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PARTISAN REVIEW
DREAMS AND LONGINGS OF A ClASSICAL SCHOLAR
HADRIAN'S MEMOIRS. By Marguerite Yourcenar. Translated from the
French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the Iluth.or. Farrar, Straus
and Young. $4.00.
This book is an astonishing feat. Begin it, and you know im–
mediately that you are in the hands of a scholar-artist who is unusually
cultivated and
fine,
and that you are being led into an experience that
has been carefully shaped for you, its smallest effects measured in ad–
vance. Yet this mind, which is at once so superbly cultivated and unas–
similable, which knows the effect it is creating and yet can be seen
standing serenely outside the design it has created, is so enraptured with
its subject that it can virtually be watched dreaming about it, with
open eyes, without any self-consciousness whatever.
The book is an act of love toward the classical world-even more,
toward the fabled image of that world, now all
luxe et calme et volupte.
The prose has a caressing, elegiac, Virgilian pace: Hadrian knows he is
dying, and in the autumn of his days, writes his autobiography to his
legal grandson, Marcus Aurelius. The phrasing, which the emperor him–
self seems to appreciate even as he puts it down, exists for the pleasure
that a man can take in finding this strange world itself so assimilable
and expressible. And the only word for it all is what
we
call "classical"
-each phrase seems to be lovingly handled not only for its truth, but
for the author's triumph at being able to dcmonstrate the wisdom that
Hadrian felt he possessed. This embrace of language itself, this book
of Hadrian's wisdom, is so beautifully done that finally one can only
think of it as a kind of classic anthology. So lovingly and cleverly have
the bits and pieces of the ancient world been put together, from the
motion of the rowers on the Nile to the mystery religions in Egypt and
the J ewish war in Palestine, that the book does finally resemble rather
more the scholar's poetry which is the historic sense in our time than
the free inner dynamics of the storyteller. In the sense that "The Waste
Land" is deliberately an anthology of a world represented as coming
apart, this book is the anthology of a world which now can be grasped
with a single embrace.
And yet this sense of "classicalness"-the temples, the bathing
places, the costumes, the gold-is not what one gets most from the
book ; all that is in the background and occasionally does have the
appearance of being worked up, of being fitted to such knowledge
as we have. The main experience one gets from the book is the over-
