in the Satires (Sat. iv, 101), holding that the gods are too happy and
too careless in their superior aloof security to plague themselves with
the affairs of mortals. But he felt sometimes, as all men feel, the need
of a supreme celestial Guide: in the noble Ode which Ruskin loved he
seems to find it in Necessity or Fortune (Od. I, xxxv); and once, when
scared by thunder resounding in a cloudless sky, recants what he calls
his "irrational rationalism," and admits that God may, if He will, put
down the mighty and exalt the low (I, xxxiv). So again in his hymn for
the dedication of Apollo's Temple on the Palatine (I, xxxi) a serious
note is struck. He will not ask the God for rich cornfields and fat
meadow land, for wines of Cales proffered in a golden cup. A higher boon
than these his prayer demands:
O grant me, Phoebus, calm content,
Strength unimpaired, a mind entire,
Old age without dishonour spent,
Nor unbefriended of the lyre.
On the other hand, his Ode to Melpomene (IV, iii), written in the
consciousness of accepted eminence as the national poet, "harpist of the
Roman lyre," breathes a sentiment of gratitude to Divinity far above the
typical poetic cant of homage to the Muse. And his fine Secular Hymn,
composed by Augustus's request for the great Century Games, strikes a
note of patriotic aspiration and of moral earnestness, not unworthy to
compare with King Solomon's Dedication Prayer; and is such as, with some
modernization of the Deities invoked, would hardly misbecome a national
religious festival to-day. It was sung by twenty-seven noble boys and as
many high-born maidens, now in antiphon, now in chorus, to Apollo and
Diana, as representing all the gods. Apollo, bless our city! say the
boys. Dian, bless our women and our children, say the girls, and guard
the sanctity of our marriage laws. Bring forth Earth's genial fruits,
say both; give purity to youth and peace to age. Bring back the lapsed
virtues of the Golden Age; Faith, Honour, antique Shame-fastness and
Worth, and Plenty with her teeming horn. Hear, God! hear, Goddess! Yes,
we feel our prayers are heard--
Now homeward we repair,
Full of the blessed hope which will not fail,
That Jove and all the gods have heard our prayer,
And with approving smiles our homage hail:
We, skilled in choral harmonies to raise
The hymn to Phoebus and Diana's praise.
Of course in all this there is no touch of ecstasy; no spark of the
inspiration which in a St. Francis, a St. Teresa, or a Charles Wesley,
scales the heights of hymnody. And, as the unimaginative Roman
temperament lacked the instinct of adoration, so was it deficient in
that other constituent of supernatural faith, the belief in immortality.
There might be a shadowy world--the poets said so--Odysseus visited its
depths and brought back its report--but it was a gloomy place at best.
Horace alludes to it always in the tone of the Hebrew Psalmists, or of
Hezekiah sick to death, utilizing Minos and Cerberus and Tantalus and
Sisyphus for poetic effect, yet ever with an undertone of sadness and
alarm. Not Orpheus' self, he says (I, xxiv, 13), in his exquisite lament
for dead Quinctilius, can bring back life-blood to the phantom pale
who has joined the spectral band that voyage to Styx: the gods are
pitiless--we can only bear bereavements patiently (II, iii). You must
leave, my Dellius, your pleasant groves and your cottage upon Tiber's
banks, since Orcus, ruthless king, swoops equally on all:
Land, home, and winsome wife must all be left;
And cypresses abhorred,
Alone of all the trees
That now your fancy please,
Shall shade his dust who was awhile their lord.
(II, xiv, 21.)
