A College of Poets

THE Romans, like the Americans, were a nation of practical idealists, if you will forgive the use of Mr. Roosevelt’s favorite slang. Like us in another respect, they were much fonder of ideals than of ideas. Any idea that they went in for is likely to be hard and monumental rather than humanitarian and beautiful, for destiny had called them to be, not the saviors, but the governors of the world. In fact, they were much more practical than we are; they had no Middle Ages to cloud their minds with chivalry and romance, nor could they have been fooled, as we were last century, into believing that the millennium was clinging to the skirts of science. They made laws, not as our legislators do, because they enjoy the sport, but because they believed in organization; they built roads, not for the sake of the scenery or even for the greater glory of commerce, but to move their armies; their attitude toward the powers above and below varied from businesslike satisfaction, when the gods fulfilled their end of the contract, to extreme and irreverent anger when the gods relaxed their efforts.

Yet in the third century B.C., long before they had finished their career of conquest, they had established a semiofficial College of Poets. The college had its home in the Temple of Minerva on the Aventine; they took in actors and scribes as well as poets; in later years, when their club life and classconsciousness had grown stronger, we have amusing evidence that a professional poet occasionally administered the Snub Salutary to some young noble, on the ground that his verse at any rate was not of high rank. Yet we might suppose that this national recognition of poetry was a freak, an accident, if it were not for the mass of witness borne in other ways. I am afraid we have a tendency to regard the ’patronage’ of poets in Rome as a sort of Associated Charities movement; to think that Scipio, Mæcenas, Augustus kept poets as a woman keeps a toy dog, to lend éclat to her movements in public. No error could be more atrocious. The Romans were never more practical or better statesmen than they showed themselves in their official maintenance of men like Ennius and Virgil.

For by saving poets they saved the nation. The moment that Rome began to grow, to reach beyond the valley of the Tiber in that amazing career of world-conquest which stopped only because they cared to go no further, that very moment they began to disintegrate, and they knew it.

They saw the splitting wedge of external power and external gold that was being driven between Rome, the goddess-city, and the devoted patriotism of her citizens; their little state might easily become mistress of the world only to lose her own soul. Therefore, businesslike as ever, they set about erecting spiritual bulwarks to guard against the floods of immigration and of imported luxury; and as the walls of ancient Thebes (said the myth) had been built, not to music but by music, so the city of Greater Rome was built, not of brick or of marble upon the Seven Hills, but of the songs and doctrines of Roman poets, in the hearts of Roman men.

I have referred to the doctrines of their poets, not to their imaginative power or emotional sensitiveness. For the Roman distinctly regarded a poet as a teacher and not as the equivalent in human shape of a suffused sunset glow; if he desired to praise a poet, nine times out of ten he called him ‘learned.’ Tennyson (for a modern example), when he called Catullus ‘tenderest of Roman poets,’ would then have been held to utter, not praise, but a scarcely veiled insult. The consequences of this point of view were tremendous. In school, a Roman boy learned to do a little arithmetic, to read, to write; and thereafter spent nearly all his time in the learning and understanding of poetry, both Latin and Greek.

Here is the crucial point, the thing which we can hardly comprehend — so far have we gone from the days when poetry was a real power in education. To the Roman, poetry not only taught the history of his own people, their glories and their heroism, but it also opened the gates of the world of men, and gave him the key to human character. By this means they attained a spiritual end; for men trained after this fashion owned in common the substance of their souls. The poet was the cement of the state.

For the Romans were practical. In comparison with them we are a sentimental people, and we suffer from the obscured mental vision that plagues sentimentalists. By sentimental I mean that our human feelings have been falsified; we constantly commit the unforgivable crime of confounding human nature, which is incalculable, with natural science, which is calculable. There lies the essential contrast between ourselves and the Romans. We need training in human nature, if we purpose to run our state successfully. They never forgot that a state is made up of men, and that the welfare of a state depends primarily upon the relations of its citizens one to another; whereas we have remembered that truth but twice in our career, in the Revolution and in the Civil War. We have built colleges, but we have never felt our bitter need of a College of Poets.