The Press. — London, England, 1858-09-18 00:00:00

THE PRESS, SEPTEMBER 18, 1`58• If we consider the expression only, and forget the great difference of circumstances, we may be reminded by the naivete and fulness of the first of these lines of Gretchen's " Gott ! war so gut ! ach war so lieb !" From whatever censure is passed on the Bucolics in general the fourth ought to be excepted. There need be no abate ment to the pleasure we feel in listening to this rich strain of jubilation, except indeed the hopeless obscurity of the last lines, upon which Mr. Conington has nothing to suggest. Twist the passage as they may, the commentators can elicit nothing from it but a conceit so far-fetched as to make a most lame and impotent conclusion of so noble and well-sustained a poem. Since in the last line Virgil plainly has llercules in his mind, we have sometimes thought that the whole passage may be built upon some lost legend of the birth of Ilercules. This poem is, in our judgment, incomparably superior to Pope's " Messiah," which has sometimes been preferred to it. An English imitation ought not, we think, to be written in the rhymed couplet, but in the measure of Lycidas. If Virgil imitated Theocritus in an injudicious manner, we agree with Mr. Conington that he was injudicious in undertaking to imitate llesiod at all. But for his singular and almost slavish propensity to imitation, he would surely have felt that " Works and Days " is not a poem at all, except in its form. Many attempts have been made to mark the difference between poetry and prose. One thing at least seems clear, that prose is language at work and poetry is language at play. All the gifts of nature are at once in struments and ornaments. Our feet convey us to and fro upon our necessary occasions, but when we are at leisure we dance with them. Our voices serve us in traffic and debate ; when work is over, we sing with them. Language also has two functions—the one of utility, the other of ornament. By it we communicate important designs, serious thoughts, whatever our minds are anxiously engaged upon. This is language at work. But when our minds are relaxed by leisure, we amuse ourselves with language ; we take pleasure in arranging words according to a certain principle, in making them submit to laws of rhythm and harmony. This is language at play. Language at work is called prose ; its chief merit is perspicuity. Language at play is called poetry; its chief merit is melodiousness. Now it is clear that to expound matters of business in melodious and rhythmical language is as great a breach of decorum as to describe beautiful objects or glorious actions, such as naturally exhilarate and delight the mind, in bare and commonplace language. It was right that Homer should describe the wrath of Achilles in measured and musical periods, for this was a subject in which his hearers were not practically interested ; it was for pleasure and delight, not for business, that they gathered round the bard. But when the old farmer at Ascraa, indignant that his neighbours would waste their money and neglect their farms, and in particular that " that great fool Verses " could not be induced to work, wrote a pamphlet to represent to them the folly of their conduct, lie could have no reason for writing it in verse, and if prose had been in vented in his time, he would no doubt, as Colonel Mure observes, have written it in prose. Nothing, therefore, could be more unfortunate than Virgil's undertaking to produce a Latin version of this poem, enlarged and modernized. The Georgics can neither be approved as practical treatises nor as poems. To make them perfect as practical treatises, all the digressions ought to be omitted, and the remainder stripped of its poetical embellishment ; to make them perfect as poems, everything ought to be omitted except the digressions. Yet Virgil's mistake was in his circumstances a very natural one. Not only was the Alexandrian school, which was regarded at Rome with such unreasonable respect, fruitful in didactic poems, but Rome had herself produced a splendid monster of this kind in the " De Rerum Naturti" of Lucretius. This poem, though Cicero professes to slight it, would naturally be received with rapture by the Epi cureans of Italy. Horace borrows from it; Ovid praises it ; Virgil would seem from that most graceful passage at the end of the second Georgic to have regarded its author with a despairing admiration. Mr. Conington appears to us not to speak worthily of the poem of Lucretius. lie speaks of the immeasurable inferiority of its corn position to that of the Georgics. He tries to account for its being so unreadable. We do not find the "De Iterum Nature" unreadable. If its metre and style be less finished and more prosaic than the metre and style of Virgil, the cause of this lies in Lucretius's sincerity. He is so much in earnest that he will not sacrifice