The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  Then Lucius smiled: "Do you want someone else to finish it for you?"

  "No!" he burst forth, full of apprehension that Lucius would offer himself for the job.

  Lucius smiled now quite broadly: "That's what I thought . . . and so you must really know that you are still in arrears to us, and to art. .."

  In arrears? To be sure! He had been in arrears, he was still in arrears—already there below in Misery Street they had known of his arrears—, aye, in himself he was in arrears to existence; however, nothing more could be collected from him. Beyond reach of the glance, he saw the sea before him, spread out to the horizon like liquid quartz, carrying the sun in its azure shimmer, seeming in its luminous, gigantic depths like a yawning mountain summit which, ready to take on and to bear, swallowed all reality in itself and gave it forth again day and night in a brazen booming; and as this brazen surf rose up and subsided he heard the symbol of the voice issue from it, the voice swelling and fading, the symbol of all reality: "What I have written must be consumed by the fire of reality," he said.

  "Since when do you draw a line between reality and truth?" interposed Lucius, ready as always for a discussion, moving up a little pretentiously to begin new arguments: "Epicurus says that . . ."

  Plotius cut short his words: "Epicurus may say what he wants, we two will see to it that the Aeneid is not consumed by any touch of reality."

  But Lucius was not so easily halted: "Beauty and truth are one with reality . . ."

  "Even so," admitted Plotius peacefully.

  Sharper grew the morning light, more azure the sky in the window frame, blacker the root-like branching of the candelabrum in front of it. Without rising, Plotius with a few shoves pushed himself with his chair out of the sunny region of the alcove into the cooler shadows of the room. Why were these two determined not to grasp the true reality? Why did they, who for thirty long years had been his devout familiars, need to come here only to become unfamiliar and strange to him? It was as if a sharper light were penetrating the spheres of existence ever more acutely, as if the surfaces of existence and the reality of existence took on more perceptible distinctness, and it was incomprehensible that everyone should not crave the veritable reality. Plotius should have had an answer, Plotius, whose worldly-trained, worldly-efficient, worldly-important maturity had always emanated so much of good intimidation that it gave one courage to recover, a never-ending courage beginning in childhood, that was like a refuge in its earthly, irresistibly-gentle warmth, which held one unhesitatingly on this side and brooked no resistance; indeed, Plotius should, have given an answer, but this seemed not to have struck him: a little troubled, he sat there heavily, thumb joined to thumb, sometimes sending over worried glances, and as always it was almost impossible to discover the once youthful features in his good, maturity-padded countenance.

  Lucius, however, was in fine form: "Lucretius, whom you, oh Virgil, do not honor less than all of us, Lucretius, no less great than you, Virgil, although no greater, he was granted the comprehension of the law of reality, and the song into which he composed it came to be one of truth and beauty; no longer is beauty shattered on reality, no longer consumed by it, but the reverse takes place: that which perishes at the touch of reality falls away from it as soon as its law is perceived and demonstrated in beauty, only the beautiful remaining, remaining as the one and only reality.'*

  Alas, he knew this language, this twilight speech of literature and philosophy, the language of the benumbed, unborn word, dead before it was born; it had once been familiar to him also, and certainly he had believed then in what it expressed, believed or thought that he believed; now, however, it sounded alien, almost incomprehensible. Law? There was only one law, the law of the heart! Reality? There was only one reality, the reality of love! Should he not, must he not, shout this aloud? should he not, and must he not, tell this to them so that they should comprehend it?! Alas, they could not comprehend it, they had no wish to comprehend it, and so he said simply: "Beauty cannot live without approval, truth locks itself off from applause."

  "The approval of centuries and millenniums is not the approval of the present, it is not the shoddy applause of the cheaply charmed masses ... in becoming immortal, the immortalized work of art comes to be a recognition of truth." Thus ran the agile answers of Lucius and he wound up with: "In immortality truth and beauty are united, and this holds good for you too, Vergilius!"

