Satire I

P. “O the vanity of mankind! How vast the void in human affairs!”

F. “Who will read stuff like that?”

P. “Is it to me you are speaking? Not a soul, by Hercules.”

F. “What? nobody?”

P. “One or two perhaps or nobody.”

F. “What a poor and lamentable result!”

P. “Why that? Are you afraid that Polydamas and his Trojan ladies will put Labeo above me? Stuff and nonsense! And if thick-headed Rome does disparage anything, don’t you go and put right the tongue in that false balance of theirs; look to no one outside yourself. For who is there in Rome who is not — oh, if only I might say my secret!— and yet say it I must, when I look at these gray heads of ours, and our gloomy ways of living, and indeed everything that we have been doing since the days when we gave up our marbles, and put on the wise airs of uncles. So please forgive me! I would rather not say it — but what else can I do? — I have a wayward wit and must have my laugh out.

“We shut ourselves up and write something grand — one in verse, one in prose — something that will take a vast amount of breath to pant out. This stuff you will some day read aloud to the public, having first lubricated your throat with an emollient wash; you will take your seat on a high chair, well combed, in a new white robe, and with a rakish leer in your eye, not forgetting a birthday sardonyx gem on your finger. Thereupon, as the thrilling strains make their way into the loins, and tickle the inward parts, you may see the burly sons of Rome, quivering in no seemly fashion, and uttering no seemly words. What, you old reprobate? Do you cater for other people’s wanton ears? — ears to which, however hardened your hide, you might fain cry ‘hold, enough!’”

F. “But what avail study and learning if the yeast, and the wild fig-tree which has sprung up within, are never to break through the bosom and come forth? See our pallid cheeks and aged looks!”

P. “Good heavens! Is all your knowledge to go so utterly for nothing unless other people know that you possess it?”

F. “O but it is a fine thing to have a finger pointed at one, and to hear people say, ‘That’s the man’! Would you yourself deem it of no account to have been conned as a task by a hundred curly-headed urchins?”

P. “See, now, the sons of Romulus, having well dined, are asking over their cups, ‘What has divine poesy to say’? Whereupon some fellow with a purple mantle round his shoulders lisps out with a snuffle some insipid trash about a Phyllis or a Hypsipyle or some other dolorous poetic theme, mincing his words, and letting them trip daintily over his palate. The great men signify their approval; will not your poet’s ashes be happy now? will not the grave-stone press more lightly upon his bones? The lesser guests chime in with their assent: will not violets now spring up from those remains, from the tomb and its thrice-blessed ashes?”

F. “You are scoffing, and use your turned-up nose too freely. Do you mean to tell me that any man -who has uttered words worthy of cedar oil will disown the wish to have earned a place in the mouths of men, and to leave behind him poems that will have nothing to fear from mackerel or from spice?”

P. “Well, my friend, whoever you are whom I have set up to speak on the opposing side, I am the last man, if by chance when writing I let fall something good (rare bird as that would be), I am the last man, I say, to be afraid of praise. My heart is not made of horn! But I decline to admit that the final and supreme test of excellence is to be found in your ‘Bravo!’ and your ‘Beautiful!’ Just sift out all those ‘Bravos’: what do they not contain? Will you not find there the bedrugged Iliad of Attius, and all the love-ditties spouted by your grandees while digesting their dinners — all the stuff in short that is scribbled on couches of citron-wood? You know-how to serve up a sow’s paunch piping hot: you know how to present a shivering client with a threadbare cloak, and then you say, ‘I love the Truth; tell me the truth about myself!’ How can the man do that? Would you like me to tell you the truth? You are just a fool, you old bald-pate, with that pot-belly of yours sticking out a foot and a half in front of you! O happy Janus, who cannot be pecked at from behind by a stork, nor mocked by a hand nimble at mimicking white donkey-ears; at whom no tongue can be thrust out as far as that of a thirsty Apulian hound! O ye blue-blooded patricians, you who have to live without eyes in the back of your head, turn round and face the gibing in your rear! And what does the town say?

F. “Why what else but this — that now at last we have verses flowing smoothly along, so that the critical nail glides unjarred over the joinings. Our poet knows how to draw his lines as straight as if he were directing a ruddle cord with one eye shut. Whatever be his theme: whether it be the morals and luxury of the times, or the banquets of the great, the Muse furnishes him with the lofty style.”