clearness to finish. lle is inspired by his subject; Virgil, on the contrary, labours continually to escape from his subject. Both poets fail equally in the attempt to combine scientific accuracy with poetic beauty. Both poets in many places deliberately sacrifice one of their irreconcileable objects of pursuit. Lucretius always prefers science ; Virgil is faithful to beauty. But when both poets have a fair field, we at least cannot perceive the great superiority of Virgil. The Lucretians and Virgilians will always form rival camps. We, for our part, prefer the thunderous cataract of the older unchained hexameter on the rough crags of the "De Iterum Natura" to the measured plash of the educated Virgilian verse in the quiet atrium of the Georgics. We prefer the Altitonaus Vulturnus et Auster fulmine pollens, to the Frigitlus ut quondam silvis immurmurat Auster. But whatever be the rival merits of the two poets, it is plain that the younger was greatly influenced by the elder. And if ever a man was justified in writing a didactic poem it was Lucre tius. lie takes such delight in his subject that the thorniest parts of it do not fatigue him. lie seeks no repose. There is more digression in a single Georgic than in the whole of the " De Rerum Nature." And even where his phraseology is most formal, or what Mr. Conington calls prosaic —and some passages might be produced which scarcely yield in preciseness to the propositions of Euclid—he is never languid, never tame. The passion for argumentation never certainly co-existed with so much imagination, enthusiasm, and eloquence before except in Plato, or since, except in Dante. Virgil, as we have said, appears to have regarded him with despairing admiration. We will cite the passage in which Mr. Conington discusses this matter, both because it is to the point and because it is perhaps the best specimen of Mr. Conington's style which could be selected : He occupies the rest of the book with praises of the country life, its tranquillity and purity, its constant round of pleasant employments, its old historic and legendary renown. But he has already painted the destiny of a scientific inquirer into natura in colours which can scarcely be intended to he less glowing, and declared that his first love is centred there. The very distinct• ness with which Lucretius is indicat••d as the ideal after which ha primarily aspires is itself a presumption that the aspiration is in some sort genuine. There is, indeed, something strange and sad, if this were the place to dwell on it, in the spectacle of a man contemplating the Lucretian system and. an attempt to realize the old moral belief as two feasible alternatives, and leaving the choice to be determined by his mental constitution; stranger, perhaps, and sadder still, if we suppose him to be esing words without a distinct consciousness of their full meaning, and to be thinking really of the compara tive aptitude for poetical purposes of the two opposite aspects of nature. But though such a state of mind has no affinity to the terrible earnestness of Lucretius himself, it is not emitharacteristic of a would-be philo sopher; while the touch which immediately follows, the praise of a country life as affording no scope for the pains of pity or of envy, seems to show a lingering sympathy with philosophic doctrine even after he has rosigneil himself to on unphilosophic life. Nor is this the only passage in which we find traces of a yearning after philosophy as the true sphere of a poet. The song of Jopas in the first book of the 4Eneid, where several lines are repeated from the passage we have just been considering, shows that the conception was one which continued to dwell with him through life; the song of Silenus, in the sixth eclogue, is a witness no less to its early formation. In the latter, as we there saw, a cosmogony, which though not strictly Epicurean is expressed throughout in Lucre• tian phraseology, is succeeded by a series of mythological stories, as in Ovid's Metamorphoses, but the compromise is merely equivalent to the oscillation of nand s'aown in the Georgics between the scientific temper that defies death by disbelieving the future and the primitive taith in wood gods and nymphs. The same feeling shows itself in the scat tered 1111116 of a passionist spirit which appear, even on trifling occasions, in the reflection on the. unequal struggle between min and nature, as exemplified in the sowing of puke, and the exhortation to the breeder of cattle to take advantage of those bright days of life which are the first to fly. The general impression which we thus gain is sin gularly confirmed by Virgil's biographer, who tells us, with every appearance of truth, that just belore his last illness he had resolved to spend three years abroad in polishing his Eneid, and then for the rest of his life to devote him self to philosophy. Such is all that can be