bearer, shows Horace in an amiable light as kindly Mentor to the young
Telemachi of rank who were serving on Tiberius' staff (Ep. I, iii).
"Tell me, Florus, whereabouts you are just now, in snowy Thrace or
genial Asia? which of you poets is writing the exploits of Augustus? how
does Titius get on with his Latin rendering of Pindar? my dear friend
Celsus, what is he at work upon? his own ideas, I hope, not cribs from
library books. And you? are you abandoning all other allurements for
the charms of divine philosophy? Tell me, too, if you have made up your
quarrel with Munatius. To break the tie of brotherhood is a crime:
please, please be friends with him again, and bring him with you when
next you come to see me. I am fattening a calf to feast you both." Here
is a dinner invitation (Ep. I, v.): "If you can put up with deal tables
and a mess of greens served in a common dish, with wine five years old
and not at all bad, come and sup with me, Torquatus, at sunset. We have
swept up the hearth and cleaned the furniture; you may see your face
reflected in cup and platter. We will have a long summer evening of
talk, and you can sleep afterwards as late as you like, for to morrow is
Augustus' birthday, and there will be no business in the courts. I told
you the wine is good, and there is nothing like good drink. It unlocks
reticence, unloads hearts, encourages the shy, makes the tongue-tied
eloquent and the poor opulent. I have chosen my company well: there will
be no blab to repeat our conversation out of doors. Butra and Septimius
are coming, and I hope Sabinus. Just send a line to say whom you would
like to have besides. Bring friends if you choose, but the weather is
hot, and we must not overcrowd the rooms." It all sounds delightful,
except perhaps the mess of greens; but a good Italian cook can make
vegetables tempting down to the present day. I think we should all have
loved to be there, as at the neat repast of Attic taste with wine, which
tempted virtuous Laurence to sup with Milton. So should we like to know
what called forth this pretty piece of moralizing, addressed to the
poet Tibullus (Ep. I, iv). He was handsome, prosperous, popular, yet
melancholy. Horace affectionately reproves him. "Dear Albius," he says,
using the intimate fore-name, "Dear Albius, tell me what you are about
in your pretty villa: writing delicate verses, strolling in your forest
glades, with thoughts and fancies I am sure all that a good man's should
be? What can you want besides the beauty, wealth, full purse, and seemly
household which the gods have given you? Dear friend, I tell you what
you want, contentment with the present hour. Try and imagine that each
day which dawns upon you is your last; then each succeeding day will
come unexpected and delightful. I practise what I preach: come and take
a look at me; you will find me contented, sleek, and plump, 'the fattest
little pig in Epicurus' sty.'" And he impresses the same lesson on
another friend, Bullatius, who was for some reason restless at home and
sought relief in travel. "What ails you to scamper over Asia or voyage
among the Isles of Greece? Sick men travel for health, but you are well.
Sad men travel for change, but change diverts not sadness, yachts and
chaises bring no happiness; their skies they change, but not their souls
who cross the sea. Enjoy the to-day, dear friend, which God has given
you, the place where God has placed you: a Little Pedlington is cheerful
if the mind be free from care" (Ep. I, xi).
His great friend Fuscus twits him, as Will Honeycomb twitted Mr.
Spectator, with his passion for a country life (Ep. I, x). "You are a
Stoic," Horace says, "your creed is to live according to Nature. Do you
expect to find her in the town or in the country? whether of the two
yields more peaceful nights and sweeter sleep? is a marble floor more
refreshing to the eyes than a green meadow? water poured through leaden
pipes purer than the crystal spring? Even amid your Corinthian columns
you plant trees and shrubs; though you drive out Nature she will silently
return and supplant your fond caprices. Do interpose a little ease and
recreation amid the money-grubbing which confines you to the town. Money
should be the servant, not the queen, the captive, not the conqueror.
If you want to see a happy man, come to me in the country. I have only
one thing wanting to perfect happiness, my desire for your society."
