September 2006 Print

The following article is taken from a speech Dr. John Senior gave to faculty a the University of Wyoming in 1967. It should be noted that this speech was given at a state university; the occasion and audience were secular, and not overtly religious.

When a contemporary disparager said to Virgil, "You have done what anyone could have–simply imitated Homer," Virgil replied, "It is strange no one else ever has." And that is still true: Virgil is the only one who ever got away with stealing from so great a man–because he did more than plagiarize; he made poetry Roman and at once raised the political vision of Julius Caesar to the permanent imperium of the mind and heart. Virgil did in letters was Augustus did in rule–together, they gave Western civilization its stamp. In the Aeneid, Jupiter, the parent of men and gods, predicts that Romans shall rule the world forever:

To them I ordain neither period nor boundary of empire; / I have given them dominion without end. (MacKail's[1] translation)

Virgil is therefore a prophet in the Old Testament sense of one who gives God a voice. At any rate, it is very difficult to read him in the context of Christianity without feeling that to be true. He had a vision of history; for him, history has a plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. The cosmos is a poem, it has an order, and each of us has a job to do within that order. The future is necessarily rooted in the past; what we do now is rooted in the past and will affect the generations to come. Virgil is a traditionalist, but do not mistake that word. Nothing could be further from tradition than stagnation, as some might think. One easy way to stagnate, in fact, is to live for the present alone; nothing is so dated as the latest thing. The newspapers, the magazines, the television shows, these give you the sorry chronicle of all that is dead about a culture; they rub off the epidermis, they give you the nail and hair clippings and, finally, the corpses of history–newspaper files are fittingly called the morgue–whereas the vital sap of history flows in poetry and statesmanship. History, within a culture, is continuous; it is a motion from sometime to some other and the poet is the one who tells us where we stand.

Virgil went to school in Homer, because the root of poetry is there. It was fashionable some years ago to talk about the Epic as a worldwide form; we were told the Gilgamesh story, for example, or the Mahabharata[2] and the Ramayana[3] were epics; but whatever such poems may be, they are not anything like the Iliad. Homer is the first epic poet and any other imitates him. This form is peculiar to what we called Western civilization, though that word is scarcely accurate today. (Western civilization prevails in Australia, for example.) The Greeks themselves were convinced that Western civilization was the only kind there was. They called every other barbarian–which certainly did not mean savage, because the Greeks had contact with rich and fertile nations, the Persian and Egyptian for example. But the word culture, for Greeks, meant not just what people happened to do; rather as Matthew Arnold[4] said, it meant the best that has been thought and said. And the Greeks were certain that they were different and better.

All arguments about cultural relativity stumble on the Greeks. No matter what theory, anthropological or sociological, you may hold about culture, the Iliad is a fact, the Parthenon is a fact, and Plato is a fact. There is nothing like this anywhere else. You can imagine a great Pantheon of all the cultures of the world–but the Greeks will not fit in. Anyone who truly holds the view that all cultures are essentially one, must stumble on the Greeks just as anyone who holds that all religions are the same must stumble on Christians. The late Ananda Coomaraswamy,[5] the Hindu writer, said of Christians that the best of them had at most risen to proclaim the insufferable slogan that "We all worship the same God–you in your way and I in His." With all the changes of tone that have come over our relations with other people, there are very few Westerners who really think we have the right to put the white man's burden down. However repulsive the wording of that phrase may seem in the context of the civil rights movement and the Peace Corps–still, is not that really the burden of the civil rights movement and the Peace Corps? Any real criticism we make of ourselves for having failed the world is made in terms of our failure to make all the people of the world civilized and Christian. We deny the terms sometimes because they seem so arrogant, but what other values are we bringing to the jungles and the slums if not Greek and Christian values? Without these, we are nothing but spoilers. The shameful fact is that we often have been.

