My dear --------,
On a bright afternoon in summer, when we stand on the high ground
above Saint Andrew's, and look seaward for the Inchcape Rock, we can
discern at first nothing at all, and then, if the day favours us, an
occasional speck of whiteness, lasting no longer than the wave that is
reflecting a ray of sunlight upwards against the indistinguishable
tower. But if we were to climb the hill again after dinner, you would
have something to report. So, in the broad daylights of humanity,
such as that Victorian Age in which you narrowly escaped being (and I
was) born, when the landscape is as clear as on Frith's Derby Day, the
ruined tower of Petronius stands unremarked; it is only when the dark
night of what is called civilisation has gathered that his clear beam
can penetrate the sky. Such a night was the Imperial Age in Rome,
when this book was written; such was the Renaissance Age in Italy,
when the manuscript in which the greater part of what has survived is
only to be found was copied; such, again, was the Age of Louis XIV in
France, of the Restoration, and the equally cynical Revolution in
England, during which this manuscript, by the fortune of war, was
discovered at Trau in Dalmatia, copied, edited, printed, in rapid
succession, at Padua, Paris, Upsala, Leipzig and Amsterdam, and,
lastly, "made English by Mr. Burnaby of the Middle Temple, and another
Hand," all between the years 1650 and 1700; such an Age was
emphatically not the nineteenth century, in which (so far as I know)
the only appearance of Petronius in England was that rendered
necessary--painfully necessary, let us hope, to its translator,
Mr. Kelly,--by the fact that the editors of the Bohn Library aimed at
completeness: but, as emphatically, such is the Age in which you and I
are now endeavouring to live.
_O fortunate nimium_, who were not bred on the Bohn, and feel no
inclination, therefore, to come out in the flesh: were you so foolish
as to ask me for a proof that this Age is not like the last, what more
answer need I give than to point to the edition after edition of
Petronius, text, notes, translation, illustrations, and even a
collotype reproduction of the precious manuscript, that have been
poured out upon us during the last twenty years. But you can
read--and have read, I am sure--a whole multitude of stories in the
newspapers, which are recovering admirably the old frankness in
narration, and have discarded the pose of sermonising rectitude which
led the journalists of a hundred years ago to call things (the names
of which must have been constantly on their lips) "too infamous to be
named"; and from these stories you must have become familiar with the
existence in our country to-day of every one of the types whom you
will discover afresh in Mr. Burnaby's and the "other Hand's" pages.
It is customary to begin with Trimalchio, not that he is the chief, or
even the most interesting figure in the book, but because his is the
type most commonly mentioned in society. To name living examples of
him would be actionable; besides, you are old enough, surely, to
remember the Great War against Germany, and the host of Trimalchiones
and Fortunatæ whom it enknighted and endamed. But to go back to
our hill above Saint Andrew's, Wester Pitcorthie yonder was the
birthplace of James, Lord Hay, of Lanley, Viscount Doncaster and Earl
of Carlisle, the favourite of James VI and I, of whom the reverend
historian tells us that "his first favour arose from a most strange
and costly feast which he gave the king. With every fresh advance his
magnificence increased, and the sumptuousness of his repasts seemed in
the eyes of the world to prove him a man made for the highest fortunes
and fit for any rank. As an example of his prodigality and
extravagance, Osborne tells us that he cannot forget one of the
attendants of the king, who, at a feast made by this monster in
excess, 'eat to his single share a whole pye reckoned to my lord at
£10, being composed of ambergris, magisterial of pearl, musk,' etc.
But, perhaps, the most notable instance of his voluptuousness, is the
fact that it was not enough for his ambition that his suppers should
please the taste alone; the eye also must be gratified, and this was
his device. The company was ushered in to a table covered with the
most elegant art and the greatest profusion; all that the
silver-smith, the shewer, the confectioner, or the cook could produce.
While the company was examining and admiring this delicate display,
the viands of course grew cold, and unfit for such choice palates.
The whole, therefore, called the _ante-supper_, was suddenly removed,
and another supper quite hot, and forming the exact duplicate of the
former, was served in its place.