  This immortality which Lucius was erecting was an earthly one and therefore not timeless, being at most of eternal duration on earth, and not even that! For only the Saturnian meadows endure eternally, stretched out in the divine forgetfulness of their infinite renewals, while here the concern was only for glory. Did not this imply the ghastly possibility that the immortals were unable to die? Did not this portend damnation,?! He who equates truth with everlasting beauty abolishes the life-giving timelessness, abolishes salvation and the grace of the voice! Then Homer and Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, those sovereign elders, as well as Lucretius, gone early to his rest, would live on in the ghastliness of their eternal earthly death, a death that must endure until the last line of their writings be tilled out of human memory, until there was no human mouth to recite their verses, until there was no stage that would show their works; a thousandfold death would be their portion, called ever and again from the underworld, evoked into the ghostly, absurd interrealm of earthly immortality. If this were so—and it was not impossible that it was so—should not these immortals, they before, and like all others, should not they also have destroyed their creations, for the sake of more blessed fields in which to abide? Oh, Eurydice! Oh, Plotia!

  aye, so it was: "Deadly the wound of Apollo's arrow e'en though it fails to kill."

  "How true," said Plotius. "If I did not have my monthly bleedings I would long since have been under the ground with my forefathers."

  Lucius nodded assent. "By Apollo eternally wounded . . . and the fastidious dignity of his attitude is the only choice left to him wounded by immortality, if he wants to live according to the exalted example of Epicurus." And he himself was the purest example of this attitude as, with one leg thrown over the other, resting his elbow on it, the palm of his hand turned upward, he offered this explanation. "For what could well be put in the place of beauty and the harmony of its pure and noble form, since human life reaches no further than seeing and hearing and the other senses? The seeing and hearing of beauty is the ultimate that Apollo has to bestow, and the artist selected by him to receive such divine gifts must accept his lot . . ."

  "Is it so hard for you, Lucius?" asked Plotius.

  "I do not speak of myself. But this applies to every artist, and before all to our Virgil . .. and he will admit that these conclusions must of necessity be drawn from the principles of Epicurus, but also that they lie close to Plato's views on the beautiful, perhaps even going beyond them and certainly never to be refuted by them . . ."

  "I admit it willingly, it may be so." Possibly Lucius was right, but it was of no moment.

  And yet, and yet: even though human life did not reach beyond seeing and hearing, and though the heart could not sound any further than it beat, and even though, in consequence of this, harmony was set up before men as something of final dignity and worth, fate-destined to be form and only form, yet, despite this, everything that happened merely for the sake of beauty remained prepossessed by empty nothingness and greatly exposed to damnation; for even in the moderation of harmony it remained in bondage to intoxication, a reversion of the path, it was simply a subterfuge and did not aim toward that perception in which alone divinity was at rest. Oh, woe to the seeing of the gold-glinting universe that looks on beauty; it remains, in spite of that, imprisoned in leaden, blindness! Oh, beauty-bedecked world, decked out for beauty! This was the world in which Rome was erected, rich in gardens, rich in palaces, that picture of a city, a rising image that moved nearer and nearer, transported in itself, yet near at hand and filling the azure sky: the house of Augustus
and that of Maecenas were there, and not far off his own house on the Esquilin, the pathways adorned with columns, the quadrangles and gardens with statues; he saw the Circus and the amphitheater in a turmoil with the furious playing of organs; he saw the gladiators wrestling to death for beauty's sake, the beasts set upon men; he saw the masses jubilant with lust, crowding about a cross on which, roaring and whimpering with pain, an insubordinate slave was being nailed—the intoxication of blood, the intoxication of death, and withal the intoxication of beauty—, and he saw more and more of these crosses, saw them multiplying, lapped by the torches, licked by the flames, the flames mounting from the crackling wood and from the uproar of the crowds, a flaming ocean that closed over the city of Rome and ebbed away, leaving nothing but blackened ruins, wrecked pediments, tumbled statues, and a land grown over by weeds. He saw, and he knew it would come to pass, because the true law of reality revenged itself irresistibly on mankind, and must so revenge itself, when, being greater than any manifestation of beauty, it was bartered for beauty— plainly affronted by this, despised by being overlooked: high above the law of beauty, high above the law of the artist, which was only greedy for corroboration, there was the law of reality, there was—divine wisdom of Plato—the Eros in the urge of existence, there was the law of the heart, and woe to a world which had forgotten this last reality. Why had he been singled out to know this? Were the others still blinder than he? Why did they not see, not grasp it? Why not, at least, his friends? Or did his blindness make him incapable of showing them? Why was he too paralyzed, too weak, too inarticulate to make them understand? Blood was what he saw before him, blood was what he tasted in his mouth; a rattling moan tore through his chest, rattling through his throat, and he was obliged to let his head sink back on the pillows!

  Oh, truth alone is immortal, immortal in truth is death. Only he who closes his eyes has a sense of the seeing blindness, a sense of overcoming fate.