Rome is the nexus. Virgil went to school in Homer and Western civilization has gone to school in him ever since. What he learned at school was fortified by life. He grew up amid the flashing military and political career of Julius Caesar–who take him all in all is, from the secular point of view, the greatest man who ever lived. And Virgil suffered the bitter shocks of mob violence upon Caesar's assassination and the oriental escapades of Mark Anthony; and then, in his maturity, he grasped those architectonic realities of politics constructed by Augustus in the light of his uncle's vision–and committed them to verse. The Roman Empire is as much the work of Virgil as of Caesar. The truths that Caesar grasped, he fixed in poetry forever. If you want to have civilization in the Greek sense, the Western sense, you must have roots. You cannot order your life on the newspapers, nor on symbolism; culture is not kitsch. The latest novel or the newest drug can only be tested against the best that has been thought and said.

Since the first public readings of the Aeneid in the reign of Caesar Augustus and actually also within the time of the reign of Herod the King, Virgil has never been considered less than the second greatest poet, and over the larger period of the two thousand years from then until now has been thought the very first. This astonishing supremacy puts us to the test when we read him: What is our failure–not his–if his poems no longer speak to us. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Virgil and the Bible have been the only common documents of Western education. It follows, as a very strong probability, that the fortunes of our civilization are connected with the values Virgil fixed in the forms of his poetry. The essential liveliness of Virgil, his revivifying power, is, it seems to me, more important today in what a communist critic of the 1930's called this "dying culture," than at any time since the poems were written.

There are those, of course, who think they do not want civilization, who opt for the destruction of the West. I believe that most who hold this view are ignorant. The crisis in the West today, the serious illness, the paralysis of will we suffer, is in very large part the consequence of the fact that a determinate number no longer knows Virgil. That sounds like the opening scene in Molière's play about the bourgeois gentilhomme,[6] but it is so.The sociologists say that a certain number–it varies according to the circumstances, sometimes quite a small number–determines society, sets the standards, raises the taste, fixes the fashions, strikes the tone in music, art, and literature. When a determinate number has been brought up on Virgil, you have civilization. When that is not so–you still have civilization for a time, because decay is slow–and so, in short you have what we have now, a world in which, as Yeats[7] said,

The best lack all conviction
While the worst are full of passionate intensity.

If Virgil had not written the Aeneid, we would be savages by now. It is my thesis in this article, 2,000 years after the poem was written, at a distance far from "high-embattled Rome," that the classical school must be restored for a determinate number and I should hope some among that number are reading this.

The general decline in education is clearly visible in the step-by-step backward moving of its matter over form. In the 50 years of most recent and rapid decline, the quantity of administrative personnel and buildings has increased exactly in proportion as the quality of education has diminished, until today, a school is first a group of buildings and a superintending force, and only then a faculty and student body. T. E. Page, British classicist and school master of the last generation and editor of Virgil, predicted this half a century ago, but few believed him then:

At the time of the Royal Commission in 1863 the position of classical studies was supreme and unchallenged....Now, however, matters have already much changed, and the whole tendency of drift of events is to still larger and more far-­reaching changes. As the number of schools which now rank as "public schools" has much increased, so the competition between them has naturally much increased also, and it has too often taken the form of extravagant expenditures of buildings and the like so that a great school is now also a great establishment, the cost attracting the favour and support of comparatively wealthy parents. Financial considerations, in fact, affect public schools more than they once did, and more than, having regard to the true welfare of education, they ever ought to do. Their noble and richly equipped buildings, their ample and well-­ordered grounds please the popular eye and look well in an illustrated paper; but, though these outward things are not without their value, it is certain that they are purchased at too great a cost if their existence induces teachers to consider not what is right, but what is profitable; not what is best, but what is most in demand.

That such a tendency exists today there can be no question, and should it ultimately become dominant, it will canker and kill all liberal education....Such a statement may, perhaps, seem to many intemperate and foolish but there is real risk that under the influence of panic we may some day fling the classics almost entirely overboard.

