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Letters on Literature-Part6_ANDREW LANG(1844-1912)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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of the streams of Hell! And happy he who knows the rural deities,



Pan, and Sylvanus the Old, and the sisterhood of the nymphs!

Unmoved is he by the people's favour, by the purple of kings,



unmoved by all the perfidies of civil war, by the Dacian marching

down from his hostile Danube; by the peril of the Roman state, and



the Empire hurrying to its doom. He wasteth not his heart in pity

of the poor, he envieth not the rich, he gathereth what fruits the



branches bear and what the kindly wilderness unasked brings forth;

he knows not our laws, nor the madness of the courts, nor the



records of the common weal"--does not read the newspapers, in fact.

The sorrows of the poor, the luxury of the rich, the peril of the



Empire, the shame and dread of each day's news, we too know them;

like Virgil we too deplore them. We, in our reveries, long for some



such carelessparadise, but we place it not in Sparta but in the

Islands of the Southern Seas. It is in passages of this temper that



Virgil wins us most, when he speaks for himself and for his age, so

distant, and so weary, and so modern; when his own thought,



unborrowed and unforced, is wedded to the music of his own

unsurpassable style.



But he does not always write for himself and out of his own thought,

that style of his being far more frequently misapplied, wasted on



telling a story that is only of feigned and foreign interest.

Doubtless it was the "AEneid," his artificial and unfinished epic,



that won Virgil the favour of the Middle Aces. To the Middle Ages,

which knew not Greek, and knew not Homer, Virgil was the



representative of the heroic and eternally interesting past. But to

us who know Homer, Virgil's epic is indeed, "like moonlight unto



sunlight;" is a beautiful empty world, where no real life stirs, a

world that shines with a silver lustre not its own, but borrowed



from "the sun of Greece."

Homer sang of what he knew, of spears and ships, of heroic chiefs



and beggar men, of hunts and sieges, of mountains where the lion

roamed, and of fairy isles where a goddess walked alone. He lived



on the marches of the land of fable, when half the Mediterranean was

a sea unsailed, when even Italy was as dimly descried as the City of



the Sun in Elizabeth's reign. Of all that he knew he sang, but

Virgil could only follow and imitate, with a pale antiquarian



interest, the things that were alive for Homer. What could Virgil

care for a tussle between two stout men-at-arms, for the clash of



contending war-chariots, driven each on each, like wave against wave

in the sea? All that tide had passed over, all the story of the



"AEneid" is mere borrowed antiquity, like the Middle Ages of Sir

Walter Scott; but the borrower had none of Scott's joy in the noise



and motion of war, none of the Homeric "delight in battle."

Virgil, in writing the "AEneid," executed an imperialcommission,



and an ungrateful commission; it is the sublime of hack-work, and

the legend may be true which declares that, on his death-bed, he



wished his poem burned. He could only be himself here and there, as

in that earliest picture of romantic love, as some have called the



story of "Dido," not remembering, perhaps, that even here Virgil had

before his mind a Greek model, that he was thinking of Apollonius



Rhodius, and of Jason and Medea. He could be himself, too, in

passages of reflection and description, as in the beautiful sixth



book, with its picture of the under world, and its hints of mystical

philosophy.



Could we choose our own heavens, there in that Elysian world might

Virgil be well content to dwell, in the shadow of that fragrant



laurel grove, with them who were "priests pure of life, while life

was theirs, and holy singers, whose songs were worthy of Apollo."



There he might muse on his own religion and on the Divinity that

dwells in, that breathes in, that is, all things and more than all.



Who could wish Virgil to be one of the spirits that

Lethaeum ad flumen Dues evocat agmine magno,



that are called once more to the Lethean stream, and that once more,

forgetful of their home, "into the world and wave of men depart?"



There will come no other Virgil, unless his soul, in accordance with




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