A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [16]
Le Bas turned without warning to his book, and, picking it up from the ground, began to read aloud in his guttural, controlled voice:
“‘Ah! leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar
Of London, and the bustling street,
For still, by the Sicilian shore,
The murmur of the Muse is sweet,
Still, still, the suns of summer greet
The mountain-grave of Helike,
And shepherds still their songs repeat,
Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.
“‘Theocritus! thou canst restore
The pleasant years, and over-fleet;
With thee we live as men of yore,
We rest where running waters meet:
And then we turn unwilling feet
And seek the world – so must it be –
We may not linger in the heat
Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!’”
He shut the book with a snap, and said: “Now can any one of you tell me who wrote that?”
We made various suggestions – Templer characteristically opting for Shakespeare – and then Stringham said: “Matthew Arnold.”
“Not a bad shot,” said Le Bas. “It is Andrew Lang as a matter of fact. Fine lines, you know.”
Another fetid whiff of Templer’s shag puffed its way through the ether. It seemed impossible that Le Bas should remain much longer unaware that a pipe was smoking somewhere near him. However, he seemed to be getting into his stride on the subject of poetry. He said: “There are descriptive verses by Arnold, somewhat similar in metre that may have run in your head, Stringham. Things like:
“‘The clouds are on the Oberland,
The Jungfrau’s snows look faint and far;
But bright are those green fields at hand,
And through those fields comes down the Aar.’
“Rather a different geographical situation, it is true, but the same mood of invoking melancholy by graphic description of natural features of the landscape.”
Stringham said: “The Andrew Lang made me think of:
“‘O singer of Persephone
In the dim meadows desolate
Dost thou remember Sicily?’
“Do you know that, sir? I don’t know how it goes on, but the lines keep on repeating.”
Le Bas looked a little uneasy at this. It was evident that Stringham had displeased him in some way. He said rather gruffly: “It is a villanelle. I believe Oscar Wilde wrote it, didn’t he? Not a very distinguished versifier.”
Quickly abandoning what had apparently been taken as a hostile standpoint, Stringham went on: “And then Heraclitus —”
The words had an instantaneous effect. Le Bas’s face cleared at once, and he broke in with more reverberance even than before:
‘Still are thy pleasant voices, the nightingales awake,
For Death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.’
“I think you are right, Stringham. Good. Very Good. In fact, alpha plus. It all has the same note of nineteenth-century nostalgia for a classical past largely of their own imagining.”
Le Bas sighed, and, removing his spectacles, began in his accustomed manner to massage his eyelids, which appeared to be a trifle less inflamed than normally.
“I looked up Heraclitus in the classical dictionary, sir,” said Stringham, “and was rather surprised to find that he fed mostly on grass and made his house on a dung-hill. I can quite understand his wanting to be a guest if that is how he lived at home, but I shouldn’t have thought that he would have been a very welcome one. Though it is true that one would probably remember him afterwards.”
Le Bas was absolutely delighted at this remark. He laughed aloud, a rare thing with him. “Splendid, Stringham, splendid,” he said. “You have confused the friend of Callimachus with a philosopher who lived probably a couple of centuries earlier. But I quite agree that if the other Heraclitus’s habits had been those you describe, he would not have been any encouragement to hospitality.”
He laughed a lot, and this would have b.een the moment to leave him, and go on our way. We should probably have escaped without further trouble if Templer – feeling no doubt that Stringham had been occupying too much of the stage – had not begun to shoot out radiations towards Le Bas, long and short, like an ocular Morse code, saying at the