Intemperate and foolish indeed in 1902, but it has happened. It is difficult now for us to imagine the great headmasters of a century ago–Butler, Arnold, Thring–who were primarily scholars and teachers, not administrators, but head masters. It is even more difficult to imagine the school of earlier centuries in which two or three teachers taught an average of 150 pupils in a single room with not even a janitorial staff or a latrine. In 1838 when the students at Eton[8] asked for running water in the dormitories they were told, "You will be wanting gas and Turkey carpets next." "Philosophical happiness," said Edmund Burke,[9] "is to want little."

Philosophic happiness is not mere sentiment. My thesis is in fact the abstract generalization consequent upon a great theme: and that is the substance of this article. If I succeed in giving anyone even the slightest glimpse of Virgil's theme I shall have made my case for the restoration of education.

The Aeneid begins with a disaster. The first magnificent scene of the poem is a shipwreck. The first emotion of its hero, fear. His first words, a cry de profundis:

East wind and south wind together, and the gusty south­wester, falling prone on the sea, stir it up from its lowest chambers, and roll vast billows to the shore. Behind rises shouting of men and creaking of cordage. In a moment clouds blot sky and daylight from the Teucrians' eyes; black night broods over the deep. The heavens crash with thunder, and the air quivers with incessant flashes; all menaces them with instant death. Straightway Aeneas' frame grows unnerved and chill, and stretching either hand to heaven, he cries thus aloud: "Ah thrice and four times happy they who found their doom in high-embattled Troy before their fathers' faces. Ah son of Tydeus, bravest of the Grecian race, that I could not have fallen on the Ilian plains, and gasped out this my life beneath thine hand! where under the spear of Aeacides lies fierce Hector, lies mighty Sarpedon; where Simois so often caught and whirled beneath his wave, shields and helmets and brave bodies of men."

Rome gave Greece its form and implicates us in the fortunes of the Trojan War. That war is our war, it is the only one we have the right to fight–and it seems to me to be more than accident that Virgil ties us to the losing side. Our history begins in shipwreck too. We are the descendents of Aeneas, victims of the Trojan horse–it should be called the Greek horse really. Now look squarely at Aeneas especially in that first scene–in the very first phrase describing him: "Straightway Aeneas' frame grows unnerved and chill..." But Aeneas is a hero. Many intellectuals have confused heroes with Dick Tracy (the child really is father to the man) and gone on from there to a further unwarranted inference that anyone not like Dick Tracy is an anti-­hero. Indeed there are anti-­heroes in life and in literature. Theristes in the Iliad is an anti-hero, Sinon in the Aeneid is another. One of the most interesting things about Sinon–the spy sent to confuse the Trojans over the real import of the wooden horse–is that he is not afraid and has to simulate being "unnerved and chill." We are expressly told he was "confident of his courage, and doubly prepared to spin his snares" or to meet "assured death." The fearless blackguard, cheat, liar, presuming upon the gentle hearts of the Trojan heroes, calling up their sympathy for anyone in trouble–this fearless blackguard, as I say, is one of the great detestables and anti-­heroes of all time.

But I have got ahead of the story. All that is filled in later in a flashback. Some of the ships are saved from this first wreck because Neptune soothes the tempest, the turbulence of that first scene ending in one of those enamelled phrases Virgil is famous for; Neptune, we are told, goes "gliding on light wheels along the watery floor."

MacKail translates that brilliantly by stealing the last two words from Milton's Lycidas–because Milton had stolen them from here. Disaster, turbulence and peace–that is the order of the poem both in the whole and the parts.

The first heroic simile is thematically significant of this also and it happens, not accidentally, to follow immediately upon that line. Neptune

channels the vast quicksands, and assuages the sea, gliding on light wheels along the watery floor....Even as when oft in a throng of people strife has risen, and the base multitude rage in their minds and now brands and stones are flying; madness lends arms; then if perchance they catch sight of one reverend for goodness and worth, they are silent and stand by with attentive ear; he with speech sways their temper and sooths their breasts even so has fallen all the thunder of ocean, when riding with forward gaze beneath a cloudless sky the lord of the sea wheels his coursers and lets his gliding chariot fly with loosened rein.

