off the evils of the old, literary continuity is held with a strong grasp, and the classic poet whose gold best endures the new crucible is Virgil. The Virgilian lines and phrases of Tennyson show us that the influence of the Mantuan did not stop with Milton. Sir Bedivere stands on the margin of the mystic lake with Arthur's sword "Excalibur" in his hand, hesitating to throw it at the King's behest, This way and that dividing the swift mind -a literal translation of Aeneid iv. 285: Atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit illuc. In The Princess we have: The moan of doves in immemorial elms, as in Eclogue i. 58, 59: Nec tamen interea raucae, tua cura, palumbes, We all know Virgil's story-how only by the power of the magic golden bough could Aeneas make his way through the dim and fearful approaches to the dwellings of the mighty dead. It was reserved for Tennyson to see the marvelous fitness of the idea to the poet who conceived it--he is himself the golden bough, the magic token, whose charm opens to us that shadowy kingdom of the dead which else were closed to us forever: Light among the vanished ages, star that gildest yet this phantom shore; I have tried, with such slight touches as I could, to bring to our thought some conception of the continuity of the influence of Virgil— how it reaches back to the very lifetime of the poet, and has grown into the inmost substance of English literary thought. We of these days have seen a new thing under the sun-we have seen the breaking of this chain. Now, for the first time since the poems were penned, is it possible that a man should be, not only highly trained, but even liberally educated, and yet know nothing of Virgil. We cannot help this, and perhaps we may not regret it. The complexity of modern life calls for varied means of culture; we would not turn the wheels of progress backward. But more than ever, it behooves us, who are, as it were, the ministers of the old temple, to know for ourselves, and, as far as possible, to show our pupils, what it is that has given Virgil his royal place among the ancestors of our intellectual life. We need not fear to own that it is in part his diction that has made him the favorite of the schoolmasters, and so perpetuated his fame. This is an age of plain speech, but slovenly, and sometimes it seems that all the beauties and fine distinctions which the ages have crystallized into our English speech are like to deliquesce into amorphous slang. We may still find profit in the study of a master of words, and it is still true that the teacher will find that he has undermined his own foundation when he tries to make Virgil popular by a superficial treatment. But it was not Virgil's syntax and prosody that moved the tears of St. Augustine, that made Dante his disciple and Milton his follower. If there is something here for our time tooand I think there is-nay, if he has that which our age greatly lacks— and I think he has-let us try to find it and show it forth. We have some advantages over our immediate predecessors. In the last generation came the reaction from the traditional, unquestioning veneration for the poet, and a tide of harsh and unsympathetic criticism set in, which seemed likely, at one time, to carry away the ancient landmarks. But this mood has been followed by one of more intelligent and independent appreciation, and a certain modernizing of our apprehension of him. In some respects perhaps, Virgil is better understood by us than by his contemporaries. Roman cruelty would be slow indeed to comprehend his tenderness, his ever-present sense of "the tears of things," the pathos and pity which invest even the doomed of the gods, like Dido and Turnus. They would better understand the perfect technique of his verses, but we, with our modern sense of the beauty and ideal significance of the outer world, may dwell with even more delight on his "fields a-blossom in the sunshine," his drooping, rain-filled poppies, his "rivers undergliding ancient walls." Our hearts cannot swell with the pride of his countrymen at his grand forecasts of "the long glories of majestic Rome," but the perspective of the centuries shows far more clearly just what it is that gives Virgil the right to his place as the national poet of the mother of the nations-I mean his deep and true insight into the real mission of Rome at her ideal best—the mission of a state set to call men from the savage, unordered, and disintegrating ways of life, to organize them under law, to conserve their achievements by custom, and to make their progress perpetual. Below these things, what are Virgil's elemental ideas? I quote Professor Santayana of Harvard: "Agriculture, with its cosmic emotions, nationality, with its deep springs and its sacred responsibilities." And I would add: "Duty, with its paramount claim upon the life of man." The natural