The madness of poets, then, stems from the Muses, while the madness of lovers comes from Venus. This arises, however, from the contemplation of true beauty, looking at the image of which we are taken away by the sharpest and most violent of our senses, struck dumb and as though placed outside of ourselves, seized away with all of our senses focused on it. Therefore, it is no less truly than elegantly said that the mind of a lover leads its life in the body of another.
This inflamed occupation and seizure of the soul is called love: a certain divine alienation, or a forgetting of oneself, or a transfusion of one’s being into that whose beauty you admire. If you call this madness and insanity, I will concede and confess it, as long as you understand that no poet is good (nor can a poet be good) unless they be seized by madness of this sort; nor do they see the future when they deliver prophecy, unless it be through this kind of madness, or is God worshiped perfectly and gloriously unless it be through this kind of alienation from one’s mind.
Poetarum ergo furor a Musis est; amantium vero a Venere. Oritur autem hic ex verae pulchritudinis contemplatione, cuius effigiem visu intuentes acerrimo ac violentissimo sensuum nostrorum, stupentes ac velut extra nos positi, totis affectibus in illum corripimur, ut non minus vere quam eleganter dictum sit amantis animam in alieno corpore vitam ducere. Haec igitur vehemens occupatio animi atque correptio amor vocatur: divina quaedam alienatio ac veluti sui ipsius oblivio et in id quoius pulchritudinem admiramur transfusio. Quam si furorem ac vesaniam appellas, concedam etiam atque fatebor, dummodo intelligas neque poetam bonum esse ullum posse nisi huiusmodi furore correptum, neque futura praevidere vaticinantes, nisi per huiusmodi furorem, neque perfecte neque eximie deum coli, nisi per huiusmodi mentis alienationem.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (3.14):
It is a singular stroke of eloquence (at least it was so, when eloquence flourished at Athens and Rome, and would be so now, did orators wear mantles) not to mention the name of a thing, when you had the thing about you in petto, ready to produce, pop, in the place you want it. A scar, an axe, a sword, a pink’d doublet, a rusty helmet, a pound and a half of pot-ashes in an urn, or a three-halfpenny pickle pot—but above all, a tender infant royally accoutred.—Tho’ if it was too young, and the oration as long as Tully’s second Philippick—it must certainly have beshit the orator’s mantle.—And then again, if too old,—it must have been unwieldy and incommodious to his action—so as to make him lose by his child almost as much as he could gain by it.—Otherwise, when a state orator has hit the precise age to a minute——hid his BAMBINO in his mantle so cunningly that no mortal could smell it——and produced it so critically, that no soul could say, it came in by head and shoulders—Oh Sirs! it has done wonders—It has open’d the sluices, and turn’d the brains, and shook the principles, and unhinged the politicks of half a nation.
These feats however are not to be done, except in those states and times, I say, where orators wore mantles——and pretty large ones too, my brethren, with some twenty or five-and-twenty yards of good purple, superfine, marketable cloth in them—with large flowing folds and doubles, and in a great style of design.—All which plainly shews, may it please your worships, that the decay of eloquence, and the little good service it does at present, both within and without doors, is owing to nothing else in the world, but short coats, and the disuse of trunk-hose.——We can conceal nothing under ours, Madam, worth shewing.
Fabricius Luscinus was a man of great glory and great accomplishments. Publius Cornelius Rufinus worked hard with his hands, was a good warrior, and was extremely skilled in military discipline, but he was a thief and given to bitter avarice. Fabricius hated him and was certainly not a friend, but hated him on account of his characteristics. But when consuls needed to be created in the republic‘s most difficult times, Rufinus sought the consulship. His competitors were useless and incompetent, and Fabricius exerted himself to get the consulship given to Rufinus. Everyone wondered why he would wish to have made consul a man who was not just greedy, but also his personal enemy. Fabricius told them that he would rather be fleeced by a fellow citizen than sold by an enemy.
Fabricius Luscinus magna gloria vir magnisque rebus gestis fuit. P. Cornelius Rufinus manu quidem strenuus et bellator bonus militarisque disciplinae peritus admodum fuit, sed furax homo et avaritia acri erat. Hunc Fabricius non probabat neque amico utebatur osusque eum morum causa fuit. Sed cum in temporibus rei difficillimis consules creandi forent et is Rufinus peteret consulatum competitoresque eius essent inbelles quidam et futtiles, summa ope adnixus est Fabricius, uti Rufino consulatus deferretur. Eam rem plerisque admirantibus, quod hominem avarum, cui esset inimicissimus, creari consulem vellet, “malo,” inquit “civis me compilet, quam hostis vendat”.