 

MacKail's uses the word reverend to describe him. Virgil actually uses the word pious, a much misunderstood and now degraded epithet. It once meant "grave in duty" according to Connington. That one man, "grave in duty" who stills the crowd as Neptune stills the sea...he is Carlyle's Samson, the prudhomme of the French chronicles, the verray parfit gentle knyght in Chaucer, or Theseus. In his person he is the figure of the theme of Virgil's poem and of our civilization. He is George Washington, whose birth we scarcely celebrate today, and he is Winston Churchill in his finest hour. Even Mark Twain, where you might least expect it, shows him stopping a lynch mob in some southern town in Huckleberry Finn. But I started to say that some of the ships, saved from wreck by Neptune, finally beached on a strange shore. Aeneas shakes off his own chill, his own dread, and gives a short, telling exhortation. No frippery, no sophistry, ten hexameters only–he is a man of few words, but what words: This is the one man stilling now the terrors of his men–as Neptune did the sea–and he himself is not at all like Sinon, confident of his courage. Exactly opposite to Sinon who feigns fear, Aeneas, "feigns hope and keeps his anguish hidden deep in his breast." And he says aloud:

O comrades, for not ere now are we ignorant of ill, O tried by heavier fortunes–to these also God will appoint an end. The fury of the Scylla and the roaring recesses of her crags you have come nigh, and known the rocks of the Cyclops. Recall your courage, put sorrow and fear away. This too sometime we shall haply remember with delight. Through chequered fortunes, through many perilous ways, we steer for Latium, where destiny points us a quiet home. There the realm of Troy may rise again. Keep heart, endure till prosperous fortune come.

"Keep heart, endure. This too sometime we shall haply remember with delight."

I have often consoled myself with these lines when trying to learn Latin. The poem in fact may be taken as a figure for education–as for any part of life, that it begins in shipwreck, drives through trouble and one day, one hopes at least, to truth–which is the peace and rest of the intellect. But, of course, he is not directly talking about the intellect.

It is an irony resulting from our systems of classification that Virgil has been the most obvious begetter of classicism, because he has given us also our greatest romance.

Aeneas has been washed ashore at Carthage whose Queen has sympathy for refugees because, as she says, "Me too has a like fortune driven through many a woe...not ignorant of ill I learn to succour the afflicted." There is a community of those who have learned by suffering. Two famous words sum up this aspect of the theme–the tears of things. Virgil believes this about life, that it really is tears–and that it is good.

Dido's love for Aeneas begins with their common sense of sorrow, which is the origin of all romance–which means that love is tears and that it is good. Dido's love for Aeneas overwhelms us today; it embarrasses us. There is nothing like it in the movies or the magazines. Professor MacKail thought Virgil himself did not intend it to happen. He says:

The story of the love of Dido and its tragic issue had beyond his first intention and almost against his will, taken hold of him, expanded to a greatness and deepened into an intensity unsurpassed in ancient or modern poetry.

Unsurpassed it is, but the speculation is unwarranted; it is in fact a tribute to Virgil's art that it seems as if to us he could not possibly have intended the greatest effect of the poem.

In a scene not even Thomas Hardy[10] has been able to destroy–though he imitated it, nor D. H. Lawrence,[11] who imitated it also, nor a hundred operas and movies you have seen even on TV–nature conspires to trap Dido and Aeneas alone. They were on a hunt, then the sudden rain–it is the primordial implication of the sky and the earth and rain in the lives of lovers. I would certainly agree that there is more to this than Virgil would be able to explain, but I should deny he did not intend it. He wrote it and rewrote for ten years and the world has been reading it and re-­reading it ever since: and no one has ever been able to destroy it or to do it better or to explain its power:

Meanwhile Dawn has arisen forth of ocean. A chosen company issue from the gates while the morning star is high; they pour forth with meshed nets, toils, broad-­headed hunting spears, Massylian horsemen and hounds. At her doorway the Punic princes await their queen, who yet lingers in her chamber, and her horse stands splendid in gold and purple with clattering feet and jaws champing on the foamy bit.

