THE ITALY Of VIRGIL AND HORACE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2522, 16 July 1902, Page 78

THE ITALY Of VIRGIL AND HORACE.

. (Elizabeth Robtxs Pexxell, in Harper s .Monthly Magazine.) I always find hon«sty the best policy, when aiot to be honest means to be found out. Therefore I might as well confess at the start that I have no 7 Latin, and that I know Virgil and Horace only in transla- ! tions. The scholar may say this is e^uiva- [ lent to not knowing them at all. But I | would not believe anybody who insisted that because I had read Theocritus in Mr Lang's version and not in the Greek, therefore I must remain a stranger among the : pines ard on the thyme-scented hillsides •where tbe poet watched his visionary flocks. Translators less happy than Mr Lang have, I admit, succeeded in making [ the Georgics of Virgil and the Odes of : Horace dull reading for the outsider like myself; I might even quote Dr Johnson to prove that the lyrical part of Horace never can be translated. Still, in the poorest paraphrase the long-horned white oxen drag the plough across the pastures, the vines hang in festoons between the mulberries, the beech trees and the chestnuts offer their grateful shade, as in the Italy of to-day. The beauty of the rare unspoiled Italian town is largely mediaeval, but leagues of Italian countiy remain exactly as in the time of Virgil and Horace, and, thanks to tbem. are a? classical in feeling as the ruins of the Forum or the tombs of the Appian Way. Nor need you bs a Latin scholar to feel this charm of association. In, one sense, II you happen to cycle thorough Italy, you may always take Virgil and Horacs foj giudes. Everywhere are the slopes dad with, corn and vines and olives, everywhere the towns on beetling crags piled heavenward, and the antique lowers, at whose base ran the still more ancient river- — averywhere the beauty that was the inspiration of their song. But in another sense there is an I»"aiv made specially theirs by accident of birth and death, or the chances of life and work, and this was the Italy we set onfe to discover — knowing it. almost all already — in the spring, when '* the ox forsakes his byre " and the meadows are with daisies pied : the sea'-on dear to both. Virgil, with obliging forethought, always managed to keep to the main, railway lines and high roads, as if he had anticipated a Cook's tour in his honour. It is comparatively easy to follow him, step by step, though long distances lia between. He was born near Ma.itua, and to Mantua the conscientious tourist goes for the sake of the Gonzagas and Mantegna. The verses most often quoted belong to places as essentially on the hpaten track: the line that made fiarda- take on new- meaning for Goethe, the few words that haunted Tennyson on Lake C'omo, the references that consecrated the valley of the Clitumnus to Virgil for ever. He lived in Naples the latter part of his life ; he lies buried within an easy saunter of the big hotels and pensions of this noisiest and moat over-peopled of Italian towns. From theJSwi.o3 frontier on the north, even- to the Sicilian coast on the south, he made all Italy his so thoroughly that we promptly found it necessary to drop at last the JEntid out of our reckoning. To wander with would be as serious an undertaking as to sail with Uly^es, and so we ynt it oft for another tune, and devoted ourselves solely to the Virr;il of the Eclogues and the Georgics. Virgil will always seem more real and his Pastorals less artificial to any one who will go, as we did one spring morning, along the banks- of the Mincio from Mantua to Pietola, about five miles away Pietola is the ancient Andes, whe.-e Virgil was born — so the authorities agree, and I am rob learned enough to dispute them. To Theocritus, scholar? say, Virgil oues nofc only the visionary flocks and shepherds of the Eclogues, but their visionary land. But his shepherds had no need to travel to Sicily in search of <-hadv groves and pleapant pastures. Beeches overhang the •stream, poplars march with the road ; to the north, far away, aie the mountains— the Alps — dwindling into hills, to cast their shadows across the plain, and to ii.vite the herds to higher pastures when the summer sun grows hot ; above, i.s a sky at times as blue and radi.int — though we only taw it wet and grey — as that which .shone aljove Thyrsis and Daphnis, and the sound of water is as rhythmical as that which accompanied their song. Nowhere could Tityrus and Melibceus have rested more soothingly at the noonday hour, or wandered more quietly to the supper of roasted chestnuts and goats-milk cktese — to-day the F-upper no doubt of the shepherd, certainly of the tourist, along the Mincio's banks. The towers of Mantua in the distance stir into life no memories of the Gouzagas or of Roman tribunes ; the FTfti'n FMJOTIi frfflg )iW puffirsd the Qoi^e

,flf war ap.d bitter feud. Tlie landscape i 0 not characteristically Italian; you migfift almost fancy yourself in France or the English. Fen counixy ; but it has a charm that makes you feel now well worth while was a little submissive praise, a little obsequious flattery, a little poetic license on the part of Virgil in return for the estate on the Mincio, where he — or Tityrus — could still srag bis rustic lays and tend his flocks, while Meliboeus, poor man, for being less astute, less of a toady, must; be senfeoff ta the hot desert of Africa, 0* the cold seas of Britain. Bfa&e, making those -woodcuts for the Pastorals that the- publishers were eager to explain "displayed less of art than of genius," was praised because, in dingy, gardenless South Molton street, he could evolve such beautiful suggestions, so pastoral in feeling, of Arcadian shepherds and their flocks under the broad setting sun or tranquil moon. Samuel Parker, in English country, imagined his classical Arcadia as he laboured over the- etchings h<; never finished to illustrate the same theme. But tbe real Arcady waits the artist down there under Mantuan skies, just as when Virgil's shepherds tended their flocks, pruned their vines, or piped and saog in pleasant rivalry near the cool stream.