faith, and preserves the old-time traditions of virtue, sobriety and public service. So here is an epic poem, wrought with verbal skill and sincerity of feeling, conveying to us the dream of Rome as it ought to be, but was not. We see the wanderings of Æneas and his ship-load of companions. We see him land at Carthage, and carry on a love affair with Queen Dido, and then desert her-not a serious impropriety in Roman days. We see the founding father celebrating the old-time religious rites, consulting the auguries and asking the blessing of those gods, of which every Roman had a little image in his home, just as orthodox Russians and Roman Catholics do today. The "Eneid" is considered ideal for infliction upon helpless school boys; it being full of that careful propriety and decorous tameness which represent what our children ought to be, but are not. The old professor of Latin who inflicted the poem upon me was an ardent propagandist of the Catholic faith, and it was his hope that if we learned proper respect for the established religion of ancient Rome, we might some day be lured into similar respect for the established religion of modern Rome. We read, or made up, a phrase: "Dum pius Æneas," meaning: "While the pious Æneas"-. We boys knew we were being propaganded, and we resented it, and this phrase gave us a chance to express our feelings. "The dumb pious Æneas" became our formula. "What's your next hour?" "Oh, I've got the dumb pious Æneas!" We would sit and solemnly translate a long account of a prize-fight-a religious prize-fight, part of the pious games. The antagonists wore no vulgar boxing-gloves, but a mysterious, romantic thing called a "cestus," which we did not recognize as plain "brass knucks." And woe to the student if the dumb pious professor happened to catch him with a morning newspaper under his desk, reading an account of a prize-fight which had happened the night before in Madison Square Garden! Woe likewise to the student who, translating the rage of the deserted Queen Dido-"furens quid femina possit"-happened to be caught reading the story of some queen of the stage or the grand opera who had committed suicide because of a faithless lover! Does anyone question that the "Eneid" is propa ganda? If so, I mention that the poet lost his country estate in one of the civil wars; and on account of his beautiful verses the Emperor Augustus restored the property to him, and made him a court favorite. So in the "Eneid" we find this pious emperor described in the following fashion: This, this is he-long promised, oft foretold- That is a more direct and personal kind of propaganda, the propaganda of a hungry poet in search of his dinner. We shall find a great deal of it through the history of art, and it is, I am told, not entirely unknown in art circles today. "I have here," says Mrs. Ogi, "a letter from a Professor who has been reading this manuscript. He protests, 'not in a professorial fashion'-" "Naturally not," says Ogi. "That you cannot possibly know the old authors as well as he does, who has given the greater part of his life to studying them. To say that Virgil was a sycophant of a Roman emperor is a very superficial estimate, which overlooks the really deep matter in his writings. To say that somehow there has constantly been a conscious trick played on humanity, in defending and glorifying the ruling classes, is merely silly. There was no knowledge of a social question then, any more than there was electric machinery.' "That is important," answers Ogi, “and I want to get it straight. I should like to put an arrow on the cover of this book, directing the attention of all professors to the fact that I do not state or imply that the great leisureclass artists were playing a 'conscious trick.'" Sometimes they knew what they were doing; but most of the time they just wrote that way, because they were that kind of men. I have tried to make this plain; but evidently the Professor missed it, so let me give an illustration: "Here is a hive of bees; each of these bees all day long diligently labors to collect the juices of flowers and make it into honey; or to collect wax, and build exact hexagonal architectural structures in which to store the honey. Now comes an entomologist, and studies the life cycle of the bee, and says that the purpose of the hexagonal structures is to hold the honey in the most economical fashion; the purpose of the honey is to nourish the infant bees which will be hatched in the hexagonal cells. Now shall a critic say that this entomologist is 'silly,' because no bee can have understood the principles of economy involved in the hexagonal structure, nor can it have performed chemical tests necessary to determine the nutritive qualities of carbohydrates? "The class feelings of human beings are instinctive and automatic reactions to economic pressure. The reactions of the artist, who seeks fame and success by voicing these class feelings, may be just as instinctive. But now mankind is emerging into consciousness, and social life is becoming rational and deliberate. I say that one of the steps in this process is to go back and study the life cycle of the artist, and find out where he collected his honey, and how he stored it, and what use was made of it by the hive." At this point Mrs. Ogi, who has been reading in her Bible-known to the rest of the world as the Works of G. B. S.