Ladies are always late. If some of the words and names seem strange, they are strange as in a dream, coming from some memory; they are strange, but not foreign.

At last she comes forth amid a great thronging train, girt in a Sidonian mantle, broided with needlework; her quiver is of gold, her tresses gathered into gold, a golden buckle clasps up her crimson gown. Therewithal the Phrygian train advances with joyous Julius (Aeneas' son) and first and fore-most of all, Aeneas himself joins her company and mingles his train with hers: even as Apollo, when he leaves wintry Lycia and the streams of Xanthus to visit his mother's Delos, and renews the dance while Cretans and Dryopes and painted Agathyrsians mingle clamorous about his altar, himself he treads the Cynthian ridges and plaits his flowing hair with soft heavy sprays and entwines it with gold; the arrows rattle on his shoulder: as lightly as he, went Aeneas....When they are come to the mountain heights and pathless coverts, lo, wild goats driven from the cliff-tops run down the ridge, in another quarter stags speed over the open plain and gather their flying column in a cloud of dust as they leave the hills.

This is the prototype of all the hunting scenes in Chrestien de Troyes[12] and all the romances–the colors crimson and gold, the fiery horse champing at the bit, dancing to get on with the chase and then the run... You can see it in the mind's eye, though no hunt we have been on was ever quite like this–still the ones we have been on are the less for that.

Meanwhile the sky begins to thicken and roar aloud. A rain-­cloud comes down mingled with hail; the Tyrian train and the men of Troy and Venus' Dardanian grandchild, scatter in fear and seek shelter far over the fields. Streams pour from the hills. Dido and the Trojan captain take covert in the same cavern. Primeval Earth and Juno the bridesmaid give the sign; fires flash out high in the air, witnessing the union, and Nymphs cry aloud on the mountain-­top. That day opened the gate of death and the springs of ill. For now Dido reeks not of eye or tongue, nor sets her heart on love in secret: she calls it marriage, and with this word shrouds her blame.

Of course this love must be destructive because it is not marriage:

How leavest thou me to die? (She says at the end.) At least if before thy flight a child of thine had been clasped in my arms–if a tiny Aeneas were playing in my hall, whose face might yet image thine, I would not think myself ensnared and deserted utterly.

There you have a difference between sex and love, so frightfully contrasted by those who think that the worst thing that can happen is the birth of a child. Because she loves him, she wants his child because the child would be a part of him. Dido does not love herself or some degraded pleasure; she loves Aeneas and she wants to be his wife and the mother of his children.

He replies: "Non sponte sequor." "I do not follow of my own will." Which is to say, "I am not my own man."

Out at sea, at dawn, looking back, he sees the flames from Dido's funeral pyre. She had committed suicide. The neo-­classic age reduced this tragic conflict to a formula: love and duty. That is correct, but the formula provides no solution. It is an irreducible conflict. In the most influential Book of the Aeneid, the sixth, the descent into the realms of death, Aeneas sees her shade and she is mute. Guided by the Sibyl, he descends:

They went darkling through the dusk beneath the solitary night, through the empty dwellings and bodiless realm of Dis; even as one walks in the forest beneath the jealous light of a doubtful moon, when Jupiter shrouds the sky in shadow, and black night blots out the world. Right in front of the doorway, in the entry of the jaws of hell, Grief and avenging Cares have made their bed; there swell wan Sickness and gloomy Eld, and Fear, and ill-­counseling Hunger, and loathly Penury, shapes terrible to see; and Death and Travail, and thereby Sleep, Death's kinsman, and the Soul's guilty Joys, and death-­dealing War full in the gateway, and the Furies in their iron cells, and mad Discord with blood-­stained fillets enwreathing her serpent locks.