“Now we must complete the chapel.” He paused reverently, and said, “And here is a fragment of the original building.” Rickie at once had a rush of sympathy. He, too, looked with reverence at the morsel of Jacobean brickwork, ruddy and beautiful amidst the machine-squared stones of the modern apse. The two men, who had so little in common, were thrilled with patriotism. They rejoiced that their country was great, noble, and old.
“Thank God I’m English,” said Rickie suddenly.
“Thank Him indeed,” said Mr. Pembroke, laying a hand on his back.
“We’ve been nearly as great as the Greeks, I do believe. Greater, I’m sure, than the Italians, though they did get closer to beauty. Greater than the French, though we do take all their ideas. I can’t help thinking that England is immense. English literature certainly.”
Mr. Pembroke removed his hand. He found such patriotism somewhat craven. Genuine patriotism comes only from the heart. It knows no parleying with reason. English ladies will declare abroad that there are no fogs in London, and Mr. Pembroke, though he would not go to this, was only restrained by the certainty of being found out. On this occasion he remarked that the Greeks lacked spiritual insight, and had a low conception of woman.
“As to women—oh! there they were dreadful,” said Rickie, leaning his hand on the chapel. “I realize that more and more. But as to spiritual insight, I don’t quite like to say; and I find Plato too difficult, but I know men who don’t, and I fancy they mightn’t agree with you.”
“Far be it from me to disparage Plato. And for philosophy as a whole I have the greatest respect. But it is the crown of a man’s education, not the foundation. Myself, I read it with the utmost profit, but I have known endless trouble result from boys who attempt it too soon, before they were set.”
“But if those boys had died first,” cried Rickie with sudden vehemence, “without knowing what there is to know—”
“Or isn’t to know!” said Mr. Pembroke sarcastically.
“Or what there isn’t to know. Exactly. That’s it.”
“My dear Rickie, what do you mean? If an old friend may be frank, you are talking great rubbish.” And, with a few well-worn formulae, he propped up the young man’s orthodoxy. The props were unnecessary. Rickie had his own equilibrium. Neither the Revivalism that assails a boy at about the age of fifteen, nor the scepticism that meets him five years later, could sway him from his allegiance to the church into which he had been born. But his equilibrium was personal, and the secret of it useless to others. He desired that each man should find his own.
“What does philosophy do?” the propper continued. “Does it make a man happier in life? Does it make him die more peacefully? I fancy that in the long-run Herbert Spencer will get no further than the rest of us. Ah, Rickie! I wish you could move among the school boys, and see their healthy contempt for all they cannot touch!” Here he was going too far, and had to add, “Their spiritual capacities, of course, are another matter.” Then he remembered the Greeks, and said, “Which proves my original statement.”
Submissive signs, as of one propped, appeared in Rickie’s face. Mr. Pembroke then questioned him about the men who found Plato not difficult. But here he kept silence, patting the school chapel gently, and presently the conversation turned to topics with which they were both more competent to deal.
Mr. Pembroke was silent. Then he observed, “There is, as you say, a higher attitude and a lower attitude. Yet here, as so often, cannot we find a golden mean between them?”
“What’s that?” said a dreamy voice. They turned and saw a tall, spectacled man, who greeted the newcomer kindly, and took hold of his arm. “What’s that about the golden mean?”
“Mr. Jackson—Mr. Elliot: Mr. Elliot—Mr. Jackson,” said Herbert, who did not seem quite pleased. “Rickie, have you a moment to spare me?”
But the humanist spoke to the young man about the golden mean and the pinchbeck mean, adding, “You know the Greeks aren’t broad church clergymen. They really aren’t, in spite of much conflicting evidence. Boys will regard Sophocles as a kind of enlightened bishop, and something tells me that they are wrong.”
“Mr. Jackson is a classical enthusiast,” said Herbert. “He makes the past live. I want to talk to you about the humdrum present.”
“And I am warning him against the humdrum past. That’s another point, Mr. Elliot. Impress on your class that many Greeks and most Romans were frightfully stupid, and if they disbelieve you, read Ctesiphon with them, or Valerius Flaccus.”
Rickie was silent. He had told his friend how he felt, but not what had happened. Ansell could discuss love and death admirably, but somehow he would not understand lovers or a dying man, and in the letter there had been scant allusion to these concrete facts. Would Cambridge understand them either? He watched some dons who were peeping into an excavation, and throwing up their hands with humorous gestures of despair. These men would lecture next week on Catiline’s conspiracy, on Luther, on Evolution, on Catullus. They dealt with so much and they had experienced so little. Was it possible he would ever come to think Cambridge narrow? In his short life Rickie had known two sudden deaths, and that is enough to disarrange any placid outlook on the world. He knew once for all that we are all of us bubbles on an extremely rough sea. Into this sea humanity has built, as it were, some little breakwaters—scientific knowledge, civilized restraint—so that the bubbles do not break so frequently or so soon. But the sea has not altered, and it was only a chance that he, Ansell, Tilliard, and Mrs. Aberdeen had not all been killed in the tram.
