Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  “Our friendly, calm Propertius is still alive, alive for his own and for our benefit, and so are you and never more than now … and in twenty years the two of you, he at fifty and you at seventy, despite your everlasting sickness, will be striving as you now strive with all the youngsters, should they be called Ovid or some other name …”

  “And just as today they would be unimaginable without your Eclogues and Georgics,” stressed Lucius, who was more concerned with correct literary definitions, “just as now you have pointed out the way, the way to the idyllic, the way to the bucolic, the way to Theocritus, just so will you precede them on new paths …”

  “I am not in the line of Theocritus, this is truer of Catullus, even though this might be argued …”

  Reluctantly, Lucius narrowed his prophetic literary forecasts: “Still, Catullus was your compatriot, Virgil, and a common homeland often leads to common aims and common inclinations …”

  “Catullus or no Catullus,” grumbled Plotius, “Theocritus or no Theocritus, and with them all their followers, you are Virgil, you are you, and even in twenty years, should I live so long, you will be my preference, essentially more to be preferred than all of them together; in my opinion you should have no truck with them.”

  It was a sharp line that Plotius had drawn, overestimating him and underestimating the young, and it felt good to be counted among the grown-ups, among the forceful who need not die before their time. Nevertheless, one had to rectify these false evaluations: “Be not unjust to the young, Plotius; they are honest in their way, more honest, it may be, than I have ever been.”

  Again Lucius cut in: “To speak of honesty in art is always somewhat beside the point. One can say of an artist that he is honest if he keeps close to the traditional, eternal rules of art, but on the other hand that just this constitutes his dishonesty, because he hides his own ego behind tradition. Are we dishonorable in making the Homeric world our own? Are the young dishonorable in emulating a Virgil? Or are they even more honorable when committing some lapse of taste?”

  “Lucius, the question of honesty and dishonesty is no longer an artistic question: the aim is toward the essential in human life before which art is almost negligible, since it is able to express only the human element.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Plotius. “That is just rhetorical bilge and I decline, as you well know, to take part in it.”

  “Virgil maintains that the young are more honest than he, and we cannot possibly be expected to stand for that.”

  “That’s a matter of indifference to me,” persisted Plotius in his staunch, friendly blindness, “Virgil is honest enough for me.”

  “Thank you, Plotius.”

  “It is just that I am fond of you, Virgil … however, you may nevertheless oblige Lucius; admit that you are more honest than the young.”

  “That would be downright dishonesty … I find that the young in their love-poetry have struggled through to an originality which I am unable to approach … Lucius does not want to admit that all reality rests on love, and that behind the love-poetry, for which he may not care, this great original reality is to be found … reality is honesty …”

  Lucius seemed to be slightly nauseated; his finger moved to and fro in refutation: “Such cheap honesty suffices in no way for art, Virgil; only exalted love, as depicted by you, and exemplified for all time in that which was between Dido and Aeneas, only such love is entitled to a place in art, in contrast to the petty love affairs with which the young gentlemen like to fill out their poetry.”

  Then Plotius grinned: “They mean nothing to me, but they are rather pleasantly readable.”

  “Once again you are over-critical, Lucius; no one will doubt that Catullus was a real poet … and need I assure you that we have to recognize such a one even in Ovid?”

  “A genuine poet?”—Lucius took fire, but with dignity—“What does it mean to be a genuine poet? It does not mean talent alone, many are talented, talent is cheap, and if possible love is even cheaper, and turns for the most part to the cheapest possible stammering, even though the gentlemen grind out their verses to the best of their ability … naturally, I should be guarded in giving these judgments public utterance for, good or bad, we writers belong together, but here in our limited circle, nothing should restrain us from defining things plainly … in short, I am able to see nothing of honesty in a lascivious stripping, and even less of true art or true poetry …”

  Was Lucius right? He could not be right; what he said was comprehensible, as comprehensible as everything that a craftsman has to say, but precisely for that reason it remained arrested in the professional realm, unperceptive of strivings which were aimed at shattering this very realm. Catullus had been well aware of this, he was the first to point out the new way, and for the sake of justice this had to be acknowledged: “Genuine art bursts through boundaries, bursts through and treads new and hitherto unknown realms of the soul, of conception, of expression, bursting through into the original, into the immediate, into the real …”

  “Fine!—and you actually want to perceive all this in that allegedly so honest love-poetry … as if in every single verse of the Aeneid there were not more true reality!”