2. MORAL. But if the gods are beyond our ken, and if the world to come
is misty, we still have this world with us; a world not always to be
daffed aside with love and wine and comradeship, since behind its frolic
wantonness lie the ennobling claims of duty and of conscience. As with
Fielding, as with Thackeray, the light current tone of sportiveness or
irony heightens the rare solemnity of didactic moral earnestness. Of all
the Latin poets, says Sir Richard Fanshaw, Horace is the fullest fraught
with excellent morality. In the six stately Odes which open the third
book, together with a later Ode (xxiv) which closes the series and ought
never to have been severed from it, Horatian poetry rises to its
greatest height of ethical impressiveness. Ushered in with the solemn
words of a hierophant bidding the uninitiated avaunt at the commencement
of a religious ceremony (III, i, 1-2), delivered with official
assumption in the fine frenzy of a muse-inspired priest, their unity
of purpose and of style makes them virtually a continuous poem. It
lashes the vices and the short-sighted folly of society; with the Sword
of Damocles above his head the rich man sits at a luxurious board
(III, i, 17); sails in his bronzed galley, lolls in his lordly chariot,
with black Care ever at the helm or on the box (III, i, 40). By
hardihood in the field and cheerful poverty at home Rome became great
of yore; such should be the virtues of to-day. Let men be _moral_; it
was immorality that ruined Troy; _heroic_--read the tale of Regulus;
_courageous_, but with courage ordered, disciplined, controlled (III,
iii; v; iv, 65). Brute force without mind, he says almost in Milton's
words, falls by its own strength, as the giants fell encountering the
gods:
For what is strength without a double share
Of wisdom? vast, unwieldy, burdensome;
Proudly secure, yet liable to fall
By weakest subtleties, not made to rule,
But to subserve where wisdom bears command.
("Samson Ag.," 53.)
Self-discipline, he reminds his audience, need not be sullen and
austere; in regenerated Rome the Muses still may rule. Mild thoughts
they plant, and they joy to see mild thoughts take root; refinement
of manners and of mind, and the gladsomeness of literary culture
(III, iv, 41).
He turns to reprove the ostentation of the rich; their adding field to
field, poor families evicted from farmstead and cottage to make way for
spreading parks and ponds and gardens;
driven from home
Both wife and husband forth must roam,
Bearing their household gods close pressed,
With squalid babes, upon their breast.
(II, xviii, 23.)
Not thus was it in the good old times. Then rich men lavished marble on
the temples of the gods, roofed their own cottages with chance-cut turf
(II, xv, 13). And to what end all this splendour? Behind your palace
walls lurks the grim architect of a narrower home; the path of glory
leads but to the grave (II, xviii, 17). And as on the men, so on the
women of Rome his solemn warnings are let fall. Theirs is the task to
maintain the sacred family bond, the purity of marriage life. Let them
emulate the matrons of the past, severe mothers of gallant sons (III,
vi, 37). Let men and women join to stay the degeneracy which has begun
to set in, and which, unchecked, will grow deadlier with each generation
as it succeeds.
How Time doth in its flight debase
Whate'er it finds? our fathers' race,
More deeply versed in ill
Than were their sires, hath born us yet
More wicked, destined to beget
A race more vicious still.
(III, vi, 45.)
3. PHILOSOPHICAL. "How charming is divine philosophy?" said the meek
younger brother in "Comus" to his instructive senior. Speaking as one
of the profane, I find not less charming the humanist philosophy of
Horace. Be content! be moderate! seize the present! are his maxims.
_Be content!_ A mind without anxiety is the highest good (II, xvi).
Great desires imply great wants (III, xvi, 42). 'Tis well when prayer
seeks and obtains no more than life requires.
Happy he,
Self-centred, who each night can say,
"My life is lived": the morn may see
A clouded or a sunny day:
That rests with Jove; but what is gone
He will not, can not, turn to nought,
Nor cancel as a thing undone
What once the flying hour has brought.
(III, xxix, 41.)
_Be moderate!_ He that denies himself shall gain the more (III, xvi,
21). He that ruleth his spirit is better than the lord of Carthage.