Two longer letters are written to his young friend Lollius (Ep. I, ii,
xviii). The first is a study of Homer, which he has been reading in the
country. In the "Iliad" he is disgusted by the reckless selfishness of
the leaders; in the hero of the "Odyssey" he sees a model of patient,
wise endurance, and impresses the example on his friend. It is curious
that the great poet of one age, reading the greater poet of another,
should fasten his attention, not on the poetry, but on the ethics of his
predecessor. The remaining letter is called out by Lollius' appointment
as confidential secretary to some man of great consequence; an office
such as Horace himself declined when offered by Augustus. The post,
he says, is full of difficulty, and endangering to self-respect: the
servility it exacts will be intolerable to a man so truthful, frank, and
independent as his friend. Let him decline it; or, if committed, get out
of it as soon as possible.
Epistles there are without a moral purpose, called forth by some
special occasion. He sends his "Odes" by one Asella for presentation
to Augustus, punning on the name, as representing an Ass laden with
manuscripts (Ep. I, xiii). The fancy was carried out by Pope in his
frontispiece to the "Dunciad." Then his doctor tells him to forsake
Baiae as a winter health resort, and he writes to one Vala, who lives in
southern Italy, inquiring as to the watering places lower down the coast
(Ep. I, xv). He must have a place where the bread is good and the water
pure; the wine generous and mellow; in the market wild boars and hares,
sea-urchins and fine fish. He can live simply at home, but is sick
now and wants cherishing, that he may come back fat as one of the
Phaeacians--luxurious subjects, we remember, of King Alcinous in the
"Odyssey,"
Good food we love, and music, and the dance,
Garments oft changed, warm baths, and restful beds.
Odyssey, viii, 248.
Julius Florus, poet and orator, presses him to write more lyrics
(Ep. II, ii). For many reasons, no, he answers. I no longer want money.
I am getting old. Lyrics are out of fashion. No one can write in Rome.
I have become fastidious. His sketch of the ideal poet is believed to
portray the writings of his friend Virgil. It is nobly paraphrased
by Pope:
But how severely with themselves proceed
The men, who write such verse as we can read!
Their own strict judges, not a word they spare,
That wants or force, or light, or weight, or care;
Pour the full tide of eloquence along,
Serenely pure, and yet divinely strong;
Prune the luxuriant, the uncouth refine,
But show no mercy to an empty line;
Then polish all with so much life and ease,
You think 'tis nature, and a knack to please;
But ease in writing flows from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
The "Epistle to Augustus" (Ep. II, i) was written (page 28) at the
Emperor's request. After some conventional compliments it passes to a
criticism of Latin poetry past and present; comparing, like Swift's
"Battle of the Books," the merits of the contemporary and of the older
masters. There is a foolish mania just now, he says, for admiring our
older poets, not because they are good, but because they are old. The
origin and development of Roman poetry made it certain that perfection
must come late. He assumes that Augustus champions the moderns, and
compliments him on the discernment which preferred a Virgil and a Varius
(and so, by implication, a Horace) to the Plautuses and Terences of the
past.
The "Art of Poetry" is thought to be an unfinished work. Unmethodical
and without proportion, it may have been either compiled clumsily
after the poet's death, or put together carelessly by himself amid
the indolence which grows sometimes upon old age. It declares the
essentials of poetry to be unity of conception and ingenuity of diction,
urges that mechanical correctness must be inspired by depth of feeling,
gives technical rules of dramatic action, of the chorus, of metre.
For matter such as this a Horace was not needed, but the felicity of
its handling has made it to many Horatian students the most popular of
his conversational works. It abounds in passages of finished beauty; such
as his comparison of verbal novelties imported into a literature with
the changing forest leaves; his four ages of humanity--the childish,
the adolescent, the manly, the senile--borrowed from Aristotle, expanded
by Shakespeare, and taken up by Keats; his comparison of Poetry to
Painting; his delineation of an honest critic. Brief phrases which
have become classical abound. The "purple patch" sewn on to a sober
narrative; the wine jar turning to a pitcher as the potter's wheel
revolves; the injunction to keep a book ten years before you publish
it; the near kinship of terseness to obscurity; the laughable outcome
of a mountain's labour; the warning to be chary of bringing gods upon
the stage; the occasional nod of Homer;--are commonplace citations so
crisp and so exhaustive in their Latin garb, that even the unlettered
scientist imports them into his treatises, sometimes with curious
effect.
[Illustration: _Alinari photo._] [_Uffizi Gallery, Florence._
AUGUSTUS.]