  For even though the law could be perceived only in the eternal and unchangeable form assigned it by fate, and even though this form, and with it fate itself, lay in the cold unchanging imprisonment of the Saturnian realm, yet the Promethean endeavor was aimed toward the fire in the conjoined depths above and below, and shattering the prison of mere form, thrust forward to the first ancestor enthroned there, in whose hands lay the truth of inner reality.

  And therefore: terrible on the outmost edge of reality hung laughter, the very sister of death, terrible beyond all darkness and every abyss, hung in a perilous balance, a floating border between greed for life and self-destruction, tilted toward this side in its earth-splitting, volcanic yelling, and toward the other in its sea of smiles which confronted the night, embraced the world and burst it asunder. But there was no longer a trace of laughter, no longer the hint of a smile. Plotius said gravely: "The doctor should have been here a long time ago . . . we'll look for him ourselves as we go to call on Augustus." And both of them stood.

  However, he wanted and was compelled to detain them; their blind blindness had to be banished: overpowering was the compulsion to make them understand, so that they should not be estranged from him, overpowering the compulsion to tell them what they had not grasped, and had not even wished to grasp. And although he himself hardly knew what it meant, a phrase presented itself: "Love is the reality."

  So it became audible and suddenly it was no longer enigmatic. For the gods had blessed man with love to ease the pang of his lusts, and he who has partaken of this blessing perceives reality; he is no longer a mere lodger in the realm of personal consciousness in which he is caught. And again he heard: "Love is the reality."

  "Quite so," affirmed Lucius, seeming neither shocked nor surprised, "that is what you taught us, and when I observe Tibullus or Propertius or even young Ovid who is so full of poor taste, I want only to maintain that you have taught this a little too fervently, because their immaturity, which proposes to follow in your footsteps and even perhaps to surpass you, you, the unsurpassable, has no longer any other theme than love, and I must confess that I am quite glutted with it, as little as I am inclined to turn against love as such . . . where, by the way, is the Greek boy whom you mentioned before?"

  It had failed. It had again glided into the trivial and the literary, gliding over the surface of the real within existence, as if to show that he deserved no better, that he was in a literary no-man's-land, which did not touch even the surface, that encompassed nothing, neither the depths of heaven nor of earth, at most only the empty province of beauty. And it oppressed him anew. For he who had trodden the unholy path of reversion, he who had always intoxicated and inflamed himself on beauty alone, he who possessed by mania wanted to deafen the weakness within him by the vastness outside of him, he who had hot been able to search for the immutable in the human heart but had been compelled to gather together into one company the stars, the primal-ages and all the doings of the gods, he had never loved; and what he had held to be love had been only yearning, nostalgia for that lost landscape, in which once, oh once, lost long ago, childhood forgotten, the beyond forgotten, love had existed even for him; only this landscape had sufficed for his poetry; never had a song for Plotia escaped his lips, and even then, when gripped by the beauty of Alexis, made his by the favor of Asinius, he had thought to sing for the boy, it had not come to be a love-song but an Eclogue of thanks for Asinius Pollio, dealing but in a most negligible way with love in a longed-for landscape. No, it was an error to assume that he, who had never loved and who therefore had never succeeded in writing a genuine love-poem, had brought any influence to bear upon these young poets of love, or even that he could qualify as their spiritual ancestor; they did not stem from him, they were more honorable than he: "Oh, Lucius, they have a better progenitor than I, he is called Catullus; they have not been my followers, nor should they ever have been."

  "You will not be able to shake them off, even if you dismiss them from your charge, despite the fact that this is so beautifully expressed in your Eclogue; nevermore shall I sing songs, and no longer am I your guardian! No, Virgil, you are and you will remain the progenitor, verily the one whose force they will never equal."

  "I am very weak, Lucius, and have always been so, and, considering my lack of force, it is possible to call me their progenitor, for truly they share this with me ... all that we have in common is that we are both short-lived . . ."

  "All I know is that Catullus and Tibullus died at thirty, and you are already in your fifties," stated Plotius firmly.

  Ah, even though the litterateur in his weakness has the fancy that the landscape of his childhood for which he may be yearning is the infinity of the Saturnian fields, and that, were he there, he would hearken to the depths of heaven and of earth, the landscape proper to him is that of sheer platitude, and he listens to nothing, least of all to death: "When was it that Tibullus was snatched away, Plotius? Scarcely a few weeks past . . . and Propertius lies sick unto death, even as I do . . . our weakness is apparently unpleasing to the gods, and now they mean to root us out thoroughly . . ."

  "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."