Hold fast the golden mean (II, x, 5). The poor man's supper, spare
but neat and free from care, with no state upon the board except his
heirloom silver saltcellar, is better than a stalled ox and care
therewith (II, xvi, 13). And he practised what he preached, refusing
still fresh bounties which Maecenas pressed upon him. What more want
I than I have? he says:
Truth is mine with genius mixed,
The rich man comes and knocks at my poor gate.
Favoured thus I ne'er repine,
Nor weary Heaven for more, nor to the great
For larger bounty pray,
My Sabine farm my one sufficient boon.
(II, xviii, 9.)
_Seize the Present!_ _Now_ bind the brow with late roses and with myrtle
crowns; now drown your cares in wine, counting as gain each day that
Chance may give (I, vii, 31; I, ix, 14). Pale Death will be here anon;
even while I speak time slips away: seize to-day, trust nothing to the
morrow.
Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears
_To-day_ of past regrets and future fears:
_To-morrow?_ why to-morrow I may be
Myself with yesterday's seven thousand years.
What more commonplace than this saying that we all must die? but he
brings it home to us ever and again with pathetic tearful fascinating
force. Each time we read him, his sweet sad pagan music chants its ashes
to ashes, dust to dust, and we hear the earth fall upon the coffin lid
amongst the flowers.
Ah, Postumus, they fleet away
Our years, nor piety one hour
Can win from wrinkles, and decay,
And death's indomitable power;
Not though three hundred steers you heap
Each day, to glut the tearless eyes
Of Him, who guards in moated keep
Tityos, and Geryon's triple size:
All, all, alas! that watery bound
Who eat the fruits that Nature yields,
Must traverse, be we monarchs crowned,
Or humblest tillers of the fields.
(II, xiv.)
The antipathy is not confined to heathenism; we distrust the Christian
who professes to ignore it; many of us felt drawn by a brotherhood of
humanity to the late scholarly Pope, when we learned that, as death
looked him in the face, he clung to Pagan Horace as a truthful and
sympathetic oracle. "And we all go to-day to this singer of the ancient
world for guidance in the deceptions of life, and for steadfastness in
the face of death."
[Illustration: _Alinari photo._]
[_Capitol Museum, Rome._
VIRGIL.]
4. PERSONAL. Something, but not very much, we learn of Horace's intimates
from this class of Odes. Closest to him in affection and oftenest
addressed is Maecenas. The opening Ode pays homage to him in words
closely imitated by Allan Ramsay in addressing the chief of his clan:
Dalhousie of an auld descent,
My chief, my stoup, my ornament;
and at the end of the volume the poet repeats his dedication (III,
xxix). Twice he invites his patron to a feast; to drink wine bottled on
the day some years before when entering the theatre after an illness
he was received with cheers by the assembled multitude (I, xx); again
on March 1st, kept as the festal anniversary of his own escape from a
falling tree (III, viii). To a querulous letter from his friend written
when sick and dreading death, he sends the tender consolation and
remonstrance of which we spoke before (p. 29). In a very different tone
he sings the praises of Licymnia (II, xii), supposed to be Terentia,
Maecenas' newly-wedded wife, sweet voiced, witty, loving, of whom her
husband was at the time passionately enamoured. He recounts finally, with
that delicate respectful gratitude which never lapses into servility,
his lifelong obligation, lauding gratefully the still removed place which
his friend's bounty has bestowed:
A clear fresh stream, a little field, o'ergrown
With shady trees, a crop that ne'er deceives.
(III, xvi, 29.)
Not less tenderly affectionate is the exquisite Ode to Virgil on the
death of Quinctilius.
By many a good man wept Quinctilius dies,
By none than you, my Virgil, trulier wept;
(I, xxiv.)
or to his devoted young friend Septimius (p. 39) (II, vi), who would
travel with him to the ends of the world, to Moorish or Cantabrian
wilds. Not so far afield need they go; but when age steals on they will
journey to Tarentum, sweetest spot on earth:
That spot, those happy heights, desire
Our sojourn; there, when life shall end,
Your tear shall dew my yet warm pyre,
Your bard and friend.
