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Disjecta membra poetae, the artificial poesy, so much admired by those for whom it is conceived and elaborated, the fragments of a pretty woman, litter every corner of the room.
The book does not deserve even to be read, which does not impose on us the duty of frequent pauses, much reflecting and inward debate, or require that we should often go back, compare one observation and statement with another, and does not call upon us to combine and knit together the disjecta membra.
Or to paraphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines: Horum pars tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membra iuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant?
We perceive here and there indeed the "torn members of the poet" disjecta membra poetae; but the whole is so constrained, disfigured, and, from the simple fulness of the original, tortured and twisted into such miserable intricacy, that even when the language is retained word for word, it ceases to convey its genuine meaning.
Strewn about were small fish, the disjecta membra of many kinds of animal, ships' masts and anchors, human bones, and merchandise; in the centre was land with hillocks upon it, the alluvial deposit, I supposed, from what the whale swallowed. This was wooded with trees of all kinds, and vegetables were growing with all the appearance of cultivation. The coast might have measured thirty miles round.
But it gives us "disjectæ membra novellæ" rather than a novel itself: and the oftener one reads it the more clear one is that the time for writing novels had not yet come. The materials are there; the desire to utilise and even a faint vague idea of how to utilise them is there; but the art is almost completely absent.
Are we not weary of these infirm nations, of these scattered members of a great body, which might dominate our planet! Membra sumus corporis magni. Let these members unite; let Humanity, the New Adam, arise! VILLENEUVE, March 15, 1918. "Revue Politique Internationale," Lausanne, March and April, 1918.
We were all equally "Italianissimi," as the phrase went then; all equally desirous that Italy should accomplish the union of her disjecta membra, throw off the yoke of the bad governments which had oppressed her, make herself a nation, and do well as such. But we differed widely as to the ultimate utility, the probable results, and, above all, as to the motives of the Emperor's conduct. Mrs.
Disjecta membra are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man. Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognize that he too was a Prophet, in his way; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven; "We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!"
Vivat academia, vivant professores, vivat membrum quodlibet, vivant membra quaelibet, semper sint in flore. As the last stanza was sung, in slow and solemn measure, the students began to throw away their torches. First one alone shot out from the belt of fire that surrounded the square, meteorlike in a wide arch, and fell in the centre of the open space amidst a shower of sparks.
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