DUMB PIOUS ÆNEAS
In the beginning the Romans didn’t bother very much with art. In their
public buildings they were content to take over the Greek styles--but
making them heavy and solid, so as to last to the end of time. The
attitude of a Roman gentleman toward the fine arts reminds me of a
wealthy Southern planter whose son wanted to become a violinist, and the
father said, “I can hire all the fiddler-fellows I want.” The Roman
gentleman bought people of that sort--musicians, dancers and poets with
skill handed down from “the glory that was Greece.”
Until the republic was dead and the Emperor Augustus took the throne.
Then came a time of peace, and a Roman scholar, the son of a country
proprietor, looked about him, and seeing the perils of internal decay
and outside barbarism looming over his world, he recalled the stern
sobriety of the good old days, and yearned to bring back the governing
class of Rome to reverence for their ancestors. There is a report that
the Emperor Augustus himself suggested the task to the poet; anyhow, Mr.
Publius Vergilius Maro, known to us as Virgil, set himself with sober
deliberation to the making of a piece of Roman national and religious
propaganda.
It was to be an epic after the fashion of Homer, written in dactylic
hexameter, like Homer. Virgil cast about him for a hero, and selected a
legendary Trojan named Æneas, who was said to have fled from the Greeks
and to have founded Rome. The characters in Homer carried an adjective
before their names, “the wily Ulysses,” “the swift-footed Achilles,” and
so on. Therefore this hero must have an adjective, and he becomes “the
pious Æneas”--the man who respects the old-time 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 “Æneid” 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 “Æneid” is propaganda? 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 “Æneid” we
find this pious emperor described in the following fashion:
This, this is he--long promised, oft foretold--
Augustus Cæsar. He the age of gold,
God-born himself, in Latium shall restore
And rule the land that Saturn ruled before.
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 leisure-class 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.”