To the great general Agrippa (I, vi), rival of Maecenas in the good
graces of Augustus, he sends a tribute complimentary, yet somewhat
stiffly and officially conceived; lines much more cordial to the
high-born Aelius Lamia (III, 17), whose statue stands to-day amid the
pale immortalities of the Capitoline Museum. We have a note of tonic
banter to Tibullus, "jilted by a fickle Glycera," and "droning piteous
elegies" (I, xxxiii); a merry riotous impersonation of an imaginary
symposium in honour of the newly-made augur Murena (III, 19), with
toasts and tipsiness and noisy Bacchanalian songs and rose-wreaths flung
about the board; a delicious mockery of reassurance to one Xanthias (II,
iv), who has married a maidservant and is ashamed of it. He may yet find
out that though fallen into obscurity she is in truth high-born and
noble, and will present him with a patrician mother-in-law.
For aught that you know now, fair Phyllis may be
The shoot of some highly respectable stem;
Nay, she counts, I'll be sworn, a few kings in her tree,
And laments the lost acres once lorded by them.
Never think that a creature so exquisite grew
In the haunts where but vice and dishonour are known,
Nor deem that a girl so unselfish, so true,
Had a mother 'twould shame thee to take for thine own.
Several of his correspondents we can only name; the poet Valgius,
the tragedians Pollio and Fuscus; Sallust, grandson of the historian;
Pompeius, his old comrade in the Brutus wars; Lollius, defeated in
battle and returning home in disgrace. Nor need we labour to identify a
host of others; Iccius, Grosphus, Dellius; who figure as mere dedicatory
names; nor persons mentioned casually, such as Telephus of the rosy neck
and clustering hair (I, xiii; III, xix), whom Bulwer Lytton, with fine
memories of his own ambrosial petted youth, calls a "typical beautyman
and lady-killer." The Horatian personages, remarks Dean Milman, would
contain almost every famous name of the Augustan age.
5. AMATORY. "Speak'st thou of nothing but ladies?" says Feste the Jester
to poor Malvolio. He might have said the same to Horace; for of the Odes
in the first three Books one third part is addressed to or concerned
with women. How many of the pretty female names which musicalize his
love songs, in syllables that breathe of the sweet south and melt like
kisses in the utterance, are representative of real girls, we cannot
guess; with none of them except perhaps one, who died young, does he
seem to have been really in love. He was forty years old when most
of his amorous Odes were written; an age at which, as George Eliot
has reminded us, the baptism of passion is by aspersion rather than
immersion. Something he must have known of love, or he could not write
as he has done; but it is the superficial gallantry of a flirt rather
than the impassioned self-surrender of a lover; of a gay bachelor, with
roving critical eye, heart whole yet fancy free, too practised a judge
of beauty to become its slave. Without emotion, without reverence, but
with keen relishing appreciation, he versifies Pyrrha's golden curls,
and Lycoris' low forehead--feminine beauties both to a Roman eye--and
Phyllis' tapering arms and shapely ankles, and Chia's dimpled cheek,
and the tangles of Neaera's hair, and the gadabout baggage Lyde,
and Glycera's dazzling complexion that blinds the gazer's eye
(I, v, xix, xxxiii; II, iv, 21; III, xiv, 21). They are all inconstant
good-for-noughts, he knows; but so are men, and so is he; keep up the
pleasant give-and-take, the quarrels and the reconciliations. All the
youths of Rome are in love with a beautiful Ninon D'Enclos named
Barine--Matthew Arnold declared this to be the finest of all the Odes
(II, viii)--she perjures herself with every one in turn. But it seems to
answer; she shines forth lovelier than ever. Venus and the nymphs only
laugh, and her lovers, young and old, continue to hug their chains.
New captives fill the nets you weave;
New slaves are bred; and those before,
Though oft they threaten, never leave
Your perjured door.
