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Page 71
I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In a
crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no
platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired, his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested they
were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great
poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were
fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal
communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows together, fix
his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then
flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain. He could
bring the drama of antique life before one out of the shadows--white
figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his face as it
looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he spent among the
sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the roofless
columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses, the
changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains. He had wilfully
stayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching
the constellations on their path down the sky until `the bride of old
Tithonus' rose out of the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn.
It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of his
departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He was
still, indeed, doing penance for it.
I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of
Dante's veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of
the `Commedia,' repeating the discourse between Dante and his `sweet
teacher,' while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long
fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who
spoke for Dante: `I was famous on earth with the name which endures
longest and honours most. The seeds of my ardour were the sparks from that
divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the
"Aeneid," mother to me and nurse to me in poetry.'
Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about
myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself
for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me
with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.
While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric
brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found
myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.
They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the
plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new
appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up
in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my
consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within
it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new
experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to
wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.
II
ONE MARCH EVENING in my sophomore year I was sitting alone in my room after
supper. There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and little
streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of old
snow-banks. My window was open, and the earthy wind blowing through made me
indolent. On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down, the sky
was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it. Higher
up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star hung like a
lamp suspended by silver chains--like the lamp engraved upon the title-page
of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new heavens, and waking
new desires in men. It reminded me, at any rate, to shut my window and
light my wick in answer. I did so regretfully, and the dim objects in the
room emerged from the shadows and took their place about me with the
helpfulness which custom breeds.
I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the `Georgics'
where tomorrow's lesson began. It opened with the melancholy reflection
that, in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to flee. 'Optima
dies ... prima fugit.' I turned back to the beginning of the third book,
which we had read in class that morning. 'Primus ego in patriam mecum ...
deducam Musas'; `for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse
into my country.' Cleric had explained to us that `patria' here meant, not
a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighbourhood on the
Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once
bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to
Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia
Romana, but to his own little I country'; to his father's fields, `sloping
down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.'
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