  “I do not want to wrangle over this with you, Lucius; in a certain sense you defend your own poetry also when praising mine … for my part, I admit myself more easily beaten than you, and so you may lay it only on me and the Aeneid if I maintain that the new art could no longer travel on in our grooves, that it is bound to find something more immediate and more original, bound to do so by a command that points to the primal cause of reality … indeed, this is how it is, whoever yields to that command has to go back to the primal cause of reality, and he must begin again with love …”

  Now Plotius took sides with Lucius: “Well, to be just, I rather like to read this stuff, but for all this originality of which you speak, these fellows are still too weak; only a real man can love in reality, and all that comes along with it is negligible in comparison …”

  “Weakness? Which needs more growing power, the juicy blade in good pasturage, or the poor leaf which has to force itself between stones? The latter is of a weak aspect, nevertheless it has power to sprout, nevertheless it is grass … Rome is stony, our cities are stone, and it could almost be called a miracle that despite this something original has grown out of them, certainly weak in appearance, but still original, still real …”

  Plotius laughed: “As far as I know, no grass has yet succeeded in picking out its growing-place, and even if it should prefer to be munched by a cow on a lovely meadow, it still remains in bondage to its stones, while these lads are quite free to seek the original wherever it is growing, and where men cause it to grow; verily nothing forces them to remain among the stones of the city, nothing more than their own lusts and inclinations, for the indulgence of which it is more convenient to stroll about in Rome, to sleep about in Rome, and to turn small kisses into small verses. First of all, they should once learn how to milk a cow, to curry a horse, and to handle a sickle.”

  The urbane existence of Lucius felt itself attacked and offended: “The born artist, no matter whether he be great or mediocre, is not born to be a farmer; you cannot treat them all alike, Plotius.”

  “I merely protest against the immediacy of such grass-love as advanced by Virgil … I have a certain understanding of these things. Weakness remains weakness.”

  “And I protest in turn against the injustice shown by you two toward the young.”

  Lucius had accompanied the statements of Plotius with an approving nod: “That’s it! They are weak and that is why they never succeed in getting beyond the imitative stage … how then can one talk of injustice! They are imitators of Theocritus, pupils of Catullus, and whatever they can take from our Virgil, that they take.”

  Alas, they both remained inconvincible, each one captive in the circle of his own thoughts and words, half asleep and unable to shatter and burst through them, unable to
escape the old habit of speech. The one called it grass-love, called it weakness, the other called it imitation, both with justice, yet both did not notice, did not want to notice, that even such a weak, urban love, pining between the walls and stones of a city, that even such a miserably-narrow, earthly-personal and often lasciviously disclosed love—a love such as this—was still touched by the miraculous lawfulness of human existence, touched by the shadow of the divine, whenever it succeeded in extending the one self toward the other self, feeling its way toward the beloved, feeling its way into the other, both imperishable in their union with love. Yes, just this could be sensed in the verse of the young, this was the new reality of truth in its human aspect which occasionally rang out from their poetry, and which they never would have found had they been his pupils. For this reality of love, which by including death annulled and transmuted it into the truly immortal, just this had been denied him, the over-prized poet Virgil, once and forever; hollow his poems, hollow even the Aeneid, and, like the poem, he too had shrunk into his own cold circle and had nothing to teach; and to Cebes, to the one who most tenderly and devotedly had wished to become his pupil, he had inclined only because he had loved himself in the mirror of this youthful soul, in order—alas, it had so happened as though under the order of demons—to shape him in his own image into a cold, beauty-possessed writing man. Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, they had been able to love, and from love they had derived a premonition of reality which was stronger than any harmony and passed earthly things. Only what proceeds from such a premonition permits the clouded heart of man to ring out, to prepare for the coming annunciation of the voice, ready as a harp is ready to sing under the wind; and, as if in a renewed challenge to Plotius to recognize the true reality, and in appreciation for his blindly-staunch friendship, the breath, exhausted by speaking, found strength for further speech: “Only the purity of the heart is immortal.”

  With no comprehension, but with benevolent kindness Plotius confirmed what he heard: “In this I agree with you, my Virgil, for it is your purity which is immortal.”

  “Were that not so,” added Lucius, “they would not emulate you as they do. The original, the immediate, the new which you project has always been that pure harmony of truth, and it is that which you have shown to the present as well as to future generations; whoever strives in that direction seeks your companionship. Now there arises a new line, one of a loftier order; these are the words in which you proclaimed it, and of this new generation you are guardian.”

  The reality of love, the reality of death, one and the same; the young were aware of it, and these two never once perceived that death was already near them in the room—, was it still possible to arouse them to real knowledge of this sort? They had to be waked, to become aware, and it seemed almost impossible to do; one could merely answer: “Lucius, that was something I once happened to write … but believe me, I have proclaimed nothing, I have only felt of the crag … perhaps I have been hurled from it … I am not sure.”

  “You torment yourself, and you want to hide this torment behind riddles; this sort of thing is not good for men,” said Plotius, “the darkness is not good.” And he drew his toga tighter about him as if he were chilly.

  “It is difficult to express, Plotius, and maybe not only because of my weakness, maybe there are altogether no words for ultimate reality … I have made my poems, abortive words … I thought them to be real, and they are only beautiful … poetry arises from the twilight … all that we do or make stems from this same obscurity … but the voice of reality has need of a deeper blindness than that of the cold realm of shades … deeper and higher, aye it goes deeper and for all that it is brighter.”

  Whereupon Lucius said: “It is not merely a matter of truth; even a simpleton speaks truth, is able to enunciate the naked truth … truth in order to be effective must be tamed, and therein lies its real harmony. How many a one speaks of the madness of the poet,”—and he looked over at Plotius, who by chance was nodding—, “but the poet is the very man who possesses the gift of taming his own madness and guiding it.”