So, in those days as in these, your Trimalchio was ennobled; though,
to do King James justice, he had a string of coronets for his Giton
also. The latter and his companions are still only emerging from a
long period of oblivion in literature and obscurity in life. Like the
pagan deities who have shrunk in peasant mythology to be elves and
pooks and suchlike mannikins, these creatures, banished from the
polite reading of the Victorians, reappeared instantly in that
grotesque microcosm of life which the Victorians invented as an outlet
for one of their tightest repressions, the School Story. I shall not
press the analogy between Lycas and Steerforth, but merely remind you
how, years before you ever heard the name (unless it is mentioned
there) of Petronius Arbiter, you welcomed Giton's acquaintance in the
pages of _Eric, or Little by Little_, where he is known as Wildney,
and painted in the most attractive colours, and were rather bored
whenever old Eumolpus walked into the School Library as Mr. Rose.
Dear old Eumolpus, with his boring culture and shameless chuckle, no
school is complete without him; indeed, I have heard that the
principal scholastic agents keep a section in their lists of
"Appointments Required" headed, for private reference, with his sole
name. Ascyltos is generally the Captain of the XV or XI, sometimes of
both, and represents the unending war of muscle against mind;
Encolpius is, of course, the hero of every school story ever written,
though (to be fair) the authors of most of them have never guessed it.
Agamemnon is the sort of form-master whom it is conventional to rag.
He may have told you already that Petronius is worth reading for its
admirable literary criticism (contained in pages 1 to 4 and 189 and
191 of this volume) and you may have listened, not knowing yet that
literary criticism is rarely admirable, nor suspecting that those are
the pages which most people leave unread. But you are fortunate in
having being born in a generation which is not afraid to say frankly
what it likes, and you will, I imagine, say frankly that you have read
Petronius, and intend to read him again because he tells a rattling
good story, and, unlike certain contemporary novelists whom you are
counselled to admire, tells it about people whose characters and
motives you have no difficulty in understanding.
But all this time I have said nothing to you about Petronius "the
man," as literary critics say, and this, as you may have suspected, is
because I know as little about him as anyone else. You have not long
since laid down your Tacitus: I need do no more than refer you to the
Sixteenth Book of the Annals, where, in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th
chapters, you will find what is almost the only historical proof of
his existence.
A detailed account of him, which must be divinely inspired since there
is no human material for it, has been made popular in the last
half-century by the author--a foreign gentleman, whose name for the
moment escapes me--of a novel entitled _Quo Vadis_. Fond as he must
have been of oysters, there is no evidence that Petronius ever visited
England, but it should be borne in mind that the law for which he is
generally regarded as showing insufficient respect was not enacted
here until more than eighteen hundred years after his death.
Moreover, suicide, the one offence with which he is definitely
charged, was not in his or his contemporaries' eyes the horrid felony
which, I hope, it will always be in yours. That his work--of which
this volume forms but a fragmentary part--had made its way into this
country, with unusual rapidity, in little more than ten centuries from
its publication, is shown by its being frequently quoted by the
English churchman John of Salisbury, the pupil of Abelard and friend
and biographer of Becket (the Saint, not the boxer), who died (as
Bishop of Chartres) in the year 1180. We may suppose that John took a
copy of the _Satyricon_ home with him from Paris, as undergraduates do
to-day from Oxford and Cambridge. Two and a half centuries later, in
1423 (I owe this display of erudition to Mr. Gaselee's collotype
reproduction of the Trau manuscript), Poggio writes to Niccolò
Niccoli that he has received from Cologne a copy recently ordered by
him, of the fifteenth book of Petronius, and asks his friend to return
the extract from Petronius "which I sent you from Britain." This
last, Mr. Gaselee spiritedly assumes, was the part known as _Cena
Trimalchionis_ (pages 41 to 118 in this volume) from which John of
Salisbury makes three separate quotations, but which is not otherwise
on record before the discovery of what may have been Poggio's own
manuscript (for it also is dated 1423) at Trau in Dalmatia, in the
middle of the seventeenth century.