If for a full appreciation of these minor beauties a knowledge of the
Latin text is necessary, the more abounding charm of both Satires and
Epistles is accessible to the Latinless reader. For the bursts of poetry
are brief and rare, issuing from amid what Horace often reminds us are
essentially plain prose essays in conversational form, their hexametral
garb an unpoetical accident. Two versions present themselves to the
unclassical student. The first is Conington's scholarly rendering,
hampered sometimes rather than adorned by its metrical shape; the other
is the more recent construe of Dean Wickham, clear, flowing, readable,
stamping with the translator's high authority many a disputed passage.
Both set temptingly before English readers the Rome of Horace's day,
and promote them to an intimacy with his own mind, character, history.
Preferable to both, no doubt, are the "Imitations" of Pope, which do
not aim at literal transference, but work, as does his yet more famous
Homer, by melting down the original, and pouring the fused mass into
an English mould. Their background is Twit'nam and the Mall instead of
Tibur and the Forum; their Maecenas St. John, their Trebatius Fortescue,
their Numicius Murray. Where Horace appeals to Ennius and Attius,
they cite Shakespeare and Cowley; while the forgotten wits, worthies,
courtiers, spendthrifts of Horatian Rome reappear as Lord Hervey or Lady
Mary, as Shippen, Chartres, Oldfield, Darteneuf; and Horace's delicate
flattery of a Roman Emperor is travestied with diabolical cleverness
into bitter mockery of an English king. In these easy and polished
metamorphoses we have Pope at his very best; like Horace, an epitome
of his time, bearing the same relation, as patriot, scholar, worldling,
epicurean, poet, satirist, to the London of Queen Anne, which Horace
bore to the Augustan capital; and so reproducing in an English garb
something at any rate of the exotic flavour of his original. In an
age when Pope is undeservedly and disastrously neglected, I shall do
well to present some few Horatian samples from the king-poet of his
century; by whose wit and finish, unsurpassed if not unequalled in our
literature, the taste of my own contemporaries was formed; and to whom
a public which decries or ignores him pays homage every day, by quoting
from him unconsciously oftener than from anyone except Shakespeare.
Here is a specimen from the Satires, heightening our interest in
Horace's picture by its adaptation to familiar English characters. Great
Scipio and Laelius, says Horace (Sat. II, i, 72), could unbend their
dignity to trifle and even to romp with Lucilius. Says Pope of his own
Twickenham home:
Know, all the distant din that world can keep
Rolls o'er my Grotto, and but sooths my sleep.
There my retreat the best Companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and Statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul:
And he, whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines,
Now forms my Quincunx and now ranks my vines,
Or tames the genius of the stubborn plain,
Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.
That Naevius is no longer read (Ep. II, i, 53) affects us slightly, for
of Naevius we know nothing; Pope substitutes a writer known and admired
still:
Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forget his Epic, nay, Pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his heart.
Horace tells how the old rough Saturnian measure gave way to later
elegance (Ep. II, i, 157). Pope aptly introduces these fine resonant
lines:
Waller's was smooth; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march, and energy divine.
Horace claims for poetry that it lifts the mind from the coarse and
sensual to the imaginative and pure (Ep. II, i, 128). Pope illustrates
by a delightful compliment to moral Addison, with just one little flick
of the lash to show that he remembered their old quarrel:
In our own day (excuse some courtly stains),
No whiter page than Addison's remains.
He from the taste obscene reclaims our youth,
And sets the passions on the side of Truth;
Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art,
And pours each human virtue in the heart.
Horace, speaking of an old comic poet, Livius (Ep. II, i, 69), whom he
had been compelled to read at school, is indignant that a single neat
line or happy phrase should preserve an otherwise contemptible
composition. This is Pope's expansion:
But, for the wits of either Charles' days,
The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,
Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more,
Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o'er,
One simile, that solitary shines
In the dry desert of a thousand lines,
Or lengthened thought that gleams through many a page,
Has sanctified whole poems for an age.
Horace paints the University don as he had seen him emerging from his
studious seclusion to walk the streets of Athens, absent, meditative,
moving the passers-by to laughter (Ep. II, ii, 81). Pope carries him
to Oxford:
The man, who, stretched in Isis' calm retreat,
To books and study gives seven years complete;
See, strowed with learned dust, his nightcap on,
He walks, an object new beneath the sun.
The boys flock round him, and the people stare;
So stiff, so mute! some statue you would swear,
Stept from its pedestal to take the air.
