CHAPTER XXIII

DUMB PIOUS ÆNEAS

In the beginning the Romans didn’t bother very much with art. In their public buildings they were content to take over the Greek styles--but making them heavy and solid, so as to last to the end of time. The attitude of a Roman gentleman toward the fine arts reminds me of a wealthy Southern planter whose son wanted to become a violinist, and the father said, “I can hire all the fiddler-fellows I want.” The Roman gentleman bought people of that sort--musicians, dancers and poets with skill handed down from “the glory that was Greece.”

Until the republic was dead and the Emperor Augustus took the throne. Then came a time of peace, and a Roman scholar, the son of a country proprietor, looked about him, and seeing the perils of internal decay and outside barbarism looming over his world, he recalled the stern sobriety of the good old days, and yearned to bring back the governing class of Rome to reverence for their ancestors. There is a report that the Emperor Augustus himself suggested the task to the poet; anyhow, Mr. Publius Vergilius Maro, known to us as Virgil, set himself with sober deliberation to the making of a piece of Roman national and religious propaganda.

It was to be an epic after the fashion of Homer, written in dactylic hexameter, like Homer. Virgil cast about him for a hero, and selected a legendary Trojan named Æneas, who was said to have fled from the Greeks and to have founded Rome. The characters in Homer carried an adjective before their names, “the wily Ulysses,” “the swift-footed Achilles,” and so on. Therefore this hero must have an adjective, and he becomes “the pious Æneas”--the man who respects the old-time faith, and preserves the old-time traditions of virtue, sobriety and public service.

So here is an epic poem, wrought with verbal skill and sincerity of feeling, conveying to us the dream of Rome as it ought to be, but was not. We see the wanderings of Æneas and his ship-load of companions. We see him land at Carthage, and carry on a love affair with Queen Dido, and then desert her--not a serious impropriety in Roman days. We see the founding father celebrating the old-time religious rites, consulting the auguries and asking the blessing of those gods, of which every Roman had a little image in his home, just as orthodox Russians and Roman Catholics do today.

The “Æneid” is considered ideal for infliction upon helpless school boys; it being full of that careful propriety and decorous tameness which represent what our children ought to be, but are not. The old professor of Latin who inflicted the poem upon me was an ardent propagandist of the Catholic faith, and it was his hope that if we learned proper respect for the established religion of ancient Rome, we might some day be lured into similar respect for the established religion of modern Rome. We read, or made up, a phrase: “Dum pius Æneas,” meaning: “While the pious Æneas”--. We boys knew we were being propaganded, and we resented it, and this phrase gave us a chance to express our feelings. “The dumb pious Æneas” became our formula. “What’s your next hour?” “Oh, I’ve got the dumb pious Æneas!”

We would sit and solemnly translate a long account of a prize-fight--a religious prize-fight, part of the pious games. The antagonists wore no vulgar boxing-gloves, but a mysterious, romantic thing called a “cestus,” which we did not recognize as plain “brass knucks.” And woe to the student if the dumb pious professor happened to catch him with a morning newspaper under his desk, reading an account of a prize-fight which had happened the night before in Madison Square Garden! Woe likewise to the student who, translating the rage of the deserted Queen Dido--“furens quid femina possit”--happened to be caught reading the story of some queen of the stage or the grand opera who had committed suicide because of a faithless lover!

Does anyone question that the “Æneid” is propaganda? If so, I mention that the poet lost his country estate in one of the civil wars; and on account of his beautiful verses the Emperor Augustus restored the property to him, and made him a court favorite. So in the “Æneid” we find this pious emperor described in the following fashion:

This, this is he--long promised, oft foretold-- Augustus Cæsar. He the age of gold, God-born himself, in Latium shall restore And rule the land that Saturn ruled before.

That is a more direct and personal kind of propaganda, the propaganda of a hungry poet in search of his dinner. We shall find a great deal of it through the history of art, and it is, I am told, not entirely unknown in art circles today.

“I have here,” says Mrs. Ogi, “a letter from a Professor who has been reading this manuscript. He protests, ‘not in a professorial fashion’--”

“Naturally not,” says Ogi.

“That you cannot possibly know the old authors as well as he does, who has given the greater part of his life to studying them. ‘To say that Virgil was a sycophant of a Roman emperor is a very superficial estimate, which overlooks the really deep matter in his writings. To say that somehow there has constantly been a conscious trick played on humanity, in defending and glorifying the ruling classes, is merely silly. There was no knowledge of a social question then, any more than there was electric machinery.’”

“That is important,” answers Ogi, “and I want to get it straight. I should like to put an arrow on the cover of this book, directing the attention of all professors to the fact that I do not state or imply that the great leisure-class artists were playing a ‘conscious trick.’ Sometimes they knew what they were doing; but most of the time they just wrote that way, because they were that kind of men. I have tried to make this plain; but evidently the Professor missed it, so let me give an illustration:

“Here is a hive of bees; each of these bees all day long diligently labors to collect the juices of flowers and make it into honey; or to collect wax, and build exact hexagonal architectural structures in which to store the honey. Now comes an entomologist, and studies the life cycle of the bee, and says that the purpose of the hexagonal structures is to hold the honey in the most economical fashion; the purpose of the honey is to nourish the infant bees which will be hatched in the hexagonal cells. Now shall a critic say that this entomologist is ‘silly,’ because no bee can have understood the principles of economy involved in the hexagonal structure, nor can it have performed chemical tests necessary to determine the nutritive qualities of carbohydrates?

“The class feelings of human beings are instinctive and automatic reactions to economic pressure. The reactions of the artist, who seeks fame and success by voicing these class feelings, may be just as instinctive. But now mankind is emerging into consciousness, and social life is becoming rational and deliberate. I say that one of the steps in this process is to go back and study the life cycle of the artist, and find out where he collected his honey, and how he stored it, and what use was made of it by the hive.”

At this point Mrs. Ogi, who has been reading in her Bible--known to the rest of the world as the Works of G. B. S.--produces a text from “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” reading as follows: “The existence of a discoverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet’s work by no means depends on the completeness of his own intellectual consciousness of it.”

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