Perhaps I have spent too much time reading books, because on beautiful sun-lit afternoons I often find myself lapsing into fits of wayward sentimentality. The springs of melancholy gurgle forth, and my heart bathes for a while in those sorrowful waters. Usually, the object of this maudlin nostalgia is nothing grand. Today my thoughts bent toward Bradley’s Arnold Latin Prose Composition (edited by Sir James Mountford).
To be sure, it is not a title to inspire enthusiasm, but it was thirteen years ago that I made my first forays into this odd little relic of a vanished age, and those youthful days are just as lost to me as the lives of Arnold, or Bradley, or Mountford. Each of those successive editors lives on in the inert product of their labors, and much of its idle curiosity remains lodged in my head. I regularly tell people (friends, family, students) that this is my favorite footnote:
For ‘Gaius and I,’ the Romans, putting ‘I’ first, said Ego et Gaius. When therefore Cardinal Wolsey said, ‘Ego et rex meus,’ he was a good grammarian but a bad courtier.
Please imagine the blank stares with which this is met by a group of teenagers. What is wrong with me? The very phrase “my favorite footnote” is absurd in its own right. But perhaps I am only the type of person who has a favorite footnote because of the psychological alteration subtly inflicted by this book.
As I flipped back through it this afternoon, I recall why it seemed like such an important book when I was young. Here was all of Latin systematized in a much more comprehensive way than even Wheelock had dared, and these guys were so goddamn sure of themselves at every turn. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a textbook today which matched this one for its reckless abandon in the use of phrases such as one must and we must.
Many of the rules were internalized along the way, and I know not why my memory has so tenaciously held to isolated chunks of rules from a tedious volume like this while struggling to retain information of real value. I never forgot the advice that one should avoid rendering metaphorical English idioms like he ascended the throne literally into Latin as solium ascendit, because it literally meant that someone climbed atop the throne. Rather, the book advised direct and concrete expression like regnum cepit (he took power). This was a useful exercise in thinking about idiom.
Of course, the classicist propagandist line holds that studying Latin will refine one’s English by making it more direct and concrete, as Latin tends to be. Since I was, like most youths, a blockhead, I internalized that codswallop, but luckily I had enough sense in later years to recognize the smell of rancid horseshit festering in the stables of my mind. English in its most concrete forms is a drab and depressing affair, and though I enjoy a highly Latinate style (e.g. Milton), all attempts by grammarians to make English adhere to the rules of Latin now strike me as unabashed villainy.
In any event, my professor and I used to regularly joke that the real challenge of completing the exercises was determining what the English even meant. After that act of decipherment, the composition of Latin was comparatively easy. (One is reminded of Porson’s comment that it would be a salutary exercise for the student to attempt to turn a paragraph from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall into English.) Just consider some of this:
He was a man of long-tried honour and rare incorruptibility; yet at that time he was taxed with avarice, suspected of bribery, and prosecuted for extortion. You all know that he was unanimously acquitted of that charge. Who is there of you but remembers that day on which he not only cleared himself of an unjust accusation, but exposed the malice and falsehoods of his accusers?
I seem to recall that there was some rule about “he said” and “said he” being translated with dixit and inquit (or was it the other way around?), and I often thought that it would have been much easier if they had settled on a more natural introduction for indirect discourse. Yet that would have spoiled the ultimate delight of this book: that it could at times be so bewildering and hard to use that its countless rules were sublimated into a generalized anarchy, all tending toward the advice just read some Latin. Once, I defied the book directly, and rendered something about labor as barbarously as possible with the phrase lardum cubiti (“elbow grease”), which possessed the virtue of being so manifestly preposterous that my professor was compelled to love it.
Why did I write that? It’s enough to conjure the emotion it describes.
As I went down this nostalgic path, I was vexed by the realization that, as a teacher, I talk in the way that this book was written. Examples are regularly followed by note that or observe how. My students begged me nearly five years ago to stop saying things like “You will note…” while demonstrating some point of grammar. I tried to wean myself off of it, but I suppose that I am just an unregenerate enthusiast for painfully high-handed and professorial modes of speech. Thanks Arnold, or Bradley, or Mountford – whoever it was.