life, patriotism, duty-have we Americans of the twentieth century yet outgrown our need of thoughts like these? HAUPTMANN'S GRIECHISCHER FRUEHLING' BY W. A. OLDFATHER Hellas has thrice within modern times been visited by distinguished men of letters belonging to as many different nations, and each has left eloquent and impressive memorials of his impressions of land and people. First the Vicomte de Chateaubriand in 1806, then Lord Byron in 1809 and 1810, and finally, nearly a century later, March and April 1907, the Silesian poet-dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann. In our eager searchings after classical allusions, reminiscences, and word-echoes among dead authors, it may not be entirely time misspent to observe how the land and memory of the Hellenes have a compelling power on this leader of modern letters who is still in the full vigor of life. It were superfluous here to analyze closely the characteristics of such universally admired works as the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, or the Childe Harold and other poems of Byron's Greek cycle; only certain salient features of their general attitude toward nature in that land are of peculiar interest for the contrast they afford with the work of Hauptmann's. Chateaubriand, with the sentimental melancholy of a nature in which the old was not yet dead nor the new as yet born into full self-consciousness, an attitude which has perhaps wrongly been called purely egoistic, felt himself to be the central figure in every landscape and ruin, in which alone they had meaning or significance. For him as for all romanticists Nature was either a background or a mirror for his own emotions. Take for example the eloquent passage on Eleusis and Salamis: * Gerhart Hauptmann, Griechischer Frühling. Fünfte Auflage. Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1908. Pp. 266. M. 6.50. In this connection a few misprints might be noted which should not have got so far as the "fünfte Auflage": Regenböen (11); Appollo (192) and appollinisch (191, 202); the letter h seems to make trouble somewhat as in late Latin, thus: Mitridates (53); Tyest (219); Thegea (228); Tymian (190) and Thymian (elsewhere); Lykabethos (88) and Likabethos (125) also occur. I have nothing to say of Eleusis after so many other travelers, except that I strolled about in the midst of its ruins, that I walked down to the harbor and paused to gaze upon the Strait of Salamis. The festivals and the glory had departed; there was the same silence on land and on sea; no more acclamations, no more chants, no more pomp along the coast, no more shouts of warriors, no more shock of gallies, no more confusion on the waves. My imagination was unable to picture at one moment the religious procession of Eleusis, at another to repeople the beach with the innumerable host of Persians who gazed upon the battle of Salamis. Eleusis is, to my feeling, the most venerable spot in Grecce, for there they taught the unity of God, and at the same time this place witnessed the grandest effort that men have ever made in the defense of their liberty. . . . . Night alone could drive me from the shore. The waves which the evening breeze had raised broke upon the strand, and their strength died away about my feet: I walked for some time along the sea that laves the tomb of Themistocles; in all probability I was at that moment the only person in Greece that was thinking of that great man (pp. 129 f.). It is not that Chateaubriand is insensible to the beauties of Nature; that were absurd to suggest of the author of Atala and Les Natchez. He sees them indeed, but only rarely do they seem to deserve special comment, while any pile of ruins or a few scratches on a block will call him aside to meditations on the passing of human ambitions or dilettante speculations on the location of some ancient temple or village. He went to the East to experience new emotions in spots that were surcharged with the memories of a glorious past; it seemed almost a desecration for the present to intrude upon his canvas in his more serious moments of reflection. For him the past existed only in ruined stone or printed page, there was no close and intimate association of land and people so that the thought of one always called forth the other. And so Sparta is for him a combination of beauty and sadness as he stands amid ruins (p. 97); Argos calls up omnia vanitas (p. 112); Corinth is a complex of literary and historical memories, where his last thought is of a similar fate that may overtake France some day (pp. 116-21); the Piraeus is mere desolation (pp. 159 f.). Typical of this one-sided view of Hellas, as well as of his exquisite imagery and landscape-painting, but unfortunately too long to quote here, is the scene at Sunium just before he left the country forever (p. 179). In much the same spirit as Chateaubriand did Lord Byron turn |