Sometimes he plays the monitor. Asterie's husband is laid up in Greece
by contrary winds: he is faithful to his wife, though his hostess tempts
him: let the wife be on her guard against her handsome neighbour Enipeus
(III, vii). His own charmers are sometimes obdurate: Chloe and Lyde run
away from him like fawns (I, xxiii): that is because they are young; he
can wait till they are older; they will come to him then of themselves:
"they always come," says Disraeli in "Henrietta Temple." He has
quarrelled with an old flame (I, xvi), whom he had affronted by some
libellous verses. He entreats her pardon; was young and angry when he
wrote; will burn the offending lines, or fling them into the sea:
Come, let me change my sour for sweet,
And smile complacent as before;
Hear me my palinode repeat,
And give me back your heart once more.
He professes bitter jealousy of a handsome stripling whose beauty Lydia
praises (I, xiii). She is wasting her admiration; she will find him
unfaithful; Horace knows him well:
Oh, trebly blest, and blest for ever,
Are they, whom true affection binds,
In whom no doubts nor janglings sever
The union of their constant minds;
But life in blended current flows,
Serene and sunny to the close.
If anyone now reads "Lalla Rookh," he will recall an exquisite rendering
of these lines from the lips of veiled Nourmahal:
There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,
When two, that are linked in one heavenly tie,
With heart never changing and brow never cold,
Love on through all ills, and love on till they die.
One hour of a passion so sacred is worth
Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss;
And oh! if there be an Elysium on earth,
It is this, it is this!
But, perhaps, if a jury of scholars could be polled as to the most
enchanting amongst all Horace's lovesongs, the highest vote would be
cast in favour of the famous "Reconciliation" of the roving poet with
this or with some other Lydia (III, ix). The pair of former lovers,
mutually faithless, exchange defiant experience of their several
infidelities; then, the old affection reviving through the contact of
their altercation, agree to discard their intervening paramours, and
return to their first allegiance.
_He._
Whilst I was dear and thou wert kind,
And I, and I alone, might lie
Upon thy snowy breast reclined,
Not Persia's king so blest as I.
_She._
Whilst I to thee was all in all,
Nor Chloe might with Lydia vie,
Renowned in ode or madrigal,
Not Roman Ilia famed as I.
_He._
I now am Thracian Chloe's slave,
With hand and voice that charms the air,
For whom even death itself I'd brave,
So fate the darling girl would spare.
_She._
I dote on Calais; and I
Am all his passion, all his care,
For whom a double death I'd die,
So fate the darling boy would spare.
_He._
What if our ancient love return,
And bind us with a closer tie,
If I the fair-haired Chloe spurn,
And, as of old, for Lydia sigh?
_She._
Though lovelier than yon star is he,
Thou fickle as an April sky,
More churlish too than Adria's sea,
With thee I'd live, with thee I'd die.
The austere Scaliger used to say that he would rather have written this
ode than be King of Spain and the Indies: Milton's Eve expresses her
devotion to Adam in an apostrophe paraphrased from its closing lines.
Observe, too, how we find in all the Odes as we read them, not only a
gallery of historical pictures, nor only an unconscious revelation of
the poet's self, of, that is, the least subjective among poets, ever, as
says Sir Stephen De Vere, looking outward, never looking in; but they
incidentally paint for us in vivid and familiarizing tints the intimate
daily life of that far-off ancient queen of cities. We walk with them
the streets of Rome. We watch the connoisseurs gazing into the curiosity
shops and fingering the bronzes or the silver statuettes; the naughty
boys jeering the solemn Stoic as he walks along, staid, superior,
absent; the good boys coming home from school with well-thumbed lesson
books; the lovers in the cookshops or restaurants shooting apple pips
from between finger and thumb, rejoicing in the good omen if they strike
the ceiling; the stores of Sulpicius the wine merchant and of Sosius the
bookseller; the great white Latian ox, exactly such as you see to-day,
driven towards the market, with a bunch of hay upon his horns to warn
pedestrians that he is dangerous; the coarse drawings in chalk or
colours on the wall advertising some famous gladiator; at dusk the
whispering lovers in the Campus, or the romping hide-and-seek of lads
and lasses at the corners of the streets or squares, just as you may
watch them to-day on spring or winter evenings amongst the lower arches
of the Colosseum;--it is a microcosm, a cameo, of that old-world life.