Finally, Horace extols the poet as distinct from the mere versifier
(Ep. II, i, 210). Pope's rendering ought to dispel the plea of an
unfeelingness sometimes lightly urged against him:
Let me for once presume to instruct the times
To know the Poet from the Man of Rhymes:
'Tis he, who gives my breast a thousand pains,
Can make me feel each passion that he feigns,
Enrage, compose, with more than magic art,
With pity and with terror tear my heart;
And snatch me o'er the earth or through the air,
To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where.
If only he had handled more! but of the forty-one Conversations Pope
imitated only seven. And so to assimilate those remaining we must
descend from the heights of poetry to the cool sequestered vale of
literal masquerade. To a lady wintering in Rome who consulted me lately
as to guide-books, I ventured to recommend Hawthorne's "Transformation,"
Marion Crawford's "Ave Roma," and Dean Wickham's translation of the
Satires and Epistles.
ODES AND EPODES
I have tried to interpret in some degree the teaching of the Satires
and Epistles. Yet had the author's genius found expression in these
Conversations only, he would not have become through nineteen centuries
the best beloved of Latin poets: beloved in his own time alike by the
weary Atlas Augustus and the refined sensualist Maecenas; "playing round
the heartstrings" of the stern censor Persius; endowed by Petronius and
Quintilian with the prize of incommunicable felicity; the darling of
Dante, Montaigne, Voltaire, Chesterfield; the "old popular Horace" of
Tennyson; the Horace whose "sad earnestness and vivid exactness" pierced
the soul and brain of aged John Henry Newman. "His poems," says a great
French critic (St. Beuve, "Horace"), "form a manual of good taste, of
poetic feeling, of practical and worldly wisdom. The Christian has his
Bible; the scholar his Homer; Port Royal lived on St. Augustine; an
earlier philosophy on Montaigne; Horace comes within the range of all:
in reading him we break not in any way with modernity, yet retain our
hold upon antiquity. I know nothing more delightful as one grows in
years, when the mind retains its subtlety, but is conscious of increasing
languor, than to test the one and brace the other by companionship
with a book familiar and frequently re-read: we walk thereby with a
supporting staff, stroll leaning upon a friendly arm. This is what
Horace does for us: coming back to him in our old age, we recover our
youthful selves, and are relieved to learn while we appreciate afresh
his well-remembered lines, that if our minds have become more inert,
they are also more feeling, than of yore."
For full justification of these graceful amenities we must turn to the
lyrical poems. The Satires and Epistles, as their author frequently
reminds us, were in prose: the revealed Horatian secret, the condensed
expression of the Horatian charm, demanded musical verse; and this we
have in the Odes and Epodes. The word Ode is Greek for a Song; Epode was
merely a metrical term to express an ode which alternated in longer and
shorter lines, and we may treat them all alike as Odes. The Epodes are
amongst his earliest publications, and bear signs of a 'prentice hand.
"Iambi," he calls them, a Greek word meaning "lampoons"; and six of them
are bitter personal attacks on individuals, foreign to the good breeding
and urbanity which distinguish his later writings. More of the same
class he is believed to have suppressed, retaining these as specimens
of that earlier style, and because, though inchoate, they won the
admiration of Virgil, and preferred their author to the patronage of
Maecenas. One of the finer Epodes (Epod. ix) has peculiar interest, as
written probably on the deck of Maecenas' galley during or immediately
after the battle of Actium; and is in that case the sole extant
contemporary record of the engagement. It reflects the loathing kindled
in Roman breasts by Antony's emasculate subjugation to his paramour;
imagines with horror a dissolute Egyptian harlot triumphant and supreme
in Rome, with her mosquito-curtained beds and litters, and her train of
wrinkled eunuchs. It describes with a spectator's accuracy the desertion
of the Gallic contingent during the battle, the leftward flight of
Antony's fleet: then, with his favourite device of lapsing from
high-wrought passion into comedy, Horace bewails his own sea-sickness
when the excitement of the fight is over, and calls for cups of wine to
quell it. In another Epode (Epod. ii) he recalls his boyish memories in
praise of country life: the vines wedded to poplars in the early spring,
after that the sheepshearing, later still the grape-gathering and honey
harvest; when winter comes, the hunting of the boar by day, at night the
cheery meal with wife and children upon olives, sorrel, mallows, beside
the crackling log-piled hearth. Even here he is not weaned from the
tricks of mocking irony manifest in his early writings and born perhaps
of his early struggles; for he puts this delicious pastoral, which
tinkles through the page like Milton's "L'Allegro," into the mouth of a
Roman capitalist, who, bitten by transient passion for a country life,
calls in all his money that he may buy a farm, pines in country
retirement for the Stock Exchange, sells his estate in quick disgust,
and returns to city life:
So said old Ten-per-cent, when he
A jolly farmer fain would be.
