Parole adorne di lingua piu d’una.
Milton. Sonnet IV.
Fancy to yourself two enthusiasts sitting under a magnificent
liriodendron (pity it is that common usage should have degraded the
glory of our _forests_ into a _poplar_; it is no poplar, and even the
name tulip-tree has a hybrid sound, half Norman half Anglo-Saxon; “it
follows not,” says holy but funny Fuller, “that the foreign tulip is
better than the rose because some usurping fancies would prefer it;”)
fancy, I say, gentle Alice, and gentle reader, two students of old books
under a lofty tree, on a knoll in sight of a broad Southern river, with
the bank all bespread with volumes. One of these youths is tall,
slender, and—“call it fair, not pale,” because two damask rose-leaves
give a hectic beauty to the skin through which the eloquent blood
courses almost visibly and all too rapidly. The brown hair, long and
neglected, falls about the neck and over the linen collar of a country
jacket. The great, liquid eye now rolls and now fixes, and the teeth,
which medical observation recognizes as more pearly in consumptives, are
disclosed in a speaking smile, as the attenuated and almost dainty
fingers turn over the heavy leaves of a Greek folio. The approach of
fatal disease (we remember Kirk White and Godman) seems only to quicken
the appetency and spiritualize the enjoyment of knowledge. Dewy bushes,
birds in the branches, a flock of sheep on the green hill-side, and a
squadron of lazy boats in the distance, only aid the pursuit. Study is
not confined to cells and conventual towers.
_Pedant._ The greatest solitude I ever felt was in a great city; when I
was in an old, tumble-down street in London.
_Albert._ O give me the open air of heaven! I used to spout speeches in
the Virginia mountains, where I could halloo to the echoes and fear no
overhearing. But that was when I dreamed of the forum and the senate. It
is past!
_Pedant._ Cicero makes much of these shades, as he calls them. He says
Eloquence did not flourish in war-times. “Pacis est comes _otiique
socia_, et jam hene constitutæ civitatis quasi alumna quæmdam
Eloquentia.” The gabble and fuss of much that is called learned talk in
our towns is destructive of deep feeling and thus of high art.
_Albert._ Yes, and as my honored abbé used to quote from Goethe,
concerning such a _litterateur_: “All the springs of natural feeling,
which were open in all their fullness to our fathers, are shut to him.
The paper-hangings, which fade on his walls in the course of a few
years, are a token of his taste and a type of his works.”
_Pedant._ Yet we lack great libraries here in our remote place.
_Albert._ We must be ignorant of many things to know any. True—though
said by a man I hate—Helvetius. My friend, let me play the old man and
warn you. You spread your nets too wide. You sow in more fields than you
can ever reap. You have a reluctance to be an undistinguished happy man.
You should read oftener in the Phædo, for you have more Greek than I.
Often am I lifted above common thoughts as I read this wonderful
dialogue. What a passage this is, about the dying swan, (chap. 30) and
the argument of Simmias (chap. 36) about the lyre and its harmonies!
_Pedant._ Thus for I can read Plato best in a version.
_Albert._ A version! It is my aversion. There goes my first pun. Think
of Pope’s Homer! Open the books at Vaucluse for a sample, as your uncle
draws a hand of tobacco from a hogshead. Here—take the Odyssey, xvii.
26-36. What can be simpler than the original—what more meretricious
than the copy?
Ἀρτέμιδι ἰκέλη ἠὲ χρυσέῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ
Pope thus:
“The beauteous cheeks the blush of Venus wear,
Chastened with coy Diana’s pensive air.”
And then, in plain English, “Weeping, she threw her arms about her dear
boy, and kissed his brow and his two fair eyes, and murmuring
plaintively, spake these winged words!”
But Pope, doubtless in wig and ruffles, thus:
“Hangs o’er her son, _in his embraces dies_;
_Rains_ kisses on his neck, his face, his eyes;
Few words she spoke, _though much she had to say_.
And scarce those few, for tears, could force their way.”
_Pedant._ Hold—I give up, Pope; but all translators have not his
redundancy and pomp of words.
_Albert._ There are few good translators; and _me judice_, the latest
are the best. Wolfius is a miracle. Our Frenchmen have shown their sense
by giving the ancient poets in prose; for it is death to classic metres
and classic thought to entangle them in Alexandrines, with male and
female rhymes. Taylor’s Plato is close enough and bald enough, but it is
harder than the Greek. It is easy to turn _simplex munditiis_ into
“simple in mundicity,” but it becomes neither sense nor English.
Cervantes knew what he was about, when he compared a version to the
wrong side of a piece of tapestry; you make out the figures, but where
are the tone, the beauty, the expression?
_Pedant._ Then you must learn Hebrew to read the Bible.
_Albert._ O, that I could! As it is—one chapter of St. John’s Greek is
glorious, beyond all the scores of version from St. Jerome to Campbell.
I never could endure the barbarisms of the Vulgate, even from the lips
of my honored abbé. I think even he blushed when he recited—_Amen,
amen_ _dico vobis: quia plorabitis et flebitis vos_, etc., S. Joann.
cap. xvi, 20. Yet it is better in its senility than the French-polish of
Castalio. And your English Bible has a venerableness from the lordly old
English of its day. Our French Bibles smack of the _salon_; the
_tournure_ of phrase is colloquial and courtly.
_Pedant._ My friend Pfeffers protests that the gospels are fabricated.
_Albert._ Pfeffers is a fool—pardon me—your friend Pfeffers is duped
by the cold, bloodless philosophers of the High Dutch universities. So
Hardouin undertook to prove that Homer, and Virgil, and all, were vamped
up by monks in the Middle Age. _Papae!_ When that is done, I will
demonstrate that the Temple of Neptune at Paestum was built by the
crusaders, and that the Antinous was chipped out of marble by a couple
of Savoyard image-boys in the year 1789. The microscopic objections of
Bahrdi and Paulus are just such infinitesimal lichens and abrasions and
scratchings as a strong lens will detect on the cheek of the Discobolos,
or the Venus of Florence. Is there sweetness in that breath of wild
roses which comes over us from the west? Was it made to be enjoyed? Is
it correlate with this olfactory sense? Then is the seventeenth chapter
of St. John a heavenly aroma, formed for this inward craving of a
departing soul. Take me back to my wild Indians, and their medicine-men
with gourds and wampum, rather than to the drivel of a learning once
Christian, but now materialistic or godless! That manna was good, but it
has bred worms. _Corruptio optimi pessima est._
_Pedant._ Dearest De Mornay, you flush and injure yourself.
_Albert._ Thanks to thee, Paul Guerin, that thou leftest me lessons
which live in the soil of this heart and germinate after thy departure!
God grant that grief and the suns of Martinique may not despoil the
earth of the purest of the emigrant clergy.
* * * * *
That day we had to carry Albert into the house, and his subsequent
studies and conversations were chiefly in a swinging hammock of Mexican
grass, suspended in our northern veranda.