This manuscript is described as "Fragments from the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Books of the Satire of Petronius Arbiter"; we may assume,
therefore, that the whole Satire was immensely long, a life-work, like
Marcel Proust's _A la Recherche du Temps Perdu_, and like that work,
perhaps, fatal to its author. Indeed, since Proust's death last year
the two have frequently been compared, and on more than the mere
alliterative ground that is in their names. Of Petronius we are told
"illi dies per somnum, nox officiis et oblectamentis vitae
transigebatur; utque alios industria, ita hunc ignavia ad famam
protulerat, habebaturque non ganeo et profligator, ut plerique sua
haurientium, sed erudito luxu. Ac dicta factaque eius quanto
solutiora et quandam sui negligentiam praeferentia, tanto gratius in
speciem simplicitatis accipiebantur." So far, this describes Proust
also, and the similarity extends to their work. In connexion with
Proust's, one of our youngest critics, your contemporary rather than
mine, raises the question: "how this titanic fragment can be trundled
from age to age," and answers himself with: "_A la Recherche du Temps
Perdu_ is not one of those things which are replaced, like the novel
of the moment, but exactly what part of it is most likely to be saved
the present cannot decide." The better answer is, surely, that, of
Proust as of his fore-runner Petronius, people will keep the things
they like best. There are many pages now in Proust that are
boring--but even now a selected edition for schools and colleges is (I
am told) in the press: there is nothing in the surviving _Satyricon_
that need bring a yawn to the lips of adolescence.
If, as I may suppose, you have planned to translate some at least of
the Greek and Latin classics, you can choose no more handy model than
Mr. Burnaby. He is later, it is true, than the richest and best
examples, but so much the nearer to you in speech. He is not always
scholarly--you can safely leave scholarship to others--but he uses an
excellent colloquial English with a common sense in interpretation
which carries him over the many gaps in the story without any palpable
difference in texture. How fragmentary the latter part of the
_Satyricon_ is you will see if you turn to the edition published last
year in the Loeb Classical Library. The reading of fragments has a
fascination for the curious mind: you also, I think, must have
devoured those casual sheets of forgotten masterpieces in which
book-sellers envelop their parcels, and have dignified the whole with
an importance which it can never when in circulation have enjoyed.
Balzac, you remember, plays on this weakness, which he must have
shared, in _La Muse du Département_, where the great Lousteau
exasperates a provincial audience, assembled to hear him talk, by
reading to them the inconsequent pages of _Olympia, ou les Vengeances
romaines;_ it is rich comedy, but the fragment carries us away, and at
the beginning of page 209: "robe frôla dans le silence. Tout à
coup le cardinal Borborigano parut aux yeux de la duchesse--------" we
exclaim, don't we, with Bianchon: "Le cardinal Borborigano! Par les
clefs du pape, si vous ne m'accordez pas qu'il se trouve une
magnifique création seulement dans le nom, si vous ne voyez pas
à ces mots: _robe frôla dans le silence!_ toute la poësie du
rôle de _Schedomi_ inventé par madame Radcliffe dans _le
Confessional des Pénitents noirs_, vous êtes indigne de lire des
romans . . ." And these are fragments that have been deliberately
chosen for preservation.
Since it is still safe to assume things, I will go on to suggest to
you that the _Satyricon_ was planned, on the Homeric model, in
twenty-four books, and will leave you to--in the striking words used
recently by _The Times_ of the Japanese earthquake--"grope for
analogies" between the text which follows and the fifteenth and
sixteenth books of the Odyssey, which you have, doubtless, by heart.
But, if I know you at all, you are more likely to be groping for
analogies between the characters in Petronius and those you will come
across in the first months of your new London life. Quartilla you
will hardly escape, or Tryphœna either; Fortunata will pester you
with her invitations, and, if you visit the National Gallery (though I
hear they intend, now, to close it) or the Turkish Baths, you must
beware of Eumolpus: while if the others cross your path by night you
will do well to bear in mind the warning given to an earlier poet by a
greater Roman even than Petronius:
Questi non hanno speranza di morte,
E la lor cieca vita e tanto bassa,
Che invidiosi son d'ogni altra sorte.
Fama di loro il mondo esser non lassa,
Misericordia e giustizia gli sdegna:
Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.
On which high note I shall leave you to enjoy the _Satyricon_, and
shall hope to hear from you, presently, what your opinion of it is.