H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: RANZOLI

 Magister: I shall play the Bolognese today, boys. Shropshire: That sounds infectious, sir. G.: Or educational, which is usually worse at school. Magister: In Bologna, before you go to the university, you have already heard of philosophy from a philosopher. Shropshire: Unlike Somerset, where we hear of weather from the weather. G.: And of Rome from masters with canes. Magister: Precisely. And today’s fare is Virgilio — la filosofia. Shropshire: But he is a poet. G.: And a philosopher, if not a cricketer. Magister: Mr. Grice has the right instinct, though perhaps not yet the right restraint. Shropshire: I should rather have the cricket. G.: That is because poetry asks more of you than bowling. Magister: Ranzoli, in his La filosofia di Virgilio, takes Virgil seriously as a thinker, not merely as a versifier of Roman weather and imperial upholstery. Shropshire: “Imperial upholstery” sounds promising. G.: Better than your psychology, which is usually merely labelled emotion. Magister: Let us begin with the obvious proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he reflects on fate. Shropshire: Or because he cannot avoid it. Roman epic drags fate behind it like a school trunk. G.: Too quick. Fate in Virgil is not merely baggage. It is a principle of intelligibility, though often made theatrical. Magister: Good. And what would Ranzoli say? G.: That Virgil does not merely decorate myth with grandeur, but uses epic form to stage a view of order: cosmic, moral, and political. Shropshire: Which is a way of saying he is being dull in hexameters. G.: No, merely serious in metre. Magister: Another proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he mediates among schools. Shropshire: Which schools? Cricket, rugger, and choir? G.: The porch, the garden, the academy, and the liceo, if one wishes to Italianise the Lyceum and make Aristotle sound like a school inspector. Magister: Indeed. Virgil is often read as eclectic. Shropshire: Eclectic is what masters say when a man cannot make up his mind. G.: Or when he can make up several at once. Magister: Very good. Eclectic in Virgil means that Stoic providence, Epicurean melancholy, Platonic colouring, and Aristotelian or Peripatetic habits of natural and moral observation may coexist under poetic discipline. Shropshire: Which sounds as if he steals from every shop on the street. G.: He borrows from all of civilisation, which is more respectable. Magister: Consider the Aeneid. Is Aeneas Stoic? Shropshire: He is dutiful to the point of boredom. G.: Boredom is your response, not his virtue. Aeneas embodies pietas, which is not simply Stoic apatheia but a Roman moral synthesis of duty, reverence, self-subordination, and historical burden. Magister: Good. Ranzoli would insist that Virgil gives us not merely an epic hero but a moral type. Shropshire: A type may still be tedious. G.: Only to those who prefer Achilles. Magister: Let us take another proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he thinks about human suffering under necessity. Shropshire: That sounds merely tragic. G.: Tragedy often is philosophy after dark. Magister: Excellent. In the Georgics and Aeneid especially, labour, death, loss, and historical cost are not accidents but conditions of human life under an ordered yet harsh cosmos. Shropshire: So he is “philosophical” because life is miserable and he writes beautifully about it. G.: Better than your usual formulae, though still coarse. Magister: Ranzoli’s good sense lies precisely there: he does not try to turn Virgil into a lecturer in metaphysics. He asks what kind of world a poet implies. Shropshire: At least that is sensible. G.: More sensible than proving that “substance” means the same in every author north and south of the Alps. Magister: Another proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he presents nature as intelligible. Shropshire: Bees in the Georgics? G.: Exactly. Husbandry, weather, bees, plague, labour, all in a cosmos not wholly arbitrary. Magister: Yet not quite Lucretius. G.: No. Virgil cannot be reduced to Epicurean mechanism, though he knows Lucretius too well not to hear him behind the line. Shropshire: So when he sounds Epicurean, he is being derivatively delicious. G.: Not delicious. Deliberate. Magister: There is a good opposition there. Virgil often sounds as though he has passed through Lucretius without remaining in him. Shropshire: Like a boy through chapel. G.: Better than you know. Magister: The Eclogues too have their philosophy, though boys usually miss it because they think shepherds are decorative. Shropshire: They generally are. G.: In bad poets, perhaps. In Virgil, pastoral often stages absence, loss, longing, political disturbance, and the distance between ideal order and actual history. Magister: Excellent. The so-called shepherd may be carrying a civil war in his flute. Shropshire: That is better than psychology. G.: Everything is better than your psychology. Magister: Ah yes, your psychology. Let us hear it. Why are Shakespeare’s Romans psychologically inferior or superior to Virgil’s? Shropshire: Shakespeare’s are obvious. Caesar vanity, Brutus conscience, Cassius envy, Coriolanus pride, Antony appetite. Virgil’s are less helpful. Aeneas duty, Dido feeling, Turnus temper. G.: A child’s apothecary. Magister: Mr. Grice? G.: Shakespeare gives dramatised conflicts in speech and scene. Virgil gives a more meditated architecture of motive under fate, office, history, and cosmic order. The psychology is not less subtle, merely less theatrical. Shropshire: Less theatrical sounds less fun. G.: Only to boys. Magister: Ranzoli would say something similar, though perhaps with less severity. Virgil’s philosophy lies not in isolated maxims but in the total stance of the poem toward destiny, labour, suffering, piety, and Rome. Shropshire: Rome again. G.: We are in Roman history, you may have noticed. Magister: And English literature, Mr. Shropshire. Shakespeare’s Roman plays and Virgil belong together here because England reads Rome through both history and poetry. Shropshire: That seems rather a lot for one lesson. G.: Clifton aims high and lands irregularly. Magister: Now, what of Dido? Is she merely passion? Shropshire: Surely. G.: Too simple. She is passion yes, but passion under divine interference, political impossibility, wounded dignity, and competing forms of obligation. Magister: Good. In Virgil, the passions are never merely private. They carry world-historical consequence. Shropshire: That sounds suspiciously German. G.: It is merely Roman with hindsight. Magister: And Turnus? Shropshire: Temper, as I said. G.: Turnus is heroic energy trapped on the losing side of fate. His anger is not merely temper but the tragic vitality of a world history will not preserve. Magister: Very good indeed. Shropshire: He still loses. G.: History is full of men who lose philosophically. Magister: Let us ask the more general question. Can a poet be a philosopher without writing doctrine? Shropshire: He can, apparently, bore a classroom. G.: He can certainly think in images, forms, narratives, symbolic arrangements, and moral types. Philosophy is not owned by the treatise. Magister: Exactly. Ranzoli’s virtue is to take that seriously without becoming silly. He does not try to prove that Virgil has a “system.” He shows that poetic vision can carry philosophical order. Shropshire: Which is more sensible than a dictionary of all the philosophical jargon. G.: There speaks improvement. Magister: Let us be fair to the title. La filosofia di Virgilio sounds larger than it is. But the largeness is a useful provocation. Shropshire: To sell copies? G.: To annoy the right readers into buying them. Magister: Also true. But above all it compels the schoolboy to stop saying “but he is a poet” as though that settled the matter. Shropshire: It usually does for me. G.: Your mind was not built for settlements. Magister: Another proposition then. Virgil is philosophical because he thinks historically. Shropshire: Meaning Rome again. G.: Meaning more than Rome. It means that human action is embedded in a temporal order larger than individual desire, and that poetry may represent not just events but their place in a providential or quasi-providential sequence. Magister: The Aeneid is full of that burden. Shropshire: Which is another way of saying Aeneas is not free. G.: Not freely frivolous, no. Freedom in Virgil is not mere arbitrariness but action under necessity with moral cost. Magister: Well said. Shropshire: I prefer heroes with less furniture on their consciences. G.: Which is why you are still at school. Magister: Let us consider whether Virgil’s relation to Epicureanism is itself philosophical. Shropshire: Lucretius in the room again. G.: He never quite leaves. Virgil inherits from Lucretius a certain gravity about nature, mortality, labour, and the fragility of human arrangements, but does not remain within Epicurean release. Magister: Exactly. The world in Virgil is too charged with duty, omen, memory, and destiny for simple Lucretian therapy. Shropshire: So he takes the weather and leaves the atoms. G.: Not entirely foolish. Magister: And Stoicism? G.: There is enough of the Stoic moral atmosphere to colour duty, endurance, order, and rational acceptance, but not enough to make the poems doctrinally Stoic. Shropshire: So again he steals from the porch and walks away. G.: Eclectic, as I said. Magister: “Eclectic” here is not abuse. It may mean that Virgil’s poetry is philosophically resonant because it is not imprisoned within one school. Shropshire: Convenient. G.: Or civilised. Magister: We should now compare this with Shakespeare’s Romans, since you boys have lately suffered them. Shropshire: Gladly. Shakespeare makes motives visible in speech. Virgil wraps them in hexameter fog. G.: No. Virgil embeds them in larger orders of interpretation. Shakespeare dramatises psychic conflict more directly. Virgil meditates moral and historical conflict more architectonically. Magister: Very good. Shakespeare is more immediately psychological; Virgil more cosmological and civic. Shropshire: Which is why Shakespeare is less boring. G.: It is why you are still young. Magister: And yet Shakespeare’s Romans also philosophise by dramatising public life. Brutus, Coriolanus, Antony, all are moral-political cases. Virgil’s cases are less theatrical, but no less philosophically charged. Shropshire: Then why study Virgil in History of England? G.: Because England’s literature, especially Shakespeare, learns Rome from poets as much as from historians. Magister: Exactly. Roman history in an English school cannot stop at Livy and Tacitus. It must pass through Virgil and then through Shakespeare. Shropshire: That sounds very curricular. G.: Which is usually how civilisation reaches boys. Magister: Another proposition. Virgil is philosophical because he teaches by disposition rather than argument. Shropshire: That sounds almost Anglican. G.: It means that the poem trains one’s sense of what counts as serious, necessary, fitting, tragic, admirable, culpable, or sacred before one has reduced any of it to theses. Magister: Excellent. Ranzoli sees that philosophical import may be atmospheric before it is doctrinal. Shropshire: “Atmospheric” is a very evasive word. G.: Better atmospheric than your one-word diagnostics. Magister: Very true. One must not say only “Aeneas = duty” and imagine the matter done. Shropshire: It was a useful beginning. G.: Only as a specimen of what not to stop at. Magister: Let us take one line of objection. Suppose one says Virgil merely borrows philosophical colouring from contemporary schools without himself “being” a philosopher. Shropshire: That is my position. G.: It is a schoolboy’s version of a fair objection. Magister: And the answer? G.: That “being a philosopher” need not mean writing in quaestio form. If a poet persistently organises action, motive, world-order, value, and destiny in ways answerable to philosophical ideas, then philosophical criticism is not absurd. Magister: Quite so. The question is not “did Virgil lecture on ethics?” but “what conception of life and order animates his poetry?” Shropshire: Which sounds less outrageous. G.: Because you have finally begun thinking. Magister: Another proposition. In Virgil, the relation between man and cosmos is philosophically central. Shropshire: More bees? G.: Bees, ploughs, storms, underworlds, omens, prophecy, sacrifice, all of it. Human action is never merely local. It is framed by a world that is both natural and numinous. Magister: Good. That is one reason why Ranzoli is sensible here. He treats poetic cosmology as philosophically consequential. Shropshire: You sound pleased with Ranzoli. G.: Only because he is doing something useful rather than giving us a dictionary of the philosophical lingo. Magister: A low blow, but deserved in some quarters. Shropshire: Then does Ranzoli make Virgil too serious? G.: Any good schoolmaster does, and sometimes rightly. Better too serious than safely decorative. Magister: Thank you, Grice. I was hoping for one ally before luncheon. Shropshire: I remain unconvinced. G.: Naturally. Conviction comes later, after memory has had time to do its work. Magister: A final comparison then. Shakespeare’s Roman plays present persons under civic pressure. Virgil presents persons under civic, cosmic, and historical pressure. Which is more philosophical? Shropshire: Shakespeare, because I can see what they mean. G.: Virgil, because one must learn how much more there is to mean. Magister: Excellent. That is almost worth the lesson. Shropshire: “Almost” is a schoolmaster’s implicature. G.: You improve by accident. Magister: Then let us end with the list we ought to remember. Shakespeare’s Roman plays: Julius Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Octavius, Casca, Portia, Calpurnia; Coriolanus, Volumnia, Virgilia, Menenius, Aufidius, Cominius; Titus, Tamora, Aaron, Lavinia, Saturninus, Bassianus; Antony, Cleopatra, Octavius, Enobarbus, Lepidus, Charmian, Iras. Shropshire: Enough Romans to sink a timetable. G.: Or to make one English. Magister: And Virgil’s principal Romans and anti-Romans? G.: Aeneas, Anchises, Ascanius, Dido, Turnus, Evander, Pallas, Latinus, Amata, Camilla, and all the rest under fate. Shropshire: Under fate again. G.: Better fate than your tropicalism. Magister: Dry enough for now. Next week we return to prose and shall all regret it.