Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 1927. A BELATED MONUMENT

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 141, 18 June 1927, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 1927. A BELATED MONUMENT

It is surprising to find that in April the memory of another of the world's greatest poets—possibly the third on the class listl—was being honoured as well as Shakespeare's, that the Shakespeare week at Strat-ford-on-Avon was matched by a Virgil week at Mantua, and that the two overlapped and almost coincided. On the 21st April, amid a learned and patriotic concourse which included the ?'Magnifici Rettori" of all the Universities of Italy and representatives of Oxford and Cambridge and other foreign seats of learning, a monument to Virgil was unveiled at Mantua bySignor Fedele, the Italian Minister of Education, and a week's festivities followed. April 23 is fixed as Stratford-on-Avon's great anniversary by Shakespeare's birthday. Why was Virgil cutting in on this occasion two days before? The explanation is given by die Milan correspondent of "The Times" in an article in which local colour, humour, and scholarship are happily blended.

The first question I asked in Mantua was ; he writes: "Why a monument to Virgil ir. 1927 V No special anniversary, such as a centenary, falls this year. The Mantuans admit this, and explain that the monument about to be unveiled should have been erected forty-six years ago. Tho story of the delay is almost as interesting aa that of the monument itself.

A delay of forty-six years is no inconsiderable item, even where the memory of a poet who has been dead for centuries is concerned, but it is actually fifty years since the project was put in hand which has now been realised. It was in 1877 that a committee of leading citizens was formed in Mantua for the purpose of celebrating in 1881 the nineteenth centenary of a poet who died in B.C. 19. The committee had big ideas and planned a scheme of international proportions.

It jiskea Tennyson to write a poem for the occasion, and set about collecting funds for a great monument. Unfortunately when JBBJ came the poem waa 6 ready but not the funds. The monument therefore could not bo pat up for the centenary year.

But the committee stuck bravely to its joh year after year, filled up from time to time the gaps which deaths and resignations made in its ranks, and having succeeded more than a generation after the original! due date in collecting about 300,000! lire, considered that.it was time to start. Then came the Oreat War, which presumably, left the committee with little to do beyond filling the ■ more frequent vacancies now occurring in its membership. The Great War was followed by the Great Slump. The bottom fell out of the lire. The fund which had previously been worth about £12,000 dropped to about £3000, and the committee had to make a fresh start. It now spread its lists abroad, and we are told that the Delegates to the Geneva Conference of 1922 were canvassed, but the results are not reported. Let us hope that this appeal was more successful than that to the Universities. Brussels and Grenoble paid 100 lire—about £1 each—and this was apparently £1 more than Oxford or Cambridge or any other University was able to afford. Time phased, say's "Tho Times" correspondent, but finally tho money vpas found and tho perseverance of tho committeo was at last rewarded. Tho effort had taken nearly half a century. Tantae molis orat ... His last words sire a happy allusion to one of Virgil's great lines:— So mighty was the tasje to found the Roman racs. The unveiling in 1927 of the monument which was projected in 1877, and is now almost as near to the twentieth centenary of the poet's death as to the nineteenth, is explained by this amusing yet pathetic story. But why 21st April? That part of the chronology j s much more easily explained. April 21 is the day dedicated to the celebration of the birth of Rome. There was nobody to note the date in the days of Romulus and Remus, and this selection, is doubtless about as well based as that by which the theologians of an earlier day identified the Ist September, B.C. 4004, as the date of the creation of the world. But after selecting the 1 21st April as the birthday of Rome there was no room left for doubting the propriety of associating the same date with the memory of Virgil,

•Virgil, gays "The Times" correspondent, among ajl Latin poets, was thp one who possessed most profoundly the sense of the origins of Homo, and who most nobly knqw how to render it.

This is really B gross understatement Not only among all Latin poets but among »\\ thp poets of the world Virgil is the one whb possessed most profoundly the sense of the origins of a great city, a great nation, and a great Empire, and who most nobly rendered it, and the centre of it all was Rome. The glory of Rome was the inspiration oi Virgil, and he became in turn perhaps the greatest of her glories, transcending all the rest in scope and quality. "Roman Virgil" are appropriately the opening words of Tennyson's great poem in which that unlucky Mantuan committee obtained forty-six years ago a monument to their poet more durable than the bronze of the statue they have npw erected in his honour: Jfoinan Virgil, tfiou that singest Ilion's lofty temples robed in fire, Ilion falling, Borne arising, Wars) and filial faith, and Dido's pyre. The beauty, the critical exactness, and the Virgilian quality of Tennyson's verses must surely give them a place very near, the top among the

tributes paid by one great poet to another. Mr. Mackail describes them as maguificont lines . . . which ure at onco tho finest and amplest account ever given of the profound and lnajestio quality of tho Aeneid, the fullest acknowledgment of his own lifelong devotion to Virgil, and tho nearest approach made by any modern poet to the splendour of the Virgilian verse. This must be our excuse for the length of a further quotation:— Landscape-lover, lord of language more than ho that sang 'the Works and Days, All the chosen coin of fancy flashing ont from many a golden phrase; Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all tho Muses often flowering in a lonely word; . „t * * • Thou that seost Universal Nature moved by Universal mind; Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind; Light among the vanish'd ages; star that gildest yet this phantom shore; Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that pass to rise • no mne; •■: • » ■ ■ • , I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest mcasuro ever moulded by the lips of man.