in me Ginnie tele Conjicite."

What right had the ,egregious Geta so to treat that famous and splendid passage in the Ninth Aeneid ?- turn ". . . vero exterritus, amens Conclamat Nisus . .

' Me, me, adsum qui feci, in use convertite ferrum, 0 Rutuli ! ' "

This book will give any one who knows Virgil- even a little, an hour or two of real amusement, and to place all the lines and phrases will severely test his knowledge. He need not expect, however, to be deeply moved by the good Hosidius' tragic Muse, for that lady is uninspired and rather gauche, and her gestures are jerky like a wooden toy's.