...Hither all crowded, and rushed streaming to the bank, matrons and men, and high-­hearted heroes dead and done with life, boys and unwedded girls, and children laid young on the bier before their parents' eyes, multitudinous as leaves fall dropping in the forests at autumn's earliest frost, or birds swarm landward from the deep gulf, when the chill of the year routs them overseas and drives them to sunny lands....

Wailing voices are loud in their ears, the souls of babies crying, whom, taken from sweet life at the doorway and torn from the breast, a dark day cut off and drowned in bitter death....

Here they whom pitiless love has wasted in cruel decay, shrouded in myrtle thickets, not death itself ends their distress....Among whom Dido the Phoenician fresh from her death-­wound, wandered in the vast forest; by her the Trojan hero stood, and knew the dim form through the darkness, even as the moon at the month's beginning to him who sees or thinks he sees her rising through the vapours....

"Unwillingly, O queen, I left thy shores...," he cries. And her silence is the most eloquent speech in the poem.

Virgil has no answer to the conflict between love and duty. Nothing could shake him from the conviction that both Dido and Aeneas are right.

Non sponte sequor–I am not my own man. Aeneas certainly is not. When he finally arrives in Italy after so much suffering, both physical and romantic, he still has half the poem to go, having got through an Odyssey, he has an Iliad to fight. And the Aeneid is still the movement of love and its twisted opposite, which is not so much hate, as the wrong kind of love. The Trojans, and Aeneas with them, had got into all their many troubles in the first place at the instigation of the goddess Juno because her vanity had been slighted by Prince Paris, who presented the golden apple as the prize of beauty to dimpled Venus, rather than to herself; and so she hated the Trojans and their hero Aeneas, especially because he was Venus's son. "If I cannot bend the gods," she cries as he approaches Italy at last, "I'll stir up hell," which sounds like Milton's Satan. Juno sets Alecto loose to start a war. Aeneas does not want war; war is the last thing he wants. The great heroes are never war-­mongers; it is for peace that they fight. Alecto the harpy enters into Queen Amata's heart infecting her with frenzy–what amounts to a new religion, in fact. Virgil's description of this demoniacal possession reaches a sublimity of horror:

At her the goddess flings a snake out of her dusky tresses and slips it into her bosom to her very inmost heart, that she may embroil all her house under its maddening magic. Sliding between her raiment and smooth breasts, it coils without touch, and instills its viperous breath unseen; the great serpent turns into the twisted gold about her neck, turns into the long ribbon of her chapelet, inweaves her hair, and winds slippery over her body.

In her frenzy, she is like a top that "runs before the lash and spins in wide gyrations," spreading the infection through the city. And the women,

their breasts kindled with madness, run at once with single ardour to seek out strange dwellings. They have left their homes empty, they throw neck and hair free to the winds.

This is the Bacchic frenzy so terribly documented in Euripides' play, the Bacchae, in which a mother, maddened by sex, tears her own son's body to shreds. These myths are not mere phantasies; they represent the reality of an evil intelligence gnawing at the human heart.

Contrast this fanatic fire, raging in the streets of Latium, with that other fire which illumines Lavinia, Amata's daughter, who finally becomes Aeneas's wife and general mother of the Roman race. She stands dutifully beside her reverend father when

feeding the altars with holy fuel she seemed...to catch fire in her long tresses and burn with flickering flame in all her array, her queenly hair lit up, lit up her jewelled circlet, till enwreathed in smoke and ruddy light, she scattered fire all over the palace.

The distinction between these two kinds of fire is that between the use and abuse of passion. The terrible women incited to riot in the unlawful rites of Bacchus are contrasted with the comely maiden, no less passionate, but lawfully awaiting her lord in the rites of marriage. Since the world is often at pains to deny that marriage has its fires at all and contrasts the Bacchic life with marriage as a flame to a clinker, it would be a wise virgin indeed who trimmed her lamp and read Virgil.

The theme is order. And order is derived from an intention toward some end. The end of love is children. The end of war is peace. The end of all Aeneas's effort is the foundation of an empire based on the law of peace.