gleaned from his works of the views and feelings of this most reserved of writers. Certainly no poet ever understood better atever how to forget himself in his work, and, wh mistakes he may have made, no poet has more completely avoided the error of attaching himself to a transitory sect or school, instead of adhering to that which is permanent and eternally interesting. We have not observed anything in the notes of this edition which is remarkably worthy of notice. We are glad to observe that Mr. Covington adopts Weise's obvious explanation of Eel. i 54, which has so strangely puzzled all the commen tators down to Forbiger. Some interesting ob servations on the scenery of the Bucolics have been borrowed from Keightley; in other respects this edition, in a critical point of view, may b e regarded as a convenient abridgment of Forbiger. The Confessions of a Catholic Priest. London: Chapman. THE title of this book is somewhat calculated to mislead a reader as to the real nature of its contents. The " confessions " of one of those mysterious beings whose dark intrigues fill so many pages of theological novels, and who, after upsetting governments all over Europe, and having been the mainsprings of wickedness enough to supply with incident half a dozen Surrey melodramas, are at length entombed, along with the secrets they possess, in the sto machs of avenging rats,—will excite in the minds of a large class of persons a curiosity similar to that with which they would decipher the con fidential letters of a Borgia, a Fouch6, or a Brinvillicrs. Others, who have duly profited by the glowing hints of M. Michelet, will at these . words conjure up visions of gliding ecclesiastics, with volcanic passions covered by an icy de meanour, who, behind latticed screens in dim recesses of grey cathedrals, amid the heavy odours of wafted incense, drink into greedy ears the whispered experiences of innocent maidenhood or conscious maturity, and cast on both alike the trail of contaminating suggestion or the shackles of a more unquestionable power. But the volume before us deals neither with the cabals of Jesuit plotters nor the perplexities of fiiir penitents. The " Priest " was too much of a man of honour, as well as too great an egotist, to profit by his position in the manner to which we have alluded. He has nothing to tell of other people's sins, griefs, or crimes, and the egarements du caur et de r esprit which he describes relate to himself alone. He describes himself as an Hungarian of noble family, taught from an early age to look forward to the priesthood as his vocation. He has not the slightest real calling for it, and, in addition to this, while preparing for ordination, falls violently in love with his cousin, and becomes aware of how much he shall have to sacrifice. Neverthe less, unwilling to disappoint his family, and wreck his future hopes of advancement, he com pletes the arrangement, his cousin on her side vowing to remain single for his sake.—Two ye.ars later she marries an Austrian general. Hie Priest takes his seat in the Chamber of Magnates at Presburg, and for a short time exercises .his ministry as a fashionable confessor. The ladies, delighted to have as director a man o f their own rank, patronized him eagerly : I spent the mornings at church, the afternoons at the Diet, the evenings in the world, in which 1 mixed too roach to be ignorant of any of the little intrigues of the society in which I lived. I often recognized in the morning, by the gentle voice that whispered its confidences in my ear, the . great lady whose tnanceuvres of coquetry towa rds one, 01 coldness towards another, hod amused the in the evening. 'Phis double existence, as an anonymous confidant and A man of the world, was very interesting, and gave me the key to many secrets others would have wished to learn at any cost. It would have been an unique occasion for confusing the game of others, and engaging in intrigues on my (tan account; hut I must confess that I did not profit by my advantages. I do not know whit I should have demo_ without iiiy love the Mathilde ; with a free heart, the.fireiilif my youth would ve scarcely allowed me to retainitteo passive part of a spectator. But I loved her too pure ) for profane this attachment by easy my heart to take a share in consoling the fair penitent e . and I was too honest to feign what I did nut feel. I 7 . _ stricted tayself to my part as confidant ; I gave my III' ! hearers more disinterested advice than they would pet nar have received from an older man leas in love; and I kept intrigues—teo.entirely t. their secrets far more by sentiment as a man of hoo o co than by duty as a priest, since fur me the secrecy of the confessional scarcely existed. He begins by being a Conservative in po O l f !ti,c 4 s ' s but " the breath of the re volution Passes over him; he joins the Hungarian army I St ti 11 'l% 11 ft if tl II 1 .1