Horace knew, and feared not to say, that in his poems, in his Odes
especially, he bequeathed a deathless legacy to mankind, while setting
up a lasting monument to himself. One thing he could not know, that when
near two thousand years had passed, a race of which he had barely heard
by name as dwelling "quite beyond the confines of the world," would
cherish his name and read his writings with a grateful appreciation
even surpassing that of his contemporary Romans.
A few Odes remain, too casual to be classified; rejoicings over the
vanishing of winter and the return of spring (I, iv); praises of the
Tibur streams, of Tarentum (II, vi) which he loved only less than Tibur,
of the Lucretilis Groves (I, xvii) which overhung his Sabine valley,
of the Bandusian spring beside which he played in boyhood. We have the
Pindaric or historic Odes, with tales of Troy, of the Danaid brides,
of Regulus, of Europa (III, iii, v, xi, xvii); the dramatic address to
Archytas (I, xxviii), which soothed the last moments of Mark Pattison;
the fine epilogue which ends the book, composed in the serenity of
gained renown;
And now 'tis done: more durable than brass
My monument shall be, and raise its head
O'er royal pyramids: it shall not dread
Corroding rain or angry Boreas,
Nor the long lapse of immemorial time.
I shall not wholly die; large residue
Shall 'scape the Queen of funerals. Ever new
My after fame shall grow, while pontiffs climb
With silent maids the Capitolian height.
"Born," men will say, "where Aufidus is loved,
Where Danaus scant of streams beneath him bowed
The rustic tribes, from dimness he waxed bright,
First of his race to wed the Aeolian lay
To notes of Italy." Put glory on,
My own Melpomene, by genius won,
And crown me of thy grace with Delphic bay.
SWAN SONG
When a well-graced actor has left the stage amid trumpeted farewells
from an admiring but regretful audience, we somewhat resent his
occasional later reappearance. So, when a poet's last word has been
spoken, and spoken emotionally, an Afterword is apt to offend: and we
may wish that the fine poem just quoted had been reserved as finish to
the volume yet to come, which lacks a closing note, or even that the
volume itself had not been published. The fourth Book of the Odes was
written nearly ten years after the other three, and Horace wrote it not
as Poet but as Laureate. His Secular Hymn appeared in B.C. 17, when
he was forty-eight years old; and after it Augustus pressed him to
celebrate the victories of his two stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, over
the tribes of the Eastern Alps. If he wrote unwillingly, his hand had
not lost its cunning. The sentiment is paler and more artificial, but
the old condensation and felicity remain. He begins with rather sad
reluctance. He is old; the one woman whom he loved is dead; his lyric
raptures and his love campaignings are at an end; he is tired of
flattering hopes, of noisy revels, of flower garlands fresh with dew.
Or are they war songs, not love songs, that are wanted? There he is
more helpless still. It needs a Pindar worthily to extol a Caesar: he is
no Pindar; and so we have an ode in honour of the Theban bard. And yet,
as chosen lyrist of the Roman race, he cannot altogether refuse the
call. Melpomene, who from his cradle marked him for her own, can still
shed on him if she will the power to charm, can inspire in him "music of
the swan." So, slowly, the wasting lyric fire revives; we get the
martial odes to conquering Drusus and to Lollius, the panegyrics on
Augustus and Tiberius, all breathing proud consciousness that "the Muse
opens the good man's grave and lifts him to the gods"; that immortality
can be won only by the poet's pen, and that it is in his own power to
confer it.
[Illustration: _Becchetti photo._
THE FORUM RESTORED AS IN A.D. 80.