Stray Studies from England and ItalyGreene, John Richard
History
Stray Studies from England and Italy
Greene, John Richard
Italy -- Description and travel
is the developement which religion takes with a British maiden and a
British parson in regions above the clouds.
ÆNEAS:
A VERGILIAN STUDY.
In the revival side by side of Homeric and Vergilian study it is easy to
see the reflection of two currents of contrasted sentiment which are
telling on the world around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler
thinking, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexities in
which modern life loses its direct and intensest joys, a craving for a
world untroubled by the problems that weigh on us, express themselves as
vividly in poems like the 'Earthly Paradise' as in the return to the
Iliad. The charm of Vergil on the other hand lies in the strange
fidelity with which across so many ages he echoes those complex thoughts
which make the life of our own. Vergil is the Tennyson of the older
world; his power, like that of the laureate, lies in the sympathy with
which he reflects the strength and weakness of his time, its humanity,
its new sense of human brotherhood, its pitifulness, its moral
earnestness, its high conception of the purpose of life and the dignity
of man, its attitude of curious but condescending interest towards the
past, its vast dreams of a future, embodied by the one poet in the vague
dreamland of 'Locksley Hall,' by the other in the enduring greatness of
Rome.
From beginning to end the Æneid is a song of Rome. Throughout it we feel
ourselves drawing nearer and nearer to that sense of the Roman greatness
which filled the soul of Vergil; with him in verse after verse "tendimus
in Latium." Nowhere does the song rise to a higher grandeur than when
the singer sings the majesty of that all-embracing empire, the wide
peace of the world beneath its sway. But the Æneid is no mere outburst
of Roman pride. To Vergil the time in which he lived was at once an end
and a beginning, a close of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to
be the mistress of the world, an opening of her new and mightier career
as a reconciler and leader of the nations. His song is broken by divine
prophecies, not merely of Roman greatness, but of the work Rome had to
do in warring down the rebels against her universal sway, in showing
clemency to the conquered, in binding hostile peoples together, in
welding the nations into a new human race. The Æneid is a song of the
future rather than of the present or past, a song not of pride but of
duty. The work that Rome has done points throughout to the nobler work
which Rome has yet to do. And in the very forefront of this dream of the
future Vergil sets the ideal of the new Roman by whom this mighty task
shall be wrought, the picture of one who by loyalty to a higher purpose
had fitted himself to demand loyalty from those whom he ruled, one who
by self-mastery had learned to be master of men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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