Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found
it impossible to read at home, but for which you have still a
lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey. At
a country inn, in the barren society of ostlers and travellers, I
could undertake the writers of the silver or the brazen age with
confidence. Almost the last regular service which I performed in
the cause of literature was to read the works of
AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS.
If you have imagined what a divine work is spread out for the
poet, and approach this author too, in the hope of finding the
field at length fairly entered on, you will hardly dissent from
the words of the prologue,
"Ipse semipaganus
Ad sacra Vatum carmen affero nostrum."
I half pagan
Bring my verses to the shrine of the poets.
Here is none of the interior dignity of Virgil, nor the elegance
and vivacity of Horace, nor will any sibyl be needed to remind
you, that from those older Greek poets there is a sad descent to
Persius. You can scarcely distinguish one harmonious sound amid
this unmusical bickering with the follies of men.
One sees that music has its place in thought, but hardly as yet
in language. When the Muse arrives, we wait for her to remould
language, and impart to it her own rhythm. Hitherto the verse
groans and labors with its load, and goes not forward blithely,
singing by the way. The best ode may be parodied, indeed is
itself a parody, and has a poor and trivial sound, like a man
stepping on the rounds of a ladder. Homer and Shakespeare and
Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves
and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the
sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to
sing. Most of all, satire will not be sung. A Juvenal or
Persius do not marry music to their verse, but are measured
fault-finders at best; stand but just outside the faults they
condemn, and so are concerned rather about the monster which they
have escaped, than the fair prospect before them. Let them live
on an age, and they will have travelled out of his shadow and
reach, and found other objects to ponder.
As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, _particeps
criminis_. One sees not but he had best let bad take care of
itself, and have to do only with what is beyond suspicion. If
you light on the least vestige of truth, and it is the weight of
the whole body still which stamps the faintest trace, an eternity
will not suffice to extol it, while no evil is so huge, but you
grudge to bestow on it a moment of hate.