P. “Yes; and so we now see heroics produced by men who have been used to trifle over Greek verses — men who have not art enough to describe a grove, or commend the abundance of country life, with its baskets and its hearths, with its pigs and the smoking hay-heaps of the Palilia; out of which emerges Remus, and thou, Cincinnatus, polishing thy share-beam against the furrow, and then thy wife in a flurry arraying thee as Dictator before the oxen, while the lictor drives home the plough! Bravo, bravo! Mr. Poet! One man pores over the dried-up tome of the Bacchanalian Aecius; others dwell lovingly on the warty Antiope of Pacuvius, ‘her dolorific heart buttressed up with woes.’ When you see blear-eyed sires pouring lessons like these into their children’s ears, can you ask whence has come this farrago of language into their tongues? or whence came those shameless ditties which put your smooth-faced sprigs of nobility into a tremble of ecstasy on the benches? Are you not ashamed to be unable to ward off danger from some hoary head without wishing to hear some trifling word of commendation? ‘You are a thief!’ says the accused to Pedius: how does Pedius reply? He balances the charges against each other in smooth antitheses, and is praised for his artistic tropes: ‘How fine!’ they say. What, Romulus? Do you call that fine? Or are you just losing your virility? Shall I be touched, think you, and pull a penny out of my pocket because a ship-wrecked mariner sings a song? You sing, do you, when you carry on your shoulder a picture of yourself, squatting on a broken plank? No, no! the man who wishes to bend me with his tale of woe must shed true tears — not tears that have been got ready overnight.”

F. “But you will admit, anyhow, that grace and polish have been added to the uncouth measures of our sires. See how we have learnt to round off our verses with ‘Berecynthian Attis’; or ‘the dolphin which was cleaving the sky-blue Nereus’; or how ‘we filched a rib off’ from the lengthy Apennines!

P. “O shade of Virgil! What is this but frothy inflated stuff, like an old bough smothered under its bloated bark! Now give me something of the languishing kind; something that should be recited with a gentle bending of the neck.”

F. “‘They filled their savage horns with Mimallonean boomings’; ‘the Bassarid ready to tear off the head of the prancing calf’; or, ‘the Maenad, about to rein the lynx with ivy-trails, redoubles the Evian shout: responsive Echo gives back the cry!’”

P. “What? Would such things be written if one drop of our fathers’ manhood were still alive in our veins? Your Maenad and your Attis are just marrowless drivel, floating and spluttering on the lips, on the top of the spittle: no banging of the desk here, no biting of nails to the quick!”

F. “But why rasp people’s tender ears with biting truths? Take heed, I beseech you, that the doorsteps of your great friends do not grow cool towards you: don’t you hear the snarl of a dog?”

P. “Well, well, have your way; I will paint everything white henceforth! Bravo! Bravo! you shall all be paragons of creation! Will that please you? ( No nuisance here, you say; paint up a couple of snakes, my lads, and clear out; the ground is holy, and I'll be off.” “And yet Lucilius flayed our city: he flayed you, Lupus, and you, Mucius, and broke his jaw over you. Horace, sly dog, worming his way playfully into the vitals of his laughing friend, touches up his every fault; a rare hand he at flinging out his nose and hanging the people on it! And may I not mutter one word? Not anywhere, to myself, nor even to a ditch? Yes — here will I dig it in. I have seen the truth; I have seen it with my own eyes, O my book: Who is there who has not the ears of an ass? this dead secret of mine, this poor little joke, I will not sell for all your Iliads!

“O all ye that have caught the bold breath of Cratinus-— ye who have grown pale over the blasts of Eupolis or of the Grand Old Man — look here too, if you have an ear for anything of the finer sort. Let my reader be one whose ear has been cleansed and kindled by such strains, not one of the baser sort who loves to poke fun at the slippers of the- Greeks, and who could cry out ‘Old one-eye!’ to a one-eyed man; nor yet one puffed up with his dignity as a provincial aedile who deems himself somebody because he has broken up short pint measures at Arretium. Nor do I want a man who thinks it funny to laugh at figures on a blackboard, or cones traced in the sand, and is ready to scream with joy if some saucy wench plucks a Cynic by the beard. To such gentlemen I would commend the play-bill in the morning, for the afternoon Calliroe.”