Since then a strange blindness has struck men in the world we were born into. There has been a Goethe, no doubt, a Wilhelm von Humboldt, a Whitman. Men have scarcely noted them. Perhaps the responsibility in part lies at the door of Protestantism. Unamuno remarks that Catholicism knew little of that anxious preoccupation with sin, so destructive of heroic greatness, which has gnawed at the vitals of the Protestantism which we have inherited, if only in the form of a barren Freethought spreading its influence far beyond Protestant lands.
Is this a clue to our Intellectual Anaemia and Spiritual Starvation?
_November_ 8.--In a letter of St. Bernard--the ardent theologian, the relentless fanatic, the austere critic of the world and the flesh--to his friend Rainald, the Abbot of Foigny, I come with surprised delight on a quotation from "your favourite"--and it almost seems as though the Saint had narrowly escaped writing "our favourite"--"your favourite Ovid." So the Abbot of Foigny, amid the vexations and tribulations he felt so bitterly, was wont to pore in his cell over the pages of Ovid.
The pages of Ovid, as one glances across them, are like a gay southern meadow in June, variegated and brilliant, sweet and pensive and rather luxuriant, and here and there even a little rank. Yet they are swept by the air and the light and the rain of Nature, and so their seduction never grew stale. During sixteen centuries, while the world was spiritually revolutionised again and yet again, the influence of Ovid never failed; it entered even the unlikeliest places. Homer might be an obscure forgotten bard and Virgil become a fantastic magician, but Ovid, lifted beyond the measure of his genius, was for ever a gracious and exalted Influence, yet human enough to be beloved and with the pathos of exile clinging to his memory, filling the dreams of fainting monks at the feet of the Virgin, arousing the veneration of the Humanists, even inspiring the superb and exuberant poets of the English Renaissance, Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton.
It has sometimes seemed to me that if it were given to the ghosts of the Great Dead to follow with sensitive eyes the life after life of their fame on earth, there would be none, not even the greatest--to whom indeed the vision could often bring only bitterness,--to find more reasonable ground for prolonged bliss than Ovid.