-produces a text from "The Quintessence of Ibsenism," reading as follows: "The existence of a discoverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet's work by no means depends on the completeness of his own intellectual consciousness of it." CHAPTER XXIV THE ROMAN FOUR HUNDRED A few years after Virgil came another Roman poet, whom I learned to read as a lad. He also was taken up by the Emperor Augustus, and wrote fulsome odes in praise of this emperor. Also he found a patron, a wealthy gentleman by the name of Mæcenas, who was really fond of the arts, and gave the poet a Sabine farm to live on. This poet was, I believe, the first author who invited the public into his home, and told them his private affairs, pleasant or otherwise. Being that kind of a tactless author myself, I early conceived a feeling of affection for Mr. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known to us as Horace. For one thing, this worldly wise poet knows how to tip us a wink, even while handing out flattery to his patron. For another thing, his Mæcenas seems to have been a really worthy soul. I know how easy it is to love a rich man; but in Rome it must have been hard to find a rich man who could be loved at any price. Horace was a man of humble tastes; all he wanted was to live in his books, and to escape the brawl and fury of politics. We might have expected him to fall down on his knees and kiss the hand of a man who gave him a quiet home, with fruit-trees around him, and snow-capped mountains in the distance, and a crackling log fire in winter-time. But, as a matter of fact, the poet was quite decent about it. He asserted the right of a man of letters to live an independent life-quite a "modern" idea, and hard for brutal rich Romans to understand. Every now and then Horace would have to visit his patron and friend, and meet some of these haughty conquerors of the world, and be put in his place by them. The father of Horace was what the Romans called a "freedman"; that is, he had formerly been a slave, and the great world sneered at the poet on that account. But instead of being ashamed of his ancestry, and trying to hide it, Horace put his old father into his books, for all Rome to meet. Yes, said the poet, that fond old freedman father brought his little boy to Rome to get an education, and walked every day to school with him, carrying his books and slate. We can honor this honest gentleman, and read his charming verses with pleasure-but without committing the absurdities of the classical tradition, which ranks Horace as a great poet. He was a pioneer man of letters, and in that way made history; but there is nothing he wrote that the world has not learned to write better today. There are a score of young fellows writing verses for the columns of American newspapers who can turn out just as witty and clever and human stuff. "F. P. A." has written "take-offs" on Horace, which shock the purists, but would have delighted Horace. Louis Untermeyer has published volumes of such mingled wisdom and wit; and there is Austin Dobson, and above all, Heine—a man who writes verse of loveliness to tear your heart-strings, and at the same time had the nerve to hit out at the ruling-class brutes of his age. "Wasn't there a single artist in Rome who revolted?” asks Mrs. Ogi. "Yes, there was one. He also was the son of a freedman, and came nearly a century after Virgil and Horace, in the reign of the infamous Domitian. His name was Juvenal, and he wrote satires in which he flayed the aristocracy of the empire for their vileness and materialism. I once published a novel, "The Metropolis,' in which I did. the same thing for the so-called 'Four Hundred' of New York; and it is interesting to compare the two pictures"Now don't you start talking about your own books!" cries Mrs. Ogi. "I don't offer "The Metropolis' as literature, but merely as a record of things I saw in New York twenty years ago. Afterwards I'll show what Juvenal has to say on the same topics. First, "The Metropolis,' page 278, listing the health-cures of ladies in high society: "One of the consequences of the furious pace was that people's health broke down very quickly; and there were all sorts of bizarre ways of restoring it. One person would be eating nothing but spinach, and another would be living on grass. One would chew a mouthful of soup thirty-two times; another would eat every two hours, and another only once a week. Some went out in the early morning and walked barefooted in the grass, and others went hopping about the floor on their hands and knees to take off fat. There were 'rest cures' and 'water cures,' 'new thought' and 'metaphysical healing' and 'Christian Science'; there was an automatic horse, which one might ride indoors, with a register showing the distance traveled. Montague met one man who had an electric machine, which cost thirty thousand dollars, and which took hold of his arms and feet and exercised him while he waited. He met a woman who told him she was riding an electric camel! "But of course they could not really succeed in reducing weight, because they were incapable of self-restraint. Mrs. Billy Alden gave Montague a delightfully malicious account of a certain lordly fat lady of her set, who had got the Turkish-bath habit. Terrible to encounter, most awful in visage, she would enter the baths by night, and all the attendants would rush into instant action. 'She delights in perspiring with great tumult,' said Mrs. Billy. |