  “Truth … its terrible madness … the calamitous within truth.” The voices of the women had been naked, naked as the truth that they were compelled to announce—nevertheless evil.

  “I disagree,” insisted Lucius, “truth when tamed is no madness, much less a calamity.”

  The truth in blindness, the flat truth, without good or evil, without height or depth, the naked truth of the eternal return into the realm of Saturn; nevertheless lacking in reality: “Oh, Lucius, to be sure … but it is not poetry which is able to enunciate this purest form of reality … poetry does not possess the discrimination … nor I … I have merely groped, merely stammered …”—the fever crept on, now it was in his chest, and his voice failed, stifled by a rattle—, “not the first step taken … stammering, groping, even less than this … no purity …”

  “You may call it stammering or groping if you like”—Lucius spoke very softly and with unwonted warmth—“it was always harmonious, and therefore annunciation at its purest.”

  “In spite of all this—now you need the doctor,” decided Plotius, “it is more than high time; so we are leaving; later we shall return to you.”

  Dark, heavy, soundless, it rushed through him. The dismay was there again. They would leave without having understood. They meant to come back—would it not have become too late by that time? First they must be convinced, they must realize it at last—oh, unable to be awakened from its twilight state, the human soul lay encompassed by evil—, and wrestling with his cough, he brought out hoarsely in an almost inaudible cry: “You are my friends … I must have clean hands … from beginning to end there must be purity … the Aeneid is unworthy … without truth … only lovely … you are my friends … you will burn it … you will burn the Aeneid for me … promise …”

  Plotius’ face into which he was staring remained heavy and mute. It became filled with love and scorn. This was distinctly seen in the ruddy, liver-spotted flesh, stippled by the blue-black beard; love could be seen in the eyes and gave him hope. But the lips remained silent.

  “Plotius … promise …”

  Plotius had begun to pace the room again. He walked back and forth steadily with long steps, his abdomen expanding the folds of his toga, a wreath of gray hair bristling around the bald spot at the back of his head, and, as many fleshy persons are wont to do, he held his arms slightly bent and his fists doubled up: yet, in spite of his sixty years, he was the very picture of ebullient life.

  As though to demonstrate the needlessness of a hasty answer, the walking continued for quite a time before Plotius terminated it, and condescended to reply: “Listen, Virgil,” he said with all the adult firmness that his voice was careful to assume when giving an order, “listen, you have plenty of time … I see no hurry …”

  The firmness with which this assurance of no hurry was tendered could not be gainsaid; it promised protection by its very intimidation, just as it had always done, and the command to recover his courage was as incontrovertible as ever; he bowed before this command and he enjoyed doing it, although he could scarcely have done otherwise, and with the restored relief his speaking had again become calmer and easier: “It is my last request, Plotius, that you and Lucius burn the Aeneid immediately … you cannot refuse me this …”

  “Oh my Virgil, how often must I assure you that there is plenty of time ahead for you and for us? Therefore you have time and to spare for a ripe deliberation of your project … but watch yourself while you are about it”—yet, in contrast to his admonition to be deliberate, his hand in its impatience was already on the door-knob—, “a farmer who wastes or destroys seed-corn isn’t worth much.”

  And then, together with Lucius who, venturing neither opposition nor interruption, seemed no less intimidated, he disappeared from the room; there followed a somewhat rude closing of the door.

  ENRICHED yet robbed, yes, so had they left him, left him alone; the
scornful and well-meaning friend had bestowed calmness upon him and taken away his anxiety, but beyond the anxiety something more had been taken away, a piece of himself as it were, and it seemed to him that Plotius had expelled him from adulthood and had turned him again into a child, thrown him back into the plan-forging callowness with which they had both been seized as youths in Milan, and from which Plotius alone had had the wit to extricate himself; oh, he felt himself plunged back so completely into the unfinished that it would have seemed quite natural to him if his friend had taken the Aeneid upon his strong shoulders and born it away together with the anxiety. Was the chest still standing there untouched and well-locked, or was this merely a delusion? It almost seemed wiser not to make sure; this was a state of defenselessness and of felicity; but it was also shame. And it was all the more shame because this strange belittlement of himself had just happened in front of Lysanias, for, most amazingly though not surprisingly, the boy was sitting exactly as he had sat there in the night, and in the self-same easy chair. Was is possible that the chair could suddenly offer room for a second occupant? Just a moment ago Plotius had been sitting there too. Truly, it would have been more desirable and even more fitting had Plotius never set foot in the room. The boy reclined there, gracious in forgetfulness, sorrow-freed and sorrow-freeing, and sounding afar was the sunny sea; if one peered at it closely one could see that the face was that of a hobbledehoy and nimble peasant lad, and on looking still more closely it appeared full of dreaminess and quite lovely. On the boy’s knees lay the rolls of manuscript from which he had read aloud during the night.

  And as if he had only been waiting for an invitation, the boy began to read:

  “Twofold the portals of sleep, and twofold ’tis said in their nature;