His moneys he called in amain--
Next week he put them out again.
is the spirited rendering of Mr. Goldwin Smith.
In his remaining Epodes we may trace the germ of his later written
Odes. We have the affectionate addresses to Maecenas, the disgust at
civil discords, the cheery invitations to the wine cup, the wooing
of some coy damsel. By and by Maecenas presses him to bring them out
completed in a volume, and he pleads a fugitive amour in excuse for his
delay. Published, however, they were, notwithstanding the distractions
of Neaera; went, neatly written out in red-lined columns, to the
brothers Sosii in the street called Argiletum, to be multiplied by the
librarian's scribes on well-bleached Egyptian papyrus, bound in pumiced
parchment, stored in metal boxes on the bookseller's shelves within,
while the names of the author and his work were inscribed upon a pillar
outside the shop, as a guide to intending purchasers. Copies were sold,
probably, for a few denarii each; what would we not give for one of them
to-day? Let us hope that their author was well paid.
Horace was now thirty-five years old: the Epodes had taught him his
power over lyric verse. He had imitated at first the older Roman
satirists; here by Maecenas' advice he copied from Greek models, from
Alcaeus and Sappho, claiming ever afterwards with pride that he was
the first amongst Roman poets to wed Aeolian lays to notes of Italy
(Od. III, xxx, 13). He spent seven years in composing the first three
Books of the Odes, which appeared in a single volume about B.C. 23.
More than any of his poems they contain the essence of his indefinable
magic art. They deal apparently with dull truisms and stale moralities,
avowals of simple joys and simple sorrows. They tell us that life is
brief and death is sure, that light loves and ancient wines are good,
that riches are burdensome, and enough is better than a feast, that
country life is delightful, that old age comes on us apace, that our
friends leave us sorrowing and our sorrow does not bring them back.
Trite sayings no doubt; but embellished one and all with an adorable
force and novelty at once sadly earnest and vividly exact; not too
simple for the profound and not too artful for the shallow; consecrated
by the verbal felicity which belongs only to an age of peculiar
intellectual refinement, and which flashed diamond-like from the facets
of his own highly polished mind. "He is the Breviary of the natural man,
his poetry is the Imitation not of Christ but of Epicurus."
His Odes may be roughly classified as Religious, Moral, Philosophical,
Personal, Amatory.
1. RELIGIOUS. Between the classic and the Christian hymn, as Matthew
Arnold has reminded us, there is a great gulf fixed. The Latin
conception of the gods was civic; they were superior heads of the
Republic; the Roman church was the invisible Roman state; religion was
merely exalted patriotism. So Horace's addresses to the deities for
the most part remind them of their coronation oaths, of the terms on
which they were worshipped, their share in the bargain with humanity,
a bargain to be kept on their side if they expected tribute of lambs and
piglings, of hallowed cakes and vervain wreaths. Very little of what we
call devotion seasons them. In two Odes (I, ii, xii), from a mere litany
of Olympian names he passes to a much more earnest deification of
Augustus. Another (III, xix) is a grace to Bacchus after a wine-bout.
Or Faunus is bidden to leave pursuing the nymphs (we think of Elijah's
sneer at Baal) and to attend to his duties on the Sabine farm, of
blessing the soil and protecting the lambs (III, xviii). The hymn to
Mercury recounts mythical exploits of the winged god, his infantile
thefts from Apollo, his guiding Priam through the Grecian camp, his
gift of speech to men, his shepherding souls to Hades (I, x). Venus is
invoked in a dainty prayer to visit the chapel which Glycera is building
for her (I, xxx):
O come, and with thee bring thy glowing boy,
The Graces all, with kirtles flowing free,
Youth, that without thee knows but little joy,
The jocund nymphs and blithesome Mercury.