One day, my students were complaining about the relatively simple Latin composition exercise I had assigned, and I lapsed into that last refuge of the bitter old man, the claim that “At least you’re not working through Bradley’s Arnold Latin Prose Composition by Sir James Mountford,” followed by what started as a threat that I would make them do it; somehow this threat shifted in tone to a hopeful promise. But I won’t make them, and they will never have the experience I had. Since I was the only one in that class, there is no one with whom I can reminisce about the singular experience of working through the book in those days, in those circumstances. Excepting what I have recounted here, the whole thing will remain an entirely individual memory until the day when I join Arnold, and Bradley, and Mountford, in that land where footnotes are forgotten.
This was the gate code to get into the neighborhood where the seminar was held. Or so I thought! I dialed the wrong house for months and was let in without a problem for months before I was told that it was the wrong one. (Gated communities suck, by the way.)
Not long ago I sent round to the library to see what they had by Ausonius. The slave returned with a wheelbarrow full of books. Ausonius must be read to be believed! As poet, no subject is too trivial for him; as courtier, no flattery too excessive. He did write one passable nature poem on the Moselle, but I’m not keen on rivers. The rest of his work is quite marvellous in its tedium. Particularly those verses he wrote at Valentinian’s request. Among the subjects chosen by the Emperor were the source of the Danube (Ausonius did not locate it but he made a good try), Easter, and (best of all) four odes to the Emperor’s four favourite horses. I had one of these equine odes copied out and Hippia reads it to me whenever I am depressed. It begins “Oh raven steed, whose fortune it is to spread the golden thighs and Mars-like firm convexities of divine Augustus…” I don’t know when I have enjoyed a poem so much. I’ll enclose a copy. Anyway, I suggest you see Ausonius as soon as possible. And of course you will remember to express admiration for his work! In a good cause hypocrisy becomes virtue.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Chp. XV)
The writings of Cicero represent in the most lively colors the ignorance, the errors, and the uncertainty of the ancient philosophers with regard to the immortality of the soul. When they are desirous of arming their disciples against the fear of death, they inculcate, as an obvious, though melancholy position, that the fatal stroke of our dissolution releases us from the calamities of life; and that those can no longer suffer, who no longer exist. Yet there were a few sages of Greece and Rome who had conceived a more exalted, and, in some respects, a juster idea of human nature, though it must be confessed, that in the sublime inquiry, their reason had been often guided by their imagination, and that their imagination had been prompted by their vanity.
When they viewed with complacency the extent of their own mental powers, when they exercised the various faculties of memory, of fancy, and of judgment, in the most profound speculations, or the most important labors, and when they reflected on the desire of fame, which transported them into future ages, far beyond the bounds of death and of the grave, they were unwilling to confound themselves with the beasts of the field, or to suppose that a being, for whose dignity they entertained the most sincere admiration, could be limited to a spot of earth, and to a few years of duration. With this favorable prepossession they summoned to their aid the science, or rather the language, of Metaphysics.
They soon discovered, that as none of the properties of matter will apply to the operations of the mind, the human soul must consequently be a substance distinct from the body, pure, simple, and spiritual, incapable of dissolution, and susceptible of a much higher degree of virtue and happiness after the release from its corporeal prison. From these specious and noble principles, the philosophers who trod in the footsteps of Plato deduced a very unjustifiable conclusion, since they asserted, not only the future immortality, but the past eternity, of the human soul, which they were too apt to consider as a portion of the infinite and self-existing spirit, which pervades and sustains the universe. A doctrine thus removed beyond the senses and the experience of mankind, might serve to amuse the leisure of a philosophic mind; or, in the silence of solitude, it might sometimes impart a ray of comfort to desponding virtue; but the faint impression which had been received in the schools, was soon obliterated by the commerce and business of active life.
We are sufficiently acquainted with the eminent persons who flourished in the age of Cicero, and of the first Caesars, with their actions, their characters, and their motives, to be assured that their conduct in this life was never regulated by any serious conviction of the rewards or punishments of a future state. At the bar and in the senate of Rome the ablest orators were not apprehensive of giving offence to their hearers, by exposing that doctrine as an idle and extravagant opinion, which was rejected with contempt by every man of a liberal education and understanding.
He mocked Postumius Albinus writing a history in Greek and asked his audience’s pardon for it, saying that it would be necessary to pardon him if he had undertaken the work compelled by the votes of the Amphictyonic League. Cato said that the Athenians marveled at the speed and the sharpness of his speech. Whatever he set forth briefly, his interpreted expanded at length and with many words. All things considered, he thought that the words of the Greeks came from their lips, but the words of the Romans came from their hearts.