Others shall beat out the breathing bronze to softer lines, I believe it well; shall draw living lineaments from the marble; the cause shall be more eloquent on their lips; their pencil shall portray the pathways of heaven, and tell the stars in their arising; be thy charge O Roman, to rule the nations in thine empire, this shall be thine art; to ordain the law of peace, to be merciful to the conquered and beat the haughty down.

Every generation is divided at this line and has been since the Fall of Man, I think. As the sheeted dead once squeaked and gibbered in the Roman streets, so they do today, and make a lot of noise. They get publicity. There is a clamor in the streets right now. Why not be new? Homer is dead. Virgil is dead. Let us have a literature of our own. Let us have a God of our own. In a word, why not be modern? I am not opposed to being alive; but I am opposed to being modern–because that really means destructive.

Gabriel Marcel, the French philosopher, in a book called The Decline of Wisdom, says that an American Officer in a town in Burgundy which had virtually been destroyed in World War II said to a friend of his: "You should be grateful to us for bombing all this old stuff. Now you can have a clean new town."

There are some, it would seem, who would like a new literature–one would hesitate to call it clean. Well, it all depends upon your view of history. Evelyn Waugh ends his novel Scott-­King's Modern Europe with this interesting, I think prophetic, colloquy between an ambitious school administrator and a classics man:

The headmaster sent for Scott-­King."You know," he said, "we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?"

"I thought that would be about the number."

"As you know, I'm an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the "complete" man any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?"

"Oh yes," said Scott-­King, "I can and do."
"I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn't conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?"
"Oh yes, often."
"What I was going to suggest was–I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?"
"No, headmaster."
"But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead."
"Yes, headmaster."
"Then what do you intend to do?"
"If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world."
"It's a short-­sighted view, Scott-­King."
"There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take."

Dr. John Senior was a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Classics whose career spanned the latter half of the 20th century. While teaching at Cornell University in the late 1950's he converted to Catholicism and shortly thereafter moved to the University of Wyoming. Later he taught at the University of Kansas, the most well-­known period of his life, where he was instrumental in several hundred conversions and many vocations. He was widely known and respected in the traditional movement across the globe. He was among the early great pioneers of traditionalism; he knew and counted as friends men such as Archbishop Lefebvre, Walter Matt, Michael Davies, Fr. Marchosky, Fr. Miceli, Dr. Marra, Hamish Fraser, et al. He died in 1999 and is buried in Our Lady of Peace cemetery in St. Marys, Kansas. This is the first appearance of this work by Dr. Senior, published posthumously from his notes of the lecture he gave at the University of Wyoming in 1967.

1 John William MacKail, 1859-­1945, Scottish literary historian, now best remembered as a Virgil scholar. His Latin Literature (1895) is a standard work.
2 Sanskrit word, meaning literally the Great Bharata (Story). It is one of the two great epics of the Hindus.
3 A Sanskrit epic detailing the adventures of Ramachandra, the seventh incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.
4 1822-­88, English poet and critic, whose "Dover Beach" is a classic. He was an inspector of elementary schools from 1851-­86.
5 1877-­1947, art historian. After 1917, he was fellow for research in Indian, Persian, and Moslem art in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
6 Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-­73, French dramatist, actor, and master of comedy. The play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670; Engl. tr., The Merchant Gentleman) is a comedy of character ridiculing the parvenu or social climber.
7 William Butler Yeats (pron. yates), 1865-­1939, Irish poet and playwright.
8 Eton School, 20 miles west of central London on the left bank of the Thames opposite Windsor. The largest and most famous of the English public schools, founded by King Henry VI in 1440.
9 1729-­97, British statesman and political writer. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) made him the spokesman of European conservatism.
10 1840-1928, English novelist and poet, whose novels were violently denounced as books depicting indecency and immorality.
11 1885-­1930, English author whose novels include Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).
12 Late 12th century, French poet, author of the first great literary treatments of the Arthurian legend.